How is literary translation an intervention in a war? Can translation serve as an antidote to imperialism? And what does the role of translation between East and West mean for a place like Ukraine, where–as Adam Zagajewski wrote–”both sides of the border face east”?

What does it mean for a writer to give up a native language? To translate her-or-himself? To re-create oneself in a different language also one’s own? To what extent are Russophone Ukrainian writers’ renunciations of Russian a metaphorical amputation, an act of solidarity with the literal amputations all around them?

Fighting at the frontline, expecting someone in captivity, living on occupied territories, loneliness in a frontline town — the war created numerous experiences which are impossible to “express” and “translate.” How to understand each other then? And how to deal with the “internal translation,” when your own experiences are constantly variable? Can a language contend with this translation?

Fascism, imperialism, decolonization, genocide, concentration camps all function as hermeneutic concepts and categories allowing for historical comparisons. How can we mediate between the particular and the universal? What kind of understanding and solidarity across borders is possible?

Can new material forms shake us into a different connection with the past? Photographer-artists Gabriela Bulisova and Mark Isaac have spent years visiting mass grave sites, collecting organic material, turning it into liquid emulsion, and then using that to reproduce photographs of Holocaust victims–whose bodies are then molecularly present in the images.

“How is translating A. S. Byatt , Susan Sontag or Julian Barnes when a Russian missile strikes a couple blocks away from your place different from translating them when one doesn’t?”— Iaroslava Strikha

Can poetry translate suffering–and cultivate empathy–when other forms fail?

Yiddish is being reflected upon anew as a language of Ukraine as the country embraces a civic national identity. What does it mean for Yiddish-Ukrainian literary translation to experience a renaissance in the midst of war?

Hannah Arendt concludes Origins of Totalitarianism with the remark: “we may say that radical evil has emerged in connection with a system in which all men have become equally superfluous.” Later, after observing the Eichmann trial, she came to the conclusion that evil could not be radical, it could only be extreme. What she learned from Eichmann, she believed, was that the nature of evil was its shallowness, its lack of depth—in contrast to our longing for the demonic.

How are words that resist translation–words like свої, произвол, перемога–keys for opening locked doors and allowing us into new, unfamiliar spaces? And what can we do with the things we learn by being in those spaces?