Untranslatables: A World System

Emily Apter

New Literary History, Volume 39, Number 3, Summer 2008, pp. 581-598
(Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/nlh.0.0055

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 Untranslatables: A World System
Emily Apter

M
any literary historians would concede that the traditional
pedagogical organization of the humanities according to na-
tional languages and literatures has exceeded its expiration date,
yet there is little consensus on alternative models. Mobile demography,
immigration, and the dispersion of reading publics through media net-
works defy such sectorization, yet, thinking the comparative postnationally
brooks obvious dangers. Postnationalism can lead to blindness toward
the economic and national power struggles that literary politics often
front for, while potentially minimizing the conflict among the interests
of monocultural states and multilingual communities (as in current U.S.
policy that uses an agenda of cultural homogeneity to patrol “immigrant”
languages and to curtail bilingual education). National neutrality can also
lead, problematically, to the promotion of generic critical lexicons that
presume universal translatability or global applicability. Theoretical para-
digms, many centered in Western literary practices and conventions, thus
“forget” that they are interculturally incommensurate. Moreover, though
planetary inclusion may be the goal of new lexicons in contemporary
comparative literature, they often paradoxically reinforce dependency
on a national/ethnic nominalism that gives rise to new exclusions.
Ideally, one would redesign literary studies to respond critically and
in real time to cartographies of emergent world-systems. Parag Khanna,
writing from an American “think tank” perspective on the shrinkage
of the U.S. as a superpower, usefully identifies a host of new “Second
World,” midsize empires built up from global trade-offs in resources
and financial services whose networks traverse but also bypass “The Big
Three” (China, Europe, America). Khanna’s nomenclature, from retro
regionalisms (“the Middle Kingdom,” the “Greater Chinese Co-Prosperity
Sphere”) to modern transnational acronyms like “the BRIC countries”
(Brazil, Russia, India, China, associated through their common status
as sites of “the world’s greatest concentration of foreign-exchange re-
serves and savings”) assigns renewed momentum to thinking in empires
(problematic in my view), but it is at least responsive to geopolitical
configurations that overturn Western assumptions about who should
be aligned with whom:

New Literary History, 2008, 39: 581–598

582 new literary history

To the Western eye, it is a bizarre phenomenon: small Asian nation-states should

be balancing against the rising China, but increasingly they rally toward it out
of Asian cultural pride and an understanding of the historical-cultural reality of
Chinese dominance. And in the former Soviet Central Asian countries—the so-
called Stans—China is the new heavyweight player, its manifest destiny pushing
its Han pioneers westward while pulling defunct microstates like Kyrgyzstan and
Tajikistan, as well as oil-rich Kazakhstan, into its orbit. The Shanghai Cooperation
Organization gathers these Central Asian strongmen together with China and
Russia and may eventually become the “NATO of the East.”1

Literary studies, arguably, has yet to catch up with this kind of socio-
economic mapping. There is no coincident or contingent structure in
place that enables fluid analysis of “Second World” cultural interactions
among, say, the “Stans,” the Greater Middle East, “Chindia,” the Americas,
Eurasia, intra-Asia, “other Asias,” or Euroland. Certainly transnational
research occurs, as does transhistorical or asynchronous historical analy-
sis, but the academic organization of the humanities tends to reimpose
national periodizing strictures on knowledge-fields, some of them in-
herited from area studies. Literary history’s cartographic catalogue is
thus either constrained by the national habitus, or thrown into the vast
agglomerative catchall of “world literature.” With respect to the latter,
what we find in the place of self-updating world-systems is a proliferation
of geographically emptied names that all more or less refer to the same
thing—globality—albeit with different political valences. “World Litera-
ture” is the blue-chip moniker, benefiting from its pedigreed association
with Goethean Weltliteratur. World Literature evokes the great comparatist
tradition of encyclopedic mastery and scholarly ecumenicalism. It is a
kind of big tent model of literary comparatism that, in promoting an
ethic of liberal inclusiveness or the formal structures of cultural simili-
tude, often has the collateral effect of blunting political critique. Then
there is “the world republic of letters,” historically tied to a Francocentric
republican ideal of universal excellence (“the literary Greenwich merid-
ian” in Pascale Casanova’s ascription), and denoting world literature’s
adjudicating power manifest in prize-conferring institutions of cultural
legitimation. “Cosmopolitanism,” (and its contemporary variant “the
Cosmopolitical”), both steeped in a Kantian vision of perpetual peace
through enlightened common culture, often act as code for an ethics
of transnational citizenship, worldliness as the basis of secular criticism,
and minoritarian humanism. “Planetarity” would purge “global” of its
capitalist sublime, greening its economy, and rendering it accountable
to disempowered subjects. “Literary World-Systems,” Braudelian and
Wallersteinian in inspiration, rely on networks of cultural circulation,
literary markets, and genre translation. Littérature-monde is the banner
term for a writers’ movement that refuses postcolonial sectorizations
untranslatables 583

of the literary field (Francophonie is denounced as “the last avatar of

colonialism”). Here, decentralized, polyphonic voices that are mondiale
in address give rise to a concept of fluctuating, relational, unbordered
language worlds. I would add to this list “Cities,” which treat metropolitan
nexuses as metonyms of “World.” Despite their current seductiveness as
units of analysis for those currently working in literature, “Cities” remain
vulnerable to the charge of depoliticization levied recently by a New Left
Review editor: “city spaces are studied in abstraction from their national
contexts,” and “the wielders of economic power and social coercion
remain anonymous.”2 Efforts to correct for the unipolar logic that per-
sists in each of these paradigms have yielded supplemental vocabularies
for nonnational blocs of culture: imagined communities, parastates,
translingualism, diaspora, majimboism, postcolonial deterritorialization,
silicon cities, circum-Atlantic, îles-refuges, the global south, and so on.
And though such terms bring some measure of specificity to global des-
ignations, they fail to answer fully the challenge of making comparative
literature geopolitically case-sensitive and site-specific in ways that avoid
reproducing neoimperialist cartographies.
Comparative literature is no more beset than other humanities fields by
the constraints imposed by its historic subject fields (genres, periodizing
frames, theoretical paradigms). But it faces the rigors of the globalist in-
junction with a heightened awareness of the Babelian ironies of disciplin-
ary self-naming, and remains more vulnerable than national literatures
to the charge of shortchanging nonwestern approaches because of its
commitment to inclusiveness. I would suggest that a translational model
of comparative literature goes some distance to answering such concerns.
Languages are inherently transnational; their plurilingual composition
embodies histories of language travel that do not necessarily reproduce
imperial trajectories. They afford a planetary approach to literary history
that responds to the dynamics of geopolitics without shying away from
fractious border wars. In my own work, this translational transnationalism
corresponds to a critical praxis capable of adjusting literary technics—
interlinear translation, exegesis, gloss, close reading—to the exigencies
of a contemporary language politics marked by:3

- Language diasporas that bolster transnational literary communities.

- The internationalization of (North) American literary studies, multilingual-
ism from within.
- The critique of linguistic imperialism: specifically global English and the
bipolar competition for language dominance between English and Mandarin
Chinese.
- The ecology of endangered languages and the statistics of language extinc-
tion.
584 new literary history

- The impact of accents, vernacular, code-switching, argot and diglossia, within

nonstandard language use.
- Translation and war: and the particular vulnerability of translators, stringers,
cultural interpreters to political targeting.
- The conflation of anti-terror and anti-immigrant language politics (exempli-
fied in language profiling and linguistic racism, or the merging of Arabophobia
and Hispanophobia).
- The critique of legislation aimed at shrinking language literacy. The self-
defeating parochialism of English-Only policies. The blindness to the socio-
economic advantages of English-Plus in the world economy.

In addition to being a field in which the Realpolitik of language conflict

meets the philological heritage of humanistic transference, displace-
ment, and exile, contemporary translation studies answers comparative
literature’s longstanding commitment to investigating zones of cultural
and literary expression that go unnamed or that are walled off into un-
translatability. Untranslatability is not unlike Walter Benjamin’s notion
of translatability; qualified as something that cannot be communicated
in language, a kernel of “the foreign” that remains, an ineffable textual
essence only realizable in the translational afterlife, or a sacred literal-
ness of the revelatory word that great literary works strive for but rarely
ever achieve.4 I would mobilize this theoretical (un)translatability for
theoretical and curricular ventures in literary comparatism that aim for
geopolitical specificity and theoretical reach against the fine grain of
aesthetic comparison.
A recent encyclopedic project edited by Barbara Cassin, titled Vocabu-
laire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles (Vocabulary of
European Philosophy: A Dictionary of Untranslatables), produces global
intellectual cartography without a hegemonic global paradigm, that is
to say, through interpretive procedures that reveal philosophical world-
systems in the making. The book uses untranslatability as an epistemo-
logical fulcrum for rethinking philosophical concepts and discourses
of the humanities. With critical finesse, it calls into question the very
possibility of naming the predicates of Western thought, even as it shows
how such lodestones have been and continue to be actively translated.
This semantic predicament is consequential for the humanities and use-
ful in defining a translational condition that complicates nation-based
epistemes and literary denominations. Using the Vocabulaire’s construct
of the Untranslatable, one might construe a translational humanities
whose fault-lines traverse the cultural subdivisions of nation or “foreign”
language, while coalescing around hubs of irreducible singularity.

***
untranslatables 585

With approximately 150 contributors, a text length comprising 1.5

million words, and a linguistic range that includes ancient languages
(Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Arabic) and myriad modern ones (English,
French, Spanish, Portuguese, Basque, Catalan, Italian, German, Dutch,
Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Hungarian Arabic),
the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies represents a unique experiment
in plurilingual analysis. Though ideally it would have had a companion
volume covering Asian, African, Indian, and Middle Eastern languages,
the Vocabulaire succeeds within its terms as a latter-day version of the hu-
manist translatio studii. Each entry is cued to a multilingual complement:
the subject pronoun “I”, for example, is keyed to: French, je, moi, soi;
Greek, egô; Latin, ego, ipse ; German, Ich, Selbst; English, me, self, myself; Ital-
ian, io, se, si, si-mismo. Right away, the alterity of signifiers is made visible,
preparing the way for a more systematic presentation of concepts labeled
in their native tongues and alphabets. Peter Osborne characterizes the
Untranslatable as that which refers to “the conceptual differences carried
by the differences between languages, not in a pure form, but via the
fractured histories of translation through which European philosophies
have been constituted.”5 Cassin, perhaps more geopolitically attuned,
speaks of a “cartography of philosophical differences.”6
The Untranslatable yields a revisionist history of ideas that gives full
weight to mistranslation. This way of working is especially apparent in
the entry on the Subject coauthored by Etienne Balibar, Barbara Cassin,
and Alain de Libera.

We know that Averroes’ Long Commentary on the De Anima is, given the current state
of the corpus, fully accessible only in Latin, or in Michel Scot’s tricky translation
(the Arabic original having been lost). One of the most famous statements, in
which Averroes appears to introduce the notion of the subject, is the passage
on eternity and the corruptability of the theoretical intellect—the ultimate hu-
man perfection. It asserts: “Perhaps philosophy always exists in the greater part
of the subject, just as the man exists thanks to man, and just as the horse exists
thanks to horse.” What does the expression mean? Going against the very prin-
ciples of Averroes’ noetics, the Averroist Jean de Jandun understands it to mean
that “philosophy is perfect in the greater part of its subject (sui subjecti),” or in
other words “in most men” (in majori parte hominum). There are no grounds for
this interpretation. We can explain it, however, if we recall that Averroes’ Latin
translator has confused the Arabic terms mawdu [ ] (subject or substratum
in the sense of hupokeimenon) and mawdi [ ] (place). When Averroes simply
says that philosophy has always existed “in the greater part of the place,” mean-
ing “almost everywhere,” Jean understands him as saying that it has as its subject
“the majority of men,” as every man (or almost every man) contributes to a full
(perfect) realization in keeping with his knowledge and aptitudes. “Subjectivity”
does slip into Averroism here, but only because of a huge misunderstanding
resulting from a translator’s error. It therefore contradicts Averroes.7
586 new literary history

For Balibar, Cassin, and de Libera, mistranslation is adduced to explain

the historic transformation of Aristotle’s hupokeimenon (substrate, the
individual substance in a given form) into subjectum (I-ness, égoité, the
subject of metaphysics, the power of thought). The nontransference
of medieval heteronomy (the it-ness of I) is shown to haunt modern
concepts of free will, egoic autonomy, and transcendent subjecthood.
Balibar, Cassin, and de Libera demonstrate how translation error has
been determinative in the genealogy of the subject. The Cartesian sub-
ject, they argue, was improperly transcendentalized by Kant; while the
Nietzschean Subjekt (which contains a critique of the effects of subjective
submission) was confounded by the French sujet, a term that fails to ren-
der the slide between commanding and obeying inherent in Nietzsche’s
usage.8 The “subject” is thus revealed not only to have an interesting
intra-European and transtemporal history, but also a “global” frame of
reference that puts Arabic mistranslation into dialogue with mistranslated
French Nietzscheanism.
As a stand-alone term with no ready equivalent, pravda is another para-
mount Untranslatable. It is arrayed alongside the Greek dikaiosunê, the
Latin justitia, the English righteousness, justice, truth, as well as vérité, droit,
istina, loi, mir, postupok, praxis, sobornost’, and svet. The article speculates
that pravda’s absence in the Russian Encyclopedia of Philosophy is attribut-
able to it being too ideologically marked as the name of the USSR’s
official, government-controlled newspaper. Pravda thus comes into its
own as that which is philosophically off-limits in its home country. This
national dislocation matches up with its semantic relocation in the in-
terstices of nonequivalent abstract nouns. The article locates pravda in
the “hiatus” between legality and legitimacy, justice and truth, ethics and
praxis. It is traced to the “short circuiting” of pardon by vengeance and
vice versa. The word’s (often colliding) ascriptions include: democratic
cosmopolitics; an extensive topology of exile, emigration, and solidarity
with persecuted minorities and refugees; Russian Saint-Simonianism and
Russophilic worldviews. Placed in apposition to slovo, pravda connotes
“word,” “discourse,” “logos,” linguistically embodied rationalism. Pravda-
Dikaiosunê, we learn, is one of the names for God, as well as a figure of
free speech, or open relationality among free agents. Negatively qualified
as nevprada the word alludes to linguistic mystification, to misinformation
spread by corrupted institutions of state power and the media (pravdopho-
bia was apparently coined at the time of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster
in 1986 when the official media lied about its severity). The pravda entry,
like many others in the Vocabulaire, allows us to grasp how an Untranslat-
able moves—often with tension and violence—between historically and
nationally circumscribed contexts to unbounded conceptual outposts,
resistant yet mobile.
untranslatables 587

The Untranslatable emerges as something on the order of an

“Incredible,” an Incontournable, an “Untouchable,” (translated as an
“L’Incorruptible” in French). There is a quality of militant semiotic in-
transigence attached to the Untranslatable, making it more than just a
garden-variety keyword. We sense this when Benjamin Buchloh, writing
in an art journal about political apathy toward the Iraq War, evokes “a
pervasive Untertan mentality.” An accompanying note explains: “We are
using this untranslatable German term because of its historical precision
in identifying the authoritarian personality of the fully subjected subject
and its servility to the authority of the State, as Heinrich Mann portrayed
it in his 1914 novel of that title.”9 “Man of Straw,” “The Patrioteer,” “The
Loyal Subject,” each has performed due diligence as an English title,
but each falls short of capturing the fecklessness of Mann’s protofascist
citizen of Wilhelmine Germany, or in a more extended sense, the Kantian
political subject, taken from the Latin subditus, meaning those obedient
to the sovereign. The irrefragable Germanness of Untertan registers the
small shock of its untranslatableness when applied by Buchloh to a de-
scription of the anemic protest culture of North American students. In
a lighter vein, Marina Warner makes the Untranslatable operative in her
analysis of “estrangement in the foreign tongue,” as a favored effect of
Mallarmé’s English examples in Thèmes anglais (as in “Who can shave an
egg?”) or Beckett’s French (as in the grammatically off-kilter response to
a query about why he chose to write in French: “Pour faire remarquer
moi”).10 In the case of Mallarmé, it is to be wondered whether he heard
or saw an Englishman shaving an egg (or indeed any number of never-
uttered yet supposedly commonplace English sayings). In the case of
Beckett, the correct grammatical construct “pour me faire remarquer”
produces a possible world of the Untranslatable through the awkward
mental locution “to make notice, me.”
This effect of the noncarryover that carries over nonetheless, or that
transmits at a half-crocked semantic angle, endows the Untranslatable
with a distinct symptomology. Words that assign new meanings to old
terms, neologisms, names for ideas that are continually retranslated or
mistranslated, translations that are obviously incommensurate (as in es-
prit to mind or Geist), these are among the most salient symptoms of the
genuine Untranslatable. The Anglophone reader might well be baffled
by an extended entry on Paronyme (“derivatively named,” “denomina-
tive”), and that is just the point. Brought to an unfamiliar linguistic
nomos, the reader is introduced to the language world of Boethius’s
translation of Aristotle’s work on categories, and to a lost set of associa-
tions around the denominative that pinpoint an intermediary semantic
zone between homonym and synonym (VEP  897). Semantically related to
“predication,” a more universally recognized concept with a substantial
588 new literary history

philosophical literature devoted to it in analytic philosophy, paronym

could in theory have been filed under predication, but that would have
literally diminished its space in the geography of philosophy. The editors
want it revalued as a hinge between ancient and medieval scholasticism
and ordinary language philosophy. The differential weight assigned by
cultures to common cognates is also registered in the distribution of pages
to ideas. A word like “force,” that hardly qualifies as a philosophical con-
cept in the Anglophone context, warrants a substantive entry in French.
Grouped with dunamis, energeia, entelekheia, virtus, Kraft, Wirkung, pouvoir,
and puissance, “force” straddles entelechy, physics, bodily substance,
conservation, and power. In another case, the term “sensation” (a crux
of British empiricism) shrinks in scale upon being continentalized; that
is, colonized under the entries sens and sentir. Such a move reveals how
Anglo-American philosophical traditions are typically negotiated, or not,
within Europe. Ordinary language philosophy, along with the names of
its avatars—Wittgenstein, Russell, Austin, Quine, and Cavell—are duly
represented in the Vocabulaire, but the imperium of English is polemi-
cally curtailed. Analytic philosophy’s inveterate hostility to its continental
counterpart, its obsession with (to borrow Cassin’s expression) “deflating
the windbags of metaphysics,” creates a gulf of untranslatability as much
cultural as it is intellectual (VEP xix).
Throughout the volume, chasms among discrete philosophical cultures
are revealed in stark relief. Nowhere are they more evident than in the
entries devoted to language names. Notwithstanding the Vocabulaire’s ex-
press commitment to undercutting national language ontologies, there is
a measure of national recidivism in these entries. “Portuguese” becomes a
hymn to the sensibility of the baroque with le fado (fate, fibula, lassitude,
melancholia) its emblematic figure. “German” hews to the language
of Kant and Hegel. “Greek” is pinioned by the Athenian efflorescence
and Heidegger’s homage to Greek as the Ursprache of philosophy. “Ital-
ian” remains indebted to Machiavelli’s notion of “the effective truth
of things” and Vico’s philological historicism. In tracing how “French”
came to be globally identified as a preeminent language of philosophy,
Alain Badiou defaults to national language myths when he insists that
for Descartes, Bergson, Sartre, Deleuze, and Lacan, to philosophize is
inseparable from marking the mother tongue (VEP 465–66). Unlike Ger-
man, whose truth is attained through verbal and syntactic unraveling,
French syntax is transparent to truth. Close to being an Adamic language
in Badiou’s ascription, it lends itself to logical formalism, axioms, maxims,
and universal principles. Above all, for Badiou, the French language
is conducive to the politicization of expression; unseating predicates
through the play of substitutions and the art of the imperious question
(what Lacan called the “denunciatory enunciation”) (VEP 471). Badiou
untranslatables 589

backhandedly returns national ontology to linguistic nominalism. Such

ontologies are, of course, impossible to purge entirely from language
names for they lend coherence to the world map of languages; they
triage and circumscribe the verbal grammatical protocols that qualify
for naming as a discrete language. Even the term “translation,” which
in a sense signifies language in a state of nonbelonging, or nationalism
degree zero, is nationally marked. The Vocabulaire entry on “translation”
notes that dolmetschen, a “lost” verb whose origins go back to Luther’s
translation of the Bible into German, renders “to translate” as, literally,
“to render as German” or “to Germanize.” Friedrich Schleiermacher was
instrumental in replacing dolmetschen with übersetzung on the grounds
that dolmetschen referred to the functional work of the interpreter while
übersetzung referred to the loftier challenge of rendering thought. From
this perspective, übersetzung is the name of a disavowed Germanocentrism
that clings to the history of the word “translation” (VEP 1316).
Must the names for language, including the names for translation,
always revert to a predicate of ethnos? The current fight over the nation-
name “Macedonia” (which involves Greece’s allegation that the former
Yugoslav republic has no legitimate claim to an appellation that also
designates a northern Greek province) suggests that they must. The
Greece-Macedonia dispute shows not only that nation-names are deep
structural referents of regional, ethnic chauvinism, but also that they
function as name-domains or trademarked political zones that guar-
antee a country’s claim to self-ownership and right to enter the fray of
international power politics (which in Macedonia’s case means access
to NATO membership).
Pierre Bourdieu recognized the power of language names as incon-
trovertible cognates, though he worked politically towards a linguistic
International. In a 1995 issue of Liber, he called for a language of the
“collective intellectual” that would denationalize the dissemination of
ideas and information:

To contribute effectively to the realistic internationalism that is its raison d’être,

Liber has initiated two complementary strategies. On the one hand, it has sought
to offer its Turkish, Greek, German and Bulgarian readers the possibility of
familiarizing themselves with English, Scottish, Czech and Irish authors, works
and institutions—and vice versa—and make known on the international scale
particularities bound up with national traditions (this is the particular function
of issues devoted to a single country, or analyses and descriptions of singular
features and characteristics of a historical tradition under headings such as “Un-
translatable” or “European ethnography”). On the other hand, it has set out to
bring together and compare different analyses of the same particular object (in
this case intellectuals) as it presents itself in different national cultures, showing
in this way, against the presuppositions and stereotypes of superficial journalism,
590 new literary history

facts and effects that are to be found on all sides, invariants that are denied or
ignored just as infallibly by the vague and pompous assertions of international
meetings and reviews, as by descriptions limited to a single nation. By thus en-
abling readers from different countries to read in their own language texts that
are free of the anecdotal particularities that fill national newspapers and reviews,
and filled with information that on the contrary is absent because it is taken for
granted by those familiar with it, we hope to contribute, patiently but constantly,
to leading them out of the limits of their national universe and creating a kind
of collective intellectual, freed from the idolatry of those cultural idioms that
are too often identified with culture.11

Bourdieu displaces language from its habitus by freeing it “from the

idolatry of cultural idioms.” He imagines a neutral zone of print literacy
and media dissemination capable of transcribing the political in a pure
state, “outside the national universe.” Bourdieu treats the Untranslatable
as a critical unit conscripted for a media commons perhaps not so distant
from Habermas’s discursive public sphere. Like Cassin, Bourdieu would
pose an ideal of linguistic civitas over and against ethnic and nation-based
language cartographies. What emerges is a translation zone constructed
off the power grid of dominant world languages and potentially mobilized
around what Jacques Rancière characterizes as la mésentente (an extended
notion of diplomatic disagreement)12 or what Christopher Prendergast
describes as a “negotiation,” “the minimalist presupposition of some
common language in and over which to negotiate, although without in
any way papering over the many cognitive misfits and value clashes that
might and do arise in the conduct of negotiations.”13

***

Where Cassin and Bourdieu rely on the Untranslatable to rethink the

geopolitics of knowledge and information distribution, Franco Moretti
has explored the potential of the Untranslatable in the field of literary
history, treating it as a catalyst of narrative world-systems in The Novel,
an ambitious collective study of the world history of a genre under his
editorial supervision. The Novel ’s “Critical Apparatus,” he writes, refers
to a “wider ecosystem, focusing, for instance, on how the semantic field
of ‘narrative’ took shape around keywords such as midrash, monogatari,
xiaoshuo, qissa—and, why not, romance.”14 What is crucial is that the names
for generic forms in Hebrew, Japanese, Mandarin, and Arabic are allowed
to stand in their original languages. As Untranslatables, they prompt
the western reader to reverse the order of comparison, with midrash,
monogatari, xiaoshuo, and qissa serving as points de repères against which
Western prose forms should be measured. The Japanese monogatari,
untranslatables 591

whose most celebrated exemplar is The Pillow Book and which is character-
ized as a genre of feminine fantasy, amorous intrigue, and leisure-class
pastimes, would then be a logical default for consideration of Western
genres of popular romance (N 241–48). Similarly, the Arabic qissa—a
generic term for narrative associated with religious instruction qualified
as less translatable than, say, the mathal (fable), the nadira (anecdote),
or the sira (chivalric tale)—would center a global curriculum devoted
to religious and secular literary expression (N 262). Though The Novel
assigns only restricted space to these narrative Untranslatables, and thus
falls short of a thoroughgoing realignment of the global literary field, it
prompts the elaboration of a literary world-systems theory constructed
on Untranslatable generic typology.
Moretti has for quite some time used world-systems to develop “big”
paradigms for comparative work on the history of the novel. His much
cited essay “Conjectures on World Literature,” together with books in-
cluding The Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez
(1996), Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (1998), and Graphs, Maps,
Trees (2005), examined how genres, styles, and subgenres (picaresque,
sentimental novels, oriental tales, war stories, minor historical novels,
village stories, bildungsroman, naturalist fiction, decadent poetry, mod-
ernist narrative, New Woman novels), might be taken as literary units of
value equivalent to units of economic capital. The mention of “abstract
models” in the subtitle of Graphs, Maps, Trees confirms an unabashed
admiration for quantitative history, geographic maps, and topological
schemata. This love of system, often alien to humanists, is traced back
to the “scientific spirit” of Marxism, acknowledged by Moretti as crucial
to the motivation of his method. Moretti marshals science in the service
of understanding literature as a socialization process responsible for
cultural power structures, class hierarchies, the bourgeois domestication
of consciousness, and the revolutionary potential of intellectual labor.
In Graphs, Maps, Trees, the political purpose of literary history seems
less evident than Moretti’s scientific ends: “while recent literary theory
was turning for inspiration towards French and German metaphysics,”
he writes, “I kept thinking there was actually much more to be learned
from the natural and the social sciences.”15 Neo-Darwinian calculations
of how a literary “tree” selects for maximizing its survival supplant the
earlier emphasis on global narrative economy.
Though Moretti’s rehabilitation of evolutionary theory has been criti-
cized as a throwback to nineteenth-century theories of natural selection
(with their eugenicist baggage), his modeling of literary life cycles, sea-
soned with quirky examples, opens up new directions for systems theory
in the marriage of biogenetics and philology, some of them already an-
nounced in the neovitalist materialism of the late French philosopher
592 new literary history

Gilles Deleuze. The afterword to Graphs, Maps, Trees, contributed by the

evolutionary biologist Alberto Piazza, explores the possibility of literal
analogies between linguistic and DNA codes. When Moretti asserts, for
example, that the bildungsroman emerged after the French Revolution
“in response to a precise social need,” that is to say, for the sake of me-
diating “the conflicting demands of freedom and stability,” Piazza reads
his argument as illustrative of how “even literary genres cannot survive
without cultural variety” (GMT 99). The open or closed status of a liter-
ary world-system is thus defined in terms of the system’s ability to mutate
like a microorganism or species. “Literary writing,” Piazza alleges, “can
be construed as a system that is not bound by the particular instruments
it has itself created, and is therefore capable of metabolizing metaphors
and ambiguities belonging to several systems of knowledge” (GMT 95).
In pushing analogies between biological and literary metabolism, Piazza
fixes on “translation” as the literary process most comparable to natural
selection, random genetic drift, and migration. “Graphs, Maps, Trees does
not tell us how far translation of the same novel into different languages
may alter the reception and success of a literary genre in the country
where it is translated, but Moretti’s findings in the third chapter of Atlas
of the European Novel, on literary diffusion and the correlation between
literary models and geographical space, suggest an important role for
migration, not of people but of ‘forms’, at least in Europe” (GMT 104).
Though translation, in Piazza’s estimation, affords an imprecise measure
of literary survival, it nonetheless emerges as a crucial variable in the
determination of a literary form’s capacity for migration and mutation.
Implicitly capitalizing on the common derivation in genus (type or spe-
cies) of the words genre and gene, Piazza assigns translatability a signal
role in biogenetic and literary evolution.
For Moretti, translatablity is defined both in market terms (by mapping
or graphing a genre’s circulation, influence, imitation, marketability,
election to the canon, congeniality to cultural comparatism, and ap-
propriation) and in evolutionary terms (as when he hypothesizes that
“morphological novelty” results from “spatial discontinuity” [GMT 90]).
“Take a form,” he writes, “follow it from space to space, and study the
reasons for its transformations: the ‘opportunistic, hence unpredictable’
reasons of evolution, in Ernst Mayr’s words. And of course the multiplicity
of spaces is the great challenge, and the curse, almost, of comparative
literature: but it is also its peculiar strength, because it is only in such a
wide, non-homogeneous geography that some fundamental principles of
cultural history become manifest” (GMT 90). Here, it would seem, texts
must experience the condition of exile. Transplanted from their native
soil and forced to encounter extreme cultural and linguistic difference,
literary forms jump the line into morphological innovation. This hap-
untranslatables 593

pens, according to Moretti, when a form like “free indirect discourse”

(associated with the postrevolutionary nineteenth-century European
novel, famous for bringing unruly subjective consciousness into line with
bourgeois idées recues via the conceit of a covertly inserted omniscient
narrator) travels to Russia and confronts an alien discursive mode. As
Flaubert becomes Dostoevsky, as Madame Bovary turns into Crime and
Punishment, the supposed passivity of free indirect style gives way to an
active stream of consciousness delivered as riposte in the second person
singular voice. The conclusion one is meant to draw from this example is
that substantive generic modification occurs not because “difference” is
reconciled in hybridity (that would be a “dialogic free indirect discourse”),
but rather, as a result of the absence of mediation. Born of Dostoevsky’s
“genius,” dialogism emerges as the equivalent of genetic drift, that is to
say, a new morphology or novelty literary form.
Whether or not one is fully persuaded by Moretti’s literary examples,
his focus on the diversification and speciation of literary forms highlights
critical issues and questions for the study of world literature: Are new
genres made by virtue of translation failure? Is the lack of a common
ground of comparison a spur to literary evolution? Does differentiation
(in the species sense) necessarily come at the expense of hybridity models
of cultural difference? Is the interdependency of narrative markets—
crucial to a Wallersteinian model of literary world-systems—now simply
the economic symptom of literary survivalism? Is a genre’s travel the
measure of its aliveness, its drift the gauge of force required to break
open the bounds of a closed world-system? When Moretti speaks of “a
materialist conception of form” that would reveal “form as force,” it
would seem that he is reimagining the literary world-system as a universe
of competing national galaxies, each combating the other for title to
possession of the maximum number of novelty genres; each rivaling
the other to become the universal form of a homogenized, capitalized
global lit (GMT 92).16
A competitive model of literary world-systems drafted from Moretti’s
evolutionary teleology may at the very least prove useful in addressing
the need for viable paradigms of East-West comparatism. As Asia and
Euro-America increasingly position themselves as bipolar models of
oneworldedness, each vying to outflank the other in becoming the “one
world” arbiter or default mode for the terms of cultural comparison, sur-
vivalism comes back into play, albeit in a rebarbatively Malthusian mode.
Two empires, one could say, are engaged in mimetic rivalry, exacerbated
by high walls of linguistic untranslatability and divergent conceptions of
the citizen-subject. Two world-systems, locked into an agon for linguistic
hegemony pitting, say, Global Chinese against Global English. As many
see it, twenty-first century language politics will increasingly underwrite
594 new literary history

the future of literary historiography, especially intra-Asian and Euro-

American literary world-systems. Global Chinese builds on the imperial
history of Chinese characters in other Asian alphabets, whereas Global
English builds on the imperial history of Romanization and humanist
literacy networks.
Both Global Chinese and Global English already serve as linguae fran-
cae of the Internet. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has observed that pinyin
and Basic English (or “Globlish” as it is sometimes called) extend their
hegemony to the detriment of poetic expression overall:

Language is there because we want to touch another. . . . There will be global

English only when every child in the world learns English this way. I am deeply
troubled by claims to global English. I should perhaps include Chinese here.
For it is sometimes claimed that the Internet can go Chinese. I think for that
to happen Chinese will probably have to go beyond simplified characters and
confine itself to the twenty-six letters of pinyin, make its tonal system contextual.
Then, since its grammar is simpler than that of English, we can make the same
troubling pronouncement about Chinese. There will be global Chinese when
every child in the world learns Chinese this way.
If globalization is as inexorable, powerful and inevitable as it is claimed by its
theorists, it is possible that the imagination will have to find its habitat within
Chinese and English, two languages whose superb poetic traditions will be in-
accessible in their globalized versions, because imagination, implicit in poetry,
takes time to train and is therefore inconvenient.17

Spivak hardly endorses a vision of dueling world languages, each driven

by unilateralist goals of global preeminence. In Other Asias, she states
clearly that “Sinocentric world-systems theories legitimize Eurocentrism
by reversal.”18 She also communicates her reservations towards “the claim
to the word ‘Asia,’ . . . . To search thus for an originary name is not a
pathology. Yet it must at the same time be resisted. The desire is its own
resistance. Today more than ever, ‘Asia’ is uncritically regionalist, thinks
‘Asia’ metonymically in terms of its own region, and sees as its other
the ‘West,’ meaning, increasingly, the United States.”19 Spivak leaves us
wondering how to fashion a noncentric comparatism that might break
the “systems” chokehold. This end will undoubtedly remain elusive as
long as Asian genres and styles continue to be referred to as formalist
categories with a Eurocentric, Orientalist inflection.
Decadence, abstraction, chinoiserie (transferred from the decorative
arts to literary description), and japonisme are obvious examples of the
West naming Asian aesthetics in its own languages. The last—japonisme—
offers a particularly exemplary case study of the West’s hegemonic hold
on global modernism. From Stéphane Mallarmé, Victor Segalen, Lafcadio
Hearn, Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, Henri Michaux, and
untranslatables 595

Wallace Stevens, japonisme has been cued to haiku-esque brevity, blank

spaces, ellipsis, understatement, and imagism. “California japonisme,”
stamped by the regional/ecological/spiritual aesthetic of California Beat
poets Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Creeley, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen,
and Cid Corman extended the life of this first-wave modernism, as did
the application of japonisme to minimalist abstraction, ideographic visual
signs, and a purist international style throughout the twentieth century.
If the term “International Style” in architecture came to be associated in
midcentury modernism with generic white minimalism and a geometric
formalism that borrowed from Shoji screens, and stripped-down décor,
so it was affixed to literary modernists who worshipped the white page
and showed a stylistic propensity for understatement or subtractive aes-
thetics. As minimalism gained ascendancy and maintained its sway into
the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries, it became increasingly
identified with culturally and temporally unmarked styles.
The return of japonisme to the history of Asian modernisms is a more
recent critical move that transforms the idea of modernism as such.
Dislodged from its culturally periodized framework as a designation
for twentieth-century American and European experimental writing,
“modernism” starts to signify in an expanded geopolitical field as an
aesthetically dissonant shuttle between modernity and modernization,
nationalism and westernization, cosmopolitanism and anti-imperialism,
individualism and militant collectivism, bourgeois and proletarian culture.
It also designates a complex intra-Asian dischronology during the interwar
period, which saw the coexistence of “art for art’s sake” (typified by the
poetry of China’s Li Jinfa and Korea’s Kim Ok), realism (defined by the
Chinese writers Lu Xun and Mao Dun), Japanese “new sensibility writers”
(fascinated by the avant-garde New Woman, urban spectacle, and technol-
ogy), pan-Asian nationalist fiction (Sato Haruo’s 1938 Son of Asia), and
anti-Western, proletarian narratives (by China’s Zhao Shuli or Korea’s Lin
Hua). This heterodox modernism never ended the way modernism in
Europe and America arguably did with World War II. For “modernism,”
in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 reforms, acquired a second life as
a loaded term for the desire for “democracy,” avant-garde conceptual-
ism, humanism, structuralism, and “global” imagism. Debates over the
meaning of modernism (xiandai) were central to 1980s conceptual art
practices (qianwei) and post-Tiannamen “misty” (obscure) poetry.
The writing of the eccentric, Misty Poet Gu Cheng from the 1970s to
the early 1990s epitomizes modernism’s generic “drift.” According to
Eliot Weinberger, Gu Cheng’s recapitulation of the gamut of Western
modernisms has fomented a new chronotope: “It is extraordinary that
Gu Cheng, largely ignorant of Western Modernism—the few poets he
knew and admired in translation were Lorca, Tagore, Elytis and Paz—
596 new literary history

independently recreated much of the Western literary history of the 20th

century. From the Imagism and Symbolism of the early lyrics, he moved
on to Dadaism or one of the Futurisms. . . . He ultimately landed in a
completely idiosyncratic corner of Surrealism. It is probably safe to say
that Gu Cheng was the most radical poet in all of China’s 2500 years of
written poetry.”20 For Weinberger, Gu Cheng’s poetic techniques nucle-
ate a new literary world, with the accent here on “world,” in the sense
of a possible or yet-to-be-apprehended global modernity. One gleans
this aesthetic novelty, even without access to the poetry in the original,
as an effect of untranslatability. Consider, for example, how modernity
is imagined as a new nominalism of capitalism taking shape within an
urban phantasmagoria. In a posthumously published “dream sequence”
called “City” that layers Chinese literary conceits from Tao to Maoist
propaganda slogans, a text titled “Hidden Moon Alley” introduces the
odd neologism “Zapitalism,” which names the futurism of China’s ex-
ploding economy:

No one could get inflamed busy lighting lamps

Zapitalism flashes down into the depths 21

The breaks in the middle of the verse lines resemble caesura, yet disre-
gard accessible conventions of versification or grammatology. As Joseph
R. Allen, one of his English translators, has noted: “As we move into the
later poems we sense that the metaphor, epigraphic or extended, can
no longer fully represent what is occupying Gu Cheng’s mind. In these
poems, fragmentation of the language sets in and the tentative logic of
syntax and metaphors begins to implode. This is accompanied by his
diminishing use of punctuation and the increasing use of the broken
and elliptical line structure. . . . Often we sense that we are listening to
broken and half-heard conversations; as if we were indeed listening to
a dream” (xiv–xv). Though it remains to be seen whether Gu Cheng’s
particular vision of “zapitalism” will bequeath future modernisms, his
language, built up from imploded line order, non sequitur, and what
Allen calls “agglutinative metaphors,” names a globality that functions
as an Untranslatable for both Asian and Euro-American interpretive
traditions. It thus challenges the way in which East-West comparatism
is currently written into literary history and throws off the bipolar dy-
namic that has one world system competing against another in claiming
primacy of first terms.

***
untranslatables 597

How to build a translational humanities responsive to fluctuations in

geopolitics, and which intersects with but is not confined to national
language frontiers? I have suggested that two grand projects, Cassin’s
vocabulary of European philosophy and Moretti’s monumental study
of the novel, stand out as approaches to globality that fully activate the
Untranslatable. Their projects have very different stakes; Cassin wants
us ultimately to rethink philosophy through translation while Moretti is
interested in untranslatability as a goad to generic evolution. But both
projects coincide in constituting micro and macro political worldscapes
contoured by mistranslation, neologism, and semantic dissonance, and
both, not incidentally, involve collaborative labor. Collective author-
ship, like multiple language learning and off-site academic immersion,
becomes one of the more viable ways of experiencing “in-translation” or
“untranslatability” as explosive conceptual practices capable of limning
new cartographies of the present.

New York University

NOTES

1 Parag Khanna, “Waving Good-bye to Hegemony,” New York Times Magazine, January
27, 2008, 37.
2 Preamble to essay by Mike Davis, “Fear and Money in Dubai,” New Left Review 41
(September–October 2006): 46.
3 Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
Univ. Press, 2006).
4 Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken
Books, 1969), 69–82.
5 Peter Osborne, introducing a dossier dedicated to the Vocabulary in Radical Philosophy
138 (2006): 9.
6 Barbara Cassin, Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles (Paris:
Editions du Seuil, 2004), xxi (hereafter cited in text as VEP).
7 Etienne Balibar, “Subject,” trans. David Macey, included as excerpt from the Vocabulary
in Radical Philosophy 138 (2006): 21.
8 Balibar, “Subject,” 28.
9 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, introduction to questionnaire “In what ways have artists,
academics, and cultural institutions responded to the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of
Iraq?” October 123 (2008): 4.
10 Marina Warner, “Commentary,” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5474 (February 29, 2008):
14.
11 Reprinted in Pierre Bourdieu, Political Interventions: Social Science and Political Action,
trans. David Fernbach, ed. Thierry Discepolo (London: Verso, 2008), 233.
12 Jacques Rancière, La mésentente: Politique et philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1995).
13 Christopher Prendergast, “The World Republic of Letters,” in Debating World Literature,
ed. Christopher Prendergast (London: Verso, 2004), 14. In the same footnote Prendergast
takes aim at the “‘incommensurability hypothesis’ according to which different cultural
systems are mutually unintelligible to one another and thus non-translatable.” Jean-François
Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne and Le Différend are representative, Prendergast argues,
598 new literary history

of the argument “that Western grands récits have not merely dominated but effectively an­
nihilated alternative narratives by the simple gesture of refusing their terms” (14).
14 Franco Moretti, “On The Novel,” preface to The Novel, vol. 1, ed. Franco Moretti (Prince­
ton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006), x (hereafter cited in text as N).
15 Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005),
2 (hereafter cited in text as GMT).
16 Worldwide concern over the homogenization of culture, particularly through Hollywood
film production and distribution, was expressed in the passage of a UNESCO resolution
(October 2005) designed to protect cultural diversity. The convention grants governments
permission to use protectionist measures such as quotas or subsidies to mitigate U.S. cul­
tural dominance.
17 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Guest Column,” PMLA 120, no. 3 (2005): 719–20.
18 Spivak, Other Asias (London: Blackwell, 2008), 212.
19 Spivak, Other Asias, 213.
20 Eliot Weinberger, “Diary,” London Review of Books 23 (2005): 42.
21 Sea of Dreams: The Selected Writings of Gu Cheng, trans. Joseph R. Allen (New York: New
Directions Books, 2005), 174 (hereafter cited in text).