Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability by Emily Apter (review)

Cobbled together from essays published in ten or more different journals over the last several years, Apter’s book has not been well edited—references to the original context of publication have not been weeded out, Hebrew is spelled backward, German words are randomly capitalized and put in inappropriate cases, Russian words are mangled (obscina for obshchina, for example), agreements in French are wrong, and many incidental facts have not been checked (Romain Gary, for instance, did not win the Goncourt Prize in 1958, and he had not written nineteen novels “by the age of 73,” since he shot himself in the head at the age of 66). Apter’s pieces range from a put-down of Franco Moretti’s provocative experiments in “distant reading” to a dithyramb on protest art from Palestine, by way of an essay on Pynchon and DeLillo, a tackle with Derrida’s attempt to tackle “comparative literature,” an essay on Flaubert’s translators, and an attempt to align Barbara Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables with Diderot’s Encyclopédie, which some may find a stretch. Much of the book is angled toward the power politics of the comparative literature syllabus, but some of it expresses the aspiration for literary studies to give support to “anti-capitalist critique.” I am not sure why its alleged failure to do so is more regrettable than its paltry contribution to rocket science and baseball scores.

This book proceeds for the most part like a verbal snow machine, spattering its tracks with such a thick layer of dropped names that the reader glides over them without ever getting much of a grip. The main idea that recurs throughout is one that I thought I had already demolished—the curious notion that some words are untranslatable, here raised by typography rather than argument into an absolute called “The Untranslatable.” Terms like saudade, fado, monde, sex, and gender obviously lack bi-univocal correspondences in other languages, but that does not makes them any more or less untranslatable than word, armchair, or, indeed, untranslatable. The blind alley into which Apter has turned comes from the elementary but widespread error of believing that translation is or ought to be an operation on words (whatever those things are when they are not at home in a dictionary), whereas in practice, as all translators know, it operates on utterances—on whole strings of words, whether they are philosophical propositions or muttered oaths. The only expressions that are truly untranslatable are those you do not understand well enough (or at all). I am not saying there are not plenty such utterances around—in conversation, in philosophical discourse, and even in this book—but the problem with them is their inscrutability, not their untranslatability.

I am sympathetic to Apter’s resistance to the narrowing of literary culture to a homogenized “canon” of world classics in translation and would support her wish to respect the difference of other cultures by teaching them in their own languages. I do not expect this book will do much to further these aims, but they are certainly worthy ones.