The reader will find, seeded throughout Issue Three, some translation tales from writers in Arabic, German, Hungarian, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish, finding their way into German, Greek, Italian, Serbian, English and more. These tales can be filed with (also in this issue) Oksana Forostyna’s parsing of « untranslatable » Ukrainian humor and with Alexander Wells’s defense of Denglisch (and Berlinglisch, and Globish).

Translation, as a topic, tends to invite polemic or lamentation. Does the ERB have a stance? Not really. Our premise is that translation finds as much as it loses. The ERB’s editorial assistants, Nienke Groskamp and Job Wester, asked nine writers not what was lost but what was found in translation, as a text is given new surfaces and new depths. What’s the rightest or wrongest or closest or strangest thing that a reader has found in a new language? What’s something you wish would be found?

An inquiry into varieties of translational experience became a series of reflections on artful error and unexpected intimacy.

☞  Mona Kareem: « Bidoon » ➞ « Bedouin »

☞  Carlos Fonseca: « Para Ati » ➞ « Para ti »

☞  Agnes Lidbeck: Why are you so cold-hearted?

☞  Defne Suman: Borrowed time is borrowed money

☞  Hans von Trotha: Judge a book by its covers

☞  Iman Mersal: Panties of the people

☞  Krisztina Tóth: « droid » ➞ « druid »

☞  Lavinia Braniște: Overalls & eyeglasses

☞  Lydia Sandgren: Read between the stripes