Translation has regularly been deployed as a defining aspect of World Literature, notably in the work of David Damrosch, who claims in a number of studies that it is circulation between contexts in different languages that underpins the ‘gains’ of any work which falls into the category, i.e., it is translation that permits texts to “circulat[e] out into a broader world beyond its linguistic and cultural point of origin” (Damrosch, 2003, p. 12). Such transnational, transcultural and (crucially) translingual displacements also inform in part Pascale Casanova’s (1999) centripetal thesis in La République mondiale des lettres, according to which passage through Paris (often accompanied by translation into French) functions as a form of literary consecration and often canonization. This article explores, expands and ultimately challenges such readings by focusing, in addition, on the production and consumption of World Literature, suggesting not only that translation may form, in such contexts and in the light of such understandings, a key trope or lens through which writing associated with this category may be identified and explored, but also that World Literature, conceived in such circulatory and relational terms, allows us to analyze the presence and function of a translational epistemology.
Since its initial coinage by Goethe in the form of Weltliteratur in 1827, the concept of World Literature has sought to disrupt the methodological nationalism and associated (often ethnolinguistic) assumptions evident in the study of national literatures; it has often, however, replaced such biases with another, that of a monolingual epistemology that approaches literature alinguistically and fails to acknowledge the challenges of researching multilingually (Phipps, 2019). Such monolingualism—evident in particular in Anglophone scholarship but perpetuated through the Anglonormativity underpinning the global academic publishing industry—has been rigorously critiqued by scholars such as David Gramling (2016), and there is growing awareness of a translational dynamics that underpins the circulation of works of literature in a global frame. In a pedagogical context, building on now well-established understandings of the (in)visibility of the translator, students studying World Literature in English only are increasingly taught to read translations consciously qua translations (Baer & Woods, 2022), foregrounding challenges identified as well as solutions proposed by the translator as opposed to assuming that they have seamless access as readers to the ‘original’. Such an approach echoes the increasing awareness, popularized in the outstanding work of scholars such as Clive Scott (2012; 2018), that translation may itself be the highest form of literary analysis, engaging as it does with the micro and the macro, and implying an incomparable intimacy with the text and a familiarity not only with its polysemy and other linguistic (and indeed multimodal) subtleties, but also close familiarity with intertextual and intercultural resonances. Such reflections on consumption and reception are then complemented with an increasing attention to production, with Rebecca Walkowitz (2015) exploring the extent to which World Literature is inherently “born translated”, i.e., how translation acts as a literary medium in its own right rather than only as an element of a text’s subsequent circulation.
This article builds on the above context in order to foreground the status of World Literature as a site of epistemic and cultural difference, in whose understanding translation plays a privileged and multiple role. As such, it seeks to move beyond translation as methodology to propose a translational epistemology, contributing to the growing emphasis on linguistic sensitivity in the construction of knowledge that is evident notably in Barbara Cassin’s philosophical interventions (2004) around the notion of the (in)traduisible, developed in relation to world literature by Emily Apter (2013) and others. The concept of the (un)translatable, I argue, is central to the study of World Literature itself as we grapple with the divergences and convergences between the term and its (not-quite) equivalents in other linguistic traditions: Weltliteratur, littérature-monde, literatura mundial… At the same time, as Dilip Menon has recently demonstrated in Changing Theory: Thinking from the Global South (2022), any systematic attempt to develop reading and analytical practices suited to analyzing the global depends on generating a conceptual vocabulary underpinned by epistemologies that will necessarily be actively multilingual but freighted at the same time through translational approaches that seek to de-create language hegemonies. But the additional challenge in developing a translational epistemology from this context— inherent in both the text and its subsequent interpretation—is to avoid the polarizing implications of any bilingual (or even multilingual) approach, and to follow Tim Ingold and others in challenging the assumption that translation undermines a concept of “the world in which people dwell as a continuous and unbounded landscape, endlessly varied in its features and contours, yet without seams or breaks” (Ingold, 1993, p. 22).
One of the key thinkers to articulate this approach—in an initially Antillean then more global frame—was Edouard Glissant, signatory of the 2007 manifesto “For a World-Literature in French”. Through his notion of Tout-Monde, Glissant in fact questions the concept of littérature-monde, in part by challenging the monolingualism inherent in the “in French” by which that body of writing was initially defined, in part by linking his own reflections on writing “in the presence of all the world’s languages” (en présence de toutes les langues du monde) (Glissant, 1996 ; p. 40, my translation) to a coherent statement of translational epistemology that is evident throughout his work as both literary practitioner and global thinker. In one of his final works, La Cohée du Lamentin, Glissant presents translation not as a secondary activity but as a literary genre in its own right: “It is not only an invention limited to marvellous equivalences between two language systems; it also creates new categories and concepts, it shakes up existing orders” (Elle n’est pas seulement une invention limitée à des équivalences merveilleuses entre deux systèmes de langage, elle crée aussi des catégories et des concepts inédits, elle bouscule des ordres établis) (Glissant, 2005, p. 143; my translation). Translation is understood here to “put languages and cultures into circulation in new interlocutory contexts, joining them and their historical traditions in new and dynamic ways” (Bermann, 2014, p. 80). Although largely absent hitherto from the literature on translation theory, Glissant produced across his career a substantial body of thought on language and translation. At the same time, as part of an emerging canon of contemporary World Literature, his own writing has itself undergone a process of translation that has ensured its impact on postcolonial thought more broadly—a process continued by the Glissant Translation Project.
In La Cohée du Lamentin, Glissant associates translation with the notion of “Relation” previously central to much of his work, suggesting that translation may be seen as a form of “multirelation”. This links all parts of the world without relying in the process on any move towards universal equivalence that ultimately erases or absorbs political, cultural, and historical specificities. Celia Britton (2008) sees translation in Glissant as “the invention of a new langage that bridges two langues” (p. 78), that is, as a process of creativity that relates and activates linguistic and cultural systems seen as distinctive and transforms that linkage into a new form of translational relation. Translation is presented in this article accordingly as a key element of Glissant’s notion of a “new archipelagic thought”, in which opacity functions in a similar way to untranslatability, avoiding the rigid polarizations of closed systems of thought. I conclude by exploring how, in Traité du Tout-Monde (1997), Glissant creates the foundations of a translational epistemology via his description of an ‘art of the fugue’.
