The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature

by Emily Apter

Translation, before 9/11, was deemed primarily an instrument of international relations, business, education, and culture. Today it seems, more than ever, a matter of war and peace. In The Translation Zone , Emily Apter argues that the field of translation studies, habitually confined to a framework of linguistic fidelity to an original, is ripe for expansion as the basis for a new comparative literature.


Organized around a series of propositions that range from the idea that nothing is translatable to the idea that everything is translatable, The Translation Zone examines the vital role of translation studies in the "invention" of comparative literature as a discipline. Apter emphasizes "language wars" (including the role of mistranslation in the art of war), linguistic incommensurability in translation studies, the tension between textual and cultural translation, the role of translation in shaping a global literary canon, the resistance to Anglophone dominance, and the impact of translation technologies on the very notion of how translation is defined. The book speaks to a range of disciplines and spans the globe.


Ultimately, The Translation Zone maintains that a new comparative literature must take stock of the political impact of translation technologies on the definition of foreign or symbolic languages in the humanities, while recognizing the complexity of language politics in a world at once more monolingual and more multilingual.

Genres: Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, Academic, Language, Literature, Essays

312 pages, Paperback

First published December 5, 2005

About the author

Emily Apter is Professor of Comparative Literature and French at New York University. Her published works include The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature and Continental Drift: From National Characters to Subjects.

Reviews

[Katarzyna Bartoszynska · Rating 3 out of 5]

I vacillated between three and four stars. Certainly, the book is impressive for the way it handles a broad range of material from many different times and places (I've certainly added a heap of things to my to-read list thanks to her). Similarly, her interest in balancing an awareness of linguistics, politics, and different media within close readings grounded in a more typical philologically-based approach is impressive. A lot of the discussions are really interesting, and one will almost certainly encounter some discussion of something that s/he is completely unfamiliar with but intrigued by and wanting to learn more about when reading this book.

But I simply do not see how the book does what it repeatedly claims to do, namely, to ground a new approach to comparative literature in a theoretical framework drawn from translation. I don't understand how that framework functions in practice, and I don't understand how it differs from other approaches to comparative literature. There are a lot of different issues that come up when thinking about translation, and Apter seems to want to hold on to all of them and put them all to work in some way. The result is a collection of readings of a lot of different texts, with an overall framework that might strike some as liberatory and exciting, but to me was frustratingly loose and vague. And the text lacks a clear account of both the specifics and the pay-off of its methods. So, for example, while I could see how a discussion of multilingual or 'creole' writing was related to the issue of translation in a broad sense, I did not see what was original in Apter's discussion of different multilingual works, or how she was modeling a new approach to comparative literature. I disagreed with (or had some quibbles with) some of the particular readings, but that seems rather beside the point -- and this is part of what frustrated me about the book. The individual pieces did not add up into a comprehensive theory.

[Reuben Woolley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m looking forward to reading Apter’s more recent book ‘Against World Literature’ because I think it might redress and clarify some of the things I think are confusing or confused here. There are some forgivable things present in this book, like the youthful, utopian dreams of the Internet freeing and decentralising human interaction (in this case regarding language and linguistic variation), which I think was very common while the Internet was still in its infancy (this book was published just as social media first started to rear its head); but there are also interesting questions that are either left unanswered or answered in unsatisfying ways. In principle, a book exploring the ways that translation and interpretation in a post-9/11 world were forced into militaristic and dehumanising disciplines, which could then have a knock-on effect on how we think about comparative literature as a field, is deeply interesting; in practice the tail wags the dog a little, and the emphasis on comparative literature as a developing discipline, while interesting and insightful from a historical perspective, ends up leaving the really fascinating questions raised by the book’s marketing and introduction still a little underdeveloped and under-explored. There’s also a tendency here, common in lots of vaguely left wing comp lit/broader humanities-based academic writing, to say that you’re using ‘Marxism’ when you’re actually using a couple of Adorno and Benjamin quotes that have almost nothing to do with Marxism as a field or Marx as a thinker — not a heinous crime, and certainly not something Apter is alone in doing, but it is annoying.

To end on a positive note, I think the broad arc of comparative literature that Apter describes in the first section is really compelling, starting with Auerbach and Spitzer marrying anti-nationalism with a latent eurocentrism that sowed the seeds for contradictions as the discipline grew, and forced a strange duality upon Edward Said as the ‘inheritor’ of their tradition, trying to critique their positions while holding onto a useful ‘humanist’ kernel. This is the line of argument that I think is going to be picked up in ‘Against World Literature’ and really shows the best side of modern comparative literature as a discipline, able to critique itself and its past role in global cultural politics.

[Jeffrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Translate the abysses.