Introduction

Abstract

Who authors translations and who authorizes them? These seemingly simple but bedeviling questions still motivate research in Literary Translation Studies (LTS), which, after the descriptive and then the “cultural turn” of the 1990s moved beyond a text-to-text comparison and began reading translation as a material act as well as a textual and literary one. The cultural turn in Translation Studies coincided and overlapped with the rise of postcolonial studies in literature departments and the (very slow) “worlding” of syllabi in English as well as Comparative Literature departments: the material considerations of translation reflected the political core and impact of asymmetrical cultural transfer being studied more generally in literature departments. Two highly influential Comparative Literature scholars in the US, Gayatri Spivak and Emily Apter, have, in turn, authorized Translation Studies as a kind of afterlife to the dying discipline of Comparative Literature, but it is, in Apter’s words, a “new translation studies” that puts “postcolonial comparatism … and media theory into combustive alignment” as opposed to old school “humanistic translatio studii” (Apter 2005, 204). “The new Comparative Literature,” Spivak writes, “makes visible the import of the translator’s choice” thinking about these translation choices can open up the discourses of power, “the disappeared history of distinctions in another space,” as she notes, “full of the movement of languages and peoples still in historical sedimentation at the bottom, waiting for the real virtuality of our imagination” (Spivak 2005, 18).