The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (review)

In an age of globalization characterized by the elasticity of borders and multiple and frequent exchanges between governments, businesses, and cultures, translation has become increasingly paramount as that which enables these exchanges to take place. In the context of war in a post 9/11 age, translation or mistranslation can be a matter of life or death. This raises the stakes of translation theory and practices.

Emily Apter's The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature, looks to the foundational method of philology in order to treat important contemporary themes of translation studies. The book traces the history of philology and comparative literature in the twentieth century, language wars, the effect of translation on world literature, and the increasingly technological methods of translation. Apter sets forth twenty provocative theses ranging from "Everything is Translatable" to "Nothing is Translatable" (xi), broaching the onerous task of contemporary translation theory and turning it into what she calls a new way of looking at comparative literature.

Apter's treatment of "translation studies" is highly ambitious. She calls for replacing the category of the subject with the category of the "human" as an emergency measure in a time of war in order to go beyond the post-­structuralist consensus that had reigned from the late sixties to the nineties.

Apter focuses extensively on foundational figures of comparative literature such as Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach, exiles and émigrés from war-torn Europe who were apprehensive of nationalism. She goes on to trace the history of Spitzerian and Auerbachian humanism, underscoring the role that their sojourn at the University of Istanbul played in the history of comparative literature. As Apter argues, the human is linked to translation because the category of the human is a way of undoing the relationship between language and nation. Apter cites Leo Spitzer's famous statement that "Any language is human prior to being national: Turkish, French, and German languages first belong to humanity and then to Turkish, French, and German peoples" (41). Apter maintains that translation is a means of denationalizing literature. Apter cites Moretti's argument that anti-nationalism is a primary reason for studying world literature. However, what would happen if nationalism no longer posed a theoretical challenge? Would the study of comparative literature no longer be valid? The anti-nationalist argument as a primary reason for studying comparative literature is reductive.

The Translation Zone contests monolingual complacency by way of Spitzer's philosophy of translation, citing Spitzer who states: "The frequent occurrence, in my text, of quotations in the original foreign language (or languages) may prove a difficulty for the English reader. But since it is my purpose to take the word (and the wording) of the poets seriously, and since the convincingness and rigor of my stylistic conclusions depends entirely upon the minute linguistic detail of the original texts, it was impossible to offer translations" (61). Spitzer's editor attenuates the force of this claim with the following remark, inserted in the text of Spitzer's essay in square brackets: "Since the linguistic range of readers of literary criticism is not always as great as Spitzer's, the editors of this volume decided to provide translations" (61). Spitzer wants the foreignness of a language to be respected, as that which is inassimilable. Apter argues that the retention of the inassimilable element of language in the act of translation corresponds to what she calls the categorical imperative of translatio studii. In her account of Spitzer, Apter persuasively demonstrates the importance of original languages in scholarship.

Apter's principle thesis in her dense work is to render translation theory and Comp Lit commensurable; symbiotically, the two disciplines would engage in a continued process of what Apter calls adequatio. She argues that they have "traditionally supported each other in arguing for enhanced conduits of linguistic and cultural exchange" (86). Her concern is that the contemporary methodology of comparative study is inadvertently perpetuating "neocolonial geo­politics in carrying over the imperial carve-up of linguistic fields...