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In August 1915, The Egoist – an avant-garde magazine which claimed to ‘recognise no taboos’ and had serialised A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses while James Joyce’s work was banned – announced that it was launching a Poets’ Translation Series With translations from Greek, French, Italian, Russian, Spanish and Hebrew, it aimed to capture the history of European literature in a unified collection, and thus to keep a spirit of internationalism alive at a time of crisis In 1941, as the continent was divided in another war, the Hogarth Press published a journal titled Daylight, a collaboration of English and Czech writers printed to ‘reaffirm a belief that the culture of Europe is fundamentally one’ and to establish an artistic alliance that would prove ‘more valuable and more lasting than any political accommodation of the moment’ Over the period during and between the two world wars, little magazines – among them Horizon, New Writing, Left Review, Criterion and Adam International Review – looked to counter the tide of nationalism in Europe by forming new and unexpected alliances within their pages, by juxtaposing the work of British writers with their counterparts from other cultures, and by foregrounding translation as an act of solidarity As we planned this issue of The White Review, knowing it would be published in the month that the UK is scheduled, at time of writing, to leave the European Union, we looked, in some small way, to their example, seeking to put together an issue concerned with language, understanding, and dialogue across borders – not only trans-European, but internationally   This issue’s roundtable takes as it subject translation Our participants – Khairani Barokka, Rahul Bery, Kate Briggs and Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen – discuss ‘fluency as power’, language extinction and oral cultures, and making mistakes A theme returned to throughout the discussion is translation’s nature as essentially relational and collaborative: a practice, as Briggs puts it, that ‘is attached to something else, and arrives pointing to something other than itself’ As if to show the theory in action, Adam Thirlwell’s essay/journal offers an account of