Mundus Artium — 2025 — Volume XIX — Numbers 1 & 2 | Add to Cart
This double issue for 2025 marks a pivotal moment in the life of the Mundus Artium journal. While extending the legacy of our world literature periodical founded in 1967—and the momentum of its relaunch in 2023 and continuation in 2024—this volume is shaped by a profound human transition.
The issue opens with a memorial section devoted to Frederick Turner (1943–2025)—poet, philosopher, translator, critic, teacher, president of Mundus Artium Press, and co-editor of this journal. Turner was the spirit behind this journal’s relaunch as a new series in 2023. An essay by the editors of Mundus Artium, “The Place of Free Time,” surveys Turner’s contributions to the journal and press, traces the threads of his legacy across this and prior issues, and closes with a poem in which he outlines his vision of paradise as boundless fellowship. Further tributes from friends, students, and colleagues include words from the journal’s ongoing editor, poet Gjekë Marinaj, and from writer and educator John Perryman, performance artist Fred Curchak, and poet and educator David J. Rothman—the 2025 recipient of the Frederick Turner Prize for Poetry. The prize named in Turner’s honor will continue to support ethically engaged formal excellence in the craft he held so dear.
Beyond the tributes, the issue features Turner’s prose meditation “A Divestment” and two late poems, co-translations with Tirtha Mukhopadhyay of Bengali poems to Kali by Kamalakanta Bhattacharya and Ramprasad Sen, and a pithy translation (with the late Zsuzsanna Ozsváth) of János Arany’s renowned ballad “The Bards of Wales.”
The issue’s remaining contributions carry forward Turner’s and Mundus Artium’s ideals—literary friendship, interdisciplinary thought, and the pursuit of beauty in form and idea—demonstrating their vitality across genres, languages, and continents.
“Open to Vital Revolution,” an in-depth interview with Claudio Rodríguez Fer (Babel Prize winner, 2025), conducted by Marinaj, with answers translated by Adina Ioana Vladu, traces the arc of a poet whose work insists on absolute freedom of expression—moving between the verbal, the visual, and the corporeal. Fer discusses how erotic lyric in Galician opened new possibilities for his language, how settings from Galicia to Brittany to New York have reshaped his poetic focus, and why translation between distant languages demands a “semiotic” rather than strictly philological approach. Throughout, he articulates a vision of poetry as at once contemplation, knowledge, and action—”capable of changing the world and improving life”—that resonates with the integrative ideals at the heart of this issue.
The issue’s essays share a conviction that creative work is both personal and social—and that its highest forms demand collaboration across disciplines, cultures, and forms of being and knowing. Andy Amato’s “Conspiracy, Anarchy, and Utopia” draws on the communitarian thought of Ivan Illich and Ursula K. Le Guin to frame culture as a utopian project irreducible to the institutional. José Osvaldo Chávez Rodríguez’s “José Chávez Morado’s Plastic Monumentalism” argues that the city itself is a collective artwork—a monumental canvas requiring diverse co-creation of public space. “Between Science’s Time and Art’s Eternity,” by Tatyana Apraksina (Babel Prize winner, 2023), meditates on time as a tool of human perception, enabling the arts to join with sacred ontology to transmit the eternal present. Translator James Manteith’s book notes reflect on the relevance of Apraksina’s integrally minded California Psalms, republished in a new edition marking twenty-five years since the work’s pre-millennial appearance in Big Sur.
The issue features poetry by Aristea Papalexandrou and Iossif Ventura (both translated by Philip Ramp), Sagawa Aki (translated from Japanese by Masato Fujii, and by Kijima Hajime and Leza Lowitz), Jeton Kelmendi, Benjamín Valdivia, Vito Davoli, Wendy Videlock and Zack Rogow, as well as cross-cultural prose by Edward H. Garcia and the concluding act of Elijah Perseus Blumov’s verse drama Yitzhak: A Tragedy.
Book reviews in the issue look beyond English-language releases, highlighting Mahmadiyor Asadov’s perspective on Marinaj’s poetry collection Mortal Air (Tashkent) and a collection of prose by the morally conscious Russian writer Danila Mironov (St. Petersburg).
The issue’s “Nostalgia” section features poems by Tess Gallagher from Mundus Artium’s 1974 International Women’s Issue—near the beginning of that writer’s varied, border-crossing career.
The issue announces Mundus Artium’s 2025 literary prize winners: Dmytro Chystiak (Gjenima Prize), Claudio Rodríguez Fer (Babel Prize), David Rothman (Frederick Turner Prize), and Khosiat Rustam (Mundus Artium Prize). We also announce the Orpheus Texts Awards Laureates of the Year: Marilyn Waligore (Visual Artist), Jovan Janjić (Writer), Sun Hyang Kim for So Long (Book), Alketa Gashi Fazliu (Journalist), Hamdy Elgabry (Literary Translator), and Salim Babullaoghlu (Poet).
The issue’s cover art, “Avoiding Dali,” is by the Turkish-German multidisciplinarian Aysen Ritzauer.
Together—from memorial to the present, and looking ahead to the future—the issue’s contributions affirm that art’s lone work can reach new coherence across boundaries: across languages, disciplines, and time itself, yielding poetic knowledge that is capable, as Fer says, of “changing the world and improving life.”