Berlin is a city of languages – not just German, and not just Turkish, Arabic, English, Polish, Kurdish, Russian and Vietnamese, but countless more as well. Since its founding in 2017, stadtsprachen has been providing a platform for our city’s literary output in all its linguistic diversity. On its bilingual German-English website – with texts also available in original language – the online magazine has published 30 quarterly issues featuring over 700 texts in some 50 languages, making sure to highlight the work of translators along the way; they also hold multilingual readings as part of their Parataxe series. We got the latest from editor-in-chief Birger Hoyer and art editor Joey Bahlsen, who together with Chiara Schimpe make up the three-person editorial team.
When was stadtsprachen founded, and what were its original goals?
Joey Bahlsen: It was founded in 2017 out of the Stadtsprachen festival for multilingual literature. After that festival, we had a huge amount of translated texts that we wanted to find the right vessel for – and that’s how the magazine was born. A huge part of what we do is representing different communities in the city, and connecting people who speak and write in different languages. We want to help people find their own community of international writers.
Birger Hoyer: Our main aim has been to make literature that is written in Berlin in languages other than German more visible. So we decided to start the online magazine, and as we went, we learned that we wanted to present many texts from many languages, in the original and in translation. It was best to do that online because no one would buy a book with texts in various languages that they often cannot read.
It’s important to us that we showcase the city’s diversity, especially now in sort of dark political times.
So publishing online isn’t a cost compromise, but something core to the project?
JB: Yes. Digital just makes more sense for us. For example, we have published poems that were written in one language and then translated several times – one has been translated into ten different languages, I think, which just lends itself to digital reading.
How do you find all this fabulous content you publish? It sounds like one hell of a scouting job.
BH: Firstly, we have a call for submissions – it’s open to anyone who lives in Berlin. We publish four issues a year, so in advance of each one, we make an open call that we advertise through our social media channels and the website. But we also get messages and tips from the authors who are already published by us. We also meet many authors and translators through our Parataxe reading series – we publish everyone involved with them. And it’s also via our communities. Often someone will come to us and say, there is this interesting person who I think is in Berlin now, and the German readers don’t know them, but everyone should know them.
Are there any authors you’ve found whose work you’ve personally enjoyed a lot?
JB: Oh, it’s hard to pick one out [laughs]. There’s a Turkish writer called Seda Mimaroğlu, a poet who publishes in Turkish and English. We’ve published her a few times. And in the last issue, we had an essayist named Fionnuala Kavanagh.
BH: There’s also Klemen Kordež, a Slovenian author who is quite well known in his country and his community – we got to know him and his writing via submission. That’s a fun element of why we do what we do: we can explore and get to know so many interesting people and texts in translation. We have even had a text in Esperanto!
Many cities have a very monolingual literary culture. Is it part of your mission that it’s actually sort of great to be surrounded by other languages, even ones you can’t understand?
JB: Definitely. It’s important to us that we showcase the city’s diversity, especially now in sort of dark political times [grimaces]. And to be able to experience other languages, to be open to other cultures, to be able to encounter other points of view. It’s incredibly enriching, I think.
How can our readers get involved?
BH: They can come along to our reading series. They can head to our website, where we publish all the texts as well as short biographies of the author and translators. And they can submit their work! We want to read fresh, interesting, original, multilingual texts. We name specific windows, but really, we are open all throughout the year.
