The Task of the Translated

What critical language do we use to talk about “the contemporary novel”? Both “the contemporary” and “the novel” are figures that we could call either indefinable or too definable. One might hear these words and have a strong notion of what they mean, yet they are surprisingly hard to pin down. “Contemporary” is a peculiar relational term that’s been press-ganged into service as a periodizing one and, in its current usage, is caught between these states of concrete and abstract temporality, in a condition of always-being-defined. “Novel,” likewise, has always been a form in the midst of constant reconfiguration: what is and what is not a novel, who is and who is not a novelist? Put together, “the contemporary novel” might look like either a cipher or a blurry entity whose plurality renders it indecipherable, a figure that looks different to everyone who encounters it. What kind of life it lives—or will live—in the twenty-first-century world is yet to be determined.

Rebecca L. Walkowitz’s Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature takes on these troubling terms and adds a third and fourth that have been much scrutinized in recent debates in comparative literature: “translation” and “world literature.” Despite the potential vagaries of all of these concepts, Walkowitz’s lively account of their inextricable entanglements in twenty-first-century spaces of circulation is animated by bold assuredness: it begins by proposing a theory and ends by reading a manifesto. Along the way, Walkowitz develops her own confident and refreshingly vivacious critical language, one situated between abstract theory and direct manifesto, to sketch out the multiple lives of her objects of inquiry.

The book’s introduction, “Theory of World Literature Now,” is a clear and fast-paced account of the two interrelated concepts it engages, “world literature” and “literature now.” Regarding the former, one way to view Born Translated is as a decisive attempt to generatively work through—and beyond—the many recent takes on the status of world literature offered by critics such as Emily Apter, Pascale Casanova, David Damrosch, Wai-Chee Dimock, Eric Hayot, Franco Moretti, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, to name only a few. Born Translated’s theory of world literature (now) suggests a way out of the maze of comparative literature’s disciplinary debates through its focus on the historical specificities of world literature at present. Born Translated owes much to the origins and development of the concept of world literature, from Goethe to the present, but its outlook is future-oriented. As Walkowitz pithily writes:

When theories of literary circulation take nineteenth-century European fiction as their examples, as they often do, it makes sense that the national model would rule the day. But what happens when we turn to new examples? Instead of asking about the contemporary novel from the perspective of world literature, we might ask about world literature from the perspective of the contemporary novel.

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The book’s account of world literature thus begins “now” and looks determinedly forward, beginning with the assertion that literature today increasingly understands itself to be world literature, thus short-circuiting the ongoing conversations about how critics understand the latter. Walkowitz addresses many of the same questions raised by her colleagues in the study of world literature—structures of circulation, the ethics and practices of translation, the role of national literatures, and the timescale of literary objects in the world—but does so from a bracing, new viewpoint of the very specific and sophisticated contemporary implied reader (a complex figure I’ll address later). Really, the book’s subtitle, The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature, says it all: whether we like it or not, we are living in a time of world literature.

Which brings us to “literature now.” Here, Born Translated stakes its claim as an ambitious work that strives to redefine not just one field but two: world literature and contemporary fiction...