Looking at Goethe’s Face

This paper attempts to change the “versus” in the title of the seminar in which this article originated, “World Literature versus Comparative Literature,” into something less confrontational, reflecting on how the two fields can become mutually helpful. The fundamental, historical difference between them hinges on the status of translation, which has indeed become a bone of contention in what is often seen as a struggle for disciplinary supremacy. It is not surprising, of course, that translation has gained a prominent place in any study of cultural expression in an increasingly globalized world. There are few comparatists left in the world, I would wager, that still hold to the old idea of purity, according to which any student of literature must acquire fluency in any language into which she may want to venture. We cannot all pretend to live in Istanbul with Auerbach and Spitzer in the 1930s, and the increasing Anglicization of the Western world hardly encourages the study of languages of smaller diffusion, even as they become more and more audible in the streetscape around us.

Djelal Kadir’s warning that resisting translation amounts to aiding and abetting terrorism provides a pithy parable that may serve as epigraph to my argument. It is, after all, better to know others a little than to know them not at all, and the resistance to translation threatens to provide an alibi for a cultural bunker mentality, a kind of homeland security that will certainly be of less ecumenical power in the long run than the diplomacy of cultural exchange. Still, it is one thing to acknowledge the inevitable march toward a global language and the necessity of teaching literatures in the language of students—and to write about it in the language of individual scholars—and quite another to dismiss bi- or multilingualism as an unnecessary luxury. The cosmopolitan speaks, or at least understands, more than one language, and if there is one way to turn the tables on xenophobia that is within reach in our classrooms, it is to value vernaculars as assets rather than encumbrances.

The recent trend in translation studies toward the increasing visibility of the translator is a symptom of the desire to value not only the work of translation, but also the world as a multilingual place. What I would like to investigate, then, is whether, and how, it is possible to make translation visible in the unilingual world literature classroom and world literature scholarship. If Kadir sees the anti-translation comparatist as terrorist, I see the pro-translation comparatist as a kind of anti-totalitarian guerilla. Yes, it is a matter of perspective—one’s terrorist is the other’s freedom fighter—but at the bottom lies the same definition of the comparatist as one who commands more than one language and literature.

The question I am asking here, then, is: how can the guerilla comparatist operate in the world literature classroom? How can we make translation visible so as to ensure that our students appreciate the otherness of a text originally written in another language while making it accessible to the unilingual Anglophone? Introducing texts in peripheral “Englishes” is surely commendable and even necessary, but I think it is not enough. The question is if, instead of having English hijack the Other, we can Other the supremacy of English. If so, this may be where comparatists can regain some of the ground lately lost to world literature without resorting to the terrorism of linguistic fundamentalism.

I want to preface my argument with two case studies or vignettes. The first illustrates the itinerary from the old appropriation of voice debate—another version of the purity idea—to what I see as an exemplary model for a new radical pedagogy in the world literature classroom. In 1998 the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation showed a miniseries based on a novel by Canadian author Rudy Wiebe published in 1976, The Temptations of Big Bear. The story concerns the resistance of the Plains Cree to the British Crown’s attempts to make them cede their land in the 1870s and ’80s. In both versions of the story Big Bear is...