The Work of World LiteratureIntroductionFrancesco Giusti and Benjamin Lewis Robinson

Translation

A quick look at the numerous monographs and edited volumes in the field attests to the extent to which the practice and problem of translation is central to the concept of world literature. Indeed, in an often-quoted statement by Damrosch — ‘World literature is writing that gains in translation’1010Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, p. 288. — translation becomes definitive of world literature to the point of becoming almost coextensive with it. A curious paradoxical aspect, however, is inherent in every act of translation: the rendering of a text, literary or otherwise, in another language is meant to overcome those boundaries that it in fact helps to establish or at least reinforce. Translation seems often to rely on the assumption of the existence of discrete languages while, in turn, it contributes to their normalization and their respective positions of power. This could constitute quite a precarious ground for world literature, especially if, as Robert Young argues, the very idea of a language ‘is altogether a Western construction’.1111Robert J. C. Young, ‘That Which Is Casually Called a Language’, PMLA, 131.5 (2016), pp. 1207–21 (p. 1208).

The mutual implication of world literature and translation receives a different articulation in Rebecca L. Walkowitz’s discussion of works that are ‘born translated’ in the context of the production and circulation of English-language novels in the current global world.1212Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). This peculiar condition undermines notions of authorship, uniqueness, and the original, by showing how such novels are inherently collective works crossing and mixing national and generic traditions, as well as readerships and languages. Yet, one could wonder to what extent such works of world literature are distinctively due to globalization, or whether their proliferation is simply accelerated and intensified by it. After all, literature is to some degree always born in translation. It has always crossed borders, languages, and traditions, as Wai Chee Dimock and Laurence Buell have shown with respect to ‘American’ literature and as Jahan Ramazani claims about poetry’s transnationalism.1313Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature, ed. by Wai Chee Dimock and Laurence Buell (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). It could indeed be argued that the idea of national literatures — which world literature as a contemporary phenomenon and as an academic discipline is meant to overcome — does not rest on properly literary grounds. In any case, on account of the trans- or post-national literary currents that it brings into view, the acceleration and intensification of the globalization of literature is seen as a source of hope as well as anxiety.

In the space opened between the two axioms ‘Nothing is translatable’ and ‘Everything is translatable’, Apter points to the field of tensions that constitute what she calls the ‘translation zone’ and the challenging position that comparative literature occupies within it. Between the accusations levelled by Spivak in the name of autochthony and Djelal Kadir’s denunciation of the dangers of incomparability,1414Djelal Kadir, ‘Comparative Literature in an Age of Terrorism’, in Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, ed. by Haun Saussy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), pp. 68–77. Apter acknowledges a need for translation:

The challenge of Comp Lit is to balance the singularity of untranslatable alterity against the need to translate quand même. For if translation failure is acceded to too readily, it becomes an all-purpose expedient for staying narrowly within one’s own monolingual universe. A parochialism results, sanctioned by false pieties about not wanting to ‘mistranslate’ the other. This parochialism is the flip side of a globalism that theorizes place and translates everything without ever traveling anywhere.1515Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 91.

Negotiating this treacherous passage between the Scylla of translation and the Charybdis of incomparability in her subsequent book Against World Literature, Apter explores the potentiality of untranslatables in order to reinstate the moments of difference that translation tends to erase, and thereby accentuate the tensions that traverse that field. The approach based on the philology of untranslatables seems to raise the question of the translatability of ‘literature’ itself. For the investigation of untranslatables in or as literature either implies a global idea of ‘literature’ or treats ‘literature’ as itself affected by the same untranslatability. Apter’s challenge to ‘world literature’ thus destabilizes not only the assumed oneness of the world but also that of literature.

In a characteristic gesture, Attridge in his intervention in this volume shifts the inflection from the work in translation to the work of translation, from product to process. It is a matter of finding strategies that convey the work of literature, indeed in a certain sense take part in the work of literature, while ‘acknowledging the unavoidable force of untranslatability’.1616Derek Attridge, ‘Untranslatability and the Challenge of World Literature: A South African Example’, p. 48. Focusing on the use of Kaaps in a poem by South African poet Nathan Trantraal, he challenges the idea of translation as a linear movement from one source language to one target language, as if they were two distinct unitary systems, by considering porous speech communities and variations within a linguistic continuum. Accordingly, translation for Attridge does not aim at domesticating the otherness of the original, but rather at creating, ‘by whatever means appropriate, an experience that corresponds in some measure to the experience of a reader who’s able to enjoy the original directly.’1717Ibid., p. 52. Rather than an equivalent text in another language, translation thus becomes a dynamic and responsive process of approaching the work that envelops a broad field of practices, ‘including literal translation, explanation, and suggested equivalents, with the recognition that readers’ differing idiolects will mean that different strategies have differing chances of success in different contexts’.1818Ibid., p. 49.

By interrogating the political construction of languages as discrete entities, Attridge’s approach resonates with Apter’s project. In her Afterword, Apter picks up on Attridge’s ‘South African example’ in order to sketch a genealogy of racialized structures that underpin standardized ‘sovereign’ languages and dominant forms of translation in a manner that, she argues, projects of ‘World Literature’ (capitalized) risk reproducing. In order to redress ingrained forms of linguistic violence, Apter explores the possibilities of a ‘reparative translation’ with radical theoretical and methodological implications for any approach to the work of world literature (without caps).

Translation emerges in Attridge’s account as internal to the work of literature. After all, for Attridge, in the act-event of reading a literary work every reader brings their own idioculture — their own ‘unique (indeed, singular) cluster of attributes, preferences, habits, and knowledges’1919Derek Attridge, The Work of Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 61. — to the encounter, regardless of the degree of familiarity with the language in which the text is written. The singularity of literature, for Attridge as for Derrida, has to do with its iterability which he presents as a play of translatability and untranslatability:

If singularity names the translatability of both languages and literary works, it also names their untranslatability. That is to say, the process of translation is not a process of exhaustive replication; even exact repetition does not produce an exact equivalence because repetition always takes place in a new context and singularity, as I have said, is always open to context and changes in context.2020Derek Attridge, ‘Contemporary Afrikaans Fiction and English Translation: Singularity and the Question of Minor Languages’, in Singularity and Transnational Poetics, ed. by Birgit Mara Kaiser (New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 61–78 (p. 70).

One could venture that a degree of translation as a process of familiarization and adaptation is always involved in any act of reading and in any singular experience of literature, even when the text being read is in the reader’s so-called ‘mother tongue’.[Attridge, Derek]

In the both active and passive encounter with a text and its singularity, as Jarad Zimbler makes clear in his essay in this volume, ‘a dialectic of proximity and distance unfolds.’2121Jarad Zimbler, ‘Working Conditions: World Literary Criticism and the Material of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’, in this volume, p. 172. In other words, the text must present itself to readers with a certain degree of familiarity — in terms of medium, language, form, genre, technique, subject matter — in order for them to be exposed to its otherness. To work as literature, a text must be first of all legible, and translation is what can make culturally distant texts relatively familiar and therefore workable in other contexts. Zimbler traces how Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s English translations of the songs of the fifteenth-century bhakti poet Kabir exhibit this kind of domestication for contemporary American readers by offering an analogue to the Beat poetry of the Sixties. A reading that focuses on this transnational domestication, however, risks overlooking the relational literary dynamics that informed Mehrotra’s translations and that only ‘archaeological’ criticism can bring to light. As Zimbler shows, translation across languages, traditions, and epochs plays a significant role in making received literary materials workable again. The ‘work of world literary criticism’ for which Zimbler argues should, therefore, reflect on ‘our capacity for making texts work’ and ‘the resources that we activate in writing, and in reading, and in writing about reading’.2222Ibid., p. 177.

Attending to transhistorical continuities in lyric poetry, Francesco Giusti in his essay proposes a shift away from the question of the linguistic translatability (or untranslatability) of contextual meaning in world literature in order to think about the transferability of gestures. Literature makes these gestures available for re-enactment in different contexts and it is in the context of each re-enactment that they acquire a specific meaning. Within the discursive mode of the lyric, the notion of gesture — which Giusti develops from Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, and Giorgio Agamben — could be helpful to account for the transferability of texts across diverse contexts and for an approach to world literature which takes into consideration both the literariness of that world and the fact that texts can perform different functions in different situations. While reading (or ‘translating’) a poem, even one ‘originated’ in a culture distant in time or space, or both, readers find themselves sharing those gestures — and thereby participating in a peculiar form of transcultural community. It is at the level of gesture that the ethical ground of lyric poetry is to be found.

Ethics, Politics

Although it markets itself as a ‘good’, world literature is often reproached for downplaying political or ethical considerations. Young, for example, argues that an ethical impetus decisively distinguishes postcolonial from world literature. While world literature presents itself as universal, postcolonial literature, which insists on its partiality and particularity, is engaged in a genuinely universal project that he calls an ‘ethics of humanity’.2323Robert J. C. Young, ‘World Literature and Postcolonialism’, in The Routledge Companion to World Literature, pp. 213–22 (p. 218). The ostensible neutrality of world literature arguably betrays a more invidious and profoundly political operation, in fact suppressing the cosmopolitan diversity it is supposed to celebrate. In a public discussion with Damrosch in 2011, Spivak expressed the concern that the unproblematic propagation of world literature risked becoming a process in which ‘the politics of identity’ overcomes ‘the ethics of alterity’.2424David Damrosch and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Comparative Literature/World Literature: A Discussion’, Comparative Literature Studies, 48.4 (2011), pp. 455–85 (p. 467).

A number of the essays in this volume approach the question of the ethics of alterity in relation to the particular alterity exhibited by literature. Taking up Young’s distinction between postcolonial and world literature, Lorna Burns explores the possibility of a ‘postcolonialism after world literature’, to cite the title of her recent book, that retains ‘the dissident spirit’ of postcolonial thought.2525Lorna Burns, Postcolonialism After World Literature: Relation, Equality, Dissent (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). Burns criticizes approaches ranging from Pascale Casanova’s field-theory to the world-system analysis propounded by the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) for presupposing a priori structures that condition world literature. Drawing on the work of Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Rancière, she argues in contrast for the significance of modalities of ‘absolute otherness’ in literary works that produce instances of ‘dissensus’. Rather than departing from a supposition of ‘inequality’ or ‘difference’, Burns deploys Rancière’s thought in order to argue for a critical approach that sets out ‘to assemble and verify moments of dissensus insofar as they enact an assumed fundamental equality between actors’.2626Lorna Burns, ‘World Literature and the Problem of Postcolonialism: Aesthetics and Dissent’, in this volume, p. 73.

In her essay on extractivism and indigenous form Rashmi Varma is, in contrast, circumspect about the insistence on ‘otherness’. If the ‘other’ is supposed to be outside of or to present an alternative to the capitalist system, then the task of literary criticism is rather to show the ways in which such ostensible alterity is in fact profoundly implicated in and even integral to the system. Rather than reading Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s collection of short stories The Adivasi Will Not Dance as performing an ethics of alterity, Varma reads it as contouring forms of extractivism that make visible otherwise obscured processes of capitalist extraction of adivasi peoples, lands, and cultures in neo-liberal India. Varma, a member of the WReC, shows how treating world literature as ‘the literature of the world-system’2727Warwick Research Collective (WReC), Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature, p. 8. does not involve immediately reaching for the abstractions of the system as the explanatory instance, but requires rather the finely calibrated work of articulating the uneven development of modernity in the concrete.

In Attridge’s theory the work of literature is defined by its ‘otherness’, an otherness that ultimately resists total assimilation by means of interpretation, translation, or analysis. Benjamin Lewis Robinson’s essay approaches the question of the particular alterity of the work in a time of world literature by considering J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus, in which two kinds of otherness are explicitly played off against each other. The first, which might be called ‘other-world literature’, belongs to a tradition of literary theology discussed by Derrida in his reading of Kierkegaard’s reading of the story of Abraham where the ‘secret’ of literature lies in the absolute otherness it harbours, as if literature were ultimately not of this world — or as if it presented the promise of another one. The second, exemplary of ‘this-world literature’, approaches otherness as absolute ‘likeness’ elaborating differences within the world. The ethical question of world literature in Coetzee’s novel depends on the extent to which readers are ready and willing to leave the ‘other-world literature’ behind.

Attridge sees the work of literature to be inherently ethical precisely because it opens onto and negotiates with otherness. Drawing a provisional distinction between politics as being concerned with the universal and the programmatic, and ethics as addressing the concrete and the singular, Attridge opposes readings of literature that too quickly translate the literary into the political. Dirk Wiemann’s essay interrogates this attachment to the ethical in the name of a more robust account of the potential politics of world literature. While the ethical account certainly corresponds to a characteristic experience of literature as the encounter between an individual reader and a singular work, Wiemann argues that what is needed is a form of literary reception and critical analysis that brings the collective dimensions of literary experience into focus and ultimately solicits an ‘ethics of commitment’. Attridge’s concept of ‘idioculture’, understood as the particular worldly context that the reader brings to the work of literature, ought to be expanded or developed with an eye to the ways in which it intersects with a broader sensus communis.

Led by a similar interest in how literature can put us in common or solicit community, but moving away from the level of meaning, Giusti focuses on the movement of individuation and dis-individuation that characterizes the ‘act-event’ of the encounter of a reader (and potential future writer) with a lyric poem. In the process of re-enacting a poem, readers are brought together as a ‘we’ in a ‘gestural community’ that is not based on a pre-existing identity — on systems of knowledge, beliefs, and behaviours — but rather on the shareability of certain transcontextual gestures.

In The Singularity of Literature Attridge observes, ‘Literature — when it is responded to as literature — is not a political instrument, yet it is deeply implicated in the political.’2828Attridge, The Singularity of Literature, p. 120. In different ways, the contributions in this volume have explored this implication of the literary and the political. But there is also the question of the relation of literature, especially when it is supposed to be ‘world literature’, to what is external to it. A number of the contributions in this volume point in this direction by taking up the problematic translation into literature of histories and positions that perhaps have nothing or want nothing to do with literature, understood as a particular, historically Western institution. In Robinson’s reading, Coetzee’s novel radicalizes the question of such indifference to literature by presenting a world without literature; its inhabitants exhibit no interest in, no passion for literature, and the absence of the literary is not even felt as a loss. More concretely, Wiemann’s contribution focuses on Refugee Tales, a project of translation of (unnamed) refugees’ oral histories into literature by well-known British writers, while Varma’s essay reflects on the ambivalences of writing about the expropriation of indigenous culture in literary form. Responding to a similar constellation of concerns with particular attention to questions of racial justice, Apter advocates in the Afterword for a ‘reparative translation’ that seeks to redress the wounds inflicted by violent forms of translation that perpetuate ‘white sovereignty on historicized language worlds’.2929Emily Apter, ‘Afterword: Towrads a Theory of Reparative Translation’, in this volume, p. 225.

Within the Rancièrian framework which Burns brings into the discussion, the question can be phrased as the degree to which works of literature that seek to account for the ‘unaccounted-for’ reinforce or disrupt the ‘distribution of the sensible’.3030Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. by Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004); see also Jacques Rancière, ‘Ten Theses on Politics’, trans. by Rachel Bowlby and Davide Panagia, Theory & Event, 5.3 (2001). Perhaps then world literature is literature that acknowledges what lies outside of the world of literature and resists being inscribed into it. Decisive would be the ways in which the literary exhibits modalities of hospitality, however partial and precarious, to the ‘preliterate’ or ‘preliterary’ external body, which is thereby rendered visible or audible and, in any case, available for particular forms of care.

Scale, Presentism

Wiemann’s title ‘Being Taught Something World-Sized’ brings into focus the question of scale. While the phrase ‘world-scale’ is often evoked in discussion of world literature, the essays in this volume tend rather to trace the ways in which world literature operates between scales. It is as if the work of literature consists precisely in scaling, in providing passage between otherwise incommensurable experiential and analytic dimensions of the world. Varma, for example, develops the notion of allegory, in Fredric Jameson’s sense as ‘profoundly discontinuous, a matter of breaks and heterogeneities’, as a means of registering the multiple levels on which extractivism operates.3131Fredric Jameson, ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’ (1986), reprinted in Allegory and Ideology (London: Verso, 2019), pp. 159–86 (p. 170). Precisely on account of its fragmentary and disjunctive quality, allegory in this way presents a way of mapping ecological imperialism. In contrast, Attridge’s essay, which presents a conception of language as differing by degree, indicates how one may approach the translation of literary works, especially of works in ‘minor languages’, by being attentive to the specific calibre of language used. Treating language as a continuum, rather than emphasizing the ostensible boundaries between (national) languages, presents an alternative way of thinking about how literature articulates the world.

So far in this introduction we have avoided the habitual references to the historical precedent for world literature, notably Goethe and Marx.3232For an expansive take on the historical dimension, see The Routledge Companion to World Literature. Without denying the value of historical and genealogical investigations of the concept — Aamir Mufti’s study of the co-relation between Orientalism and world literature presents one of the most provocative of such approaches3333Aamir R. Mufti, Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). — we have sought to insist on world literature as a largely distinct contemporary phenomenon, one that is defined by its presentism. Indeed, the popularity and proliferation of world literature can arguably be considered a symptom of an epoch that is presentist.3434François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, trans. by Saskia Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). Giusti shows how world literature risks not only conflating objects of study to include works that cannot straightforwardly be categorized under the contemporary term ‘literature’, but also the adoption of critical approaches which import contemporary questions — that of translation for instance — into contexts where they do not necessarily apply. At the same time, the presentist disposition tends to occlude the specific temporality of works of literature, such as the transhistorical lyric gestures Giusti traces. A different conception of ‘nonsynchroneity’ is at the centre also of Varma’s reflections on ‘combined and uneven development’ in adivasi literature. Wiemann’s recovery of the ‘anagogic’ moment of medieval hermeneutics may be read as part of a project to expand the present understanding of literature and reconfigure what literature can do. While in an archeological manner, Zimbler shows with the example of Mehrotra’s translations of the songs of Kabir that the fascination with the actuality or the actualization of world literature, which in this case meant its ostensible Americanization, obscures transnational and transhistorical dynamics responding to local exigencies that are essential to a thoroughgoing understanding of the work as world literature.

In a 1989 interview that Attridge conducted with Derrida and published in Acts of Literature under the title ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’, Derrida remarks: ‘It’s the most interesting thing in the world, maybe more interesting than the world.’3535Derek Attridge, ‘“This Strange Institution Called Literature”: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, trans. by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, in Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. by Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1993), pp, 33–75 (p. 47). It’s a joke of course but one that is revealing of the present conundrums of literary studies. For if the peculiar fascination of literature that we, following Attridge, have called the work of literature, owes indeed to its being more interesting than the world, then it presents the risk of disparaging the world and discounting its concerns. And this would in turn explain the widespread distrust of literature in the face of more urgent if ultimately less interesting worldly concerns. Within literary studies, the turn to ‘world literature’ evinces such distrust by deliberately shifting away from what is most interesting about literature in order to attend to more mundane concerns. But ‘interest’ comes from inter‑esse, to be among, to be in the midst of, even to participate, to take part in — and for that reason to matter. Perhaps there is then another possible inflection of the phrase: Literature is more ‘worldly’ than the world. If literature is ‘more interesting than the world’ it is not because it transports beyond the world but rather because it engages in the world — it is an intensification of the world.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the ICI Berlin for making both the workshop and this publication possible. Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Manuele Gragnolati showed enthusiasm for the project from the start and we are particularly pleased that this volume will join the Cultural Inquiry series and the new venture of the ICI Press. Claudia Peppel was a tireless source of support and inspiration, and we have her to thank for the cover image. Arnd Wedemeyer’s comments were most helpful. We would like to extend our thanks to all the contributors to this volume as well as to the interlocutors who joined us for the workshop in the summer of 2018, especially Refqa Abu-Remaileh, who led the concluding discussion.