What is the role of the humble hyphen? That small punctuation mark punches above its weight by connecting what would otherwise stay apart. It creates meaning from the space in between. This is the animating idea behind Hyphen, (the-hyphen.in) a new quarterly journal of translation founded and published by Vivek Shanbhag and edited by Deepa Ganesh. The name, aptly, is inspired by A.K. Ramanujan’s description of himself as the hyphen in “Indian-American.”The journal aims to move between “tongues, places, memories and ways of seeing”, and the first issue is an ambitious introduction to the project. It comprises fiction and non-fiction featuring 17 writers and 11 translators, with work in seven languages. The language in focus for this issue is Marathi.Hyphen is handsomely produced and illustrated, with a design that gives the contents the heft of a literary journal. In this way, it contributes to the necessary project of translation as an intellectual practice in its own right.The fiction in the inaugural issue is almost a who’s who of contemporary writing in Indian languages. These include stories by Benyamin, translated from Malayalam by J. Devika; Banu Mushtaq, translated from Kannada by Deepa Ganesh; and Perumal Murugan, translated from Tamil by Iswarya V.In his essay on Marathi literature, Rajeev Naik stresses that such writing refuses to stay static. Writers have always experimented with genres, styles and ideas in response to social and cultural circumstances. This is not a simple rejection of tradition. Modern Marathi literature, Naik writes, is entangled in its own history even as it departs from it. The relationship is like a hyphen itself: two things retaining their identities while producing something new in their partnership.The story ‘Indulkar’ by Kiran Gurav in the issue, translated by Shanta Gokhale, can be seen as an example of this. Here, the protagonist moves through the worlds of government employment, home and family, as well as his dreams. The story’s postmodernism draws on a traditional Marathi narrative: it exists in a network of relationships between individual and society, reality and fiction, inherited and new forms.The same point, though in a different context, is made by Adivasi writer Parvati Tirkey, in an interview with Sundar Sarukkai while referring to the oral tradition and writing: “Creativity emerges from the moment, from work, from the surrounding world. No single individual owns the song. The next time someone sings it, the song changes slightly; many people carry it forward together. Literature, in this sense, is created collectively by the community.”This sense of literature as a meeting place also acquires political and social weight in Pradnya Daya Pawar’s ‘A Diamond Is Forever,’ translated by Jerry Pinto. The essay, a tribute to Pawar’s mother Hira Pawar, is a portrait of a Dalit woman whose life was shaped by caste discrimination, poverty, feminism and Ambedkarite ideals. Hira Pawar emerges as rebellious and committed, but not without her own contradictions and imperfections. A woman’s private struggle becomes part of a larger social history.A similar mix of the personal and the political appears in Chandrashekhar Phansalkar’s translations of the Marathi poet Narayan Surve on his centenary. These poems reveal, in Phansalkar’s phrase, “a rare combination of tenderness and political consciousness.”In this way, the pieces in Hyphen resist the impulse to put literature into closed boxes: artistic or political, personal or historical, traditional or experimental.Another revealing exploration of this space can be found in an essay born of a conversation between the poet A. R. Venkatachalapathy and the musician Rithvik Raja. They begin with the question: What does it mean to translate a Tamil poem into English? This expands into something larger. For them, translation is not just carrying meaning across languages; it is an attempt to communicate with another time, standing between worlds separated by more than words.Harish Trivedi’s expansive essay, ‘The Making of Modern Hindi,’ extends the argument from individual works to language itself. The Hindi that is seen as a stable linguistic form, Trivedi writes, is instead a product of historical and political transformations. Much of what we think of as traditional Hindi literature was written in Awadhi and Braj. From the late 19th century onwards, Khadi Boli increasingly became the basis of Standard Hindi, accompanied by efforts to standardise spelling, vocabulary and grammar.Thus, languages, like literary traditions, are made rather than inherited intact. They evolve through contact with power and circumstance. Hyphens again: between old and new forms, between region and centre, between literature and politics.It’s worth pointing out that every piece in Hyphen arrives in English from other languages. As a link language this is understandable, even necessary: it is how a Malayalam writer, a Marathi poet and a Hindi scholar can all be read by a common audience. But the hyphen here joins each language to English more firmly than it joins them to one another.It will be interesting to see whether later issues find ways, perhaps through some form of bilingual presentation or translators’ notes, to widen the circle. That would make Hyphen fully live up to its credo of creating the conditions “for listening across linguistic and cultural boundaries, fostering dialogue, empathy, and a richer understanding of one another”.Sanjay Sipahimalani is a Mumbai-based writer and reviewer.