Translation in a Global Context; Translation and World Literature
Following Moroccan writer and theorist Abdelkebir Katibi, Ungar reminds us that “all of us who study and teach literary translation are corporatists and even professional foreigners of sorts, in deed if not always by title”. Our classroom discussions of translations of texts from a variety of national and historical traditions led naturally into debates about the status of non-English-language literature, from the classics to the contemporary. All of us who have taught or taken courses in Links Of London Bracelets which literature is read in translation are well aware of the way in which a text’s translated status is all too often invoked only to address inconsistencies or perceived flaws, thus sidelining vital questions about the task and status of translation. Traduttore traditore, the saying goes, but if translators do necessarily betray, we can nevertheless profit from a study of their particular form of infidelity.
The course we propose provides students with essential conceptual tools for furthering their acquaintance with foreign-language writers who lie outside the traditional boundaries of the English department. For this reason, we believe that it would transition well into courses in foreign-language literature (in translation or not), as well as world literature courses, whether they are wide-ranging “great books” courses or era-specific courses (on the contemporary world novel, for example). At some point, Moretti suggests, our reading of foreign-language literature must “yield to the specialist of the national literature, in a sort of cosmic and inevitable division of labour”. We have found it useful to ground our thinking about contemporary world literature in the questions raised by our translation studies course. Why is Paul Auster, although critically acclaimed domestically, still less known in his native United States than in Links Of London continental Europe, where he is translated into French and German, among other European languages Why do we read so little foreign-language literature in the United States What do we read when we do read foreign-language literature, and why How do books journey from their original language and country of origin to “universal recognition” on the global stage (Casanova 354) Do we read foreign literature with different expectations Put bluntly, do we read to confirm or enrich Who are the judges for contemporary non-English-language literatures; who, that is, determines the “evolving criteria” by means of which these literatures are judged and rewarded (English 305).
Of course, we cannot merely append world literatures to the English department. Something has to happen to English first. Cultivating the necessary changes means pursuing the fundamental questions and debates that surround the contested field of world literature, questions that necessarily involve issues of translation. In her Manifesto for Literary Studies, Marjorie Garber counsels readers that “the future importance of literary studies and, if we care about such things, its intellectual and cultural prestige both among the other disciplines and in the world will come from taking risks, and not from playing it safe”. We propose our course in this spirit. T.S. Eliot believed that a work’s survival in foreign markets depends on its universality; although it is the foreignness that first attracts the reader, “it will not survive unless the foreign reader recognizes, perhaps unconsciously, identity as well as difference”.
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