MUCH AS I'D LIKE TO THINK my family history tells the story of sinking educational standards, the truth is that it probably says more about the decline of the Abramovich work ethic. My grandmother, who had a knack for languages, spoke four of them: Russian, French, German, and, finally, English -- although she hardly needed it living out in Brighton Beach. My father speaks three of these, plus a smattering of Japanese. I speak two, and that's due only to circumstance. I was born in the Soviet Union, and though I left at a young enough age to learn to speak English without an accent (that I mumble to the point of inaudibility may be just another way to be misunderstood) my earliest memories involve looks from American children as I'd try to get some point across in Russian.

That feeling of disconnection stayed with me long after I'd decided, at age seven, that Sasha -- my grandfather's name and mine -- would better suit a girl. Had I stayed in Russia, I might have focused more on the essence of things and not the names for them; more on what we say than on the impossibility of saying it. I might have found it easier to talk about novels and records that I loved. Or never despaired, even in moments of intimacy, of getting my point across. But I wouldn't be so interested in translation. As it is, I stand in awe of those who speak and, especially, write fluently across cultures -- for me, there's nothing more difficult than expressing the simplest sentiments with a modicum of elegance and intelligibility.

There are things I don't think I'll ever be able to express in English. Take, for instance, the Russian word interresnaya, which translates simply as the feminine form of "interesting." If you told an American man you'd like to set him up with an "interesting" woman, chances are he'd roll his eyes at you. But what the Russian word actually describes is richer and, ultimately, incommunicable: The closest English gets is "striking." When you say of someone, "there's just something about her," interresnaya is the word you're looking for. But to explain where "striking" and "interesting" part ways, I'll tell you that the Russian men I know would invariably prefer an interresnaya woman to a beautiful one. Conversely, I'd have a hard time explaining the concept of privacy to my relatives in the homeland -- Russian has no word for it. It's like that with a lot of things.

For FEED's second-annual books issue, we've gathered together writers who say that, in a sense, what they do for a living is fail to communicate. And yet they surmount these failings with what looks, to the rest of us, suspiciously like ease. We begin with an essay by Jhumpa Lahiri, winner of this year's Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, about the problems that result -- at home and abroad -- when you try to write about thoughtful Bengalis in American prose. Tuesday, Julian Dibbell shows how machine translation may provide us with more than funny pidgin English. For Wednesday's Dialog, we've invited the poet Christopher Logue, translator and short-story writer Lydia Davis, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, a husband-and-wife team now focusing its energy on a translation of Dostoevsky's The Idiot and Haruki Murakami's interpreter, Jay Rubin, to talk about what gets lost -- and found -- in translation. Thursday, Susan Choi confronts the reality of the country she imagined in her first novel. On Friday, we present Michael Kupperman's drawings of King Lear in translation through the centuries. And Gregory Rabassa, in an interview with Aaron Retica (who edited this issue with me), talks about his long career as a translator of Latin American, Spanish, and Portuguese books and his days as a soldier and O.S.S. man during the Second World War.

As always, please remember to join us daily in FEED's very own Tower of Babel, the Loop.

-- Alex Abramovich