Translingual Practices and Alternatives: Literary Studies in the Age of Global Mobility

The anthology Comparative Literature for the New Century, edited by Joseph Pivato and Giulia De Gasperi, takes the baton where the three previous reports of the American Comparative Literature Association (Bernheimer; Heise; Saussy) left it. The volume is a critical response to these American reports and also acts as a “self-interrogation” of the discipline in light of the radical changes that have deeply affected academic departments in North America (Hutcheon vii). The last two decades have been characterized by a dramatic increase in the global mobility of material and immaterial goods and resources, and of humans, with their related dialects, languages, and highly localized cultures (see Simon). The growing number of people experiencing the effects of migration, dislocation, transnational practices, neonomadic impulses, and processes of transculturation has led to the emergence of individuals who are culturally versatile and highly proficient in different languages, and whose identities, ethnic loyalties, and senses of national belonging have become more complex and less definable (see Ong; Zembylas et al.). These individuals tend to produce literary and artistic texts that reflect the kaleidoscopic nature of their transcultural makeup (see Ascari; Dagnino, Transcultural Writers; Walkowitz). Such circumstances call for new vocabularies, theories, and ways of interpreting our multilayered “global modernity” in its various social, anthropological, political, and cultural aspects. As Arif Dirlik maintains, “Modernity may no longer be approached as a dialogue internal to Europe or EuroAmerica, but is a global discourse in which many participate, producing different formulations of the modern as lived and envisaged within their local social environments” (“Modernity as History” 17; see also Dirlik, Global Modernity). In this context, Pivato argues for the use of different languages in Comparative Literature, rather than English translations in English programs (41–63).

Within a more specific literary context, this contemporary scenario has spawned a renewed interest in translation studies and comparative methodologies in the way we approach texts (see Bassnett; Ingram and Sywenky). Most importantly, the growing relevance of “questions of agency” (Bassnett 239) in the wider field of “world literatures” (see Dagnino, “Transcultural Literature”; Tötösy de Zepetnek and Mukherjee) has led to the rediscovery, or the resurrection, of the author (the artist, the creator at large) with her peculiar sensibility and life experience. Despite Barthes’s postulations on the “death of the author,” writers are alive and kicking and, as Pivato contends, inalienable from their writings. More or less subconsciously, they inscribe themselves, as they have always done, in their fictions, like characters inside and outside their work, in that Bakhtinian dialogic perspective that postulates a fusion between author and character, real life and imagined life. For this very reason, authors are, and should be studied as, living knots, dynamic hotspots in the ever-growing web of cultural, cross-cultural, and intertextual references.

Caught at the crossroads of my personal experiences as an academic researcher, published author of fiction, and self-translator, in Italy, South Africa, and Australia, I almost perforce vouch for the reinstatement of the author and her life experience in the literary discourse. Obviously, I am not advocating for the trend toward author as celebrity, nor supporting the author’s narcissism and her apotheosis. Rather, I challenge the disposal of the author’s subjectivity and situatedness invoked by an early Barthes and so often enthusiastically accepted in scholarly quarters ready to overlook the ironic subtleties and “clever word-play” (Pivato 48) inherent in Barthes’s original French text. In their contributions to the anthology, both Pivato and E.D. Blodgett call for a reinterpretation and reassessment of Barthes’s work in the light of changed cultural landscapes and, most importantly, through a more nuanced understanding of his writing that takes stock of the unreliability of translation and its subsequent proposed interpretations (Pivato 48).

Barthes’s equivocal stance on the “removal” of the author from the text (255) becomes apparent in his later work—in particular, Le Plaisir du texte (The Pleasure of the Text, 1975) and Fragments d’un discours amoureux (A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, 1977). In those instances, Barthes himself seems to recant the alluring idea of handling literature...