This ideal is not new: already before the First World War, poets and writers tried to create alliances in order to resist the egoism of national rhetoric. All historical periods have their stories of literary transmission, of sharing, intellectual borrowing, reciprocal influences. These stories are full of friendships and complicities that ignore Europe's formal boundaries. And yet, of the European writers and translators who do spring to mind, the examples of Baudelaire translating Edgar Poe, of Victor Hugo translating Shakespeare, of André Gide championing Dostoyevsky's work during its publication in France, or, more recently, of Claudio Magris commenting in Italian on the Austro-Hungarian work of Robert Musil, are struggling to inscribe themselves as a model for our long-term future.

Should the "mediator" die, the chain will be broken...`

How then should we think of a place, shunting points on the railway, between the different European languages - and what should be its mission? How to de-centre "national" literary and intellectual traditions in order to allow them points of contact, to come together regularly, outside of context of big publishing fairs? How to forge stable relationships between Europe's authors, translators and publishers? And finally, what structure could fit the long-term framework of the written works, the time it takes to write, translate and support them, when increasingly the only thing that counts in the publishing industry is the number of copies sold? Since Spring 2008, these questions have been fuelling a growing group of European writers, intellectuals and researchers united by the "European Society of Authors."

Let us begin with the notion of "cultural export." Because what happens in the absence of a common European translation policy? Each state, each national funding system, will naturally prefer to stick to the old paradigms of ex-translation and in-translation, in other words, of exporting "national" books and importing "foreign" books. The French export "their" French literature, the Germans "their" German literature, the Polish "their" Polish literature, the Italians, etc... And yet everyone will agree that Proust belongs no more to the French than Joyce to the Irish. Or, to be more contemporary, that the work of Michel Foucault is no more "exotic" in Poland than that of Slavoj Žižek in Hungary. There exists a flagrant contradiction between the values of sharing, transmission and the universality of books and the logic of exporting "national" literatures. This is then one of the first paths we want to follow: if European works exist, funding for translation must be rethought as based on the inter-crossing model of railway points, of constant "in-translation"at the very heart of the continent. This, by the way has already been the policy of the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Institut for Human Sciences) in Vienna since 1982, as it develops a model for multilingual translation.

Let us now turn to the market imbalance from which translation suffers: more than sixty years ago, while seeking to defend Dostoyevsky's work to French readers, who judged it confused, rough, incomprehensible, André Gide happened also to outline what he meant by 'authors for export'. Contrary to the meaning this might suggest to contemporary readers, by this term Gide meant writers whose books, though difficult and little read, were still finding publishers in other countries - by means of a kind of international literary fraternity. While this literary fraternity still exists among publishers, agents, readers and translators, commercial pressure these days is such that 'authors for export' now means above all authors who sell, if possible, those who sell millions. Those who are familiar with the game of literary fairs know that the number of copies sold is now the key criterion for the sale of "foreign rights". Further, this fundamental change sets us on quite another path: is it possible to create a space that will value the guiding principles and long-term future of a literary work? A space of conversation, of transition, of companionship?

At this point, let us foreground the naivety underlying the belief that a book will be translated and read widely solely due to its own merits. There are more than thirty European languages. Each has its writers, its poets, its intellectuals, but no matter - we must acknowledge - once we know that on average more than 60% of books translated in Europe each year are translated from one or another English source. Thus hundreds of books remain hidden in the 'paradise lost' of a so-called secondary language, for lack of translations, translators and publishers to finance their translation. We could discuss at length why and how one literature may come to triumph over others: quality of the fiction, universality of the stories, but also effectiveness of publishing infrastructure and the drive of commercialisation. But this is not the point. In a European space aiming, despite all this, to unite people of multiple identities and different languages, is it possible to continue in the context of such a distortion? A third avenue for exploration follows from this: how might we help to support and fund  translations from the literatures of North, South, Eastern and Western Europe while excluding translation from English?

For some years now, a number of 'multilingual' organisations have been trying to get organised on a European level, hoping to do something to correct the shortcomings, the black holes left by the market. By definition sensitised to the imperative of literary communication, translators have been among the first to create an association of their associations in order the better to defend their rights: CEATL, the European Council of Literary Translators' Associations (see the study they recently published: www.ceatl.eu). For theatrical writing too, an organisation has managed to bring together the various European scenes: with the help of the European Commission, the European Translation Workshop, the AET, managed to link up eight different cultural institutions, in Lisbon, Valladolid, Madrid, Florence, Milan, Athens, Timisoara, Bratislava, Debrecen and Orléans. Since 2005, the AET has supported seventy translations of theatre texts into French, Italian, Portuguese, Slovakian, Greek, Romanian and Spanish. Finally, in Spring of 2008, an appeal was launched by a group of European philosophers, artists and researchers, including Yves Bonnefoy, Edgar Morin, Barbara Cassin, Etienne Balibar, Adonis and Michel Deguy. The signatories to this appeal of 2008 were using their gesture to call for "a common European culture".

Little by little, then, Umberto Eco's famous statement, "the common language of Europe is translation", is gaining ground. A miraculous statement, limpidly complex, that in a single sentence makes us aware that unlike for other cultures, Europe's "common language" entails a certain cost. And more than a cost: it includes the riches of misunderstanding, of interpretation and of the complexity of the translator's profession. This is summed up by the translator's endless return to the fundamental questions: "What exactly should I betray in order to remain faithful?", "How much should I transform a thought for it to be understood?" and too "From what collective history, what personal experience must I draw in order to transplant this work without uprooting it?"

The day that we are able to build in the "cost" of this statement, "the common language of Europe is translation", perhaps then we shall be able to make our case that a "European policy on translation" is not only necessary but should form the very foundation of our common destinies. And that we need a lasting, constant, tough political will to underwrite the cost of European language, this real requirement which represents the price we must pay in order that, while not being perfectly shared, a poetic emotion may yet be grasped, understood, assumed.

Books today may seem to be marginal "products", leftovers of an "old world", far from the demands of our current crises. But in having always to choose between bread and books, which is in effect what is happening in France, in Germany and elsewhere that budgets are being cut and cultural centres closed, we are forgetting what's essential. Whoever wishes to understand what connects us beyond the wars, massacres and other atrocities of the 20th and 21st centuries, will turn to texts: the Iliad, the Odyssey, some lovely passages from the Bible, the rediscoveries of Greek and Latin texts during the Renaissance, and ultimately, to "everyone's novel", Europe's shared chuckle, Don Quixote, the wonderful picaresque... "In the beginning were the books", we could write of Europe; books, authors, ideas. And of who else but those "Lumières"? Die "Aufklärung"? The "Enlightenment"? Those crossings between France, Germany, beyond, as far as Russia. And much later, on the other side of Mediterranean, the "Nahdâ"? Only that, the time it took for these works to reach the other side of the sea. But how, then, are we to make this Europe of the thousand and one translations, this place of shunting points, between languages, between all the languages, come to pass?

It begins here, right now.

People are coming together, beginning to talk, to exchange ideas. Translators, authors, editors, actors, theatre directors. Then, they come to an agreement. On a slogan. Or rather, on a paragraph which they address to institutions, to patrons, to foundations: "If you wish to give Europeans reasons to come together, let their language be translation, the difficulties of translation, the comedy of it; allow works to travel and encounter each other, beyond importing and exporting; give translators the means to make a decent living and to convey the emotions of their forked tongues; let the distortions of the editorial market be corrected, so that difficult works may also be read and appreciated in the common tongue of translation, and take responsibility for the cost of this sharing, of this gift, of this transmission." And now, what of this invitation? The greater our number to champion the idea of a European policy of translation that matches the poetic, cultural and, ultimately, the political stakes of Europe, the further our voice will carry.

Camille de Toledo