Translation, Language, and Dialogue: A Critical Response to Comparative Literature for the New Century

Introduction: A “Canadian” Approach to Comparative Literature

Joseph Pivato’s and Giulia de Gasperi’s 2018 collection is undoubtedly a breath of fresh air in a field largely dominated by American theorists and schools of thought. Consisting of various contributions mostly from and about Canada, Comparative Literature for the New Century brings new voices and perspectives on the many theoretical, methodological, and critical debates that animate our discipline today. Although the collection is not exclusively concerned with Canadian matters, both de Gasperi’s introduction and Pivato’s review of the field in his own chapter make it clear that their aim as editors was to put forward a Canadian approach to Comparative Literature, one that most importantly distances itself from “American Agendas” (De Gasperi 4). The book implicitly argues that, in light of their experiences of official multiculturalism and institutional bilingualism, Canadian scholars are more attuned to questions of language, translation, belonging, and identity. In contradistinction to America’s “unilingual focus on theory” (Pivato 47) and in response to globalization and the growing hegemony of English, the editors call for “the importance of language use beyond English” (De Gasperi 10) and the promotion of different languages in Comparative Literature.

One has to wonder if this will to distinguish Canada from the United States is not in fact a symptom of late cultural nationalism, articulated by the CanLit canon and Canadian literary criticism in the 1970s and onwards (see Dobson).¹ At first glance, this distinction would indeed seem to reaffirm an us/them dichotomy, which can enable not only a liberal, feel-good celebration of Canada as an open, inclusive, “multicultural” space, versus an evil, monolingual, racist United States, but also an unquestioned notion of the nation-state, which has by now been overwhelmingly challenged and deconstructed by many scholars in a number of fields. Indeed, the affirmation of a specifically Canadian way of doing Comparative Literature contradicts the call, made by some of the volume’s contributors, to transgress, dissolve, and subvert national boundaries (see Saidero 210; Seccia 158). One final concern with this approach is that this volume is far from exhaustive, leaving many “Canadian” issues, voices, and languages outside of its scope: the articles are written entirely in English, Indigenous issues are mentioned only in passing, and the chapters focus predominantly on the prestigious, canonical, and established genre of print literary fiction.

The questions raised above suggest the very impossibility of delimiting or specifying a Canadian approach to Comparative Literature. After all, as Pivato himself observes, Comparative Literature departments in Canada were, for the most part, founded by European immigrants, and today, at the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, where I study, the majority of professors are not Canadian or do not work on Canadian corpuses, and there are as many international students as domestic students. Thus, in the spirit of self-interrogation and self-reflexivity that this collection so generously puts forward, I wanted to begin my response by questioning its starting assumption of a specifically Canadian approach to Comparative Literature. The volume indeed presents new, refreshing voices, and of course Canada’s sociopolitical context does partially determine the scholarship that is being produced here, but I wonder if it is really necessary to unify all voices under the umbrella of a “Canadian CompLit,” which could in turn neglect or obscure other perspectives, no matter how diverse or inclusive we want it to be.

That said, the collection offers fascinating insights from a diversity of scholars, both emerging and established. Its many chapters engage with crucial debates that are unfolding in our discipline throughout the world. It is undoubtedly a good addition to the field of Comparative Literature as a whole and should be of interest to any literary scholar interested in questions of language, translation, and culture, in Canada and beyond. The following discussion engages with three chapters that resonate with my own research interests: “The Languages of Comparative Literature” by Joseph Pivato, “Reading Literature Through Translation: The Case of Antonio d’Alfonso into Italian” by...