VIOLENT PHENOMENA

Translation and transgression.

“It’s hard to explain what it’s like to live in the shadow of English, looking up from south of the equator.” So writes author and translator Bruna Dantas Lobato in the foreword of this remarkably diverse collection of essays on the challenges of reading and writing outside the Anglophone world. Contributors from South America, Africa, and Asia reflect on how, as Kaiama L. Glover writes, we can “present non-Western culture to the West…without betraying that culture in the process.” One answer is to foster knowledge shorn of condescension of exoticism. Another answer is to challenge old, colonial commands of power and control. And yet another answer is simply to say that some things are just untranslatable, that English should not be the marker of literary success. This is less a volume about how to translate or about the practicalities of language crossing than it is a cry of dispossession. Some readers may welcome learning about Arabic, or Ethiopian, or Haitian, or Welsh literature and may seek out books for global journeys. Other readers may bristle at the sentiment behind claims to “dismantle the patriarchal canon” or the assertion that “Western poets kidnap your poems and call them translations.” Why cling, one writer asks, “to the narrative of the white-saviour literary scholar who does all of us a favour and reads us, translates us, interprets us?” This is a book more for university scholars than for casual readers. And yet, if such browsers open its cover, they will find an international collection of writers and thinkers who may shake them from complacency and confidence.

A bold collection of essays on the power politics of translating global literature into English.