About

what · who · why

What Zıvana is the name of the joint that fits two pieces into one another; “to come off the joint” — to lose one’s temper — is in it too. An online, bilingual literary magazine: poetry, fiction, essay and letter, interview, art — and, as its backbone, translation. World literature into Turkish, Turkish into the world. The pages accumulate; nothing published is ever removed.

How If a work is in a language other than Turkish or English, original · Turkish · English stand side by side; if it is in Turkish or English, two columns suffice. The original is not touched; the translation comes to stand beside it. The red line between them is the joint. Beneath every work there is a rights slip: the author’s year of death, the rule, the source, the translator. A sentence whose source cannot be shown is not printed.

Who Zıvana is published in Ayvalık by DDL Limited; it is a new imprint in the wake of Göçebe (1995, seven issues) — it does not imitate it, it greets it. Reader-supported, without advertising, not for profit. The content is always open; money comes by a separate route: translation workshops, printed special issues, membership and donations.

Reading is free; holding costs money.

Submissions

what we take · how to send

What we take Poetry, fiction, essay and letter, interview proposals, art and photography portfolios; translation takes priority in every genre. We draw on three sources: public-domain works whose rights have been verified, works in copyright with the rights holder’s permission, and texts commissioned for the magazine. For previously published texts, the place and date of first publication are stated.

TranslationSend the original with the translation and name its source (edition or link). Translations without the original are not considered.

RightsFor public-domain claims, the author's year of death and the work's first publication year; for works in copyright, the rights holder's written permission. Unverified works wait.

FormatPlain text or .docx; line breaks in poems are kept. One work per submission.

DecisionThe editor reads; acceptance or rejection comes in writing. The masthead entry of an accepted work is settled with its author; a published page is never removed.

WhereSubmissions go to the contact address in the masthead.

Rights policy

For every public-domain work three things are checked: the author’s year of death, the work’s year of first publication and the country. In Turkey, the European Union and the United Kingdom a work is protected for seventy years from the beginning of the year following the author’s death; in the United States the publication-date rule applies as well. Where there is doubt the work is put on hold and not published.

The original text is preserved byte for byte; its source (edition or link) and the date it was opened are written on the slip. Translations belong to their translators; each translation’s masthead entry records who translated it, when, and which revision it has passed through. If a rights claim arrives, the work is put on hold for the duration of the review; the outcome is written on the slip.

Privacy

no cookies · no tracking

This site has no cookies, no advertising and no tracking code; no request goes to any third party, and the typefaces are served from our own server. Nothing is stored in your browser; your choice of language is the address itself.

Masthead

Issue zero · 2026

PublisherDDL Limited · Ayvalık

TypefacesFraunces · Newsreader · Space Grotesk · GFS Didot — SIL OFL 1.1, self-hosted