The translational epistemologies of World Literature

Translation has regularly been deployed as a defining aspect of World Literature. This is notably the case 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 falling into the category. 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, potentially allows us to analyze the presence and function of a translational epistemology in this body of writing. As such, the argument seeks to move beyond translation as methodology to propose the presence of a set of translational epistemologies, contributing thus to the growing emphasis on linguistic sensitivity and global relationality in the construction of knowledge, as illuminated notably by Barbara Cassin’s philosophical interventions around the notion of the (in)traduisible and Edouard Glissant’s reflections on translation in the Tout-Monde.A synopsis of this article can be found here.