Discoveries tend to fall into two categories: the Eureka moment – finding what you set out to find – and the serendipitous one, inadvertently stumbling across something totally unexpected, without necessarily realising what it is you have found. The poetics of co-translation definitely belongs to the second category, as literary revolutions tend to: in the words of Gertrude Stein as Toklas, ‘Naturally one does not know how it happened until it is well over beginning happening’ (Stein 1933: 25). In the case of the Koteliansky–Mansfield–Woolf translations, there is sufficient textual proof to suggest that in the ‘translating laboratory’ conjured up in the introduction, something happened that certainly exceeded what each collaborator initially hoped to attain. Koteliansky clearly subscribed passionately to the idea that via translation he could feed the public's interest in Russian literature and the arts, earn a living, and remain true to his belief in ‘real being and creating’ (Diment 2011: 90). Woolf and Mansfield were both passionate readers of Russian literature, they were convinced that the future of the British literary world lay in techniques and modes of fiction they detected in the Russian writers they admired, and both were undermined by doubts about their own authorial ambitions. They wanted to define new paths for literary expression, and they were in need of literary recognition as well as commercial success.

To form a clearer impression of how their poetically creative, yet acutely precise form of co-translation then developed, it is important to start from what ‘translation’ meant to the three co-authors individually: How did they write about it? Which qualities did they value in a ‘good’ translation? This chapter therefore starts by looking at the often misleading definitions of translation voiced by the three writers individually, and some of the language games and ‘translational encounters’ inscribed within Woolf and Mansfield's fictional and non-fictional writing. From here we move briefly to the Russian dialogues between them, as attested by their reviews of key works; the features they pick out will turn out to be exactly those highlighted in the co-translations themselves, as we shall see in chapters to come.