On October 18 and 19, 2006, no man's land authors Johannes Jansen, Hendrik Jackson, Orsolya Kalasz, Monika Rinck and Peter Waterhouse met with their translators - respectively, Catherine Hales, Nicholas Grindell, Donna Stonecipher, Alistair Noon and Ann Cotton – at a workshop hosted by the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin. Dubbed "Encounters in no man's land", the workshop concluded on the evening of the 19th with a reading and discussion moderated by literary critic Gregor Dotzauer, from which the following statements have been adapted.

Johannes Jansen * Catherine Hales

Jansen
The strange thing is that the sound of the other language makes you realize that this foreignness doesn't really exist. […] When I hear my own sound in another language, this foreignness doesn't exist. […] I'm for the total abolition of foreignness among languages.

Dotzauer
What language do you translate your texts from when you write them?
Jansen
I translate them from the German.

Hales
For every text, there's one original, but there can be many translations. In general I don't like the word "translation", especially when you're dealing with poetry. Johannes suggested a wonderful word: adaptation.
These aren't the kind of texts I write myself, and that makes them a kind of trip into another world, so to speak.

Hendrick Jackson * Nicholas Grindell

Jackson
All that happens in translation is that gentle shifts take place. But they always happen anyway. In that sense it is absurd to deplore the loss that supposedly takes place in translation. No one says of a mediocre work that a "loss" has occurred. Though when you start to think in terms of loss, it would make just as much sense to use the word for mediocre works as for translations. […] It's better to speak of shifts, which encompass not only losses but the gains which can distinguish any good translation. The yardstick is not the original, so to speak, but the quality, even if the original is the first source of this quality.

Grindell
When there are things [in the original] that are hard to understand, first you have to have them explained to you, and then you have to work them back into the translation so that they're just as hard to understand for the English reader.

Monika Rinck * Alistair Noon

Rinck
Some [of my] poems only really found themselves in English. […] Maybe without knowing it I've written a few Czech poems that are still waiting to come home.

Rinck
Now I couldn't really say exactly when I first met the people from lauter niemand. Those were mobile sociotopes anyway, the kind where they met in back rooms, and you knew: Sundays.
Dotzauer
And were these English-German back rooms, even then?
Rinck
Yes, that too. [To Alistair Noon]. Did you also go to "Meyers Beautiful Meat Salon" back then?

Noon
Monika' good command of English influences what she writes in German, and that sometimes poses unexpected problems for the translator. In "Absolute Romantic Zero" she uses [the word] "atemnehmend". […] It clearly comes from English "breathtaking". Now, in German it's a kind of neologism, and I wouldn't translate it as "breathtaking", because I don't just want to translate the words, I want to translate their function, the way the poem functions.

Orsolya Kalász * Dona Stonecipher

Stonecipher
That was the decision we had to make [in "Language gives up the Ghost"], whether to build in that the speaker is Hungarian speaking to a German person, and then keep the images that work in those two languages, or make the speaker an English native speaker and find equivalents […] if you keep the Hungarian and German, then English is only a tool, and the English doesn't live in that poem.
In some sense [the translated poem] becomes your own, especially if you have to read it before a public, you have to like it to be able to read it well, and so you have to make it your own in that sense.

Kalász
Now I can understand the insecurity other authors feel when their poems are translated into a language that's completely foreign to them, the way Hungarian is for most people. It's a little bit like sending your child to school by himself for the first time. You sneak after him, hiding behind bushes and trying to keep an eye on him, but at some point you have to let him go and say, he'll get to school in one piece, everything will be just fine.

Peter Waterhouse * Ann Cotten

Waterhouse
I experience translation, especially the translation of poetry […] almost less as a translation than as a thinking-further of the text. And perhaps less a decrypting than a further encrypting. […] I have this experience over and over again with translation, that the cognitive possibilities are sometimes freer in the translation than in the so-called original.

Cotten
Maybe I have more of a screw loose than people who grew up only in one language. So many people share this bilingual fate. I think it's becoming less and less unusual. […] I've always talked like a foreigner. In Austria people think I'm German. I'm not used to being seen as a native, as soon as I open my mouth. So, that seems normal to me. I've always spoken a bit strangely, or perhaps not. I just speak.