Especially for translators themselves, working in isolation at their desks, translation can often seem an abstract and disembodied affair, a struggle with pure language, a matter of creating text from text. But every act of translation is also, on some level, an engagement with another human being: the author. And even with authors long since deceased or otherwise incommunicado, this emotional rapport, intellectual stimulation or provocation, friction and tension keeps the translator going and lifts the isolation of the writing desk.

One aim of no man's land is to encourage closer connections between writers and translators; another is to explore and convey the creative process of translation itself. There is no better vehicle for both these aims than the classic translation workshop. The predictable-seeming format - writers meet with their translators, or writers meet other writers to translate one another in tandem - merely provides the framework for the completely unpredictable: What happens when creative personalities collaborate? Where are they compatible, where incompatible? Where are the borders of understanding? How do writers and translators, or writers and writers, inspire one another, and where can they truly collaborate? In the few intense days of a workshop, translation is revealed as the human interaction it always is.

no man's land has organized two translation workshops so far, a writer-translator workshop for Issue # 1, held in October, 2006 at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, and a dialect translation workshop with two German and two Scottish poets for Issue # 3, held at the University of Edinburgh in March 2008. Both were highly rewarding experiences that released intense creative energies and created lasting bonds. We look forward to more such encounters in future!