The no man's land we will explore here is, in the abstract sense, the no man's land between languages, the space in which translators operate, and which authors themselves enter when they are translated. And this specific "no man's land" is the English 10th anniversary issue of the Berlin literary magazine lauter niemand, translated in part at this workshop at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin.
For me, the project itself began with a very concrete translation problem: what could an "English lauter niemand" possibly be called? The phrase, from Franz Kafka's "Excursion into the Mountains", is a perfect example of the untranslatable. Rendered variously as "a pack of nobodies", "just Nobodies" and "absolutely nobody", its emphatically paradoxical quality ("plenty of nothing" comes to mind) is nearly impossible to convey, especially when removed from the context of Kafka's story. I abandoned the idea of a "direct" translation in favor of an allusive approach: "no man's land" (in German, Niemandsland) plays on - or extrapolates from - lauter niemand, while offering a wealth of new associations.
lauter niemand is not just an untranslatable Kafka quote, nor is it just a Berlin literary magazine, lauter niemand is also a "literature lab", an open forum where writers - newcomers and old hands alike - present their work for discussion by an audience of fellow writers and readers. This laboratory is a simmering place of experiments, elements colliding, reactions, counter-reactions, fusions and the occasional explosion. Here literature takes the form of interpersonal dialogue, confrontation and friction - just as it does in the translation process.
It seems only natural that this literature laboratory should give rise to a translation laboratory. Here, too, things simmered, texts were analyzed, broken down and reconstituted in another language. Here, too, experiments were undertaken, new solutions and constellations emerged. Never ones to shy away from paradox, we even went so far as to have a German poet translate another German poet into German…
We are very grateful to the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, especially Jürgen Jakob Becker, for hosting and assisting us with this workshop.

Isabel Cole