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This year we shift language fronts to explore a new no man's land between
them. The centerpiece of this issue is an experiment conducted in Edinburgh
in March 2008, when two German and two Scottish poets met to translate
not merely between German and English, but between their respective dialects:
Franconian and Scots/Shetlandic. An intentional challenge to the poet,
the dialect, the language, translation itself – and a challenge
that all rose to.
We are proud to present the outstanding translations as well as reflections
on the process of dialect writing and translation itself, offered here
in part as a new approach to more fundamental questions: How does language
reflect a given natural, cultural and social landscape? How do poets find
"their" idiom within this landscape, within the broader language of their
society, its everyday speech patterns and literary traditions? And how
do their translators, in turn, find their idiom?
In this spirit, the current issue focuses entirely on poetry. We hope
that our excursion into the dialectic of dialect will shed a new light
on the remaining work featured here, on the poets' and translators' use
of language.
For instance, while Norbert Hummelt's work mines the historical and cultural
dimensions of specific landscapes, the overlapping strata of time, and
Waltraud Seidlhofer's poetry navigates the cityscape, mapping its labyrinth
of facades, Daniela Seel turns inward, seeking an idiom for the vulnerable
body. Gerhard Falkner, Hendrik Jackson, Bert Papenfuß and Monika
Rinck – poets we have featured in previous issues of no man's
land – likewise focus on constructing radically individual idiolects.
One way or the other, poetry lives by finding specificity in the surrounding
landscape of language and images that too often threaten to blur into
generality.
Isabel Cole
Clemens Kuhnert
Alistair Noon
Editors, no man's land
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