ABSTRACT
One of the tactics available to translators and writers in situations of conflict or post-conflict is to challenge the very categories they are dealt. Rather than accepting the intractability of the space between us and them, between our language and theirs, they question the conditions of exchange. In the Cypriot context, this means questioning the often-fictitious purity of mother tongue that sustains official histories. In the case of the poet Mehmet Yashin, it means proposing the category of “step-mother tongue” instead. And it means defiantly occupying the middle space, in the hopes of chipping away at the certainties that keep the two sides apart. This is the significance, then, of the meandering of the poets through the streets and alleyways of no man’s land. They occupy this middle ground not as a safe place outside of transactions between opposing tongues but as a space that can unsettle the terms of engagement.
