2023 A Translational Sociology - Interdisciplinary Perspectives On Politics and Society

A TRANSLATIONAL SOCIOLOGY
A Translational Sociology provides an interdisciplinary investigation of the key

role of translation in society. There is a growing recognition of translation’s
intervention in the intellectual history of sociology, in the international
reception of social theory, and in approaches to the global literary and
academic fields. This book brings attention to aspects of translation that have
remained more elusive to sociological interpretation and analysis, investigating
translation’s ubiquitous presence in the everyday lives of ordinary people in
increasingly multilingual societies and its key intervention in mediating politics
within and beyond the nation.
In order to challenge a reductive view of translation as a relatively straightforward
process of word substitution that is still prevalent in the social sciences, this book
proposes and develops a broader definition of translation as a social relation across
linguistic difference, a process of transformation that leaves neither its agent nor its
object unchanged. The book offers elaborations of the social, cultural and political
implications of such an approach, as a broad focus on these various perspectives and
their interrelations is needed for a fuller understanding of translation’s significance in
the contemporary world.
This is key reading for advanced students and researchers of translation studies,
social theory, cultural sociology and political sociology.
Esperança Bielsa is an Associate Professor and ICREA Academia Fellow at the

Department of Sociology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Her most
recent books are The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Media (ed. 2022) and The
Routledge Handbook of Translation and Globalization (with D. Kapsaskis, eds. 2021).
Translation, Politics and Society
Series Editor: Esperança Bielsa, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Translation is increasingly becoming a broad topic of scholarly reflection in the

social sciences. In disciplines like sociology, anthropology, international relations,
policy studies and human rights studies a new concern with the significance of
translation in social life is emerging among interdisciplinary scholars who pro
ductively draw from accounts developed in postcolonial studies, translation stu
dies, and science and technology studies. This heterogeneous body of research
shares the following distinctive traits:
• An association of translation with movement and transformation.

• An attention to the key intervention of local actors and to spaces of
contestation and resistance to the global diffusion of practices and
norms.
• A broad view of translation as relating not just to texts but to
emerging social relations between previously unconnected people,
materials and things.
• A critical call to rethinking their disciplines through translation.
Translation, Politics and Society is a series providing an interdisciplinary space
where different approximations to the role of translation in contemporary politics
and society can flourish and interconnect, becoming more widely visible. The
series publishes broad-ranging, accessible titles that will be of interest to advanced
students and researchers with disciplinary backgrounds in sociology, political
science, anthropology, international relations, human rights studies, cultural stu
dies and translation studies.
A TRANSLATIONAL
SOCIOLOGY
Interdisciplinary Perspectives
on Politics and Society
Esperança Bielsa
Cover image: Antonio Aguilera
First published 2023
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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© 2023 Esperança Bielsa
The right of Esperança Bielsa to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Names: Bielsa, Esperanç a, 1971- author.
Title: A translational sociology : interdisciplinary perspectives on politics and
society / Esperanç a Bielsa.
Description: First edition. | Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY :
Routledge, 2023. | Series: Translation, politics and society | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022028975 | ISBN 9781032112121 (hardback) | ISBN
9781032112138 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003218890 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Translating and interpreting‐‐Social aspects. | Translating
and interpreting‐‐Political aspects.
Classification: LCC P306.97.S63 B546 2023 | DDC 418/.02‐‐dc23/eng/
20220715
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022028975
ISBN: 978-1-032-11212-1 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-11213-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-21889-0 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003218890
Typeset in Bembo
by MPS Limited, Dehradun
For Antonio, recalcitrant monolingual
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
PART I
Translation and society 7
1 Translation and identity 9
2 Translation and transformation 30
3 For a translational sociology 45
PART II
Translation and politics 65
4 Politics of translation 67
5 Translating democracy 77
6 The translator as producer 94

viii Contents
PART III
Translation and experience 113
7 Translation and modernity: Benjamin’s Baudelaire 115
8 Translating strangers 135
9 Homecoming: an auto-analysis 152
Conclusion: translation and reflexivity 164

General bibliography 167
Index 170
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The materials that have gone into writing this book have been evolving for a long
time and if I try to thank all those who have been relevant during a period of
almost 20 years I will fail miserably. Instead, I express my gratitude only to those
who have significantly intervened since the book was first conceived as such,
about three years ago.
Intensive intellectual work isolates but it can also bring people together in the
most fruitful of ways. I have had the good fortune of having been able to enjoy
regular extended conversations with Antonio Aguilera and Mattea Cussel during
the writing of this book and both have offered a stimulating sounding board for
new ideas and thoughts. Antonio has always pushed me to go further into the
more general social and political significance on translation. My engagement with
Walter Benjamin has also greatly benefited from his own. Mattea suddenly
appeared with a doctoral project that cleverly defied from the start key received
ideas in translation studies. Supervising her research has been a constant source of
enjoyment and learning. This book is coming to an end roughly at the same time
as her thesis. I hope my guidance compensates for the guilty pleasure of
assimilating her name into Catalan/Spanish.
I have benefited, during the past two years, from pleasant and productive
collaborations with the team members of the project I lead on ‘Political
Translation’ at the Autonomous University of Barcelona: Oriol Barranco,
Carmen Bestué, Mattea Cussel, Dionysios Kapsaskis, Judith Raigal. I believe the
work we undertake together in this project can drive the main insights offered in
this book in new productive directions.
I am also very grateful to Gerard Delanty and Bridget Fowler for their readings
and critical comments on previous versions of several chapters of the book and for
thought-provoking conversations, and to Robert Gibb for his advice on a difficult
issue and for telling me that the book needed a conclusion.
x Acknowledgements
I have presented initial versions of some chapters as keynote speeches at the 8th
Mid-term Conference of the European Sociological Association’s Sociology of
Culture Research Network (Helsinki, 2021), the International Association for
Translation and Intercultural Studies’ 7th International Conference (Barcelona,
2021), and the 9th International Colloquium on Translation Studies in Portugal
(Lisbon, 2015). I am grateful for the critical engagement of those present. I am also
indebted to several anonymous reviewers and the journal editors of the European
Journal of Social Theory, International Political Sociology and Journal of Classical
Sociology. The journal Translation Studies rejected an article on which chapter 6
is based and I hope this book will change the views of two negative anonymous
reviewers.
Chapter 1 is a substantially enlarged version of a chapter entitled ‘Identity’
that first appeared in O. Carbonell and S.A. Harding (eds), Routledge Handbook
of Translation and Culture, London and New York: Routledge, 2018, pp. 48–60.
An earlier version of chapter 3 was published as an article entitled ‘For
a Translational Sociology. Illuminating Translation in Society, Theory and
Research’, European Journal of Social Theory, 2022, 25(3), pp. 403–421. Two
different versions of chapter 5 have been published as ‘Cosmopolitanism
Beyond the Monolingual Vision’, International Political Sociology, 14(4), 2020,
pp. 418–430, and ‘Translating Democracy’, in E. Bielsa and D. Kapsaskis (eds),
The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Globalization, London and New York:
Routledge, 2021, pp. 427–440. Chapter 7 has previously appeared in article
form as ‘Benjamin’s Baudelaire: Translation and Modern Experience’, Journal of
Classical Sociology, 2022. DOI: 10.1177/1468795X221097001. Chapter 8 has
been previously published in O. Carbonell and E. Monzó-Nebot (eds),
Translating Asymmetry – Rewriting Power, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2021,
pp. 15–33. All chapters have been revised for the present book.
It was the time and working conditions granted by a generous ICREA
Academia Fellowship that first decided me to embark on the writing of this
book. I have also obtained funding from the Spanish Ministry of Science and
Innovation (ref.: PID2019-104755GB-I00) for a project entitled ‘Political
Translation’, already mentioned above.
This book is the first volume to be published as part of the new Routledge
series entitled ‘Translation, Politics and Society’, of which I am the editor. I am
very grateful to Louisa Semlyen for all her trust and support and for the belief
that the kind of intervention proposed in it can be extended to other fields and
disciplines and become, in this way, a collective project towards the greater
visibility of interdisciplinary research on translation in the social sciences and
the humanities.
INTRODUCTION
This book outlines the contours of a sociology that is centrally defined by an

investigation of the key role of translation in society. A serious consideration of
translation, it argues, transforms the sociological outlook in substantive ways,
enabling reflexivity on the linguistic materials of social life that we usually take for
granted. The book is thus conceived as an exercise in interdisciplinarity not mainly
because it substantially incorporates insights from both sociology and translation
studies, but more in the sense that it reexamines sociological knowledge through
translation. Translation can deepen our insights on key sociological issues and
debates around identity and transformation, politics and democracy, or the nature
of modern experience, renewing our approaches to the global character of con-
temporary society and of sociology. If the latter’s aim is described in terms of
making society strange, translation can be used to make sociology strange in much
the same way, generating novel critical perspectives that emerge from situating
linguistic multiplicity, lack of understanding and the social processes that attempt
to overcome it at the centre of our inquiry.
We live in a highly interconnected world where widely relevant multilingual
practices can no longer be ignored. Although the monolingual paradigm or vision
that has dominated throughout European modernity still prevails, it is increasingly
challenged by growing recognition of widespread plurilingualism, so that in this
sense it is appropriate to refer to our present in terms of the postmonolingual
condition (Yildiz, 2012). A translational sociology recognises the central role that
translation plays in mediating linguistic difference in all aspects of social life, from
television news or world literature to the production of automatic translation apps,
from designs of cosmopolitan democracy beyond the state to the transformation of
the language of human rights, from the contradictions and conflicts caused by
widespread cultural mixing to the ordinary realities of lives lived in translation.
This requires a reconceptualisation of the notion of translation away from both a
DOI: 10.4324/9781003218890-1
2 Introduction
narrow definition that conceives it strictly in terms of an interlingual transfer (what

in sociology is often approached as ‘just translation’ or ‘simple translation’ and in
translation studies as ‘translation proper’) and vague, metaphorical uses of the
concept which forget its linguistic dimensions. Narrow definitions of translation
might have been useful to help define the scope of translation studies as a newly
emerging autonomous academic discipline in the middle of the 20th century, but
have come under increased scrutiny. On the one hand, poststructuralist critiques
have sought to destabilise the borders that a notion of translation proper takes for
granted and to illuminate the process of bordering actively pursued (Derrida, 2001;
Sakai, 2009). On the other hand, this notion is increasingly incapable of capturing
the wide diversity of existing practices in multimedia translation which include, in
addition to interlingual forms of translation – translation proper, in Roman
Jakobson’s terms (2000) – intralingual and intersemiotic forms.1 Moreover, in
highlighting translation’s linguistic aspects, narrow definitions drive attention away
from its broader social and political dimensions. Metaphorical, fuzzy notions of
translation are a consequence of the proliferating use of the concept in a con-
siderable number of disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences in a
variety of ways, and generally with little respect for what the discipline of trans-
lation studies has long viewed as translation proper.2 These uses reflect the
growing contemporary relevance of translation in a multiplicity of fields, and the
need for tackling its social, cultural and political dimensions from an inter-
disciplinary approach.
At its most general, translation is a social relation across linguistic difference
or, as Naomi Sakai adeptly expressed, ‘a poietic social practice that institutes a
relation at the site of incommensurability’ (1997, p. 13). In my earlier book
Cosmopolitanism and Translation (2016), I approached translation as the experience
of the foreign, based on Antoine Berman’s account of a movement which starts
from what is one’s own, what is known and familiar, in order to go towards the
foreign and to return again to the point of departure through this experience of
alterity (1992, p. 46). In this book, I also devote attention to the ways in which
translation enables us to establish new connections with others, both human and
non-human – a key insight from the sociology of translation first proposed
in Actor-Network theory – and intervenes in existing power relations. Indeed,
translation crucially mediates between what Walter Benjamin would call the
language of things and human language, or what Bruno Latour approaches as a
material world that we have rendered, in language and by means of language, mute
and inert (2017, p. 67). Translation is also key for the international circulation
of policy and human rights norms and increasingly approached as a basic medium
for the creation of alternative democratic practices in local as well as transnational
contexts (Santos, 2005, 2010; Balibar, 2006, 2010; Baker, 2013, 2016; Doerr,
2018; Fernández, 2021). This is why it is necessary to reflect on the politics
of translation not just with reference to textual strategies and effects, but also
in terms of translation’s intervention in sustaining or subverting existing power
relations and generating possibilities for alternative social practices.
Introduction 3
At the level of subjective lived experience, translation mediates our relationship

with the world and with others, something that starts to become visible when we
consider the constitutive role of language in the formation of individual selves. If,
initially, we are able to incorporate the language of others and turn it into an
undeniable part of our most inner self (our native language, a language that we feel
belongs to us and through which we can express our most intimate thoughts) we
never cease to be ordinarily involved with linguistic difference and translation in
our adult lives. We react to this experience of the foreign in different and creative
ways, and the means by which we do so can become the source of significant
transformations at the individual level but also at a wider social level. The ways in
which this occurs merit investigation. Like Simmel’s stranger, translation offers a
peculiar synthesis of nearness and distance, and both are intimately related. This
book further develops the substantive perspectives on the stranger provided in my
former book by offering an account of cosmopolitan strangers as translating
strangers, approached through two case studies of popular heroes, and an auto-
ethnographic perspective on homecoming.
We need to definitively leave behind the limited notion that translation pri-
marily serves the communication of meaning if we want to be able to grasp these
important social dimensions. At the same time, it is necessary to remain perceptive
of what I approach as a significant translational component that alerts us to lan-
guage’s specific materiality. At the centre of the interdisciplinary proposal con-
tained in this book is my long-term engagement with a form of cultural sociology
that is strongly indebted to Walter Benjamin’s thought in two main respects. First,
the conviction that no cultural phenomenon is too small or irrelevant not to merit
the attention of the sociologist who, like a detective or archaeologist, brings
to light the significance of these overlooked objects and practices. Second, the
adoption of a mode of inquiry that is not guided by existing disciplinary con-
ventions but rather by the complexity of the phenomena it investigates, by the
object riddled with error. Benjamin was centrally interested in translation and
provided one of the most penetrating reflections on its task. At the core of
Benjamin’s account is a non-instrumental view of translation that relies on lan-
guage’s expressive character, which is at the basis of the approach I develop to
its wide-ranging social and political dimensions. The reception of Benjamin’s
thought on translation has been constrained by the disciplinary specialisation that
he despised, and this book also represents an effort to overcome these limitations
through the critique of partial readings and an actualisation of his work that
contemplates translation’s foremost challenges in the 21st century.
The pages that follow are the result of a long theoretical and empirical en-
gagement with translation that started in 2003 when I obtained a post-doctoral
fellowship to work on a collective project on the translation of news, led by Susan
Bassnett at the University of Warwick. On returning to my disciplinary home in
2007 with a lectureship at the Department of Sociology of the University of
Leicester I continued, rather than abandoned, this interdisciplinary engagement
along new routes. When I addressed this work to an audience of sociologists for
4 Introduction
the first time, in a departmental seminar shortly after taking up my post, Tim
Edwards asked me a question about the philosophy of language that underpinned
my approach. I could not give him an answer then. In fact, I have needed all these
years to clarify my position on the matter, during which I embarked on a slow
learning path that has transformed my sociological outlook. This book is an in-
vitation to others to consider the surprising ways in which translation awakens us
to the significance of language in society and ourselves.
Notes
1 For an up-to-date account of the wide diversity of practices in this rapidly changing field,
see Bielsa (2022).
2 For discussions of the use of the concept of translation in other disciplines on the part of
translation studies scholars, see Dizdar (2009), Zwischenberger (2017, 2019) and Valdeón
(2018).
References
Baker, M. (2013) ‘Translation as an Alternative Space for Political Action’, Social Movement
Studies, 12(1), pp. 23–47. doi: 10.1080/14742837.2012.685624
Baker, M. (2016) ‘Beyond the Spectacle: Translation and Solidarity in Contemporary
Protest Movements’, in Baker, M. (ed) Translating Dissent. London and New York:
Routledge, pp. 1–18.
Balibar, É. (2006) ‘Strangers as Enemies: Further Reflections on the Aporias of
Transnational Citizenship’, Globalization Working Papers. Université de Paris-X Nanterre
and University of California, Irvine, 06/4.
Balibar, É. (2010) ‘At the Borders of Citizenship: A Democracy in Translation?’, European
Journal of Social Theory, 13(3), pp. 315–322. doi: 10.1177/1368431010371751
Berman, A. (1992) The Experience of the Foreign. Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany.
Translated by S. Heyvaert. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Bielsa, E. (2016) Cosmopolitanism and Translation. Investigations into the Experience of the
Foreign. London and New York: Routledge.
Bielsa, E. (ed.) (2022) The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Media. London and
New York: Routledge.
Derrida, J. (2001) ‘What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?’, Critical Inquiry, 27(2), pp. 174–200.
Dizdar, D. (2009) ‘Translational Transitions: “Translation proper” and Translation Studies
in the Humanities’, Translation Studies, 2(1), pp. 89–102. doi: 10.1080/147817008024
96274
Doerr, N. (2018) Political Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fernández, F. (2021) Translating the Crisis. Politics and Culture in Spain after the 15M. London
and New York: Routledge.
Jakobson, R. (2000) ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’, in Venuti, L. (ed) The
Translation Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 113–118.
Latour, B. (2017) Facing Gaia. Translated by C. Porter. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Sakai, N. (1997) Translation and Subjectivity. Minneapolis and London: University of
Minnesota Press.
Sakai, N. (2009) ‘How do we Count a Language? Translation and Discontinuity’,
Translation Studies, 2(1), pp. 71–88. doi: 10.1080/14781700802496266
Introduction 5
Santos, B. de S. (2005) ‘The Future of the World Social Forum: The Work of Translation’,
Development, 48(2), pp. 15–22. doi: 10.1057/palgrave.development.1100131
Santos, B. de S. (2010) Descolonizar el saber, reinventar el poder. Montevideo: Trilce.
Valdeón, R.A. (2018) ‘On the Use of the Term “Translation” in Journalism Studies’,
Journalism, 19(2), pp. 252–269. doi: 10.1177/1464884917715945
Yildiz, Y. (2012) Beyond the Mother Tongue. New York: Fordham University Press.
Zwischenberger, C. (2017) ‘Translation as a Metaphoric Traveller across Disciplines’,
Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts, 3(3), pp. 388–406. doi: 10.1075/
ttmc.3.3.07zwi
Zwischenberger, C. (2019) ‘From Inward to Outward: The Need for Translation Studies
to Become Outward-going’, Translator, 25(3), pp. 256–268. doi: 10.1080/13556509.
2019.1654060
PART I
Translation and society
1
TRANSLATION AND IDENTITY
The ideas live in the cavities between what things claim to be and what they are.
Utopia would be above identity and above contradiction; it would be a togetherness
of diversity.
Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (2004, p. 150)
Introduction
In March 2021 a polemic around the translation of Amanda Gorman’s poem ‘The
Hill we Climb’, read by the author at Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration, filled
international headlines. An opinion piece by journalist Janice Deul questioned the
choice of the Dutch translator, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, an award-winning
young author, lamenting the missed opportunity to give visibility to a translator
who could also have been ‘unapologetically Black’. Rijneveld subsequently
withdrew from the translation project. The debate also had direct repercussions in
other linguistic regions, as the Catalan translator, Víctor Obiols, was deemed no
longer suitable and removed from the job, and translators of Gorman’s poem into
other languages (as well as cultural commentators more generally) felt called to
pronounce themselves on the issue. Rather than on the social conditions that
make translation possible, or on the structural inequalities that affect the positions
and life chances of members of marginalised groups, attention was mostly centred
on the personal attributes or identities of the author and translators, mirrored in the
abundance of photographic portraits that illustrated the news. The aporias that
resulted from this are reflected in the kind of questions that were posed in different
media outlets, which included the following:
Can only a Black person translate a Black person? (P. Corroto, El

Confidencial, 13 March 2021)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003218890-3
10 Translation and society
Is the act of translation also an extension of a particular identity? Is the

experience of a person of color in Holland analogous to that of an African
American? (D. Pineda, Los Angeles Times, 22 March 2021)
How can an oppressed activist wear Prada? (A. Baños, Comunicació
Alternativa Territorial, 23 March 2021)
Would it be necessary to find a nonbinary translator for Marieke Lucas
Rijneveld’s work? (T. Parks, The New York Review, 31 March 2021)
The character of the debate, and the polarisation to which it led, can be discerned
through the description of three brief opinion pieces which express different
viewpoints on the matter: the already mentioned key intervention by journalist
Janice Deul, published in the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant on 25 February 2021,
an article by translation studies’ scholar Luc van Doorslaer, published in the
Belgian Dutch-language newspaper De Standaard on 1 March 2021, and a piece by
Nuria Barrios, the Spanish translator of Gorman’s poem, published in the cultural
supplement of El País on 11 March 2021.
The title of Deul’s text foregrounds the ‘incomprehensible’ choice of a white
translator for Gorman’s poetry. She describes Gorman as ‘the African-American
spoken word artist, activist and poet, who on 20 January suddenly became a sen-
sation’, praising her both for her ‘powerful-vulnerable poem’ and her appearance
and the designer clothes she wore at the presidential inauguration. For Deul, not
only Gorman’s poetry but also ‘(h)er looks inspired many’ and were seen by ‘black
women and girls worldwide as a legitimation of their natural beauty’. The choice
of a white translator is incomprehensibly blind to Gorman’s rare achievement as a
Harvard-educated author who was brought up by a single mother and once la-
belled as a special needs child because of her speech problems. On the contrary, it
reinforces the principles that determine that ‘such trust is not often conferred on
people of color’. Thus, in not choosing someone who, like Gorman, is ‘a spoken
word artist, young, a woman, and unapologetically Black’, ‘we celebrate Amanda
Gorman – and rightly so – but are blind to spoken word talent in our own country’,
an issue to which agents, publishers, editors, translators and reviewers need to be
urgently sensitised.1
Van Doorslaer’s piece caricaturises Deul’s position in order to bring home that
‘activism always carries a totalitarian aspect with it’. It bears a provocative and
manifestly ambiguous title: ‘After Zwarte Piet, the White Translator’ (Zwarte Piet
or Black Pete is St Nicholas’ aide in the traditional yearly Sinterklaas celebrations,
now widely denounced as the product of racism). Rather than for its simplistic
denunciation of the inevitable ‘one-dimensional’ character of any activism, the
piece is interesting for the unquestioned belief that literature and translation un-
equivocally represent its opposite; that is, they are ‘multilayered’, constituted by a
‘richness expressed in diversity’, and ‘can thus be interpreted in different ways’.
None of these interpretations or translations is deemed more suitable than another
(‘They will all be richer in some places and poorer in others than the source text’).
Translation and identity 11
By contrast, activism imposes an ‘overriding, ideological perspective’, forcibly

reducing diversity to one-dimensionality and dictating how a text has to be read.
This case is about the ‘dictatorship of identity thinking’, which is ‘disturbingly on
the rise’ in ‘our globalised world’. Identity thinking treads ‘a dangerous path’
because ‘(a)ny identitarian category will find a good reason somewhere in the past
to feel wronged: women, blacks, Flemish, Hottentots, Catalans, and so on’. It is
opposed to and ultimately threatens the value of diversity that literary translation
celebrates.
Rather than reflecting on the theme announced in its title, ‘The Challenge of
Translating Amanda Gorman if you are White’, Spanish translator Barrios regrets
in her piece the ‘catastrophe’ of ‘Deul’s triumph’, who has become invested with
the ‘new and fearsome power of social media’ and its ‘censorious supremacy’.2
This triumph represents ‘the victory of identity politics over creative freedom’.
According to Barrios, ‘Deul is not talking about translation, she’s talking about
politics’. Surprisingly for someone who has just translated the poem, this is also
Barrios’ case. The only argument that comes close to discussing translation is the
interesting, if problem-ridden view that ‘Deul’s logic makes translators visible,
when the essence of translators is to be invisible’. To be fair, we can discern in this
denunciation the defensive move of a suddenly visible translator whose com-
mission to translate Gorman’s poem might have been in jeopardy, as was the case
of her Catalan counterpart, even though the task had already been finished.
However different in their arguments, these three interventions tellingly fall
into what Michel Agier has called the identity trap, ‘where most commonly what
is seen is only identity determinations, present or inherited’ (2016, p. 134). In all
three instances our understanding of translation is impoverished as a result.3 Deul
relinquishes an actual perspective on translation in favour of a politics of re-
cognition (a key term that will be discussed in detail in what follows). Van
Doorslaer places literary translation outside society and its highly unequal struc-
tures, which are not only a thing of the past. Barrios essentialises the invisibility of
the translator and fails to reflect on her own practice. This chapter proposes an
alternative conception of the relationship between translation and identity that
takes the cue from and extends Theodor Adorno’s philosophical approach to non-
identity. But first it approaches the discursive explosion of identity from a his-
torical perspective and discusses the main issues that have accompanied its upsurge
as a category of analysis in scientific research.
The discursive explosion of identity

It is appropriate to reinstate in this context the notorious paradox that Stuart Hall
remarked on over 25 years ago when he pointed to a discursive explosion around
the concept of identity and a simultaneous searching critique of the very same
concept (1996, p. 1). Thus, while issues of sexual, ethnic, cultural or national
identity are seen to be central in the social construction of individuals and groups,
the very concept is also deemed so highly problematic not to merit its use as a
category of analysis in scientific research (Brubaker and Cooper, 2000; Alasuutari,

2004). Nevertheless, the continued relevance of identity in academic discourse, as
well as in political mobilisation and in common everyday usage, bears witness to its
connection with significant elements of the lived experience of our times. In
particular, the contemporary salience of identity points to how modern life is
perceived as a reflexive project of self-construction. Its profuse and sometimes
highly contradictory use is also associated, on the other hand, with the marked
polysemy of the term. While identity used to designate in the past, in the most
general sense, absolute sameness and the specificity or uniqueness of a person or
thing, pointing to a defining unchanging property throughout existence, it is
precisely this meaning that has been denounced as essentialist in the attempt to
foreground the socially constructed, changing nature of individual and collective
identities in the contemporary context.
During the second half of the 20th century, the term identity rapidly ex-
panded throughout the social sciences, the humanities, the medical and natural
sciences, and beyond academic discourse in journalistic, political and everyday
usage (Brubaker and Cooper, 2000, pp. 2–4; Moran, 2015, pp. 18–20).
According to Brubaker and Cooper, from the late 1960s concerns with and
assertions of individual identity were readily transposed to the group level with
the emergence of identity politics (2000, p. 3). What the ‘Black Power’
movement and the ‘Women’s Liberation’ movement, as well as a variety of
other groups which mobilised around ethnic, sexual, religious or national
claims, had in common was an explicit focus on issues of identity as a basic
defining characteristic of its members. And whereas previous struggles were
fought in terms of vindicating universal human rights on the part of marginalised
groups (civil rights movement, women’s rights movement, etc.), identity claims
were now made in order to articulate a politics of difference which not only
positively reframed the meaning of the very identity categories that had pre-
viously marked these groups as inferior but also pursued a new focus on group-
specific problems. Thus, as Linda Nicholson has argued, ‘“identity politics” was
a politics emerging out of a group’s distinctive experiences and expressed the
needs it saw as following from those experiences’ (2008, p. 2). Particularistic
demands centred around (cultural) recognition thus came to challenge an older
class-based politics centred around (economic) redistribution and the defence of
equality on universalistic grounds.
The present use of identity in terms of self-construction through which in-
dividuals acquire certain defining characteristics marks identity as an explicitly
modern phenomenon. What is alluded to as the pre-history of identity
(Nicholson, 2008; Moran, 2015), prior to the ‘discursive explosion’ that took
place in the second half of the 20th century, reveals a questioning of the divinely
ordered and later naturally grounded understanding of differences between in-
dividuals and groups by key authors such as George Herbert Mead, Sigmund
Freud, and cultural anthropologists like Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict and
Margaret Mead. In very different ways, their work challenged naturalistic
conceptions and promoted a reconceptualisation of individual selves and

cultural groups in terms of the intersubjective processes that constitute them in a
given environment. Central to the doubleness of identity as signifying both
particular characteristics of persons (personal or individual identity) and mem-
bership to culturally defined groups (collective identity) is the fact that, as
George Herbert Mead showed, communication with others is at the very core
of the self, that social location or positioning produces and defines a sense
of individual self. Thus, identity becomes a category of belonging that marks
individuals, as members of particular social groups, with specific personal
attributes.
Identity could emerge as a concern only when the rock-solid certainties of
traditional societies had been relativised and one no longer knew for sure where
one belonged. Thus, as Zygmunt Bauman maintains, identity ‘was born as a
problem (that is, as something one needs do something about – as a task)’ (1996,
p. 19; 2009, p. 3). However, Bauman also points to a historical transformation of
the ‘problem of identity’, from a modern context in which it was defined in terms
of how to construct an identity and keep it stable, to a postmodern one in which
the real problem became not how to build identity, but the avoidance of fixation
(1996, pp. 23–26). This increasingly fluid conception of identity is mirrored in a
new focus on lifestyle and consumption, which became a key aspect of what has
come to be known as flexible capitalism. The fact that the acquisition and con-
servation of identity are fraught with difficulties in a world that is becoming in-
creasingly devoid of solid or lasting frames is also evidenced in the proliferation of
fragmented and discontinuous biographical trajectories and of social types like the
vagabond, which Bauman opposes to the pilgrim (1996; 2009, p. 7), as well as in
the more general process which the author analyses in terms of the universalisation
of strangerhood (1991).
Since the postmodernism of the 1990s and the crisis of multiculturalism of the
2000s there was an increasing sense that identity politics might be a thing of the
past, or at least no longer able to mobilise political action to the same extent as
before. There has arguably been a deep transformation of the socio-economic
realities that made possible the emergence of identity in the first place, making
visible the proliferation of global interdependencies and transnational connections
and leading to new perceptions of diversity and hybridity. Nevertheless, the no-
tion of identity not only remained strong in academic as well as in everyday
discourse but is gaining new ground in present forms of collective mobilisation,
from the Black Lives Matter movement or the politics of trans, to a resurgence of
populism (Müller, 2016; Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017) and right-wing
extremism or postfascism (Traverso, 2019). In the cultural sphere there has been a
related increase in what has come to be approached by the media predominantly as
‘cancel culture’, largely fuelled by the new power of social media. Nevertheless,
rather than as a new face of the politics of recognition on the part of marginalised
groups, in its consumerist undertones cancel culture is and remains, above all, an
offshoot of celebrity culture.
Critical issues and debates

A number of key issues have accompanied the upsurge of identity as a way to
define basic characteristics of individuals and groups. In what follows, three of
these debates are examined in some detail: the attempt to rebuke essentialism and
the problems that a social constructivist notion of identity involves; the re-
lationship between positioning and identity; and the nature of particularistic claims
for recognition, as opposed to more universally defined demands for economic
redistribution or for inclusion of the other.
Essentialism
The modern conception of identity as a problem and a task emphasised the social
construction of what was previously seen as a given, whether divinely ordered or
naturally determined. Constructivism thus became a way to challenge the essen-
tialism of previous beliefs about the social characteristics of individuals and groups.
However, social constructivism was also explicitly used, at the same time, to re-
spond to the essentialism of the new identitarian thinking and claim-making, by
affirming that identities are not invariable and fixed, but rather fluid and multiple.
In this way, a deconstruction of the notion of identity was proposed which sought
to redefine the basic connotations of the concept as a category of being, such as
sameness or unity, and which resulted in the softening of the very categories that
defined identity as such. Above all, it was emphasised that identity emanated not
from the inherent characteristics of subjects as such, conceived as stable, self-
identical selves, but from the social instances that discursively constituted them.
Consider, by way of example, Stuart Hall’s influential definition of identity:
I use ‘identity’ to refer to the meeting point, the point of suture, between on
the one hand the discourses and practices which attempt to ‘interpellate’,
speak to us or hail us into place as the social subjects of particular discourses,
and on the other hand, the processes which produce subjectivities, which
construct us as subjects which can be ‘spoken’. Identities are thus points of
temporary attachment to the subject positions which discursive practices
construct for us … (Hall, 1996, pp. 5–6)
The complexity of this conception that establishes identity as a fleeting and un-
stable point of contact between socially produced subjectivities and historical
discourses about them emanates from its anti-essentialist move. Similarly, Judith
Butler pointed out that ‘There is no gender identity behind the expressions of
gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that
are said to be its result’ (1999, p. 34). Butler insisted on the difference between a
notion of personal identity which ‘centers on the question of what internal feature
of the person establishes the continuity or self-identity of the person through time’
and one which focuses on the regulatory practices that constitute identity, the
internal coherence of the subject, so that ‘the “coherence” and “continuity” of

“the person” are not logical or analytic features of personhood, but, rather, socially
instituted and maintained forms of intelligibility’ (1999, p. 23). In this way, Butler
sought to displace an essentialist ‘metaphysics of substance’ which assumes a
substantive person with various attributes, a self-identical being.
Nevertheless, essentialism has continued to haunt identity, even when it is
explicitly conceived as ‘constructed within, not outside, discourse’ (Hall, 1996,
p. 4), or as ‘an effect of discursive practices’ (Butler, 1999, p. 24). Thus, Brubaker
and Cooper refer to identity as ‘an uneasy amalgam of constructivist language and
essentialist argumentation’ (2000, p. 6) and argue that the prevailing constructivist
stance on identity ‘leaves us without a rationale for talking about “identities” at all’
(2000, p. 1). Marie Moran maintains that ‘it is the idea itself, rather than the groups
or individuals to which it refers, that is inescapably essentialist in its operation as a
classificatory device’ (2015, p. 6). As such, identity construes experiences of
selfhood and of group membership specifically in an essentialist way, by empha-
sising either the uniqueness of a set of characteristics that remain the same through
time, in the case of personal identity, or that there is a set of characteristics that
is the same for members of a particular group (Moran 2015, p. 50). Implicit es-
sentialism is reproduced most clearly in the notion of collective identity, which
must inescapably be based on an assumed degree of sameness of group members
and of the distinctiveness of groups that presupposes the very existence of the
bounded groups that it designates. Thus, identity building works by defining a
fundamental sameness which allows the specification of who belongs and who
does not, so that othering and bordering are at the source of every identity. As
Rada Ivekovic maintains, identity ‘is an excess of self, an appropriative positioning,
and one that needs to construct alterity in order to build itself’; ‘under this guise,
culture becomes naturalised, essentialised, instrumental’ (2005, p. 5).
Positioning
An effect of the growing emphasis on the social construction of identities has been
to bring attention to positioning as a major determining aspect of the very
identities produced. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hall’s discursive notion
of identity, which he explicitly refers to as ‘not essentialist but strategic and po-
sitional’ (1996, p. 3). Positioning, in terms of history and culture, but also in terms
of the power relations that define a given field, is thus an inherent part of how
identity is constructed. Indeed, according to Hall, ‘… identities are the names we
give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the
narratives of the past’ (1990, p. 225). Thus, identity is ‘Not an essence but a
positioning’ (1990, p. 226).
Similarly, Iris Marion Young nuanced her earlier arguments in defence of a
politics of difference (1990), particularly references to the distinct cultural identity
of oppressed groups, through a new emphasis on relationality and positioning,
pointing to fluid, interdependent social location (rather than to the logic of
identity) as its defining mark (2000). In this view, categories such as gender, race
and sexuality refer not to notions of identity, but to the subaltern structural po-
sitioning of groups, and in this sense are similar to class divisions. People who are
differently positioned in social structures have different experiences and under-
standings, derived from the structural inequalities that privilege some in detriment
of others. From this perspective, the relationship of an individual to a group is not
one of identity but is defined by a relational logic. As Young maintains, ‘social
groups do indeed position individuals, but a person’s identity is her own, formed
in active relation to social positions, among other things, rather than constituted by
them’ (2000, p. 99). Moreover, these groups and movements respond to structural
differences that are not reducible to cultural differences of gender, ethnicity or
religion (2000, p. 86).
The idea that position in social space determines a person or a group’s social
and political action is not exclusive of those who theorise identity politics or a
politics of difference but is also widespread in more universalistically orientated
accounts of the social. However, as Brubaker and Cooper point out, ‘social lo-
cation’ means something quite different in the two cases: ‘For identitarian theo-
rizing, it means position in a multidimensional space defined by particularistic
categorical attributes (race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation). For instrumentalist
theorizing, it means position in a universalistically conceived social structure (for ex-
ample, position in the market, the occupational structure, or the mode of pro-
duction).’ (2000, p. 7). Here, Brubaker and Cooper also distinguish an emphasis
on non-instrumental modes of social behaviour, based on particularistic self-
understandings or identifications rather than on putatively universal self-interest,
that the idea of identity foregrounds. It is important to attend to this very particular
meaning of positioning that is presupposed by conceptions of identity because, by
referring to a fundamental condition of which one is not always necessarily aware,
it replicates the underlying essentialism of identity as a category of being. Perhaps
this is more clearly revealed if one considers, for instance, modern nationalism as a
conception of collective identity centred on the customs, rituals and ways of life of
a people. What Richard Sennett described as an anthropological, as opposed to a
political view of the nation, based on spontaneity and authenticity rather than self-
consciousness, reveals a very similar view of social location. As Sennett points out,
‘Nineteenth-century nationalism established what we might call the modern
ground rule for having an identity. You have the strongest identity when you
aren’t aware you “have” it; you just are it.’ (2011, p. 61). This conception nat-
uralises identity and problematises the condition of being a foreigner, a significant
issue that will be analysed in some detail below. Because, as Norbert Elias already
discerned, nationalism subsists today as the most powerful, albeit paradoxical form
of collective identity in the context of a highly individualised and globalised
society (Elias, 1991).
In social psychology, positioning has been used as a category that allows for a
more dynamic understanding of the discursive production of selves, which the
concept of role was seen to prevent (Davies and Harre, 1990). Emphasising actual
conversations between particular people on particular occasions, positioning has

been put to productive use in translation studies. In her narrative account of
Translation and Conflict, Mona Baker devoted some attention to the notion of
positioning in the reframing of narratives in translation (2006). Thus, she analysed
the repositioning of participants as a key strategy for mediating the narratives of a
source text or utterance in translation and interpreting. This refers to how the
translator or interpreter’s subtle choices in the linguistic management of time,
space, deixis, dialect, register, use of epithets and various means of self- and other
identification reposition participants within the source narrative in relation to each
other and to the reader, reconfiguring the relationship between here and there, now
and then, them and us, reader and narrator, reader and translator, hearer and interpreter
(2006, p. 132). Repositioning of participants in translation can in fact point to
a dynamics of translation as transformation that is potentially at odds with even a
socially constructivist stance on identity, implicitly more dependent on being than
on doing, as will be argued in this chapter.
Recognition
According to Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, identity politics has turned re-
cognition into a ‘keyword of our time’, giving new currency to the old Hegelian
motive of ‘the struggle for recognition’ in the context of globalising capitalism and
the acceleration of transcultural contacts, as opposed to claims for universal re-
distribution whose national bases were taken for granted (Fraser and Honneth,
2003, pp. 1–2). The fundamental link between recognition and identity has been
most clearly formulated by Charles Taylor (1994), who maintained that ‘our
identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition
of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real dis-
tortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or
demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves.’ (1994, p. 25). Taylor addressed
the problems that derive from the pursuit of a politics of difference based on the
recognition of particularity arising from demands for ‘equal respect to actually
evolved cultures’ (1994, p. 42), most notably in the context of multicultural
Canada. These relate to the clashing between universal individual rights and
certain measures in pursuit of collective goals on behalf of a national group, for
instance with reference to Quebec’s language legislation, which prescribes the type
of school that children can attend (1994, pp. 53–55).
An argument for a politics of recognition explicitly points to the significance of
a notion of collective identity. However, it is interesting how, at least in Taylor’s
classic formulation, recognition is in fact related to a notion of individual identity,
particularly to Mead’s emphasis on continuous communication and dialogue with
others in the intersubjective constitution of the self. But cultures are not in-
dividuals, in the most immediate sense that they are not indivisible organisms, and
it is precisely because of this that problems emerge. The notion that ‘actually
evolved cultures’ should be accorded equal respect and appeals to ‘cultural
survival’ or to the ‘integrity of cultures’ as valid collective goals are inherently

problematic because of the very concept of culture that they imply. Cultures are
not homogeneous groups of people, islands of sameness, a contention that be-
comes even more problematic in the context of globalisation and the increasing
porosity of borders. This is precisely the claim of Seyla Benhabib, who proposes to
interrogate the meaning of culture so as to avoid a reification of given group
identities (2002). Rather than recognition as a key for the preservation of cultural
distinctiveness, critics who put forward the constructed and contradictory char-
acter of cultures and groups have sought to argue for democratic inclusion instead
(Benhabib, 2002; Habermas, 1998; Aguilera, 2015; see also Young, 2000).
In his argument about the significance of recognition in fostering and preser-
ving distinct collective identities, Taylor uses the term culture as a synonym of
community. As with the concept of culture, an idea of community that emphasises
boundedness and distinctiveness is inherently problematic. In the sociological
tradition, community (Gemeinschaft) emerged, as it were, retrospectively at a
moment when it was perceived to have been dissolved by the social processes that
gave origin to modern society (Gesellschaft). However, the myth of a closely
connected community retained a powerful appeal in modernity, often leading
to nostalgia and to the development of what Sennett has referred to as ‘destructive
gemeinschaft’, self-absorbed communities as defensive mechanisms against
otherness (1978, pp. 220–223). Moreover, the history of identity reveals an in-
teresting connection with that of community: the emergence of identity itself has
been seen as an expression of the demise of community in modernity. As Bauman
maintains, ‘“Identity” owes the attention it attracts and the passions it begets to
being a surrogate of community: of that allegedly “natural home” which is no longer
available in the rapidly privatized and individualized, fast globalizing world’ (2009,
p. 10). From this perspective, identity claim-making and the politics of recognition
can be seen as an expression of a falsified notion of the collective that in fact
emanates from a vision of the individual and the personal. Thus, Bauman refers to
identity as ‘a phantom of the self-same community which it has come to replace’
(2009, p. 10). This is also what Sennett had in mind when he pointed to the
relationship that exists between the phenomenon of community as projected
collective personality and the loss of group interest (1978, p. 223). Identity then
both expresses the social concerns of an epoch in which all certainties have been
relativised and gives them misguided form, thus contributing to the loss of
meaning it sought to offer a response for in the first place.
Identity and translation in the age of strangeness

Dispensing with identity, as some critics have suggested, does not contribute to an
explanation of its widespread significance or to an understanding of why identity
emerged at a particular moment as a central social and political concern. As Stuart
Hall maintained, identity is ‘an idea which cannot be thought in the old way, but
without which certain key questions cannot be thought at all’ (Hall, 1996, p. 2).
Identity has contributed to a positive reconceptualisation of the social particularity

of individuals and groups in complex, heterogeneous societies. Identity and
identity politics introduced a new understanding of social difference, so that ‘[o]ne
legacy of identity politics has been, in fact, a very extensive recognition in social
thinking about the importance of societal differences in affecting people’s attitudes
and people’s lives.’ (Nicholson, 2008, p. 7). Identity exposed the exclusions as-
sociated with seemingly universal categories such as ‘worker’ or ‘citizen’, signalling
the insufficiency of a universalism proclaimed on the assumption of homogenising
assimilation and contributing to the renewal of democracy in multicultural so-
cieties. Even the most fervent critics of identity, such as Brubaker and Cooper
(2000), recognise the importance of particularistic claims and of their con-
ceptualisation, although they would argue against the way in which particularity is
construed in identitarian terms.
Nevertheless, the shortcomings of identity, most notably the assumption of
group boundedness and the ready match between individual and group which
underpin it, are even more problematic today in the context of what has been
approached in terms of the globalisation of strangeness. This refers to the rea-
lisation that globalisation is leading not just to the intensified consciousness of a
smaller, highly interconnected world, but also to an increased sense of strangeness.
Thus, Chris Rumford examined the proliferation of unfamiliar spaces in a world
which is increasingly perceived as uncertain and threatening, and the blurring and
reconfiguration of borders on a national as well as a global scale (2008). More
recently, Rumford characterised strangeness as a more general experience of
globalisation that renders the social world unrecognisable in many ways, defining
it as a type of social disorientation ‘as a result of which we are no longer sure who
‘we’ are, and we find it difficult to say who belongs to ‘our’ group and who comes
from outside’ (2013, pp. xi-xii). From this perspective, the continued insistence on
identity can also be seen as a response to the erosion of familiar reference points
in a world that has become increasingly strange, where the notion of a clearly
defined, cohesive community is dissolved.
Under these circumstances, identity can easily turn into an experience of
globalisation that leads to disconnection and closure rather than openness. In his
book, Rumford identifies cosmopolitanism – a ‘strategy for sociality under
the constraints imposed by strangeness’ (2013, p. 107) – as offering an alternative
response. From a different perspective, Ulrich Beck has also explicitly referred
to the cosmopolitan outlook as an alternative to what he calls the ‘prison error’
of identity, arguing that ‘It is not necessary to isolate and organize human
beings into antagonistic groups, not even within the broad expanses of the
nation, for them to become self-aware and capable of political action.’ (2006,
p. 6). Beck contrasts ‘the social image of frozen, separate worlds and identities
that dominated the first modernity of separate nationally organized societies’
(2006, p. 6) to the increasing transnationalisation promoted, for instance, by the
mass media and the both/and identities that proliferate in an age of place
polygamy and multiple belonging (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002, p. 25).
These hybrid identities, if they can be so approached, refer not to enduring

sameness and distinctiveness as the constituting characteristic of the self, but
rather to the internal contradictions and conflicts to which individuals and
groups must permanently face up to. They result from what Beck has ap-
proached as ‘the clash of cultures within one’s own life’, a cosmopolitan ex-
perience derived from ‘the internalization of difference, the co-presence and
coexistence of rival lifestyles, contradictory certainties in the experiential space
of individuals and societies.’ (Beck, 2006, p. 89).
In this section I seek to formulate an account of identity in an age of strangeness
that productively engages with the changed conditions for living together both
locally and on a planetary scale. I argue that the significant shortcomings of identity
can be overcome through an emphasis on non-identity, a focus on what identity
leaves out, rather than on what is affirmed. Such a strategy allows us to preserve
identity as a concept without which certain ideas cannot be thought, but escapes
from identity’s essentialising mechanisms, from what Ivekovic has characterised as
its appropriative positioning. Moreover, as I will show in what follows, translation
plays in this account a fundamental role by helping to conceptualise a view of
intercultural relations based on contradiction and transformation, not on unity and
sameness, and by contributing to articulate an alternative view of particularity that
does not preclude universalistic claims.
The most ambitious and thorough critique of identity is contained in Theodor
Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (2004) [1966]. The book makes clear the pervasiveness
of identity not merely as a concept but as a basic mode of thought: ‘We can see
through the identity principle, but we cannot think without identifying. Any
definition is identification’ (2004, p. 149). However, identifying thought is ex-
posed as a basic mechanism through which contradiction is eliminated and a false
unity between word and thing is proclaimed. This unity that we construct in our
consciousness is also the source of what appears divergent, dissonant and negative.
For Adorno, non-identity is precisely ‘the secret telos of identification. It is the part
that can be salvaged’ (ibid.). This is because non-identity contains a utopian ele-
ment – ‘the pledge that there should be no contradiction, no antagonism’ (ibid.) –
which would be lost if the ideal of identity was discarded. Rather than identity,
our goal should thus be non-identity. As Adorno explicitly maintained, his phi-
losophical critique of identity transcends philosophy (2004, p. 11). In this context,
I will pursue a conception of identity based on non-identity through a con-
sideration of the figure of the foreigner, on the one hand, and of translation, on
the other.
The foreigner’s experience of displacement can be examined as an instance that
forces individuals to face up to the essential discontinuity between the self and the
outside world. In this light, Sennett has referred to the exile as the emblematic
urbanite, someone who does not inherit any identity and is obliged to transcend
dreams of home and turn outward in order to find the conditions for living with
others (1990, p. 134). But it is in his essay on ‘The Foreigner’ (1995, republished
in 2011 in a book of the same title) where Sennett has more fully formulated his
account of the foreigner’s experience of displacement as an experience beyond

identity. Foreigners are forced to seek conditions for living with others who do
not understand them, thus incorporating incompletion and doubt instead of
seeking self-assertion through a mirror image of sameness. They are obliged to
respond creatively to their displacement, to ‘deal with the materials of identity the
way an artist has to deal with the dumb facts which are things to be painted’ (2011,
p. 69). For Sennett, the foreigner confronts the passions of modern nationalism,
based upon ‘its emphasis on sharing, among similar people, the dignity of everyday
life, the value of identity’, with a passion for displacement (2011, pp. 75–76).
Thus, foreigners can attempt to turn dislocation into something positive, turning
away from a society of self-referential identities. In the search of Russian exile
Alexander Herzen, Sennett finds an exemplary instance of ‘the vivid consciousness
of oneself as a foreigner which is necessary to defeat this pluralist self-enclosure in
ethnicity’ (2011, p. 82, see also Bielsa, 2016, pp. 30–31), pointing to a way out of
the segregating game of pluralism in which our contemporary politics of identity
threaten to entrap us all.
But the foreigner’s experience of displacement can be radicalised through a self-
conscious search that takes language and translation as its primary materials. This is
precisely how Teresa Caneda explores the work of Modernist authors like T.S.
Eliot, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce and Ezra Pound, foreigners and polyglots, who
undertook to defamiliarise their medium of expression through the search for a
new language beyond identity (2008, 2015). As Caneda maintains, translation,
understood not as communication or transfer but rather in its more interrogative
and self-reflexive aspects, was for Modernists much more than an implicit practice:
‘it conformed to a whole array of aesthetic experiments through which they
challenge established concepts of self and otherness’ (2008, p. 58). Translation
came in fact to embody this new language that makes it possible to abandon the
familiar and well-trodden paths and to view oneself as foreign. Modernist writers,
as it were, translate themselves, they ‘abandon the conventional lexicon and
syntax, and even violate the principles of standard grammar as if they were writing
under the pressure of having to translate from a different tongue’ (2008, p. 58). As
a result of this, their productions ‘self-reflexively reveal themselves as multilingual
modernist texts marking the speakers’ position as strangers, always being some-
where else, always translating themselves into someone else and thus standing
in opposition to clearly defined identities speaking in the ‘original’ language’
(2008, p. 59).
Caneda perceptively notes that translation always reveals the gaps between
world and word (2008, p. 65). Herein lies its utopian potential, in Adorno’s
sense, because it exposes the contradiction that is hidden by an identifying
thought that presumes their unity. The utopian idiom of the translated writer
is also expressed in Joyce’s dismantling of monolithic English linguistic
structures and their imaginary translation into a non-existent ‘autonomous’
language, a language ‘simultaneously unique and multiple, original and
derivative’ (2008, p. 66). Thus, Joyce’s translational poetics of hospitality

contains a lesson for us all:
By repositioning readers in their relationship to language, the polyglot Irish

writer who died in Zurich, held a British passport all his life and spoke
Italian with his family, even when they were settled in Paris, ultimately
seems to remind us that we are all foreigners. (Caneda, 2015, p. 276)
Today, the experience of estrangement, boundary trespassing and displacement from

which Modernist translational poetics emerged has become universalised. The
cosmopolitan condition of living in translation (Bielsa, 2016, pp. 12–13) finds in
what Rebecca Walkowitz has approached as born-translated literature (Walkowitz,
2015), but also in the traumatic character of a colonial experience in which blacks
and colonised peoples were forced to see and experience themselves as ‘other’ (Hall,
1990, p. 225; Fanon, 2004, 2008), a learning laboratory, not in terms of identity but
with reference to what identity negates. For Walkowitz, world literature is born
translated not only because it appears in multiple languages and circulates globally
from the start but, significantly, because it thematises and incorporates translation
into its production in substantial ways, thus alerting us to works that begin in several
languages and several places, generating alternatives to the experience of native
reading and challenging the very idea of a national literature as the expression of an
imagined community. By building translation into their form, born translated novels
‘force readers to grapple with partial fluency, register the arrogance of US mono-
lingualism, and invent strategies for incorporating the several languages, geographies
and audiences in which they get their start’ (2015, p. 42). They devise and
experiment with strategies for connecting with others in a context in which our
familiar reference points have become unstable.
An example
As a special kind of born-translated literature that is decolonial in character,
Behrouz Boochani’s international bestseller No Friend but the Mountains (2019),
offers interesting insights on translation from the perspective of non-identity. If the
cultural struggles that have emerged regarding the translation of Amanda Gorman’s
work are intrinsically related to power, celebrity culture and even fashion, in
addition to literature, Behrouz Boochani should rather be approached as the other
who appears to us, through his own depiction, as a fragile body wrapped in baggy
clothes and plastic flip-flops; his degrading yellow-polyester T-shirt offering an
uncanny correlate to Gorman’s yellow Prada coat. Boochani is the prototypical
stranger, which Bauman considered an eternal wanderer, ‘homeless always and
everywhere, without hope of ever “arriving”’ (1991, p. 79), a vagabond who
embodies ‘the waste of the world which has dedicated itself to tourists’ services’
(1997, p. 92).4 As Bauman himself already saw, the most characteristic face of the
contemporary stranger is that of the refugee, who has become ‘the very
embodiment of human waste’ (2007, p. 41, 2016). Moreover, in the context of a

global space that has assumed the extraterritorial character of a frontierland, re-
fugees have become the epitome of that extraterritoriality, deprived of their es-
sential human rights and indefinitely detained in offshore installations explicitly
created for this purpose (Bauman, 2002, p. 85).
It is precisely this type of installation or what he characterises as the border-
industrial complex that Boochani sets out to describe and theorise in his book. The
work is the product of an unusual mix of genres in which the expression of the
author’s most intimate and harrowing experience of incarceration through literary
means coexists with the attempt to analyse the characteristics of the system that has
imprisoned him. This is why both Boochani and his translator, Omid Tofighian,
resist its unsatisfactory classification as ‘refugee writing’ or ‘refugee memoir’, rather
pointing to the book’s contribution ‘to produce new knowledge and to construct
a philosophy that unpacks and exposes systematic torture and the border-industrial
complex’ (Boochani, 2019, pp. 396–97).
Indeed, even though the book perhaps finds its closest parallel in the nar-
ratives that depict first-hand experiences of horror and survival in concentration
camps, it is also manifestly distinct from them in several key respects. First, it is
characterised by the presentness of the realities it describes, as well as by the
coexistence of writing and translating as simultaneous processes. Rather than
writing a memoir as an articulation of past experience, Boochani explicitly
embraces writing as an act of resistance to his ongoing incarceration. His work is
closer in this respect to prison writings in the tradition of Gramsci and others,
although in this instance the main object of reflection becomes the experience of
imprisonment itself, as in memoirs. Moreover, the simultaneity of writing and
translation processes also typically distinguishes Boochani’s book from con-
centration camp memoirs, which in some cases have not been translated until
many years after their original publication.5 Tofighian, who regularly discussed
with Boochani his interpretations of the latter’s work and even visited Manus
Prison, precisely emphasises the simultaneous planning, writing and translating
as one of the book’s unique features (Boochani, 2019, p. 382). As a prime
example of born-translated literature, Boochani’s book, originally written in
Farsi, was in fact born in Tofighian’s English version.
Second, and in relation to the former point, the author and translator’s co-
presence and active collaboration, described by Tofighian as ‘shared philoso-
phical activity’, constitute a fundamental element in Boochani’s book. The
significance of the translator as a secondary witness in the context of Holocaust
memory transmission and, more generally, in the representation of experiential
and corporeal knowledge has been appropriately described in translation studies
(Deane-Cox, 2013; Susam-Saraeva, 2021). Aleida Assmann had employed this
notion to refer to the special responsibility that is placed on the listener of video
testimony, ‘who must be willing to share the testimony and become a co-
witness or secondary witness of the memory that he or she helps to extend in
space and time’ (2006, p. 265). It is the strategic presence of a listener that in
many cases elicits the testimony in the first place, which would not be produced
without the stimulus of a receiver. Sharon Deane-Cox uses the term to speci-
fically refer to the translator of Holocaust memoirs, who becomes a necessary
and active figure in the mediation and transmission of the testimony across
languages (2013). Further, for Sebnem Susam-Saraeva, the notion of secondary
witness ‘highlights the possibility that one may not have the same experiential
knowledge and yet still be able to comprehend and translate someone else’s
experience through attentive listening and conscientious mediation’ (2021,
p. 87). In the instance that concerns us in this chapter, Tofighian does not have
direct knowledge of the realities of Manus prison and becomes a secondary
witness, a mediator and amplifier of Boochani’s testimony. He does not himself
elicit Boochani’s account, as in video testimony. However, in many other ways
his role far exceeds that of a secondary witness; he becomes a necessary colla-
borator and co-creator without whom the book could not have been written. In
this context, the peculiar nature of Boochani and Tofighian’s collaboration
directly contributes to its unique features. Boochani himself chose Tofighian,
who had already translated some of his journalism, to translate the book. After
this, a close collaboration between them was established through which the
translator consulted and discussed his interpretation and translation choices with
the author, influencing in turn the writing of the original text. Textual evidence
of this collaboration or co-creation is abundant in Boochani’s text, ranging from
the poems introduced by Tofighian’s translation to the use of key theoretical
concepts and character names. Finally, the collaboration of Tofighian and others
was necessary to allow Boochani’s writing, most of which was done on
Whatsapp on a hidden mobile phone, to escape from the prison confines and
reach the outside world.
Third, testimonial narratives expose but do not fundamentally challenge the
hierarchy of knowledges that governs the distinction between memory and his-
tory, or between experiential and corporeal knowledge as opposed to abstract
knowledge. In incorporating, on the one hand, his own account of subjective
lived experience as well as an analysis of the objective structural characteristics of
Manus Prison, and denunciating, on the other hand, the complicity of expert
knowledge (journalists, lawyers, medical personnel, interpreters) with the system
that has imprisoned him, Boochani’s book pulverises this very distinction. The
implications of such a challenge are far-ranging. In Boochani’s words,
I can’t analyse and express the extent of the torture in this place. But I think
it’s inevitable that for years and years to come I’ll end up opening critical
spaces for engaging with the phenomenon of Manus Prison … this work
will attract every humanities and social science discipline; it will create a new
philosophical language. (2019, p. 363)
In its decolonial intention of ‘speaking back’ to the metropole by dislodging the

relationship between power, knowledge and discourse that it has erected,
Boochani’s book belongs to the type of intervention that Ipek Demir has char-
acterised as Kurdish transnational indigenous resistance (2022).
The remaining paragraphs of this chapter are devoted to analysing how the
book creates not only a new philosophical language but also a new translation
language, which I describe in more abstract terms in chapter 6 as reflexive
translation, a translation technique which puts translation in the hands of its users,
both authors and readers. This new translation language is the result of a politics of
translation through which novel answers can be found to the aporias revealed in
the introduction to this chapter regarding the relationship between translation and
identity. The perceptive accounts by Deane-Cox and Susam-Saraeva on transla-
tion as secondary witnessing bring new light but cannot escape from the con-
straints imposed by identity on translation. Deane-Cox reflects on how problems
derived from conceiving the precise nature of the assistance granted by the sec-
ondary witness might be amplified in translation. Thus, whether this assistance is
seen as full identification or as total empathy, the risk of appropriation of the other
through translation, conceived as an ‘appropriative transfer of meaning’ (Steiner,
quoted in Deane-Cox, 2013, p. 312), introduces significant textual tensions.
Susam-Saraeva highlights issues of representation regarding experiential knowl-
edge and narratives emerging from racial, ethnic, sexual and gender-based iden-
tities. She poses an important question that closely resonates with those
highlighted in the introduction in relation to Gorman’s case: ‘Are we heading
towards an era where interest, enthusiasm, and professional experience might be
challenged by anxieties around authenticity and “politically-correct” representa-
tion, where one will be able to translate/interpret only those one shares some kind
of affinity with?’ (2021, p. 90).
It is my contention that the politics of translation that inform Tofighian’s
work can provide a model for an urgent alternative to a politics of identity. Such
politics is articulated around four basic principles. The first is to make explicit
and clarify the translator’s choices, strategies and point of view, as well as the
theoretical frame from which he or she interprets the author’s work, opening up
the translator’s reflexive process of engagement with the original text to others.
Tofighian not only routinely converses, reports and consults his translation
decisions with Boochani and other collaborators; he also authors relevant
chapters that discuss translation issues and explicitly formulates a general inter-
pretation of Boochani’s work as horrific surrealism, while openly reflecting on
previous interpreting frames (magic realism) which he has abandoned. The
second principle is to challenge the predominant individualistic view of trans-
lation in favour of a focus on connections and relationships with others through
translation, as part of a more general move that undermines the distinctions and
hierarchies that are a product of the western Romantic tradition, including the
following: writer/translator, creation/rewriting, original/translation. This view
informs not just Tofighian’s work but also Boochani’s, who ‘connected with the
Indigenous people on Manus Island and drew strength from their history and
from their stance against colonialism’ (Tofighian, forthcoming). The third
principle refers to respect and solidarity (neither empathy nor identification)

with the author as key to the assistance or mediation that is offered by the
translator as a secondary witness.6 Respect and solidarity require the acknowl-
edgement of incommensurate experience and the opacity of others, of the fact
that I may not be able to understand you, however hard I try. At the same time,
they enable the pursuit of common objectives and the articulation of valuable
differences through collaborative efforts. Tofighian admires Boochani’s work
and discovers through their intense intellectual engagement a ‘shared vision of
narrative and life’ (2019, p. 359). He has a different experience of marginality
and oppositional politics in Iran, as well as of exile and discrimination, that does
not hinder but is rather conducive to new forms of resistance. The fourth
principle is literary experimentation and the use of translation as a creative la-
boratory through which established practices, forms and genres can be sub-
verted. This kind of freedom might appear more easily attainable to untrained or
inexperienced translators (such as Tofighian) but should also become a reflexive
form of unlearning that is explicitly sought after by more experienced translators
who wish to move beyond the straightjackets of custom and profession.
To ask if the translator has the same ethnic identity as the writer (he does not)
is in this context irrelevant, as Tofighian’s politics of translation has served to
amplify Boochani’s words much more effectively than a politics of identity ever
could. As Brubaker and Cooper maintained, an identitarian emphasis on
boundary formation rather than boundary crossing limits the sociological and
the political imagination: ‘it points away from a range of possibilities for political
action other than those rooted in putatively shared identity’ (Brubaker and
Cooper, 2000, p. 35). A politics of translation offers a more realistic alternative
to the politics of identity in a deeply interconnected world. Opposed to an
emphasis on what is, it is moved by the utopian pursuit of that inaccessible realm
of reconciliation and fulfilment of languages that Walter Benjamin so powerfully
described (1996).7 Perhaps more significantly, a politics of translation can never
be confused with an indefensible claim about the primacy of the universal over
the particular. Rather, it offers an alternative way of conceiving and approaching
particularity, not in terms of imaginary self-sufficiency, but precisely in re-
cognition of the necessity of others for the formation of self, for a definition of
self that is not self-contained, autoimmune, closed off to self-questioning and
learning from others.
Notes
1 Words in italics are in English in the Dutch original.
2 I am quoting here from Nick Lyne’s English version, published by El País on 12 March
2021.
3 Various reflexive pieces which enlighten our understanding of literary translation also
appeared. These include: Pieter Vermeulen, ‘Waarom Rijneveld niet de beste keuze was
om Gorman te vertalen’, De Morgen, 2 March 2021; Mridula Nath Chakraborty, ‘Friday
essay: Is this the end of translation?’, The Conversation, 11 March 2021; Haidee Kotze,
‘Translation is the Canary in the Coalmine’, Medium, 15 March 2021; Tim Parks, ‘The
Visible Translator’, The New York Review, 31 March 2021.
4 For an account of Bauman’s sociology of strangerhood that explores the transformation
of the figure of the stranger from solid to liquid modernity see my former book (Bielsa,
2016, pp. 31–40). The significance of Bauman’s approach for a conception of the
cosmopolitan stranger in the contemporary context is discussed in chapter 8.
5 But, in this respect, Boochani’s work can also be related to documentary approaches
such as Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), where director, witness and translator are
simultaneously and visibly present. For an account of Shoah as a new type of video
testimony see Assmann (2006). However, as typical of memory studies more generally
(Deane-Cox, 2013, p. 309), Assmann’s account does not discuss the significant presence
of the translator in Lanzmann’s work.
6 See Sennett (2004) for an approach to respect as enabling the establishment of real
connections with others in social contexts marked by inequality. On the significance
of solidarity among strangers for cosmopolitics see Brunkhorst (2005).
7 See chapter 7 for an interpretation of Benjamin’s classic essay ‘The Task of the
Translator’.
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2
TRANSLATION AND
TRANSFORMATION
Translation is removal from one language into another through a continuum of

transformations. Translation passes through continua of transformation, not abstract
ideas of identity and similarity.
Walter Benjamin, ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’
(1996, p. 70)
Introduction
Unlike recent very visible and pressing public issues and academic disputes about
translation and identity, the relationship between translation and transformation
has not attracted a significant degree of scrutiny and has remained rather marginal
in both public and academic debates. Yet this is an important topic which
can connect the disciplines of translation studies and sociology in novel ways in
relation to the kind of thinking that is required in the face of unprecedented
processes of global transformation and climate change. My point of departure for
a reflection on translation and transformation is the constatation of a similarity
between the disciplines of sociology and translation studies regarding the tendency
to privilege a point of view that emphasises continuity rather than change, a
tendency which is being increasingly challenged in recent years.
In translation studies, a discipline which emerged in the 1970s out of the field
of applied linguistics, equivalence became the privileged notion to account for
what translation does, thereby limiting the scope for understanding the transfor-
mations that it entails and unwittingly contributing to widespread views of
translation’s inevitably treacherous nature. In the 1990s, the so-called cultural turn
in translation studies signalled a move away from predominantly textual concerns
(seen in terms of equivalence and faithfulness of the translation to the original text)
towards wider cultural matters and the study of how translations function in their
DOI: 10.4324/9781003218890-4
Translation and transformation 31
cultures of destination (Bassnett and Lefevere, 1990). In this context, notions

of cultural manipulation, ideology, and power were seen to account for the sig-
nificant transformations that translating cultures brought to original texts, and
translations increasingly came to be perceived as rewritings, rather than equivalent
reproductions (Lefevere, 1992). However, views of translation as equivalence
remained strong and were inadvertently preserved in the instrumentalist notion of
transfer, which still enjoys an uncritical acceptance in the discipline. Significantly,
it is the study of novel and increasingly relevant forms of media translation, which
involve the radical transformation of texts and formats in changing technological
contexts, that is pushing for more thorough reconceptualisations (Bielsa, 2022).
In sociology, a social science which was born out of the radical transformations
from which modern society originated, 19th-century concerns with historical
change were gradually replaced by the functionalist approaches that prevailed in
the middle of the 20th century. An illustrative example of this dominance is the
fate of Norbert Elias’ magnum opus, The Civilizing Process (1939), which lay
unread and forgotten for 30 years while Parsonian functionalism prevailed. It is
with an acute awareness of the consequences of this dominance for his work that
Elias critiques in the introduction to the second edition of this now classic book
Talcott Parsons’ systematic reduction of social processes to social states. Parsons
does not just simplify complex and variable structures by turning them into given
invariable states, says Elias; he also assumes the preservation of equilibrium as the
normal state of society, thereby making social change appear as a malfunction of a
normally well-balanced system (1982, pp. 454–456). In sociology, as in translation,
only an orientation that starts from the normality of change can account for the
dynamism of complex social processes, without reducing them to static states or
categories in search of an imaginary equilibrium. Several such notions of structural
change have been proposed in 20th-century sociology which have slowly gained
more prominence in the discipline, including Elias’ own account of long-term
directional change in the form of civilising processes over many generations, Karl
Polanyi’s description of what he called the great transformation (2001), or the
collapse in the 1930s of the economic and political institutions of the 19th century
(market liberalism and the liberal state), or Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s
work of the transformative role of critique in the restructuring of capitalism in the
last decades of the 20th century (2005).
Here I will be exclusively concerned with a concept of structural transforma-
tion that is becoming particularly relevant at the beginning of the 21st century:
the notion of metamorphosis which, at its most general, refers to a complete
transformation that renders our world unrecognisable in many ways. I need not, I
believe, devote much effort to illustrate the character of metamorphosis in the
present context. May it suffice to allude to how the Covid-19 pandemic affected
what we thought was politically possible as well as our daily lives in ways that
just before its spread would have appeared unthinkable. Perhaps of even greater
consequence is how the pandemic has led us all to accept that our plans, no matter
how thorough or well made, are subject to sudden and unexpected changes, and
to become artists in quick improvisation and creative adaptation as a matter of

everyday survival, from the need to circumvent numerous obstacles to interna-
tional travel to the provision of full-time care for our home-bound children. But
metamorphosis is not only an increasingly common form of sudden and dis-
orientating change with which we are confronted in our everyday lives. I believe
its current significance also relates to how this concept can bring attention to
our connections with non-human others and with our planet. This is why me-
tamorphosis can be linked to the major social and political challenges of our time.
The main object of this chapter is to elaborate on how the notion of meta-
morphosis relates to the major challenges of the present, and how a view of
translation as metamorphosis can help to articulate and start to look for answers
to these challenges. In the following sections I will examine, first of all, how two
sociologists, Ulrich Beck and Bruno Latour, have approached metamorphosis
in the current context. I will then complement these recent sociological accounts
with older notions of metamorphosis that defy established disciplinary boundaries
before I come to reflect on the significance of translation for an understanding
of metamorphosis and, conversely, of metamorphosis for an understanding of
translation’s radical task of textual transformation.
Two sociological approaches to metamorphosis

Ulrich Beck is the sociologist who has most clearly expressed the relevance of
a notion of metamorphosis for an analysis of the present. His last, posthumously
published book, entitled The Metamorphosis of the World, is centrally concerned
with metamorphosis as a pattern in which, in Beck’s words, ‘what was ruled out
before-hand as utterly inconceivable is taking place’ (2016, p. xii). For Beck, the
world we live in has metamorphosed into something that we no longer under-
stand. Unlike previous notions of change available to social scientists, such as
evolution, revolution or transformation, Beck stresses that metamorphosis is the
product of unintended processes which have gone unnoticed for a very long time.
Metamorphosis brings into focus the side effects of technical and economic
modernisation, rather than the transformative powers of rationally pursued social
action, destabilising the certainties of modern society. According to Beck, meta-
morphosis ‘challenges our way of being in the world, thinking about the world,
and imagining and doing politics’ (2016, p. 20). It is not just ordinary social actors;
institutions are similar faced with the impossibility of adequately responding to
these unprecedented changes and progressively hollowed out.
In this context, Beck seeks to direct our attention to what he calls ‘the positive
side effects of bads’, particularly focusing on climate change as an agent of meta-
morphosis. Thus, he argues for the significance of emancipatory catastrophism,
because only from the consciousness of constant and accumulating failures and of
impending catastrophe can a new normative horizon of common goods emerge that
drives us beyond national frames towards a cosmopolitan outlook, an outlook in
which notions of ‘world’, ‘humanity’ and ‘planet’ become central points of reference.
From this point of view, metamorphosis is about the hidden emancipatory side ef-
fects of global risk (2016, p. 116). In other words, it is only from being forced to face
up to those inconvenient side effects of progress that can no longer be brushed under
the carpet that a radically new solution can emerge that will drive humanity towards
an as yet untried route.
Beck’s key contribution has been to direct our attention to an endless story
of human failure as the agent of metamorphosis of the world (2016, p. 17). In this
respect, his notion of emancipatory catastrophism is reminiscent of Walter
Benjamin’s famous angel of history, who views the past as a single catastrophe
which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage while being propelled backwards
towards the future (2003). However, Beck fails to adequately connect such view
of human catastrophe to the role played by non-human agents, to what we usually
describe as nature, an aspect which was significantly already anticipated in
Benjamin’s theses ‘On the Concept of History’ in a visionary way.
Metamorphosis’ fundamental connection with the non-human world is better
accounted for by Bruno Latour in his approach to politics in the context of the New
Climate Regime, ‘in which the physical framework that the Moderns had taken for
granted, the ground on which their history had always been played out, has become
unstable’ (2017, p. 3). Perhaps the most significant trait of this new instability is
precisely that ‘the political order now includes everything that previously belonged
to nature’ (ibid.), traditionally conceived as a distinct and self-evident domain against
which human culture, society or civilization stood out. This fact is approached by
Latour in terms of ‘a profound mutation in our relation to the world’ (2017, p. 8)
which, as in Beck’s account, is seen to have come about not through progressive
reforms, but rather as a result of catastrophic changes, of the Great Acceleration
that marks the beginning of the Anthropocene (2017, p. 39). In a context in which
the great modernisation project has become impossible
because there is no Earth capable of containing its ideal of progress,

emancipation, and development … all forms of belonging are undergoing
metamorphosis – belonging to the globe, to the world, to the provinces, to
particular plots of ground, to the world market, to lands or to traditions.
(Latour, 2018, p. 16)
At the same time, what Latour calls the ‘Terrestrial’ emerges as a new political
actor: no longer the background of human action but an actor that reacts to
human actions. This implies a further important sense of metamorphosis, ‘a me-
tamorphosis of the very definition of matter, of the world, of the Earth’, which has
taken place, according to Latour, ‘more or less surreptitiously’ (2018, p. 61).
Redirecting attention from ‘nature’ towards the Terrestrial pushes us to be more
material in our definitions of matter, driving us towards a new materialism
(Bennett, 2010), but also towards a new way of thinking about politics in which
humanity is no longer the sole agent and previously unnoticed forces can be
mobilised. Thus, quoting Latour,
Caught up in a system of production, humans are alone in having the

capacity to revolt – always too late; caught up in a system of engendering,
many other protestors can make themselves heard – before the catastrophe. In
the latter system, not only points of view [points de vue] but also points of life
[points de vie] proliferate. (2018, p. 88)
Thus, borrowing from the language of geology, Latour asserts that we need to
learn to inhabit a metamorphic zone, where we can ‘capture in a single word all
the “morphisms” that we are going to have to register in order to follow these
transactions’ between multiple human and nonhuman agents beyond the Nature/
Culture distinction (2017, p. 58). He compellingly argues for a sort of counter-
Copernican revolution in the New Climate Regime, where we are forced ‘to turn
our gaze toward the Earth considered once again with all its processes of trans-
formation and metamorphosis, including generation, dissolution, war, pollution,
corruption, and death.’ (2017, p. 61).
In spite of their differences, two shortcomings can readily be identified in Beck
and Latour’s conceptions of metamorphosis. First, their emphasis on radical
transformation leads both authors to a distinctive lack of reflection on essential
forms of continuity and mechanisms of social reproduction without which the
very concept of change cannot be specified. Beck is arguably not interested in
change as such (and consequently in lack of change) when he categorically dis-
tinguishes between change in society and the metamorphosis of the world, which
comes about unnoticed and unplanned, destabilising the certainties of modern
society. Yet, there are insurmountable difficulties in moving away from a con-
sideration of humanity’s constructive and transformative powers, which are ex-
ercised simultaneously and undistinguishably on both society and the world. From
this perspective, it becomes difficult to envisage ‘the positive side effects of bads’,
that is, how the radical transformation of the world can produce new normative
horizons of common goods and a cosmopolitan outlook. It is precisely the very
separation between ‘society’ and ‘the world’ that Latour has sought to challenge.
He ironically comments on how the realisation that the world finds itself at a
tipping point of mutating into an inhospitable, dangerous place has failed to
modify the bases of our existence from top to bottom (our food, our habitats, our
means of transportation, our cultural technologies) (2017, p. 8). Yet he attributes
this not to the constraints imposed by rock-solid social structures, but to our point
of view on the situation, a point of view from afar or from nowhere which
overlooks the fact that we inhabit the very place that is being transformed. Latour
wishes that we share agency with the powers and forces that we have traditionally
seen as inert and sought to control, yet he forgets how this very agency has been
taken away from humans by oppressive and dehumanising social structures.1
A second shortcoming concerns the implicitly Eurocentric standpoint that
identifies progress as a universal category and does not recognise that the cata-
strophe that is suddenly becoming widely perceivable in the global North is much
more familiar in societies that have suffered the catastrophic disruptions imposed
by colonial rule. This is why a notion of metamorphosis might actually become

more intelligible from the perspective of Southern theory. Because, as Raewyn
Connell has argued, the concept of time as an intelligible historic succession re-
flects how time is experienced in the metropole, whereas in colonised and settler
societies time involves fundamental discontinuity and unintelligible succession:
‘For colonised cultures, conquest is not evolution, rationalisation or transforma-
tion, but catastrophe. Colonisation introduces fundamental disjunctions into social
experience that simply cannot be represented in metropolitan theory’s models
of change through time.’ (Connell, 2007, pp. 45–46). It is precisely from the social
thought that is produced in marginalised indigenous societies but erased in me-
tropolitan texts of general theory that we can learn relevant novel perspectives
on the metamorphosis of the world beyond the Western nature/culture divide.
Nevertheless, and in spite of these important shortcomings, Beck and Latour have
rightly emphasised the challenges that the metamorphosis of the world poses to
contemporary politics. Beck insists on how the most radical form of social trans-
formation that is metamorphosis takes place unwanted and unplanned in the form of
unintended side effects, hence, beyond the domains of politics and democracy. At the
same time, he argues that the anthropological shocks that derive from metamorphosis
can lead to a new way of doing politics. Latour contemplates the repoliticisation
of planetary questions, but only if we are prepared to undertake a critique of the
ideology of nature, which limits human action and the politicisation of nature.
It is my contention that, in order to respond to the challenges posed by me-
tamorphosis to our political imagination, which require no less than the meta-
morphosis of politics, we need to turn to older, much more concrete notions of
metamorphosis that are intrinsically connected to the literary imagination. Literary
accounts remind us with fastidious insistence of metamorphosis’ most surprising
feature: the relative ease with which human beings can transform themselves (or
others) into anything; the essential fluidity of nature. More generally, the literary
imagination has offered a space where the transformative powers of humanity have
been preserved, particularly after the disenchantment brought about by modern
science as an endeavour premised on an instrumental and im/partial view of its
object of study, approached as separate from both the observing subject and the
world to which both belong. Rather than on the rich imagery of metamorphosis
which pervades the literary tradition, I’d like to briefly focus here on two more
reflexive accounts that nevertheless emerge from, and retain significant relation-
ships with, this tradition. I will first refer to Goethe’s study of The Metamorphosis of
Plants (2009) [1790] and, second, to Elias Canetti’s description and interpretation
of transformation in the book Crowds and Power (1981) [1960].
Metamorphosis and/of knowledge beyond disciplinary

boundaries
Goethe dedicated his long life to both literary and scientific writing in equal
measure, integrating a poetic and a scientific sensibility towards a comprehensive
view of nature and the world, an intention that resonates today in the work of
heterodox scientists like James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, who have re-
defined our views of the nature of life on Earth. In The Metamorphosis of Plants,
Goethe’s purpose is to describe ‘the laws of metamorphosis by which nature
produces one part through another, creating a great variety of forms through the
modification of a single organ’ (2009, pp. 5–6). His central proposition is that, in
spite of their apparent diversity, all these forms are in fact metamorphoses of
the leaf. Directing his attention to the plant as it develops from the seed, the
first organs, the cotyledons, appear unformed and crude, gradually developing
into more refined leaves and culminating in flowers and fruits. For Goethe,
metamorphosis is not just a process of refinement of form, but also of the juices
or saps that make up the leaf, from coarse to purer liquids, as the plant, in
Goethe’s words, ‘reaches the point ordained by nature’ (2009, p. 22). Thus, the
study of metamorphosis mobilises ‘our power of imagination and understanding’
(2009, p. 93), opening our eyes to the secrets of the multiplicity of nature, to
the hidden interrelationships between things.
As Adolf Portmann has noted, Goethe ‘seeks to grasp what can be known of
a spiritual world through a full experience of the sensory given’ (1987, p. 137).
An understanding of metamorphosis thus becomes the basis of an interpretative
science which acquires, it is worth emphasising again, powerful connotations for
the type of research that is urgently needed in the present context:
Just as the audience lives within the mood of the actors in a drama, Goethe
lives within this hidden life. No chemical analysis interferes with this
activity; no experiment, no technological intervention disturbs this ordered
harmony. The spirit intimates what is occurring there; the “gentle
empiricism” of analogy guides the viewer of a drama which moves closer
and closer to the climax, the miracle of the blossom. (Portmann, 1987,
pp. 140–41)
Goethe’s approach to metamorphosis also underpins his mature literary in-

vestigation of human chemistry in Elective Affinities (1809), which Max Weber
later metamorphosed into both an explanation of the spirit of capitalism and a
foundation of an interpretative sociology. But here I’d like to emphasise how
Goethe’s ‘gentle empiricism’ contrasts with the positivism of the hard sciences
not because of a lack of intervention, as we could be led to believe from the
words I have just cited, but because it is partially derived from a radically dif-
ferent type of intervention. Goethe’s relationship with and intervention on his
object of study is rather similar to that of a gardener, whose objective is to
help nature develop to its full potential. In fact, the direct inspiration for his
account of the metamorphosis of plants comes from both his Italian travels and
his intense gardening practice in Weimar.
Goethe’s science as an expression of an intimate knowledge of nature and, in
more than one sense, as a form of cultivation, contrasts with a specialised science
that intentionally limits itself through method in order to produce knowledge as

mastery over nature. A similar refusal to restrict himself to disciplinary con-
ventions is present in the work of Canetti, an author who once wrote: ‘My
whole life is nothing but a desperate attempt to overcome the division of labour’
(1985, p. 36). Crowds and Power, which demanded from him a dedication of
30 years, is the best illustration of this ambition. If his intention was ‘grabbing
this century by the throat’, he approached the task through an interpretative
and classificatory excess that relied on available descriptions of distant and ar-
chaic crowds drawn from the most diverse anthropological and literary sources.
Even a heterodox figure like Theodor Adorno – who himself defended a form
of thinking that is not subject ‘to the approved rules of the sciences and does not
respect the boundaries imposed by the division of labour’ – considered Canetti’s
subjective approach ‘something of a scandal’ because of its emphasis on re-
presentations and images of crowds, on the work of the imagination, rather than
on real crowds and their experiences (Adorno and Canetti, 1996, p. 2). Canetti
dedicates one part of Crowds and Power to examine humanity’s talent for
transformation which is, according to the author, one of its most mysterious and
least well-understood gifts (1981, p. 337). He follows in this analysis the same
scandalous approach that guides the book as a whole through a detailed de-
scription of a variety of accounts of metamorphosis, ranging from Bushmen
folklore or Australian totemism to delirium tremens and paranoia.
Transformation is, according to Canetti, the source of words and objects, the
source of all human culture: ‘Everything that a man can do, everything
that represents his culture, he first incorporated into himself by means of
transformation’, Canetti states (1981, pp. 217–18). It relates to the crowd’s
inherent multiplicity, but also to power, which is first acquired by transfor-
mation but then sustained through its prohibition. Primitive societies like the
Aranda preserve an ordinary experience of transformation. In recurring to their
myths to unearth its secrets, Canetti’s intention is not essentially dissimilar to
that of Émile Durkheim, who seeks in Australian totemism (which Durkheim
considered ‘the simplest and most primitive religion known today’) the secret of
the religious energies of humanity. According to Canetti, modern society has
become infinitely impoverished by the limits it imposes on transformation and
that is why a memory of metamorphosis has something important to contribute
to the present.2
If we seek a more explicit formulation of what exactly that is we won’t be able
to find it in Crowds and Power, where the crucial significance of metamorphosis
remains somewhat mysterious. This is why I now turn to a speech Canetti
delivered in 1976, entitled ‘The Writer’s Profession’, in order to understand this
important dimension. There, Canetti defines the writer as ‘the keeper of meta-
morphosis’ (1986, p. 160) in a twofold sense. First, in the sense of making
‘mankind’s literary heritage, so rich in metamorphoses, his own’ (ibid.) – from
Canetti’s account in Crowd’s and Power we must really conclude that it is mankind’s
heritage, as women are usually excluded from and prohibited transformation. For
the second sense in which the writer is considered a keeper of metamorphosis I

need to quote Canetti at some length:
In a world of achievement and specialization, a world that sees nothing but

peaks, towards which one strives in a kind of linear focus that exerts all strength
on the cold solitude of the peaks while scorning and blurring the adjacent things,
the many, the real things, which do not offer themselves for any help towards
the peaks – in a world that prohibits metamorphosis more and more because it
hinders the overall goal of production, which needlessly multiplies the means of
its self-destruction while simultaneously attempting to stifle whatever earlier
human qualities are still extant – in such a world, which one might label the most
blinded of all worlds, it seems of cardinal significance that there are people who,
nonetheless, still keep practicing the gift of metamorphosis. (1986, pp. 161–62)
For Canetti, the gift of metamorphosis is, I repeat, the source of all human culture;
the non-instrumental means through which human beings relate to the world. Its
nature is obscured by a disciplinary knowledge that privileges notions of reproduc-
tion over notions of multiplication, which are inherently related to metamorphosis.
Scientific and societal progress are premised on a mode of production that reduces
nature (viewed principally in terms of resources) and human beings to commodities,
subjecting them in equal measure to the logic of profit, which becomes the real
subject of history. Metamorphosis contains a memory of a different relationship
between humans and the world. Scholarship has rescued the inexhaustible spiritual
legacy that is found in ‘these early incomparable creations by people who, hunted,
cheated, and robbed by us, have perished in misery and bitterness’ (1986, p. 161).
However, ‘its resurrection to our life are up to the poet, the Dichter’ (ibid.).
Like Goethe’s The Metamorphosis of Plants, which has divided the scientific
community to this day, Canetti’s ‘exceptionally hermetic and idiosyncratic’ image of
society in Crowds and Power (Arnason, 1996, p. 45) has proven particularly resistant to
sociological assimilation and has remained largely ignored. Nevertheless, in the
present context something of the pre-scholarly mode of thinking adopted by both
Goethe and Canetti in approaching metamorphosis needs to be recovered if we
want to be able to effectively respond to the metamorphosis of the world. This is a
type of thinking that needs to remain open and alert to concrete practices beyond
worthless universals, that literally ‘demands the concrete metamorphosis into every
individual thing or person that lives and exists’ (Canetti, 1986, p. 165). I will not be
able to tackle this difficult point until the end of this chapter. However, I now finally
find myself in a position to further expand on the relationship between translation
and transformation, as promised in its title.
Translation and metamorphosis: a universal practice of the

concrete
I have already referred, at the beginning of this chapter, to the fact that a notion
of translation as transformation, as opposed to the illusion of equivalence
(Hermans, 2007), or the instrumentalism of transfer (Venuti, 2019), is becoming

increasingly heard in translation studies. Both equivalence and transfer are re-
miniscent of the Parsonian reduction of complex social processes to given in-
variable states that Elias critiqued. Both inevitably minimise the translator’s
intervention, particularly what Theo Hermans has conceptualised as the transla-
tor’s voice, which inscribes any translated text with the translator’s discursive
presence (Hermans, 1996). Both also privilege the communicative aspects of
translation, in detriment of its expressive character. They are not only conducive
to an impoverished and reductive view of the transformations that are produced by
translation, but they also hinder interdisciplinary connections by reinforcing a
simplistic view of translation that still prevails in the social sciences.
In contrast to such views, productive approaches to translation as transformation
are currently being developed within translation studies through critical inter-
disciplinary engagements with other fields, such as journalism studies and film studies
(see, for instance, the chapters authored by Luc van Doorslaer and by Dionysios
Kapsaskis and Josh Branson in Bielsa (2022)). There is also very relevant new re-
search, both within and beyond translation studies, that theorises and empirically
describes how translation activism contributes to processes of social transformation
(Baker, 2013, 2016, 2020; Doerr, 2018; Fernández, 2021). These accounts of the
transformative role of translation question old disciplinary certainties like the con-
cept of ‘translation proper’, which has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years
(Dizdar, 2009; Zwischenberger, 2017, 2019), and push towards a broader under-
standing of translation that erodes established disciplinary boundaries. My purpose
here is not to review this important work. Instead, I will proceed by connecting the
main perspectives on metamorphosis I have already elaborated on to translation. My
central question is: how does a notion of metamorphosis change the way we un-
derstand the nature and the work of translation? I will attempt to respond to this
question through three subsequent moves. First, by referring to the material nature
of translation as a process of linguistic transformation. Second, by elaborating on the
relationship between unity and multiplicity in translation. Third, by considering
translation’s relation to the division of labour.
First, unlike metaphor, metamorphosis is not a process of mental association or
analogy but one of material transformation. Metamorphosis’ material character also
distinguishes it from more spiritually conceived processes of transformation such
as transubstantiation, related to the Christian ritual of the Eucharist and the notion
of Real Presence (Hermans, 2007). Moreover, metamorphosis is never just a
change of form as something external, but one that indicates a complete trans-
figuration. We get a sense of the type of change involved in Goethe’s description
of the metamorphosis of plants, where increasingly elaborate forms are matched
by the refinement of their substances or saps, or in Canetti’s accounts of trans-
formation among the Bushmen, where individuals can feel approaching game
through physical signs in their own bodies. Translation is also a concrete process of
material transformation: in it metamorphosis is accomplished word after word,
not abstractly posited.
This is not to point in the direction of a literalist translation practice, but rather
to focus on a fundamental aspect of language that is revealed through the practice
of translation: how social life is materially present in words. As George Herbert
Mead maintained, ‘You cannot convey a language as a pure abstraction; you in-
evitably in some degree convey also the life that lies behind it’ (1934, p. 283). This
is the source of the transformations that translation, a social relation across lin-
guistic difference, ordinarily accomplishes. A reflection on its material aspects, on
what is often conceived as ‘form’ or ‘the letter’, highlights precisely language’s
social contents. Materialist approaches to the transformation of words through
history within a single language, such as Raymond Williams’ pioneering account
in Keywords (1983), have also brought attention to this dimension. Williams in fact
refers to the concept of culture, which is at the start of his reconstructive attempt,
as ‘just a difficult word, a word I could think of as an example of the change which
we were trying, in various ways, to understand’ (2015, p. xxv). As a materialist
analysis reveals, no language exists without transformation; no language can exist
without translation.
Metamorphosis invokes a materialist notion of translation, calling attention
to the signifiers, in which social relations are sedimented. Translation is, above
all, transformative work with signifiers, a concrete engagement with language’s
material dimension. Conceiving translation as metamorphosis, again, contrasts
with the extended metaphor of translation as transportation, so close to the
instrumentalist notion of transfer, where all primacy is given to the meanings or
signifieds that are moved from one place to the other. The new materialism
which Latour and others pursue must also, by necessity, reflect on the linguistic
materials that mediate our relationship with the world and with others. The
concrete and material process of translation calls attention to this important
but easily overlooked dimension.
Second, the process of metamorphosis identifies a relationship between unity
and multiplicity that can help us approach translation beyond traditional di-
chotomies like source text and target text or, indeed, original and translation. This
is most clearly visible in Goethe’s account, which emphasises how ‘the various
plant parts developed in sequence are intrinsically identical despite their manifold
differences in outer form’ (2009, p. 56). Metamorphosis, a basic principle in
morphology as a science of organic forms and formative forces, allows us to dis-
cover an underlying unity beyond the vast multiplicity produced by the trans-
formative processes of nature. Again, Goethe’s approach to metamorphosis as
a material process of transformation is connected to a view of metamorphosis as a
universal process of spiritual ascent from crude matter to, I repeat Goethe’s
expression, ‘the point ordained by nature’.
Goethe, of course, practised and thought about literary translation itself a great
deal, and not in an essentially dissimilar manner. In fact, his approach to world
literature as signalling the intensification of interrelations and exchanges between
literatures is foremost revealed in a profusion of readings, appropriations and
transformations of foreign works:
Walter Scott used a scene from my ‘Egmont,’ and he had a right to do so;
and because he did it well, he deserves praise. He has also copied the
character of Mignon in one of his romances; but whether with equal
judgment, is another question. Lord Byron’s transformed Devil is a
continuation of Mephistophiles [sic], and quite right too. If, from the
whim of originality, he had departed from the model, he would certainly
have fared worse. Thus, my Mephistophiles [sic] sings a song from
Shakspeare [sic], and why should he not? Why should I give myself the
trouble of inventing one of my own, when this said just what was wanted.
If, too, the prologue to my ‘Faust’ is something like the beginning of Job,
that is again quite right, and I am rather to be praised than censured.
(Eckermann, 1850, pp. 198–199)
As Antoine Berman has noted, the coherence of Goethe’s thoughts on translation

is related to his interpretation of nature as a process of interaction, participation,
reflection, exchange and metamorphosis (1992, p. 54). Goethe’s observation that
his Hermann and Dorothea seems nobler in Latin translation, ‘as if it had returned to
its original form’ (Eckermann, 1850: 200), is oddly reminiscent of his description
of the metamorphosis of plants, written almost 40 years earlier, because both bear
on similar notions of regeneration and renewal that ensue from processes of
continuous transformation. Thus, Goethe’s views on metamorphosis and trans-
lation drive us in the direction of admiring the transformative processes that
produce natural and cultural multiplicity, over a sterile fixation on origins, which
dominant perspectives have repeatedly mystified. They find a more recent, widely
recognised expression in Benjamin’s notion of translation as the renewal of the
life of the originals, beyond the mere transmission of subject matter, marking
the work’s survival in the age of its fame, which is directly indebted to Goethe
(this connection is analysed in detail in chapter 7).
My third point concerns the relationship between metamorphosis, translation
and the intellectual and scientific division of labour. As I have already indicated,
one important dimension of Goethe and Canetti’s penetrating accounts of me-
tamorphosis is that they were not formulated within the established limits of
scientific specialisation. It could be argued that metamorphosis explicitly demands
such a perspective, and this important point would, I imagine, also be readily
acknowledged by both Beck and Latour, who have called attention to the need to
think beyond current disciplinary boundaries and modes of thought to respond to
the metamorphosis of the world. The non-specialisation of translation or – perhaps
I should rather say – the odd specialisation of translation, might provide a very
valuable alternative in this regard. From one point of view, translation appears as
the least specialised of endeavours, ready to transform anything, whether a com-
mercial ad or a film, a scientific treaty or a literary masterpiece. From another
point of view, it is the most specialised of activities, requiring not just an excellent
command of different languages, but also remarkable interpretation and writing
skills, as well as the expert background knowledge demanded by the particular task
at hand. Most translators have an ordinary experience of bypassing the division

of labour, just as they know how insufficient the mastery that ensues from dis-
ciplinary specialisation can be for translation. This is why Goethe’s approach to
cultivation is more appropriate for the task of the translator who, from this point
of view, could be conceived as a gardener of words. This is also why, following
Canetti, not only the poet but also the translator might be considered as an in-
dispensable keeper of metamorphosis. Even though often unacknowledged and
unseen, translation both exceeds the division of labour and intervenes in the
construction of every disciplinary knowledge and, simultaneously, in its meta-
morphosis across existing disciplines.
Translation is both agent and object of metamorphosis in a world at risk. It is
high time to substitute the popular anachronistic image of the treacherous trans-
lator by one that is more attuned to the challenges of the present, such as the
nocturnal butterfly, which evokes the invisibility of translation as well as its powers
of transformation. Translation is not a science, but a linguistic intervention
without which science cannot exist and that also contains an untried transfor-
mative potential for the sciences. The final paragraphs of this chapter are con-
cerned with how a view of translation as metamorphosis can help us to rethink our
relationship with the world in the context of metamorphosis.
For Beck, the metamorphosis of the world is a highly ambivalent and open-
ended process. His emancipatory catastrophism hints at the possibility that what
has hitherto been repressed as side-effects has not only radically transformed the
world, but might also lead us to change our modes of thinking, lifestyles and
habits, the law, the economy, science and politics. But only active cultural work
and cooperative politics of many actors can turn the climate emergency into an
emancipatory catastrophe, providing a compass for the 21st century with new
normative horizons (2016, p.117–18).
Translation, itself no less ambivalent and open-ended than metamorphosis, is
the name of this cultural work, and the age of metamorphosis is not just the age of
side effects, as Beck has noted, but also the age of translation (Berman, 2018). Beck
insists that metamorphosis renders the terms we use anachronistic because they
no longer describe our transformed realities (2016, p. 57). Translation can help us
populate a language which metamorphosis has emptied of meaning, relating it in
new ways to the world we live in. As Goethe knew very well, translation, as the
expression of an era of heightened cultural contact and exchange, regenerates and
rejuvenates traditions and works that without it would become obsolete.
But, in a context of metamorphosis in which the very distinction between
nature and society is problematised, the work of translation might become even
more relevant. Metamorphosis, as I have argued through Goethe and Canetti,
can orient our thinking beyond the Anthropos that is ever so prominent in the
Anthropocene. And in this necessary task, translation can offer an inestimable
assistance. What is demanded from it is not that animals, plants and even in-
organic objects and forces are made to speak human but that, in learning to
listen to what extractive capitalism has silenced, we gain a new perspective on
how their existence is inextricably related to our suffering and our needs. We
will not be able to converse with viruses, but perhaps in putting our human
ways into perspective by fearing and marvelling at their fast biological trans-
formations, which put our slow cultural transformations to shame, we might be
able to reorient our priorities and reconnect in a different way with a world at
risk. We can only do this through language, and that is why translation retains
an essential role in transforming our consciousness and our imagination in
the direction of what Latour has referred to as the Terrestrial (2018), or
what Chakrabarty has described as the planetary, as opposed to the global, a
perspective to which humans are incidental (2014, p. 23, 2021).
Notes
1 However, this irony is not lost on him when he states that ‘At the very moment when
we ought to be loosening the grip of the first Nature, the second Nature of Economics is
imposing its iron cage more strictly than ever’ and cites Fredric Jameson’s observation
that nowadays ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of
capitalism!’ (Latour, 2017, p.108).
2 Here Canetti is alluding to the disappearance of what Benjamin approaches as the mi-
metic faculty, which I discuss in chapter 7.
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3
FOR A TRANSLATIONAL SOCIOLOGY
Introduction
Translation has become a key social relation in a deeply interconnected world,
whether in the widespread plurilingual practices in which the majority of the world’s
population is ordinarily involved, in the processes of political translation that take
place among both civil society and governmental organisations and agents within
and beyond the nation, or in the circulation and diffusion of all kinds of cultural texts
and informational goods. Translation mobilises our relationship to the other as well
as to ourselves, destabilising culture internalised as second nature and contributing
to learning through the experience of alterity. Sociology can no longer afford to
ignore its myriad forms and manifestations in all aspects of social life or to reduce
translation (approached as ‘simple’ translation) to a purely linguistic means.
Revealing the central significance of translation not only serves to focus our
attention on widespread social exchanges taking place across a vast number of
domains but offers a new perspective on global connectivity itself. It is no coin-
cidence that translation has been foregrounded in postcolonial re-examinations
of the structural inequalities that are constitutive of modernity and globality,
from history to literature (Bassnett and Trivedi, 1999; Bhabha, 1994; Chakrabarty,
2008; Mignolo, 2000; Niranjana, 1992; Rafael, 1993, 2005; Spivak, 1993, 2012).
Thus, at a time in which the universalistic pretensions of Western sociology have
been deeply questioned and alternative orientations are being sought, translation
also provides the means for a productive confrontation with Eurocentrism. Rather
than the overcoming or dissolution of Eurocentrism, the object is here conceived
in terms of the radical engagement with different traditions through transcul-
turation as double translation (Mignolo and Schiwy, 2003), interpreting otherness
(Godrej, 2009, 2011) or cultural translation (Delanty, 2014), as social processes
which leave neither the interpreter/translator nor its object unchanged.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003218890-5
In spite of the significance of these contributions, which engage with

translation from the perspective of postcolonial studies or a critical cosmopoli-
tanism in order to problematise and reexamine the cultural entanglements that
are constitutive of modernity, the extent to which translation shapes basic social
processes as well as fundamental sociological understandings and procedures
remains widely unacknowledged and overlooked within sociology.1 One im-
portant reason for this is the reduction of translation to a mere process of word
substitution, which not only denies the very nature of translation as a social
relation across linguistic difference but also serves to disallow its constitutive
presence in any cultural formation. In this respect, sociological common sense
resembles the magical belief in automatic translation that is constantly produced
and enacted by common translating apps.2 The purpose of this chapter is
to challenge such belief so as to reveal why sociology needs translation and
cannot avoid to critically investigate its manifold presence and role in society.
To this end, contemporary approaches in the sociology of translation and in-
terdisciplinary translation studies will be brought into conversation with older,
fundamental sociological insights. While new sensitivities towards translation are
being developed primarily within the field of cultural sociology, it will be
shown that the implications of this research profoundly concern the discipline of
sociology as a whole.
The sociological tradition has provided indispensable perspectives on the
significance of language in socialisation processes, on the meaningful character
of social life, and on the nature of communicative action. A consideration of
translation deepens and widens such perspectives. In the following sections a
reasoned account is offered of some prominent ways in which attending to the
significance of translation can contribute to key sociological insights, while also
helping towards a reconceptualisation of the sociological endeavour in a new
light. The first section starts by situating translation in the context of con-
temporary globalisation. After elaborating on how the direction of global
translation flows expresses fundamental inequalities and asymmetries, it main-
tains that it is necessary to examine actual translations in their new cultural
settings in order to understand what happens when texts, forms and traditions
are brought to different locations. The second section examines translation as a
process of linguistic transformation, identifying how a tendency to focus on
meaning but not on the signifiers or words in which it is by necessity embodied ？
can inadvertently permeate even the most perceptive sociological accounts. A
materialist approach to translation offers a means to escape from this problem.
A third section extends Raymond Williams’ reflection on the ordinariness of
culture to translation while addressing and updating other classical sociological
views on the role of language and translation in ordinary social experience. A
fourth section discusses how translation is part of the ordinary work of many
sociologists and calls for a self-reflexive approach towards the implications
thereof.
For a translational sociology 47
Translation questions simplistic views of cultural

homogenisation
Accounts of globalisation of the 1990s characteristically emphasised the hy-
permobility of people, objects, information, and ideas across cultural and territorial
divides. New technological means changed the character of worldwide con-
nectivity, as the cost and time needed to move commodities and people were
dramatically reduced and information technologies made it possible to overcome
space as a crucial factor. In what Manuel Castells approached as the space of flows,
the overcoming of linguistic boundaries seems unproblematic, whether it takes
place through real-time translation of news (Castells mentions the coming down
of the Berlin wall as an example) or through the language of technology, as new
workers and managers are ‘able to speak the same language, the digital language’
(2000, p. 212). In a similar manner, Lash and Urry observed how hypermobility
and speed could enable ordinary subjects to ‘view and evaluate cultures at the flick
of a switch’, through ‘the rapid and extensive juxtaposition of, and comparison
between, different cultures and places’ (1994, p. 243).
If we examine the linguistic means that enable such speedy transmission of ideas
and information, translation appears as a key infrastructure of global commu-
nication (Held et al., 1999, p. 345). Moreover, translation is pivotal in what has
come to be seen as the key form of contemporary globalisation: abstracted or
disembodied globalisation, characterised by the movement of immaterial things
and processes, including words, images and electronic texts (Steger and James,
2019, p. 122). Contemporary globalisation has for the first time witnessed the
appearance of English as a lingua franca of truly global reach, whereas lingua
francas of the past, such as Latin or French, had only achieved a regional character.
According to Abram de Swaan (2001), the global language system is a constellation
of mutually unintelligible languages connected through multilingual speakers, who
ensure communication between different groups. These connections follow a
strongly hierarchical pattern: peripheral languages are connected by multilingual
speakers to a central language, but rarely between themselves; central languages are
in turn connected to supercentral languages for long-distance and international
communication. English has become the hypercentral language that holds the
entire constellation together (2001, p. 6), not merely because of the number of
its native speakers, but especially because of the many people who learn it and
use it as an additional (second, third, fourth … ) language, thus connecting it with
other languages. It is necessary to insist on connectivity in order to perceive the
central relevance of translation because, as Theo Hermans appropriately reminds
us, ‘Every language in the world is a minority language because no single language
is spoken by the majority of the world’s population’ (1999, p. 1).
Thus, the unprecedented dominance of English does not mean that translation
ceases to be essential to the global circulation of information and ideas, as in neo-
Babelian dreams; rather, products are translated to facilitate consumption in dif-
ferent linguistic regions and people translate themselves to the dominant languages
to access cultural and informational goods or to participate in international ex-

changes (Cronin, 2003). Global asymmetries are directly mirrored in international
translation flows. According to Johan Heilbron, in the world system of translation
English becomes the most translated language worldwide, while Britain and the
United States have a very low proportion of translated works in their own book
production (1999, 2010). But translation is not only significant in terms of the
sheer volume of dominant translation flows. It is for writers from the periphery of
the literary space a means of acquiring international visibility and recognition, a
key step towards the universal consecration of peripheral texts which, although
smaller in quantitative terms, can help transform the whole of the global literary
space (Casanova, 2004). This is as much true of sociological translations, which are
discussed in the last section of this chapter, as it is of literary translations.
Globalisation increases the volume of translation, although this may actually
be detrimental to cultural diversity due to the hierarchy of languages to which
attention is paid (Brisset, 2010, p. 74, 2017). Further, cultural diversity appears
to be primarily confined to the pole of small-scale production or upmarket
literary publishing, as opposed to large-scale production or commercial publishing,
where English prevails, also in non-English-speaking contexts such as France
(Sapiro, 2010). However, the view that global translation flows unavoidably lead
to homogenisation is belied if one closely examines the nature of actual translation
processes. Precisely because of this, it can be argued that in face of the homo-
genising ambition of English and of the idiom of neoliberalism, the question of
translation acquires a new urgency (Venn, 2006, p. 82).
Translation can be explicitly enlisted to combat what could be viewed as a
‘methodological globalism’ that imagines the world as a uniform and borderless
space (Clarke et al., 2015, p. 23). Beyond the evident asymmetries in the di-
rectionality of translation flows, it is necessary to closely examine what trans-
lation actually involves. Far from transparent and automatic, as if it was a mere Prof. Wu
transcription, translation necessarily refers to two different aspects or sets of

complex processes: on the one hand, the creation of a new text in a different
language and, on the other, the need for this new text to function in a new
cultural context. Cultural sociologists (and translation scholars since the so-called
cultural turn in translation studies (Bassnett and Lefevere, 1990)) have typically
focused on the second of these aspects: on how, as Pierre Bourdieu pointed out,
texts travel without their contexts (2002) so that their production and reception
is determined by the translating culture. This defines what Lawrence Venuti
calls the relative autonomy of translation with reference to both the foreign-
language texts that are translated and texts that are originally written in the
translating language (2005, pp. 800–801). What gets translated and how is ty-
pically influenced by the translating culture and how foreign literatures and
translating strategies are approached within it. Translations not only reach many
more readers than the originals ever will, creating images of a writer, a work, a
period or even a whole literature (Lefevere, 1992, p. 5); translated works lead, as
it were, separate lives and have their own paths of reception, from which very
different or even contradictory images of authors and works in different lin-

guistic regions can originate (see Bielsa (2013) for an example).
Translation is thus similar to (and can contribute to specify) processes of in-
tercultural communication that have been approached in terms of hybridisation
(Nederveen Pieterse, 2004), creolisation (Cohen, 2007; Cohen and Sheringham,
2016), transculturation (Clifford, 1997; Pratt, 2008; Rama, 2012) or glocalisation
(Robertson, 1992; Roudometof, 2016; Roudometof and Dessì, 2022). What
distinguishes all of these concepts and understandings is that they signal the power
of local agents, traditions and institutions to modify imported forms and contents,
to produce domestic versions which are visibly different and/or have a different
meaning and effect from the original formulations they replace, rather than the
one-way transmission process that is presupposed by theories of globalisation as
homogenisation.
Translation avoids idealism by focusing on the materiality

of language
Translation involves the creation of a new text in a different language, what has
traditionally been approached in terms of the transfer of meaning from one lan-
guage into another. However, this first aspect of translation underlined above,
which is a precondition for the possibility of a text to function in a new cultural
context, has been more elusive to sociological investigation. This might be
because of a persisting gulf between sociology and linguistics (Labov, 1978), in
spite of the growing recognition of the significance of the linguistic turn within
sociology and the social and human sciences more widely (Wagner, 2003).
There have been calls for a specifically cultural approach to sociology whose
objective is to unearth and make visible the hidden meanings of social structures
that are internalised by social actors (Alexander, 2003). The difference between
a sociology of culture and the cultural sociology approach that Jeffrey Alexander
advocates is readily discernible with reference to translation. The sociology of
translation has since the 1990s provided accounts of the structures and agents that
determine the production and circulation of translations in the international
literary field, as well as of the significance of translation in processes of capital
accumulation or the consecration of literary works. However, this has gone hand
in hand with a tendency to ignore actual texts and their linguistic means. As Annie
Brisset, writing from a translation studies approach, has remarked:
The sociology of translation that dominates today focuses largely on a

sociography of the agents of translation and their fields of operation. It
proclaims loud and clear that we must turn away from the text, which was
formerly the object of all attention. (2010, pp. 76–77)
According to Brisset, such a perspective is slightly out of phase with the enlarged
scope of translation studies, which includes not only new media and technological
formats but also considerations of translation spaces and many other issues.
Moreover, the predominant focus on literary translation fails to acknowledge the
widespread significance of translation in a variety of other contexts, from foreign
news to common translating apps. Such an approach can only serve to reinforce
narrowly conceived divides between the humanities and the social sciences, the
former felt to provide aesthetic and formal accounts while the latter is credited
with causal and institutional perspectives.
A different sociology of translation has been proposed in Actor-Network
Theory to account for the ways in which relations are established between dif-
ferent entities, human and non-human. Translation is, from this perspective, a
process ‘during which the identity of actors, the possibility of interaction and the
margins of manoeuvre are negotiated and delimited’ (Callon, 1984, p. 203), often
by acts or persuasion or violence, and thanks to which ‘an actor or force takes, or
causes to be conferred on itself, authority to speak or act on behalf of another actor
or force’ (Callon and Latour, 1981, p. 279). For proponents of ANT, translation
both displaces and transforms the agents and objects it brings into contact, giving
origin to the macro entities that tend to be posited as pre-existing facts by so-
ciologists. This focus on translation as transformation is a very welcome alternative
to the narrow views that have tended to prevail in mainstream sociology, which
consider translation as a mere substitution at the level of words and insist on se-
mantic invariance. In ANT theory, a view of translation as a social relation is
foregrounded and the significance of the connections it brings into existence
is acknowledged. A focus on the process of translation also allows for a dis-
tinctively materialist approach that brings into view how different species, objects
and forms of knowledge are interrelated, thus attesting to the vitality of matter
(Bennett, 2010). However, in view of ANT’s criticism of some basic categories
and dichotomies (micro/macro, nature/society, social/technical, human/animal)
that sociology takes for granted, it is striking that the linguistic nature of the
materials that make possible the establishment of actor-networks receives no
significant attention. It could be claimed, using their own way of putting it, that
ANT leaves language in the black box. This results in a paradoxical conception of
translation without language.
What is at stake is not just the need to consider the meanings of social life, to
which cultural sociologists have brought attention, or to throw new light on the
type of connections that are enabled by translation. Translation calls for a dis-
tinctively material approach that is centred not principally on objects or matter,
but rather on the linguistic materials that mediate our relationship with the world
and with others, foregrounding not just meaning but words and the paradoxes that
occur when the transfer of meaning between different tongues is attempted.
Interpretative sociology and the hermeneutical tradition have drawn attention to
understanding, but have tended to remain oblivious to the dual aspect of language
as signifier and signified. Translation by necessity must also confront the materi-
ality of words as signifiers, which do not just transmit a pre-existing message or
signified. Meaning does not precede writing or, as Jacques Derrida pointed out,
‘To write is to know that what has not yet been produced within literality has no
other dwelling place’ (2001, p. 11). The limits of understanding are readily re-
vealed if we attend to translation not just as a form of communication, but pri-
marily as a social relation at the site of incommensurability (Sakai, 1997, p. 13).
This is why Walter Benjamin warned that ‘any translation that intends to perform
any transmitting function cannot transmit anything but communication – hence,
something inessential’ (1996, p. 253). Transmitting information is in this view a
deformation of what a good translation requires, a translation that, in recreating
a text, does not merely inform but also gives form.
Chapter 5 explores how this understanding of translation can contribute to a
conception of democratic politics beyond the state that challenges what I approach
in terms of a pervasive monolingual vision. More generally, translation makes
visible the idealism of those who assume the global transmissibility of pre-
established meanings (information). Texts travel without their contexts, but
meanings cannot travel without words. It is precisely from the need of inter-
pretation and from the resistance that occurs when new words have to be found to
express something that was uttered in a different tongue, that the work of
translation can be conceptualised, and its social, cultural and political consequences
explored. This also challenges common taken-for-granted beliefs that would ap-
proach meaning as an invariant essence that simply needs to be dressed in new
words in different linguistic contexts (for a recent critique from a translation
studies perspective see Venuti, 2019). A materialist approach to translation avoids
an essentialist notion of meaning by foregrounding the meaning contained in
signifiers that exist in different languages, and how they relate to one another and
to the social and cultural contexts in which they have emerged.
Attending to what is involved in translation as a key process of transfor-
mation should be part of a sociological undertaking that seeks to uncover the
historical and social core that has been deposited in words through linguistic
means. It can also foster a self-reflexivity that releases the sociological imagi-
nation in unexpected directions, once the apparent naturalness of the mono-
lingual vision is questioned. Thus, a sophisticated understanding of translation
can shed new light on the sociological endeavour itself, promoting reflexivity
on its own linguistic materials and conditions, as well as on the relationship
with those of its research subjects. A striking example of this is found in
Abdelmalek Sayad’s approach to the sociology of migration. Sayad challenges
prevailing sociological discourses on immigration with the need to examine
both immigration and emigration as the two indissociable aspects of a single
reality in what becomes, at the same time and by necessity, a self-reflexion on
sociological thinking on emigration and immigration. A pillar of this self-
reflexive approach is attending to the experience of migration as expressed by
the emigrants themselves, and especially to what in their discourse resists un-
derstanding. Thus, Sayad presents us with a translation (‘which is as literal as
possible’) of the discourse of a Kabyle emigrant while offering the following
reflection on the significance of its obscurity:
The opacity of a language that is not immediately comprehensible is perhaps

the most important piece of information – or at least the rarest kind of
information – we could hope for at a time when so many well-intentioned
spokesmen are speaking on behalf of emigrants. (2004, p. 7)
The opacity to which Sayad refers is related not just to the violence that is exerted
in making a discourse uttered in a different language intelligible to Sayad’s readers,
but also to the fact that the emigrant’s language is used to express something that
is radically foreign to it. Sayad’s awareness of the significance of this opacity leads
him to attempt to minimise the first (for instance by preserving terms from the
original language such as fellah, cheikh, kanoun) while foregrounding through the
second the inscription in language of the highly contradictory social experiences
that derive from moving across different worlds.
Translation is ordinary
ordinary是何意？稀松平常？ubiquitous？
A key realisation for the cultural sociologist is that culture is ordinary. Not just a
set of institutions, or a tradition of artistic refinement and learning, but rather the
meanings and lived experiences of human societies and human minds (Williams,
1989, p. 4). Translation is ordinary in much the same way, although in this case
our project is not to rescue it from a cultivated window display but to recover it
不经意地
from the mechanic toolkit box where it has inadvertently been relegated.
Traditional definitions of translation as the transfer of meaning from one language
into another have greatly aided such a reduction by leading to the view that
translation is essentially a search for linguistic equivalence.
When Raymond Williams reflected on the ordinariness of culture, he was not
only aiming at democratising a notion of culture that had remained narrowly
associated with the productions of the dominants, but also pointing at its con-
stitutive nature of the social itself. Culture, as a whole way of life, is present in all
forms of social activity and can be conceived as ‘the signifying system through
which necessarily (…) a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced
and explored.’ (1981, p. 13). According to Williams, our social experience is
characterised by its meaningful nature, so that a culture can be adequately de-
scribed as the common meanings through which we make sense of society and we
communicate our experiences.
But if an approach to culture as ordinary meaning-making activity has found a
fertile ground in contemporary sociology, translation as an ordinary process of
linguistic transformation has yet to be given significant consideration. As Paul
Ricoeur has argued, the universality of language (the fact that all human beings
speak) is contradicted by its fragmented, scattered and disorganised execution (the
plurality and diversity of languages) (2006, pp. 11–12). The myth of Babel, ‘lets us
imagine, in a regressive movement, a supposed lost paradisiacal language; it does
not include a guide to behaving in this labyrinth’ (2006, p. 12). We will only find
this guide if, instead of searching in vain for a pre-Babelian language (or devising
monolingual neo-Babelian designs), we acknowledge the positive role that

translation has always had in mediating between the diversity of languages.
Approaching translation as the transfer of meaning between different languages
is insufficient because it does not guard us off from the possibility that translation is
simply conceived as the technical means through which linguistic equivalences
may be arrived at. ‘Simple’ translation or ‘just’ translation are common designa-
tions of a process that is essentially conceived as a mechanical operation of word
substitution in order to arrive at a pre-established meaning. Yet, no such equiv-
alences exist, because there is never just one single unequivocally accessible
meaning but a plurality of meanings which are text and context-dependent, and
because the lexical and syntactic structures of languages are not directly compar-
able so that we cannot really say the same thing in a different language. The labour
of translation alludes precisely to this uncertain endeavour of interpretation and
transformation that cannot be adequately captured by a notion of translation as the
transfer of meaning from one language into another. A wider view of translation as
a social relation that mobilises and questions the linguistic materials that shape our
conception of others and of ourselves is needed. Translation is by necessity lin-
guistic and cultural at the same time, which makes designations of ‘cultural
translation’, which seek to foreground the more contextual aspects of translation,
unnecessary at best or dangerous at worst because they might rest upon a reductive
view of ‘just’ translation as a simple, strictly linguistic operation essentially con-
ceived as a search for equivalence.
There is something missing in William’s conception of culture as both the most
ordinary common meanings and the finest individual meanings because linguistic
difference and translation are internal to cultures and to human minds. We cannot
remain oblivious to the fact that ‘our’ language is merely one language among
others. Williams himself points out that he speaks ‘a different idiom’ from his
father and grandfather (1989, p. 4), without giving this fact any further reflection.
Had he followed Bakhtin’s clue, he could have conceptualised this difference in
terms of heteroglossia, which is still prominent in apparently homogeneous lin-
guistic communities (Bakhtin, 1981; Busch, 2017, p. 342). Culture is ordinary
because translation is ordinary, to such an extent that it remains invisible.
Others in the sociological tradition have more explicitly gazed at the abyss that
exists for individual and collective experience across languages. George Herbert
Mead remarked that,
A person learns a new language and, as we say, gets a new soul. He puts
himself into the attitude of those that make use of that language. He cannot
read its literature, cannot converse with those that belong to that
community, without taking on its peculiar attitudes. He becomes in that
sense a different individual. (1934, p. 283)
Mead’s awareness of the relation of language to the world of lived experience is

precisely related to his approach to the former ‘not from the standpoint of inner
meanings to be expressed, but in its larger context of co-operation in the group

taking place by means of signals and gestures. Meaning appears within that pro-
cess.’ (1934, p. 6). Just as meaning does not precede writing, or words, it does not
precede social interaction. Mead offers, in fact, a critique and a reversal of what he
considered as the traditional philological perspective, which tended to see language
from the point of view of a prisoner, shut up in his own cell of consciousness, who
was then moved to establish communication with others, similarly conceived as
closed monads. Such a view not only fundamentally ignores the character of
单孢体
human socialisation, but also reduces language to an instrument of communication
without realising language’s non-instrumental role as a basic means of social in-
teraction. Mead’s remarks on the consequences of adopting a new language find a
contemporary correlate in Salman Rushdie’s often cited notion that he exists as
a translated man (1991, p. 17). In both cases, the inadequacy of the perception of
the native speaker as the true and natural owner of a language that is associated
with methodological nationalism and the monolingual vision is also exposed.
Perhaps one of the most poignant reflections on the role of language and
translation in ordinary social experience can be found in Alfred Schutz’s renowned
essay on the stranger. In a passage which could have been a source of inspiration
for Williams, Schutz explains:
Only the ways in which his fathers and grandfathers lived become for
everyone elements of his own way of life. Graves and reminiscences can
neither be transferred nor conquered. The stranger, therefore, approaches
the other group as a newcomer in the true meaning of the term.
(1976, p. 97)
For Schutz, the fact that her experience cannot be ‘transferred nor conquered’
determines the stranger’s characteristic uncertainty and insecurity in a cultural
pattern that no longer possesses ‘the authority of a tested system of recipes’ but
rather becomes ‘a field of adventure’. In this context, the arduous attempt of
mastering a new culture is explicitly examined in terms of translation. Strangers are
obliged to translate to the cultural coordinates they already know in order to orient
themselves within a new cultural system. However, these translated terms are ‘at
hand but not in hand’ and ‘fundamental discrepancies’ remain between the cultural
pattern of group members and that of the translating stranger (1976, pp. 99–100).
Only the progressive mastering of the new culture as a scheme of expression marks
the successful integration of the stranger, which for Schutz inevitably implies a
renunciation of both ‘the magic fruit of strangeness’ and the ambiguity of
translation.
But in a world where we increasingly need to relate to others whom we do not
understand, the closure and security that Schutz sought – precisely because of his
intimate and acute awareness of the instability of strangeness and translation – in
the automatisms of an unquestioned cultural pattern can no longer provide
an adequate solution, but unavoidably leads to division and confrontation.
The ambiguity of translation may on the contrary point to a valuable alternative

in calling attention to the slippery and enigmatic character of the languages we
speak and to our inescapable tendency of taking culture for granted, of turning
culture into second nature. Schutz’s phenomenological approach can be taken in
new directions that do not presuppose stable speech communities as a point of
departure, but precisely centre on how individuals experience their multi-layered
linguistic repertoires in the context of increased mobility and participation in
transnational networks of communication, such as Brigitta Busch’s work on the
lived experience of language (Busch, 2017).
Contexts of superdiversity call attention not just to the social relevance of
linguistic diversity, which multiculturalists already highlighted, but to forms of
linguistic interconnections that challenge our received ideas about the existence
of separate languages and how they relate to one another. Current approaches
to translanguaging and translation challenge a still widely prevalent and taken for
granted monolingual vision, on which the dominant conception of languages as
separate, bounded wholes rests. The first moves beyond traditional understandings
of bilingualism and multilingualism to insist on hybrid language practices and their
transformative nature (Canagarajah, 2013; García and Wei, 2014). The second,
conceived as an activity that leaves neither what is translated nor the translator
unchanged, offers a glimpse as to how culture’s ordinary and common meanings
are always already marked by complex processes of interpretation and negotiation
of difference.
Translation underpins the production and circulation

of sociological knowledge
Without translation the collection of texts that make up the sociological tradition
could not exist. We are so much accustomed to the transnational character of
sociological production and exchange that it is difficult to imagine an alternative
world in which sociologists would be limited to receiving and engaging with only
the works that are written in the languages they speak. Since its inception, the
international circulation of sociological ideas and works has shaped a sociological
tradition based on the interpretation, adaptation and indigenisation of topics,
methodologies and authors from different linguistic regions. The international
reception of sociological theories and authors and the circulation of sociological
concepts and texts is part of the intellectual history of the discipline and has been
the object of some critical attention (see, for instance, Sapiro et al., 2020 for a
recent contribution). Less contemplated, however, are the ways in which trans-
lation becomes part of the ordinary work of many sociologists, contributing in
productive ways to their own sociological outlook. Translating sociology is still
primarily viewed as second-order, derivative work not worthy of attracting critical
attention or of being considered as sociological work in its own right.3
Many sociologists have followed the desire to translate, motivated not solely
by the wish to make valuable works available to new readers, or to introduce
them into a different sociological tradition, but also because they sought a
profound engagement with these works, an engagement which only the in-
timacy found in the labour of translation makes possible. This translating activity
cannot really be separated from other forms of their sociological production.
David Frisby’s work on Simmel can offer here an appropriate illustration.
Frisby’s role in helping to consolidate Simmel as a key sociological thinker
and the first sociologist of modernity is widely recognised. This intervention is
precisely founded upon the essential continuity of the tasks of editing, inter-
preting and translating the German author, on the one hand, while also being
fundamentally connected with Frisby’s own sociological investigations of the
cityscapes of modernity, on the other. As Thomas Kemple aptly put it, ‘Frisby
made Simmel speak English to a new generation of social and cultural theorists,
but never lost his own voice in the process’ (2010).
Just as sociologists have often engaged in translation in order to interpret
and closely relate to the theories and concepts of others, many sociologists have
willingly embraced self-translation, a phenomenon which is becoming increasingly
widespread in the context of the adoption of English as the global academic lingua
franca. If Adorno or Elias could still pursue a substantive amount of their writing in
German, even when they were living in English-speaking countries, today many
sociologists increasingly switch to English, even if they remain located in their
native countries, in order to participate in international sociological exchanges.
The nature of these self-translations has not been given much consideration,
maybe because of the naïve assumption that they bring about the disappearance of
translation. Yet, multilingual authors’ scientific interventions are inescapably
shaped by their self-translations, their contexts of production and the way they are
designed for and targeted to specific academic circles. Just as global sociology seeks
to direct attention to the particularity of many sociological claims to universality,
a consideration of multilingualism and translation alerts us to the particularities
related to the specific places of enunciation of sociological articulations, which
are not erased by self-translation into English. This is why the (unequal nature of)
self-translation practices of sociologists and their contribution to global sociological
debates should become the object of sociological exploration.
A fascinating line of sociological inquiry is opened when the nature of such self-
translations is explored without renouncing to account for their material linguistic
dimension, such as in the monographic issue of The Sociological Review ‘On Other
Terms’ (2020). As its editors argue, today the homogenisation fostered by the
predominance of English-language publication outlets, to which multilingual
authors necessarily submit, echoes the monolingualisation imposed by nation-state
formation (Law and Mol, 2020). In this context, the aim of foregrounding ‘the
possible value for English of importing some of the intellectual resources embedded
in other tongues’ (2020: 265), adopts the form of making visible the distinct nature
of some key foreign words, the cultural, material, semantic and multilingual re-
sonances with which they are associated (Mol, 2020), and the thinking that they
allow. The basic need remains, in these approaches, to recognise such endeavours
as translation, and particularly as a form of reflexive translation that does not erase
the traces of otherness or the fact that it has taken place. A specification of such
a politics of translation is the main aim of Part II of this book.
Translation plays a pivotal role in the production of sociological knowledge not
only through the textual outputs of many sociologists, whether they translate
others or themselves, but also by mediating the process of data gathering in
multinational research contexts or in interlingual exchanges between researchers
and their subjects. Ignoring the fundamental role of translation in this respect, or
reducing it to a mechanical and transparent process of word substitution from one
language into another, becomes here even more problematic because the opacities
of translation condition the outcomes of research exchanges and data gathering in
important ways. Yet the presence and influence of these opacities tend to be
minimised or simply forgotten. The earliest conceptualisation of the significance of
translation in social science research comes from anthropology, whose distinctive
task became increasingly described since the 1950s in terms of ‘the translation of
cultures’ (Asad, 1986: 141–3). However, what this conceptualisation obscured was
precisely the politics of translation between highly unequal languages, and the
power positions that authorised western scientists to read cultures as texts and to
reveal their implicit meanings. Following Asad, more conscious modes of eth-
nographic representation must face up to the disciplinary, institutional and social
limits imposed by dominant languages, reveal the power involved in processes of
translation, and adopt a more reflexive and critical position towards it.
However, this growing critical awareness of the significance of the politics of
translation in ethnographic research has not been accompanied by a sustained re-
flection on the linguistic conditions that make this research possible. As Axel
Borchgrevink maintains, language has been effectively silenced by not examining
fundamental issues related to language competence or the frequent use of inter-
preters in fieldwork, so that ‘paradoxically, ‘the linguistic turn in anthropology’ has
largely missed one of the important linguistic aspects of interpreting cultures’ (2003,
p. 102). Glossing over the linguistic conditions of fieldwork thus directly contributes
to a ‘fieldwork mystique’ that helps to place fieldwork outside the scope of serious
critique (2003, pp. 114–115). If, by contrast, the active negotiation of meaning that
takes place between researchers, informants and interpreters is made visible, it be-
comes a source of productive reflexivity on the politics of translation and the
partiality and contested nature of the meanings that shape and are in turn produced
in social research (Palmary, 2011).
Within sociology, a few voices have raised similar issues referring to the sur-
prising lack of self-reflection on the impact of language-related issues in cross-
cultural research. Bogusia Temple called attention to the constructedness of our
research concepts, as well as to the inevitable variation that is involved when those
concepts relate to different cultural contexts, not forgetting that ‘we are all creative
in our translations’ (1997, p. 614). She also maintained that, because of its epis-
temological consequences, researchers, interpreters and translators should be in-
volved in discussing their particular perspectives and position in conceptual
construction. Robert Gibb and Julien Danero Iglesias argue for a heightened
awareness of researching multilingually by documenting and analysing the process
of language learning and the ways in which levels of fluency affect the research
process (2017). Promising new research is appearing in this direction (Gibb,
Tremlett and Danero Iglesias, 2019). Yet, interventions of this type are few and
have emerged far between, thus revealing that the discipline is still dominated by
the usual response that these authors describe concerning ordinary multilingual
operations: silence.
The epistemological and methodological significance of translation in socio-
logical research goes beyond matters that are directly associated with language. It
also concerns the articulation of more general issues relating to how comparative
research is approached and cultures, societies or traditions conceptualised. Just
as predominant views of ‘the great divide’ have tended to obscure existing bor-
rowings and the intricacy of relations between high and low culture (Bielsa, 2006),
methodological nationalism and the monolingual vision have shaped the per-
ception of the very entities that are then posited as basic units for the construction
of sociological knowledge. In drawing attention to widespread cultural borrowings
and interconnections, translation complicates the perception of societies as clearly
bounded wholes that is often presupposed in comparative research. In particular,
translation calls attention to the processes of transnationalisation that are a key
feature of contemporary globalisation. Very much in the original sense that
Goethe gave it in 1827, when he invented the notion of world literature to
identify a new historical epoch in which a market for international literary ex-
changes became generalised, translation both makes possible and embodies a
cosmopolitanised transnational field defined by heightened contact and interaction
across borders. Today, this cultural contact zone (Pratt, 2008), this translation zone
(Apter, 2006), can no longer be taken as marginal but rather extends over the
whole social space.
Conclusion
This chapter has posited the central significance of translation for sociology,
identifying four important ways in which translation shapes not only social reality
but the very nature of the sociological endeavour itself. First, an examination of
translation challenges views of cultural homogenisation by showing often ignored
practices of transformation and diversification, thus helping to specify hugely
significant processes that have been variously conceptualised and approached as
hybridisation, creolisation, transculturation, and glocalisation. Second, a materialist
approach to translation alerts us to the fact that meanings can only live in words,
thus combatting idealism, and calls attention to the significance of interpretation
and the limits of understanding. It interrupts a connection to the world and to
others that we easily take for granted, thus contributing to sociology’s aim of
making society strange. Third, recognising the undeniable ubiquity and ordi-
nariness of translation and its social significance enables us to better respond to the
multifaceted cultural and political realities that we currently face and to question
methodological nationalism and the monolingual vision. Fourth, we all rely on
translated sociology to make sense of the sociological tradition. Many sociologists
also productively engage in translation in projects that, although often margin-
alised, are inseparable from their other sociological writings, or habitually translate
themselves in order to participate in international sociological debates. Translation
also has important methodological implications for the conduct of sociological
research in multilingual settings and for the very basic concepts that underpin
sociological methodologies and conceptualisations. Developing alertness to and
sensibility towards the complex processes of translation that shape both social
reality and the sociological knowledge we produce about it contributes to dee-
pening sociological insights on the meaningful nature of social life and to a self-
reflexive engagement with the sociological tradition. This requires nothing less
than an alternative approach to language and translation that does not silence
but productively engages with the abyss that emerges between different ways of
existing, a translational sociology.
Notes
1 In the discipline of translation studies, by contrast, the social aspects of translation have
been attracting increasing attention since its so-called ‘sociological turn’ at the beginning
of this century, which has generated productive theoretical reflections on key socio-
logical concepts like habitus or system (Simeoni, 1998; Hermans, 1999; Inghilleri (ed)
special issue on Bourdieu in The Translator, 2005; Tyulenev, 2012), an interest in eth-
nographic research methods (Koskinen, 2014; Tesseur, 2017), and extensive research on
topics like migration (Inghilleri, 2017), social movements (Baker, 2013, 2016;
Fernández, 2021) or the Anthropocene (Cronin, 2017). For perspectives on the nature
and significance of the sociological turn within translation studies see (Angelelli, 2014;
Bielsa, 2010; Wolf and Fukari, 2007).
2 Automatic translation reaches the ideals of instantaneity and transparency that have
always been a mark of the invisibility of translation, hiding not only the very nature of
translation as a social process but the human source of the translations that are auto-
matically processed by machines. For a classic account of translation’s invisibility and its
history see Venuti (2008); on translation’s transparent instantaneity in relation to global
information flows see Cronin (2003: 49).
3 Talcott Parsons’ translation of Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
would appear as an exception, but on closer examination, it becomes apparent that it is
the canonical status of the translation that has been the source of consideration (Baehr,
2001; Ghosh, 1994; Scaff, 2005), which has seldom been extended to an interest in
dilucidating the relationships between Parson’s sociological work as a translator and as a
writer (but see Gerhardt, 2007 for an interesting account).
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PART II
Translation and politics
4
POLITICS OF TRANSLATION 1
1. Translation is currently seen as a central process of intercultural communication

in a cosmopolitan context. However, until recently, its significance has remained
largely unnoticed in the social sciences. The clearest illustration of this can be
found in most approaches to globalisation, which have typically devoted more
attention to the circulation of information, ideas, people and goods than to
the productive conditions that make it possible. This has led to assuming that
global texts can automatically be received by different audiences and to obscuring
the crucial intervention of translation in the production of a multiplicity of local
versions (Bielsa, 2005; Bielsa and Bassnett, 2009). Whereas globalisation theory
emphasises the singularity of the world, social theories of cosmopolitanism ques-
tion this pretended ‘unicity’ (Roland Robertson’s term (1992)), underlying the
multiplicity of perspectives and the interaction between different traditions
(Rumford, 2008, p. 1). Paralleling this development, attention to the homo-
genising spread of a simplified form of global English – a lingua franca perceived as
the ‘McLanguage’ of a globalised ‘McWorld’ or as the ‘Eurospeak’ of our mul-
tilingual continent (Snell-Hornby, 2000, p. 17) – has increasingly given way to a
new perception of the cultural and political significance of multilingualism and
its complexities. It is in this context that key theorists of what has been called the
new cosmopolitanism have called attention to the central role translation plays in
mediating between different modernities or traditions in our forcibly intercultural
destiny. Thus, for Ulrich Beck, cosmopolitan competence ‘forces us to develop
the art of translation and bridge-building … relativizing one’s own form of life
within other horizons of possibility’ (2006, p. 89), while Gerard Delanty argues
that cosmopolitan processes ‘take the form of translations between things that are
different’ (2006, p. 43) and uses the notion of cultural translation to focus on how
one culture interprets itself in light of the encounter with the other and constantly
undergoes change as a result (2009, pp. 193–198). There is also an increasing
DOI: 10.4324/9781003218890-7
68 Translation and politics
awareness of the significance of multilingualism and translation in key aspects of

the cosmopolitan project such as global democracy (Archibugi, 2008), human
rights (Santos, 2010), transnational or cosmopolitan citizenship (Balibar, 2006),
social movements (Santos, 2005) and borders (Balibar, 2010). Boaventura de Sousa
Santos has called attention to an underlying epistemological issue that is relevant
to all these approaches, proposing an ecology of knowledges and intercultural
translation as an alternative to a general theory that cannot grasp the infinite di-
versity of the world. This demands and makes it imperative to formulate a politics
of translation.
2. If my first point referred to the constatation that translation is a key process

of intercultural communication in a cosmopolitan context, a second step is to
question our current definition of translation as the transfer of a verbal message
from one language into another and to reveal its radical insufficiency to for-
mulate a politics of translation. In this sense, Étienne Balibar has called attention
to the curious reduction of what is understood by translation in our political
constitutions, defending a wider conception of translation as the basic instru-
ment for the creation of a transnational public space in a democratic sense,
where ideas and projects can be debated across linguistic and administrative
borders (2006, pp. 5–6). For Balibar, the political importance of the practice of
translation lies not in the transmission of contents but in the production of a
transnational space of translation, to which he refers as ‘a multilateral and
multicultural regime of translations’. Translation is conceived as the common
idiom of this new public sphere, representing a form of practical universalism, as
opposed to the idea of a universalised and simplified use of a shared language
such as ‘international English’ (2006, p. 6). This conception of translation is
based, on the one hand, on the belief that ‘[t]he possibility of universalism lies
precisely in this common capacity to reach an effective communication without
possessing in advance common meanings and interpretations’ (Bauman, quoted
in Balibar, 2006, p. 5). On the other hand, Balibar relies on Benjamin’s con-
ception of translation, which insists that its function is not the transmission of
contents. For Benjamin, translation does not play an intermediary role but
primarily establishes a certain relationship with the foreign. A second, funda-
mental step to articulate a politics of translation consists therefore in stating that
what matters about translation is not the information or the contents that are
communicated through it, but how they are transmitted and the relationship
that is established with the foreign in the process. That is, to substitute what
could be characterised as an instrumental view of translation for a more sub-
stantive conception of translation in its key intersubjective and intercultural
dimensions. This is the starting point of all those that propose a politics of
translation against the limited dominant definition of translation, including
authors like Gayatri Spivak (2000), Antoine Berman (1992) and Lawrence
Venuti (2008), about whom I am going to refer in what follows. And if a de-
finition that questions translation as the transmission of contents from one
Politics of translation 69
language into another may initially seem strange, it is due to the narrow concept
of translation that we are used to, which considers it as a derivative act, as a mere
reproduction of something the value of which lies beyond translation itself
(and this is why something always seems to get lost in translation). This is a
definition that reduces and depoliticises translation.
3. The formulation of an alternative and political conception of translation leads

me to a necessary third step, which is to outline how ethnocentrism is a central
tendency or resistance in any act of translation. This aspect of translation has not
sufficiently been recognised in the recent sociological literature on cosmopoli-
tanism, which is in danger of adopting an essentially idealist notion of translation.
Thus, both Beck and Delanty simply assume the possibility of transcending eth-
nocentrism through translation. For Beck, translation is ‘the capacity to see oneself
from the perspective of cultural others’ (2006, p. 89), while for Delanty translation
provides ‘the possibility of incorporating the perspective of the Other into one’s
own culture’ (2009, p. 13). These conceptions presuppose not only a genuine
openness to others but also that incorporating the perspective of the other into
one’s own culture is a relatively straightforward process, thus minimising the
degree of difficulty or resistance with which one is confronted when one embarks
on such a translation. However, according to Lawrence Venuti, translation is a
fundamentally ethnocentric act (1998, p. 10). Venuti emphasises the violence that
is implied in any act of translation and defines translation as: ‘ … the forcible
replacement of the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text with a text
that is intelligible to the translating-language reader’ (2008, p. 14). I am calling
attention to this definition of translation as an act of ethnocentric violence in order
to problematise Beck and Delanty’s assumption that translation offers the possi-
bility of transcending ethnocentrism and to underline that what is interesting about
translation is rather the struggle that is established with cultural ethnocentrism in
any translating act. The best theorisation of this important aspect is that offered by
Antoine Berman, who reflects on the paradox that exists between the ethnocentric
trends in any culture and what he describes as the ethical objective of translation,
which is by necessity openness, dialogue, crossbreeding and decentering (1992,
p. 4). For Berman, a bad translation is not one which results in a loss of meaning
from the original, but one in which it is not possible to perceive the foreignness of
the original, a strangeness which cannot be directly assimilated into the receiving
culture. This is why he refers to bad translations as ethnocentric translations, that
is, those translations which carry out a systemic negation of the strangeness of the
foreign work, generally under the pretext of the difficulty of its transmission (1992,
p. 5). Both Berman and Venuti’s approaches to the difficulties of translation can be
traced back to the central notion of intelligibility. To respect the other, to do
justice to the difference of the foreign text, means to resist to the highest possible
degree the ethnocentric demand of intelligibility, the violence inherent in trans-
lation. However, this resistance also implies to subject the translator’s language to
the strangeness of a different tongue and can lead to the production of a text that
threatens to become unintelligible. The relevance of these issues goes beyond an

academic reflection on translation and necessarily implies all of us as consumers of
translations. Because, are we really willing to be confronted with opaque trans-
lations that offer not a presumably transparent access to otherness (to an other who
can readily be recognised and assimilated into our cultural patterns) but rather
make visible the difficulty of understanding others in their strangeness? I am al-
luding not just to literature, where it might be easier to accept the autonomy of art
and its distance from an everyday reality we all take for granted, but also, for
instance, to translated news, which are our window to the world, when we cannot
even perceive in them the ubiquitous mediation of translation. I would like to
refer here to the only textual example I will discuss in my paper, which comes
from an opening remark in Roger Silverstone’s book on Media and Morality (2007)
about an interview broadcast on BBC Radio 4 during the height of the war in
Afghanistan. In it, an Afghani blacksmith offered his account of why the bombs
were falling on his village: ‘It was because, his translated voice explained, Al Qaeda
had killed many Americans and their donkeys and had destroyed some of their
castles.’ (2007, p. 1). The strangeness of the blacksmiths’ appearance on British
radio is not only connected to the rarity of hearing the discourse of an ordinary
person so far removed from us in the news, but also to what he says and how he
says it, to the fact that he is offering an account of us as well as to us, that he is
interpreting our reality and his in order to tell us, through his voice, ‘a translated
truth, a cultural truth, and a truth meaningful for him’ (2007, pp. 1–2), in
Silverstone’s words. To this we should add that the rarity of this presence on
British radio is also due to the fact that no effort has been made to hide that
translation has taken place. This contrasts with the dominant form of translation in
the media, which is characterised by privileging fluency and making others speak
as we would ourselves, thus clouding the foreignness of their discourse and making
translation an invisible process.
4. It is the fundamental ethnocentrism of translation, the reductive tendency that

is present in any culture, that makes it necessary to formulate a politics of trans-
lation in any cosmopolitan project. A politics of translation that is based on the
ethical purpose of translating, which according to Berman is to open up in writing
a certain relation with the other, to fertilise what is one’s own through the
mediation of what is foreign (1992, p. 4). Paul Ricoeur has stated that translators
can find happiness in what he calls linguistic hospitality, appealing to a regime of
correspondence without adequacy that does not erase the irreducibility of the pair
of what is one’s own and what is foreign (2006, p. 10). The fourth step in order to
articulate a politics of translation of openness to the other consists therefore in
invoking Derrida’s notion of hospitality and conveying its relevance in this con-
text. I am defending here a notion of unconditional hospitality and not mere
visiting rights, as in Kant’s version of hospitality, because even though Kant ra-
dically affirmed the right to hospitality as a right of individuals and not of states in a
cosmopolitan context, the Kantian concept of hospitality remained caught in the
paradox that it only guaranteed entry into a state, but not the right to permanently
settle in it (Kant, 1991). Derrida appeals instead to a notion of absolute hospitality
that is beyond the law and that also demands a break with the hospitality of
the law:
absolute hospitality should break with the law of hospitality as right or duty,
with the “pact” of hospitality. To put it in different terms, absolute
hospitality requires that I open up my home and that I give not only to
the foreigner (provided with a family name, with the social status of being
a foreigner, etc.), but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that
I give place to them, that I let them come, that I let them arrive, and take
place in the place I offer them, without asking of them either reciprocity
(entering into a pact) or even their names. (2000, p. 25)
Absolute hospitality may be unattainable, but only linguistic hospitality understood

as an absolute or unconditional hospitality that lets the strangeness of the foreign
tongue arrive and does not hide it under a pretended equivalence or false famil-
iarity will make it possible to fertilise what is one’s own through the mediation of
what is foreign, thus allowing the incorporation of the perspective of the other
into one’s own culture that Delanty and Beck refer to. Absolute hospitality, as
Derrida points out, breaks with the law of hospitality as a right or as a duty.
Beyond the obvious reason that an ethical translation of the other, that is, a
translation that does justice to the difference of the other, is not contemplated in
any regime of rights, one would need to approach a politics of translation based
on linguistic hospitality as a responsibility and not as a right. This is a responsibility
that is beyond the law and that must also be distinguished from the concept of
duty (Aguilera, 1999, pp. 122–125), a responsibility that cannot be put under a
general rule but requires instead a strategic ethical and political positioning of the
translator in front of a concrete situation. In many instances, this responsibility not
only anticipates the law, or is even positioned in certain cases against the norm so
that justice can be done, but refers to the circumstances and conditions in which
genuine communication can be established. This cannot be articulated from a
rights-based approach, which approves of any type of communication as long as
nobody’s rights are infringed.
I would like to illustrate this point with two reflections about the positioning and
responsibility of the translator in a context marked not only by cultural and linguistic
difference but also by pronounced inequality and asymmetry. These examples refer
to how the translator confronts the challenges of translation in a concrete situation,
which as I have already stated is the only way in which a politics of translation can be
articulated. The first concerns Gayatri Spivak’s reflections on translation, in essays
like ‘Translating into English’ (2005) and, especially, in her influential piece entitled
‘The Politics of Translation’ (2000). In them, Spivak deals with the responsibility of
the translator who translates from non-European languages into English, a respon-
sibility which is greater because of certain geopolitical complications like the
growing power of English as global lingua franca, the demand for translations from
non-western literatures as a quick way of accessing other cultures, and the non-
existence of a community of polyglots in the receiving society which could judge
such translations. For Spivak, a neo-colonialist construction of the non-western
scene can only be avoided through a reflection on the ethical and political re-
sponsibility of the translator, who does not simply transmit the contents of a foreign
literature but reproduces them assuming their opacity from what she calls a sense of
the rhetoricity of language (2000, p. 399), pointing again to that non-instrumental
conception of language to which I have already referred to.
Global asymmetries and inequalities demand a more immediate response from
the translator in the second of my examples, which refers to the context of legal
interpreting. Take for instance the interpreter who clearly perceives in the accent
of the man she is interpreting that he is from Morocco and not a Palestine from
Ramallah as he pretends to be, but decides not to reveal this to the police so as
not to jeopardise his claim that he is a refugee. As Moira Inghilleri points out
in her excellent book Interpreting Justice, the principles of neutrality and impartiality
contained in interpreter’s codes of practice should not be taken to mean the ab-
dication from the personal and social responsibilities in their role (2012, p. 51). In
cases like the one I have just referred to, the professional duty of the interpreter,
which consigns her to a mere role of mediator from a supposed position of
neutrality or impartiality, would not allow her to respond to power abuses or
injustices that she may witness, or would even lead her to become an accomplice
of these abuses. Just like justice is beyond the law, a politics of translation based on
linguistic hospitality is beyond the deontological obligations of the translator and
obliges us to think in a different way.
5. A politics of translation constitutes an alternative to a politics of identity or of

recognition (Taylor, 1994), which since the decade of 1970 has been at the basis
of multiculturalist politics in western democracies. This is because the political un-
derstanding of translation I am defending here leads us to question certain funda-
mental aspects of what is commonly understood by identity; it explodes the very
notion of identity. In this perspective, the key for living together in heterogeneous
societies does not lie in the recognition of identity and cultural difference, but in
the practices of cultural translation, where openness to others leads to self-
problematisation and change, to the perception of one’s own limits and not to the
reinforcement of an assumed originary identity that emanates from old presupposi-
tions about what cultures and individuals are. Thus, Rada Ivekovic maintains that,
The idea of “translating, between cultures” as an open-ended relational and

reciprocal gesture of freedom putting into question the “translator” and the
“original” itself can be opposed to the somewhat limiting and communitarian
(communalist) arrogant idea of a “dialogue between cultures” (…), often
proposed by a benevolent yet limited multi-culturalist approach. (2005, p. 6)
Ivekovic shares several of the ideas that I have elaborated upon in this paper,
starting with a political conception of translation that asserts that it significantly
transforms both the original text as well as the translator. A similar approach to
the inherently destabilising effects of translation can also be found in Naoki Sakai’s
critique of what he refers to as the metaphysics of communication (embodied
in the conventional notion of translation as transfer and as the establishment of
homogenising equivalence) and to the binary opposition between same and other
that is established by a regime of translation based on monolingual address. Instead,
Sakai argues for a different attitude based on the translator’s ambiguous and
unstable position as a subject in transit, or a form of heterolingual address as
‘a situation in which one addresses oneself as a foreigner to another foreigner’
(2006, p. 75).
The notion of transformation, of the incorporation of the perspective of the
other into one’s own culture, is diametrically opposed to what is behind that of
identity, both with reference to individual self-identity as well as to the concept
of a community with well-defined borders that is presupposed by the idea of a
dialogue between cultures, which in reality serves to hide existing differences
and asymmetries between them. Perhaps more fundamentally, as Ivekovic also
points out, identity essentialises and naturalises culture (2005, p. 5). While the
main source of identity is the process of construction of alterity, translation
points to the opposite process, that of a radical and reciprocal exchange between
different forms of being or existing, a questioning of self in light of the differ-
ence of the other that is at the basis of a cosmopolitan notion of genuine
openness to others.
This defence of a politics of translation against a politics of identity does not
only refer to normative principles and philosophical issues but also possesses an
eminently sociological and empirical aspect in the sense that Beck defended in
his book The Cosmopolitan Vision (2006). We live in a society that, in a certain
sense, has been cosmopolitanised. The cosmopolitan vision enables us to per-
ceive an already existing cosmopolitan reality, a reality of multiple belonging or
cultural hybridity, of translated lives, a reality that escapes and can no longer be
grasped by traditional conceptions of identity, which assume a natural correla-
tion between the identity of individuals and the place they belong to. If we
take, for example, world families, a concept through which Beck and Beck-
Gernsheim analyse a growing and particularly relevant case through which the
contradictions caused by globalisation are manifested in the everyday and in-
timate life of families (2014), we realise that there is not a possible notion of
identity that defines them, but a permanent struggle with the contradiction and
difference that characterises them, a translation which is always provisional and
therefore unfinished and infinite between different ways of existing. World
families question our most familiar assumptions about what families are; like
strangers, they are ambivalent figures of non-identity. In a similar way, a cos-
mopolitan politics of translation makes strangeness appear in the midst of what is
most familiar to us, our mother tongue. And only when identity disappears,
when the unquestioned immediacy of the circumstances that surround us

vanishes, can we think ourselves and openly relate to others in a world that has
become increasingly strange.
6. A politics of translation implies the coming out of translation from its dis-
ciplinary borders in order to demonstrate its political and social relevance in the
contemporary context. Translation studies, which has been described as an in-
terdiscipline from the start (Snell-Hornby, Pochhacker and Kaindl, 1994), and
which is a small and young enough discipline to be open to relevant developments
elsewhere, may be especially well placed to undertake such an interdisciplinary
turn. However, the sort of interdisciplinarity I am calling for is perhaps not so
much in terms of the incorporation of relevant concepts, theories and meth-
odologies from other disciplines (as illustrated by the different turns of translation
studies in recent decades), but in making its knowledge about translation relevant
to other disciplines that have overwhelmingly ignored it. In a cosmopolitan
context, this is primarily about challenging the assumption of transparency that
underlies the belief in the constant, relatively easy and relentless circulation of
people, ideas and texts in a deeply interconnected world. Key insights on trans-
lation teach us not only about its inherent ethnocentrism and violence, to which
I have already referred, but also force a perspective centred on the materiality of
writing which reveals the idealism of those who believe in the free circulation
of meaning across borders, of a meaning that seems to be independent of the
materiality of words and to precede writing itself.
I have been arguing for the adoption of a wide notion of translation not as the
transfer of meaning but rather as a social relation with otherness, which in my view
constitutes a necessary precondition for articulating a politics of translation. I have
been arguing for a notion of translation as the experience of the foreign, in
Berman’s terms, which connects to significant social scientific approaches to
translation as a crucial aspect of the constitution of a transnational public demo-
cratic space, such as Balibar’s, but also to key insights on the centrality of language
in the intersubjective processes that constitute us as individuals. It is from this
exploration of the political and social role of translation that interdisciplinary
bridges can be built between translation studies and relevant disciplines in the
social sciences. Attending to the social nature of language and translation teaches
us that we become different individuals through them. A hospitable politics
of translation can therefore also turn our communities into a different, more
democratic space, a space that is open to strangers of different kinds. This is an
essential insight that should be incorporated at the centre of a cosmopolitics based
on openness to the world and to others as an alternative to homogenising global
capitalism.
I would like to finish my intervention by referring explicitly to the title of the
conference that brings us here together: ‘Translation and Revolution’. Marx’s
concept of revolution is perhaps too dependent on a 19th-century concept of
progress that can no longer be sustained in the present context. Maybe we should
look instead at Benjamin’s reformulation of Marx’s idea of revolution. In a

preparatory fragment of his fundamental theses ‘On the Concept of History’,
Benjamin stated: ‘Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history.
But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the pas-
sengers on this train – namely, the human race – to activate the emergency brake.’
(Eiland and Jennings, 2003, p. 402).
It is not a matter of chance that what is and remains, in my opinion, a key
notion of revolution which can be pursued in a manner that is respectful
not only with human beings from any place in the world but also with what
is not human, with living organisms and the finite natural resources of our
planet Earth, comes from somebody who was deeply conscious of the social
significance of translation, and who contributed with a classic essay called ‘The
Task of the Translator’ to specify the politics of translation in important ways.
The apparently insignificant and often unattended practice of translation is
very much like the act of activating the emergency brake of the locomotive of
history. It is, in Benjamin’s terms, a dialectics at a standstill that can be employed
to interrupt the belief in the automatic, endless circulation of discourses and
texts in a globalised world and to re-examine interconnectivity in a different
and more productive light.
Note
1 This paper was presented as a keynote speech at the 9th International Colloquium of
Translation Studies in Portugal, entitled ‘Translation & Revolution’, which took place
in Lisbon, 22–23 October 2015.
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5
TRANSLATING DEMOCRACY
Introduction
Contemporary approaches to cosmopolitanism have brought attention to the
significance of multilingualism and translation in a global context, emphasising a
multiplicity of perspectives and the interaction between different traditions rather
than the world’s unicity or homogenising trends towards the constitution of a
global culture. As already discussed in the previous chapter, cosmopolitan com-
petence has been defined as the art of translation and bridge-building (Beck, 2006,
p. 89), while cosmopolitan processes are seen as taking the form of translations
between things that are different, where one culture interprets itself in light of
the encounter with the other and constantly undergoes change as a result (Delanty,
2006, p. 43, 2009, pp. 193–98). On the other hand, there is a renewed urgency
to specify the conditions and principles of a cosmopolitan order that recognises
the increasing interconnectedness of political communities and provides a de-
mocratic space at local, national, regional and global levels in the face on new
global threats (Held, 2010).
This chapter examines how debates on language and democracy have been
differently framed within a multiculturalist and a cosmopolitan framework,
questioning some of their underlying assumptions and demonstrating a basic
continuity with what is approached as the monolingual vision. It then goes on to
propose an alternative conception of the language of democracy based on plur-
ilingualism, linguistic hospitality and translation. Such a conception is not ignorant
of the social role of language in the constitution of individual selves and of col-
lective identities, nor does it avoid confronting the politics of language in a highly
unequal global space. It recognises that the grounds of a cosmopolitan democracy
can only be built through generalised plurilingual exchanges and sees in the dif-
ficulties of understanding and the productive confrontation with the opacity of
DOI: 10.4324/9781003218890-8
others and of ourselves the very substance of democracy amongst diversity. This
approach also identifies different processes of political translation as a key area of
interdisciplinary interest for the humanities and social sciences.
The language of democracy

In view of the growing relevance of new forms of democratic politics beyond the
state, as well as challenges to still prevalent, taken-for-granted notions of cultural
homogeneity at the national level, the question of linguistic diversity is increasingly
becoming unavoidable. Thus, in reflecting on the possibility of a multilingual
democracy, Daniele Archibugi (2008, pp. 256, 259) refers to Will Kymlicka’s re-
nowned statement that a democratic politics is politics in the vernacular (Kymlicka,
2001) as dangerous and even reactionary. With reference to new demands for
democratisation not just on a national level but increasingly beyond, Archibugi
proposes instead a cosmopolitan approach that, from a normative standpoint,
maintains that ‘democratic politics must be in Esperanto’ (2008, p. 260).
For Kymlicka, a common language is not just a basic element of nation-
building, through which states have achieved institutional integration within
a given territory, but also essential to democracy. A common language and
social institutions provide cohesion to what is otherwise characterised by di-
versity and plurality within modern liberal democracies (with reference to re-
ligious and political beliefs, family customs or personal lifestyles) (Kymlicka,
2001, p. 25). Language is thus considered a basic and necessary constitutive
element of national identity; indeed, the only remaining principle that is left
when older, more problematic notions such as soil, faith or blood have been
rejected. For Kymlicka, a common language defines the very practices that are at
the basis of democratic politics: ‘how can ‘the people’ govern together if they
cannot understand one another?’ (2001, p. 26). This is the reason why he is
fundamentally sceptic about the possibilities for a transnational democratic
politics and defends the nation-state as the basic unit through which politics at
the supranational level can take place. For instance, in the context of the EU,
Kymlicka considers demands for democratisation through a strengthening of the
European Parliament as inherently flawed, and remarks that democracy can only
be maintained through accountability to national governments and the pre-
servation of national veto powers, thus effectively taking his model of multi-
national states as federations of peoples beyond the state level. Interestingly,
linguistic diversity is presented as the central reason for defending such a model:
For Danish citizens to engage in a debate with other Danes, in Danish, about
the Danish position vis-à-vis the EU is a familiar and manageable task.
But for Danish citizens to engage in a debate with Italians to try to develop a
common European position is a daunting prospect. In what language would
such a debate occur, and in what forums? (2001, p. 326)
Translating democracy 79
By contrast, Archibugi defends a passage from a language of identity to a language

of communication as a basic prerequisite for promoting democracy amongst di-
versity. However, whereas Kymlicka falls prey to an essentialist view of language
as the defining property of a community or a nation, Archibugi instrumentalises
language as a vehicle of communication, ignoring the powerful connections be-
tween language and subjectivity and blinding himself to the politics of language in
the context of globalisation. A more sociological approach is needed that retains
a perspective on language as the basic means of socialisation, and not just as an
instrument of communication, and that considers the implications of going
beyond one’s language in order to be able to communicate with others, both at
the individual and collective levels. Esperanto in Europe (Archibugi, 2008,
pp. 265–66), English in India (Archibugi, 2008, pp. 267–68; Sommer, 2004, p. 96)
or Spanish in the Philippines (Rafael, 2005) have helped to bring people together
because they did not belong to any single group. But the use of a lingua franca as a
democratic means has many important implications that relate to existing power
asymmetries between languages and to the specific consequences derived from
adopting and promoting one particular language, which inevitably benefits some
and is detrimental to others.
Archibugi’s unwillingness to consider the politics of language is reflected in the
choice of the Esperanto metaphor as a normative principle, which in reality hides
the promotion of English as the de facto common democratic language, as his
discussion of paradigmatic cases at different local, national and supranational levels
reveals. As Peter Ives has argued,
Archibugi’s position can be none other than an advocacy of global English

for cosmopolitan democracy. The reasons for obscuring this advocacy – or
presenting it in very abstract and metaphorical terms – are telling of the
political issues that Archibugi hopes not to have to deal with. (2009, p. 520)
Despite their apparent differences, Archibugi and Kymlicka share some funda-
mental ideas about the language of democracy. On the one hand, both authors
highlight that states cannot be neutral towards language, unlike in matters con-
cerning religion or race. This idea is at the basis of Kymlicka’s emphasis on nation-
building through the promotion of a common language, which makes national
democracies possible in the first place and provides, at the same time, a rationale
for the defence of minority rights (Archibugi, 2008, pp. 254, 257; Kymlicka, 2001,
pp. 26–27). On the other hand, like Kymlicka, Archibugi unquestioningly be-
lieves that democracy is monolingual, in spite of the fact that he acknowledges that
monolingual communities are becoming increasingly rare (2008, p. 257). By
adopting the prevailing linguistic model for democracy at the national level to
tackle the conditions for a democratic politics outside the state, Archibugi is bound
to amplify its paradoxes and unresolved contradictions, falling into idealist notions
of a universal language of communication that is detached both from the social
contexts from which it emanates and from the materiality of language itself.
It would seem that cosmopolitan designs are inextricably bound to fall upon an
abstract vindication of a universal language, implicitly conceiving language mainly
as a vehicle for conveying ideas (Ives, 2009, p. 521; May, 2014) and diluting
the significance of the politics of language to which multiculturalists have called
attention. From this perspective, Archibugi’s case for a democratic politics that,
wherever possible, can and must be in Esperanto appears as a contemporary ex-
ponent of a long-standing tradition of cosmopolitan designs that go back to the
Enlightenment. Thus, Kymlicka refers to Condorcet’s belief in the emergence of a
universal language as the culmination of a process of emancipation of individuals
from the ethnic, religious or linguistic communities in which they are born, as
cultural membership is replaced by a cosmopolitan identity (2001, p. 203).
According to Kymlicka, this ideal of a universal language was endorsed by cos-
mopolitans from Descartes and Leibniz to Franklin, Voltaire, d’Alembert, and
Turgot (2001, p. 205). In addition to Archibugi’s proposals, it also finds expression
in contemporary notions about the creation of a universal digital language of
communication in the network society (Castells, 2000, pp. 2, 212).
However, the dichotomy between the essentialism of multiculturalist lan-
guage politics and the idealism of cosmopolitan designs that reduce language to
an instrument of communication is questioned when one turns to the per-
spective of a critical cosmopolitanism that reveals some of their key underlying
assumptions about nation, culture and language. On the one hand, nationalism
and cosmopolitanism can be seen as mutually interrelated, rather than opposites,
and different particularistic and universalistic moments can be identified in both
nationalist and cosmopolitan positions (Rao, 2010, 2012; Chernilo, 2015). On
the other hand, Eurocentric cosmopolitan designs can be subjected to critical
scrutiny from the perspective of border thinking, pointing to a notion of critical
cosmopolitanism that reconceptualises cosmopolitanism from the perspective
of coloniality (Mignolo, 2000a; Mignolo, 2000b), or from a dialogical cosmo-
politanism that contextualises universalism and finds in the processes through
which others reappropriate and reinterpret institutions and cultural traditions
that initially excluded them the source of cosmopolitan reflexivity and change
(Benhabib, 2004; Mendieta, 2009). Or, closer to the approach that will be
pursued in this chapter, a productive confrontation with Eurocentrism can also
be sought through radical engagement with different traditions in the key but
often neglected practices of interpreting otherness (Godrej, 2009, 2011) or of
cultural translation (Delanty, 2014) as social processes that leave neither the
interpreter/translator nor their object unchanged. Rather than overcoming or
dissolving Eurocentrism, this approach points towards a post-Eurocentric space
as a fertile ground for learning and transformation in light of the difference of
the other.
Framing its contribution within this tradition of critical cosmopolitanism, this
chapter seeks to articulate an alternative view of the language of democracy that
does not renounce the cosmopolitan ideal of a language beyond identity without
reducing it to a language of communication in a social void. In opposition to both
multiculturalist views and the cosmopolitan approach defended by Archibugi, my

argument will be that cosmopolitan democracy is necessarily plurilingual and takes
place through the practice of translation. Although explicitly conceived for de-
mocratic politics outside the state, such a view on the language of democracy is
also relevant at the local and national levels because it breaks with multiculturalist’s
essentialism in promoting a democratic politics in increasingly heterogeneous
communities, where assumptions of linguistic and cultural homogeneity can no
longer be sustained. This democratic politics is not based on the construction of a
common culture through the privileging of one language over others, but emerges
from the negotiation of diversity and from the continued exposure of different
languages to each other, opening them up to the presence of others. Contrary to
Kymlicka’s belief, this view can in fact be traced back to Enlightenment cosmo-
politan designs that are not formulated through the notion of a universal language,
most notably to Goethe. Moreover, such a conception of plurilingual democratic
politics through the practice of translation recuperates an artistic cosmopolitanism
that has been systematically ignored in the literature, thus overcoming the division
between political and aesthetic cosmopolitanism (Papastergiadis, 2012; Bielsa,
2014). But before such articulation is offered, it is necessary to critically examine
the view that profoundly permeates both Kymlicka’s and Archibugi’s approaches
to the language of democracy: the monolingual vision. This undertaking is offered
in the next sec.
The monolingual vision: a critique

Like nationalism, with which it is inextricably related, the monolingual vision that
underlines the discussion about the language of democracy presented above has its
origins in late 18th century Europe. It has constructed monolingualism as second
nature and the mother tongue as both the private property of individuals and
collectivities and a key marker of identity. The monolingual vision has entailed
the promotion of one language over others for the creation of monolingual po-
pulations, effectively marginalising alternative languages and dialects and already
existing widespread plurilingual practices, both within and outside Europe.1
Unquestioned assumptions regarding the necessary diffusion of a single language as
a basic element of nation building and the impossibility of state neutrality towards
language, highlighted above, attest to its continued presence and pervasiveness.
Herder, who approached the distinctiveness of each language as emanating
from the character of a people or nation (Volk), is typically highlighted as initiator
of a conception that became highly influential in the 19th century (Anderson,
1983, p. 66; Yildiz, 2012, pp. 6–7; Canagarajah, 2013, pp. 20–22). This con-
ception lies at the basis of a politics of language that has characterised the national
vision in its different forms until the present day and that has also deeply pene-
trated popular beliefs about the nature of the language we speak and the meaning
of linguistic diversity. One of its most significant implications is that the distinc-
tiveness of languages, rather than their commonalities and interrelations, is
emphasised and considered an indicator of the cohesiveness of cultures and

identities, similarly conceived as separate, bounded wholes. Another important
implication of the link between language and nation is that the native speakers
of a language are considered its legitimate owners and language their inherent
property. In both cases, notions of purity and authenticity are reinforced, and
a particularism founded upon the perceived incommensurability of different
traditions is asserted.
The first implication of the monolingual vision specified above relates to
the emphasis on the distinctiveness of languages and, by extension, of the cultural
groups from which they emanate, approached as separate, cohesive and well-
defined entities. As has already been indicated, language, more than any other
cultural or historical trait, is often used as a marker of identity. Moreover, a
widespread tendency to treat language as a naturalising element that designates
really existing differences has been described. Thus, Blommaert and Verschueren
note in this respect that language’s
identificational function implies separability, a natural discontinuity in

the real world. These discontinuities are ‘nations’ or ‘peoples,’ i.e. natural
groups, the folk perceptions of which conceptualizes them in much the
same way as species in the animal kingdom. If feathers are predictive of
beaks, eggs, and an ability to fly, so is a specific language predictive of a
distinct history and culture. (Blommaert and Verschueren, 1992, p. 359)
At the individual level, non-negotiable, exclusive membership of one linguistic

group is presupposed. We can only be ourselves when we lose ourselves in the
depths of our language. From this perspective, it becomes hard to imagine
that people can step outside their language and live in a language that is not
their own, or that they may choose to use different languages for different
purposes in their everyday lives. Just as the foreigner becomes a figure ne-
cessarily in pain (Sennett, 2011, p. 56), polyglots are reduced to silence
(Kristeva, 1991, p. 15).
Perhaps more pervasive in the way it has shaped our most ingrained concep-
tions about our language and ourselves is the second implication of the association
between language and nation, through which native speakers are inherently de-
fined as the legitimate owners of their language and the naturalness of the mother
tongue mystified. This view implies that there is only one mother tongue, defined
as one’s ‘true’ language. It has also led to the perception that non-native speakers
are both illegitimate users and somehow deficient and impaired, expressed for
example in the widespread perception that literature can only be written in one’s
mother tongue. As Yasemin Yildiz has argued,
The uniqueness and organic nature of language imagined as “mother

tongue” lends its authority to an aesthetics of originality and authenticity.
In this view, a writer can become the origin of creative works only with
an origin in a mother tongue, itself imagined to originate in a mother.

The result is a disavowal of the possibility of writing in nonnative languages
or in multiple languages at the same time. (2012: 9)
Like mother’s milk, the mother tongue seems so natural that it has taken an
Algerian Jew who was never able to call French ‘my mother tongue’ to remind us
of the impossibility of owning a language: ‘I only have one language; it is not
mine.’ (Derrida, 1998: 1, 34). It is only from this questioning of language as a
possession and a belonging, from a recognition of every language as the language
of the other, that a cosmopolitan politics of language can emerge. In other words,
just as a necessary, although not in itself sufficient, precondition of cosmopolitan
citizenship is the disaggregation of citizenship, through which the privileges of
political membership are no longer tied to national and cultural origins (Benhabib,
2004), a cosmopolitan vision can only emerge from a conceptualisation that dis-
aggregates linguistic origins, communal belongings and affective investments, from
a critical multilingualism where linguistic practices are not tied to ethnic identity
(Yildiz, 2012: 29).
In addition to deconstructing the mirage of language as a possession through
a vision of the monolingualism of the other, it is necessary to destabilise the
notion of a single mother tongue, which is presupposed in common concep-
tions that have taken monolingual individuals and communities as the norm.
Part and parcel of the promotion of a shared language in processes of nation-
building (a process of enforced monolingualisation) was the suppression of
widely extended plurilingual practices. Yet, in the context of increased con-
nectivity and mobility, and of the questioning of clearly defined borders and
identities, the persistence and changing forms of plurilingualism are becoming
the object of considerable multidisciplinary interest. In the field of socio-
linguistics, notions of double talk, heteroglossia, language crossing and code-
meshing have been used to approach plurilingualism and in-betweenness and to
challenge prevailing ideas of the distinctiveness of languages as bounded wholes
(Woolard, 1989; Rampton, 2005; Canagarajah, 2013). A critical sociolinguistics
of globalisation that can account for new linguistic patterns of mobility and
diverse scales of plurilingual use has been proposed to analyse emerging
landscapes of superdiversity (Blommaert, 2010), while literary studies have
opened their conceptual apparatuses to literatures outside the nation (Seyhan,
2001; Sommer, 2004; Yildiz, 2012; Walkowitz, 2015). Translanguaging and
flexible bilingual education are at the centre of pedagogical approaches that
break with monolingual instructional practices in order to mobilise the over-
lapping of languages for learning and teaching (Creese and Blackledge, 2010;
García and Wei, 2014). Attention is also turned to communication strategies
that do not necessarily involve shifting to a shared language, for instance
amongst diaspora Tamil families and communities (Canagarajah, 2013), or to
how Kurds in Europe translate their political movements and struggles for
European audiences (Demir, 2017, 2022), or to widespread multilingual
workspaces and classrooms as sites of ordinary language crossing. In a variety of

fields in the social sciences and humanities, the significance of multilingualism
is being rediscovered while prevailing assumptions that reduce it to the simple
aggregation of different languages with reference to individuals or communities
are increasingly challenged. Thus, notions of translingualism or plurilingualisn
seek to emphasise the intermeshing of languages and identities from a more
dynamic perspective (Canagarajah, 2013, p. 8) whereas the term post-
monolingual is proposed to designate the persistence of a monolingual para-
digm even when the presence of widely relevant forms of multilingualism is
acknowledged (Yildiz, 2012).2
From these critical perspectives, Kymlicka’s recurring assumptions about
language can readily be revealed as the expression of the monolingual vision. For
instance, he refers to Condorcet’s proposition that everyone should learn a
second universal language regardless of social class as fundamentally unrealistic,
arguing that
Various efforts have been made to encourage personal bilingualism,

particularly in multination states, but they have failed. The goal was that
Belgian citizens, for example, would read a Flemish newspaper in the
morning, and watch the French news on television at night, and be equally
conversant with, and feel comfortable contributing to, the political debates
in both languages. However, these efforts have been uniformly unsuccessful.
This sort of easy personal bilingualism is more or less restricted to
intellectuals, while the vast majority of the population clings stubbornly to
their own tongue. (2001, p. 217)
Kymlicka’s assumptions about the impossibility of bilingualism for the majority of

the population would arguably not apply in non-Western contexts, where the
monolingual practices introduced by European colonisation have not penetrated as
deeply. But even within Europe, his vision can be refuted with reference to ef-
fective and widespread bilingualism in Catalonia, for instance, which has been
extended in the last decades to individuals of varying social, ethnic and linguistic
backgrounds, in addition to Catalan native speakers (Woolard and Frekko, 2012;
Woolard, 2016).3 Further, and contrary to what Kymlicka suggests, linguistic
policies in Belgium have not been designed to promote personal bilingualism, but
rather led to divide the country into separate linguistic groups, effectively dis-
avowing plurilingualism and reaffirming distinct populations conceived in
monolingual terms.4 It is also worth noticing how, in Kymlicka’s view, only in-
tellectuals are seemingly liberated from the identity trap of monolingualism,
paradoxically becoming both heralds of the monolingual vision and free-floating
entities at the same time.
A different but equally puzzling disavowal of plurilingualism can be found in
Benedict Anderson’s approach to language use before the generalisation of
monolingualism in Europe:
The pre-bourgeois ruling classes generated their cohesions in some sense

outside language, or at least outside print-language. If the ruler of Siam took
a Malay noblewoman as a concubine, or if the King of England married a
Spanish princess – did they ever talk seriously together? Solidarities were the
products of kinship, clientship, and personal loyalties. ‘French’ nobles could
assist ‘English’ kings against ‘French’ monarchs, not on the basis of shared
language or culture, but, Machiavellian calculations aside, of shared kinsmen
and friendships. (1983, p. 74)
Needless to say, the assumption that a shared language is needed for successful
communication is itself the product of the monolingual vision through which the
nation has been imagined. This vision affirms, as we have seen, that most in-
dividuals cannot feel comfortable using more than one language for ordinary
exchange and that plurilingualism inevitably leads to a deficiency in democratic
terms because it disrupts the shared meanings that are considered to make possible
and facilitate collective decision-making.
Here, an alternative view is proposed that does not see linguistic diversity as an
unnecessary hurdle for the conduct of a democratic politics. Contrary to old as-
sumptions that relegate the competence of polyglots to the rare attribute of a
privileged few in blind ignorance of the widespread plurilingual practices in which
the majority of the world’s population is ordinarily involved,5 this view breaks
with dominant conceptions of the monolanguage of democracy in order to re-
cuperate an already existing reality of cultural mixing for cosmopolitics. In this
approach, which rejects both the essentialism of identity politics and the in-
strumentalism that conceives language merely as a medium of communication, the
incongruities and discrepancies that appear at the interstices between languages
are not erased but turned into an important source of reflexivity. Indeed, there
is scarcely a better source of cosmopolitan learning than confronting ourselves
through the language of the other, questioning our innermost beliefs and inter-
rupting the fluidity that gives our reality its rock-firm naturalness. Strangeness can
be enroled at the service of a democratic politics through which the legitimacy of
procedures is renewed and the scope of democracy enlarged (Honig, 2001;
Rumford, 2008, chapter 5; Sommer, 2004). It is precisely the difficulties of un-
derstanding that in Kymlicka’s view limit the scope of democracy beyond the
nation that can generate new forms of cosmopolitan democracy, both at the local
and at the global level.
Cosmopolitanism, linguistic hospitality and translation

Unlike reified notions of culture as bounded and cohesive wholes, which have
been the object of considerable critical attention (Waldron, 2000; Benhabib, 2002;
Scholte, 2014), the monolingual assumptions of multiculturalists have not been
significantly challenged within mainstream cosmopolitan theorising and, as we
have seen, have even been unwittingly reproduced in cosmopolitan designs.
Nevertheless, cosmopolitanism’s emphasis on cultural interaction and the nego-

tiation of difference calls for an explicit approach to linguistic diversity and
translation as key aspects of the cultural contact zone. Just as attention to the
changing meaning of borders offers a new perspective on social phenomena that
were previously confined to the margins and a reconceptualisation of global
connectivity itself (Balibar, 2002, 2004; Rumford, 2008; Mezzadra and Neilson,
2013; Agier, 2016), a consideration of linguistic exchange and translation reveals
the central significance of what, according to the monolingual vision, can only be
considered as an anomaly. Indeed, as the pioneering work of Étienne Balibar has
consistently revealed, borders and translation are significantly related (Balibar,
2006, 2010). Balibar has described the border as the ambivalent site of two op-
posite paradigms, the paradigm of war and the paradigm of translation, through
which relations with others are constructed and peoples, languages or races pro-
duced. What characterises the current epoch is precisely ‘a new intensity of this
overlapping or indecision of the relationship between war and translation, more
generally power and discourse’ (Balibar, 2010, p. 317). In fact, as Vincente Rafael
has shown, translation is used as an instrument or, indeed, a weapon by imperial
and national powers, while wars of translation often become wars on translation
(Rafael, 2016). Linguistic differences and hierarchies are always heavily politicised,
and this is why rather than avoiding these issues a cosmopolitan politics of lan-
guage and of translation becomes indispensable, as I have argued in chapter 4.
Like the border, translation offers a privileged vantage point for a discussion of
cosmopolitics, but this requires us to challenge common definitions of translation
as the transfer of meaning from one language into another. Against this narrow
definition that reduces and depoliticises translation, I have called attention to
translation as the experience of the foreign (see also Bielsa, 2010, 2016), a social
relation across linguistic difference that mobilises our relationship with others as
well as our conception of ourselves. Like the border that is itself the origin of the
territories it partitions, translation is what allows us to conceive the separateness of
languages that is posited as a natural fact by representing linguistic difference as
a difference between language unities (Sakai, 1997, p. 14). Like the border,
translation represents both closeness and openness, or their permanent dialectical
interplay (Balibar, 2010, p. 394). Balibar shows how this essential ambiguity is
resolved in current constructions of strangers as enemies, which are aimed at their
permanent exclusion (2006). Similarly, it is necessary to examine different ways of
dealing with the strangeness of others in translation, the ambiguity that has given
origin to widespread views of its inevitable treason.
The transparency and ease of communication that are presumed and celebrated
by the monolingual vision as basic characteristics of community and of democracy
must be questioned in order to make space for heterogeneity. In this approach,
difficulty of understanding is not an obstacle to democratic debate but precisely the
substance of the democratic process itself, through which difference can be pro-
ductively confronted, our horizons widened and our convictions re-examined. As
Balibar has already clearly perceived, translation is precisely the basic medium for
the creation of a transnational public space in a democratic sense, the real

‘common’ idiom of its citizens (2006, pp. 5–6).
When we consider translation as the non-transparent medium of democracy, a
non-instrumental means, the key is no longer communication but rather con-
fronting the opacity of meaning that results when diverse people attempt to
communicate with each other. This is why linguistic hospitality becomes in this
context more important than the practical possibilities offered by the use of a
common language of communication, for instance, international English, which in
reality erases substantive issues of cultural difference and power inequalities that
bear on the democratic process. Linguistic hospitality has been called upon to
defend an ethical approach to translation in terms of the fundamental ambiguity
between openness and closeness highlighted above. The ambiguity of translation,
which is said to serve two masters at the same time – the strangeness of a foreign
author and the reader’s demand for intelligibility – is expressed in the paradox
of either bringing the author to the reader or the reader to the author
(Schleiermacher, 1992; Ricoeur, 2006, p. 23). Bringing the author to the reader,
in Schleiermacher’s terms, has the advantage of producing a transparent, fluid
translation that puts in the mouth of a foreign author the words that readers would
use themselves, thus minimising the very foreignness that makes translation ne-
cessary in the first place. Bringing the reader to the author preserves a notion of
the author’s strangeness, of the fact that she writes in a different language, but
places unusual demands on readers and shakes their unquestioned expectations.
Linguistic hospitality – the ethical objective of translation – clashes with the
ethnocentrism that is present in any culture, and that is why there is a permanent
pressure to resist translation and to produce bad, ethnocentric translations that
deny translation’s very aim of enlarging one’s language through the mediation of
another (Berman, 1992, p. 4). The social and political significance of linguistic
hospitality emerges only when we recognise translation as approximation without
identity, as correspondence without adequacy, as continuity in discontinuity
(Sakai, 1997, p. 13; Ricoeur, 2006, pp. 10, 22). This is precisely what is denied by
those that insist on the importance of communication, both in translation and
in democracy.
At this point, one more voice needs to be called upon to complicate the false
dichotomy presented above between a democracy in the vernacular or a de-
mocracy in a language of international currency. It is the voice of Goethe, a
remarkable cosmopolitan polyglot who reflects on the practical advantages of
learning international languages without reducing them to mere instruments of
communication:
young men do well to come to us and learn our language; for … no one can
deny that he who knows German well can dispense with many other
languages. Of the French I do not speak; it is the language of conversation,
and is indispensable in travelling, because everybody understands it, and in
all countries we can get on with it instead of a good interpreter. But as for
Greek, Latin, Italian, and Spanish, we can read the best works of those
nations in such excellent German translations, that … we need not spend
much time upon the toilsome study of those languages. It is in the German
nature duly to honour after its kind, everything produced by other nations,
and to accommodate itself to foreign peculiarities. This, with the great
flexibility of our language, makes German translations thoroughly faithful
and complete. (Eckermann, 1850: 190–91)
One could easily be led to doubt Goethe’s cosmopolitan intent in recommending

what is, after all, his mother tongue as a universal medium for a cosmopolitan
culture. However, Goethe’s argument is not principally related to German as such,
but to what was then, and still is, a relatively marginal type of translation that can
serve as a vehicle for an experience of the foreign potentially to all contemporaries,
as opposed to a narcissistic experience of recognition of dominant cultural values
of one linguistic group. German thus becomes, through a reflexive form of
translation that renounces full fluency and transparency, demanding from readers
some accommodation to the author’s strangeness, a privileged language for the
acquisition of a cosmopolitan culture, whereas French (English today), as the
dominant language of transnational linguistic exchanges, merely represents a more
pragmatic choice for ordinary travel and interchange.6 This perspective is not
just relevant for literary translation, but also for a form of cosmopolitics that sees
in deliberation between diverse people the very substance of democracy, ap-
proaching democratic politics not as the space for expedient, mostly unproble-
matic communication within homogeneous groups but primarily as an arena
where heterogeneous voices can be productively confronted. Goethe’s approach
also reminds us that, even if we resort to the use of a lingua franca, translation is
unavoidable, and it always implies taking a position with respect to the strangeness
of others and of ourselves.
A perspective on translation as the medium of democracy breaks with a view of
language as a vehicle of identity without resorting to an instrumental view of the
lingua franca of democracy as a language of communication. Translation is not
about identity, but about how we deal with the strangeness of others. In preserving
a degree of linguistic hospitality, a type of non-transparent translation that does not
succumb to demands for instantaneous communication can make space for the
strangeness of others, obliging us to step outside ourselves and look at ourselves
as another. The stranger’s language, a language that does not belong to us as a
property, is key to cosmopolitan reflexivity and self-transformation in light of the
difference of the other. Just as democracy is a politics among strangers (Honig,
2001, pp. 39–40, 72), the stranger’s language is the language of democracy.
Conclusion
Generalising a critique of the monolingual vision and replacing it with a plur-
ilingual vision is one of the major challenges that await the cosmopolitan
imagination. The plurilingual vision makes us perceptive of the cultural mixing

and absence of borders that Beck discerned in a reality that has already been
cosmopolitanised, of the cosmopolitanism of ordinary migrants and world fa-
milies who confront in their everyday and intimate lives the contradictions
of lives lived in translation (Beck, 2006; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2014). The
plurilingual vision challenges the simplistic assumption that one culture corre-
sponds to one nation and to one identity, that we own a language that belongs
to us as a property and are its authentic bearers. It replaces a politics of belonging
for a politics of translation in the cultural contact zone in a context of growing
interconnectedness, increasingly blurred borders and hybrid identities.
Plurilingualism and translation are today essential skills for individuals and
communities which enable to confront and productively address the tensions
and conflicts that inevitably emerge when heterogeneous people need to find ways
of living together and collectively addressing common problems. However, the
monolingual vision is still pervasive and monolingualising projects continue to
shape democratic politics within the state and beyond, even though the prevalence
of monolingualism can no longer be taken for granted. Contrary to what
Kymlicka believes, plurilingualism and translation are not detrimental to democ-
racy, neither are they the reserve of a privileged intellectual elite, but rather the
source of much-needed reflexivity that allows us to distance ourselves from
our unexamined beliefs in light of the difference of others and to participate in
democratic decision-making among strangers.
Cosmopolitan designs based on the use of a lingua franca among diverse people
decouple language from identity in order to find in language a vehicle for new
democratic possibilities. But, as Mignolo’s decolonial perspective has already made
clear, an approach to languaging rather than language is required in order to
destabilise taken-for-granted assumptions that link language, culture, identity, and
territory to the nation (2000). Furthermore, as Godrej has suggested, we need to
break with the tendency to relegate this undertaking to the margins in order
to permeate our disciplines at large with a more genuine understanding of a
cosmopolitanism that is explicitly linked to dislocation, to an existential immersion
in the unfamiliar and to the theoretical illumination that this experience brings
forth (2009: 138).
Only from a plurilingual vision that articulates forms of hospitable translation
without reducing language to an instrument of communication, from a plur-
ilingual vision that is not ignorant of the politics of language and translation in a
highly unequal world, can we defend the use of a lingua franca of democracy.
Translation can serve as a cosmopolitan democratic means not because it pro-
vides a common idiom that we share with others or because it allows to
communicate ideas from one language into another, but because it can make us
step outside ourselves and meet others in their strangeness, creating new ways of
existing and inhabiting a world that we share with strangers whom we do not
understand.
Notes
1 For classical accounts of nationalism that trace its connection to processes of linguistic and
cultural homogenisation see Anderson (1983) and Gellner (1983). Renaissance literature
offers not only a glimpse of a material bodily principle that was a strong component
of medieval folk culture but also of an existing plurilingualism that crystallised in the
new novelistic genre as a literary contact zone (Bakhtin, 1981, 1984). For reflections of
the role of translation in colonial relations with plurilingual Others see Cheyfitz (1997),
Niranjana (1992) and Rafael (1993).
2 The preferred conceptual choice of plurilingualism in this chapter is to question views of
multilingualism as the coexistence of neatly defined distinct linguistic minorities within
federal political structures, identifying instead the simultaneous presence and use of
different languages both at the individual and group levels as an open challenge to en-
forced monolingualisation that has been part and parcel of the process of state formation.
3 This is not to suggest that a plurilingual vision has been promoted by the policies aimed
at the ‘normalisation’ of Catalan after Franco’s dictatorship. Rather, it can be seen as an
unintended effect of policies that could also threaten existing plurilingual practices,
particularly amongst native Catalan speakers.
4 This is reflected in the constitution of three separate cultural communities, Dutch-
speaking, French-speaking and German-speaking, which only partially overlap with the
three autonomous regions of its federal system. The division of some of its main uni-
versities along linguistic lines (Vrije Universiteit Brussel/Université libre de Bruxelles and
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven/Université catholique de Louvain) is a clear example of
these monolingualising policies.
5 A Eurobarometer survey shows that over half of Europeans (54%) are able to hold a
conversation in at least one additional language to their mother tongue, while regular
foreign language use is widespread, particularly with reference to watching films/tele-
vision or listening to the radio, using the internet and communicating with friends. The
proportion of Europeans who do not use a foreign language regularly in any situation
was only 9% in 2012 (European Commission, 2012). David Crystal estimated that ap-
proximately one in four of the world’s population is capable of communication to a
useful level in English (2003, p. 69).
6 For a discussion of Goethe’s views on world literature and translation see Berman (1992)
and Bielsa (2014, 2016).
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6
THE TRANSLATOR AS PRODUCER
Introduction
Since the so-called cultural turn in translation studies, the politics of translation
has been a persistent theme of reflection and theoretical elaboration because
it identifies the significance of translation in contexts marked by structural
inequality and cultural asymmetry. However, contemporary processes of glo-
balisation and cosmopolitanisation of reality increasingly challenge some of the
assumptions on which existing conceptualisations are based. There is also a
need to reexamine current disciplinary orientations in light of more general
interest in translation within the humanities and the social sciences as a basic
social relation across linguistic difference in a highly interconnected world.
This chapter seeks to contribute to this task by rethinking the politics of
translation from an essentially interdisciplinary perspective. It first examines
existing critiques to Lawrence Venuti’s famous formulation of the politics of
translation in terms of domesticating and foreignising translation. Second, in-
terdisciplinary approaches to a notion of translation as transformation are dis-
cussed. These challenge not only a still widespread understanding of translation
as transfer, but also views of the politics of translation as primarily a process of
textual transformation. A third section theorises the politicisation of translation
by developing an account of the translator as producer that is inspired by
Walter Benjamin’s approach to the politicisation of art. A fourth section
outlines an alternative conceptualisation of the politics of translation that de-
rives from this approach. It is envisaged that such a reconceptualisation, which
directly engages with wide-ranging social scientific concerns, can make the
theoretical and methodological perspectives of translation studies more relevant
for current interdisciplinary debates on translation.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003218890-9
The translator as producer 95
Moving authors and readers, home and abroad

The most influential contemporary formulation of the politics of translation refers
to, but also significantly alters, Schleiermacher’s classical account of the two
choices facing the translator. For Lawrence Venuti, if ‘the translator leaves the
author in peace as much as possible and moves the reader towards him’
(Schleiermacher, quoted in Venuti, 2008, p. 15) he is ‘sending the reader abroad’,
whereas if ‘he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the
author towards him’ (ibid.) he is ‘bringing the author back home’. Home and
abroad thus become the determining categories of what is conceptualised as do-
mesticating and foreignising translation. Domesticating translation is based upon
‘an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to receiving cultural values’, whereas
foreignising translation puts ‘an ethnodeviant pressure on those values to register
the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text’ (ibid.). Significantly,
rather than attributing the value of a foreignising practice to a transparent re-
presentation of a ‘foreign’ essence, Venuti conceives it as a ‘strategic construction’
which ‘signifies the differences of the foreign text, yet only by disrupting the
cultural codes that prevail in the translating language’ (ibid.). Foreignising practices
deviate from native norms to stage an alien reading experience, thus drawing
attention to the constructedness of any text and the partiality of any interpretation,
a fact which domesticating practice seeks to hide under the appearance of fluency.
Venuti’s advocacy of foreignising translation is explicitly formulated in the
context of the global hegemony of English and the unequal cultural exchanges
that English-language nations establish with more peripheral ones. This has
tended to drive attention away from its universalist claims and implications,
which are more readily acknowledged in Berman’s account of the ethical ob-
jective of translation against the ethnocentric trends that are present in any
culture (1992), or in Sakai’s call for forms of heterolingual address that do not
presuppose linguistically homogeneous communities (1997). In particular,
Venuti’s defence of foreignising translation has attracted criticism from those
who put forward the danger that minority languages or subaltern traditions incur
in opening themselves to influences from more prestigious, dominant ones
(Cronin, 1998, 147–48; Hatim, 1999, 219; Tymoczko, 2007, 211–12; Bennett,
2013, 171) or portray foreignising translation into a major language as poten-
tially ethnocentric and exoticising (Shamma, 2009). Nevertheless, a strategic
closure for the preservation of what is by definition impure and can only
constitute itself through cross-breeding and contamination, could also easily
deprive more marginal languages and traditions from the very flexibility that can
perhaps better contribute to their survival.1 Critics also readily forget that it is
extra-linguistic political structures (particularly states) that, by protecting and
enforcing the use of certain languages and not others in education and in or-
dinary social exchange, help to secure their preservation.
Another source of criticism has been directed at Venuti’s ‘sweeping dichoto-
mies’ for being overly theoretical constructs which fail to acknowledge the rich
positionality that translators adopt in relation to their texts, authors and societies,
and obscure their shifting positions within the same text (Baker, 2007, p. 152).
Again, this is a criticism mainly addressed to Venuti’s formulation, not to alter-
native but similarly dichotomical categorisations, from Schleiermacher to Berman.
It is undeniable that, from a practical standpoint, thoroughly and exclusively
foreignising or domesticating strategies seem difficult to sustain, so that it would
perhaps be more appropriate to conceive of Venuti’s concepts as two ends of
a continuous scale, rather than as binary opposites, and approach degrees of for-
eignisation and domestication, particularly in the empirical analysis of texts
(Pedersen, 2005; Scammell, 2018). Yet, alternative conceptualisations of the
politics of translation, such as that suggested from a narrative theory approach, in
focusing on the multiple positionings that condition translators’ agency and textual
choices, run the risk of failing to acknowledge the specifically translational nature
of the politics involved. If translation establishes a social relation with otherness
through language, then this politics primarily refers to how this very relationship
is approached, either from a standpoint that foregrounds the translational process
or from one which seeks to hide it. This is why Schleiermacher asserted that ‘there
are only two’ paths open to the translator and considered it necessary to insist on
this very dichotomical fact: ‘I wish to assert that there could be, besides these two
methods, no third one that would have a definite goal in mind. Actually, no other
methods are possible.’ (Schulte and Biguenet, 1992, pp. 42–43).
A more compelling criticism of Venuti’s dichotomy can be formulated if the
very nature of the domestic and the foreign is interrogated anew in the light of
thoroughgoing processes of globalisation and cosmopolitanisation of reality.
Whereas globalisation refers to increased interconnectedness at all levels of social
life, by emphasising the degree of ‘internal globalization’ or ‘globalization from
within the national societies’ (Beck, 2002: 17), cosmopolitanisation calls attention
to the fact that globalisation does not only involve interconnections across borders
but also causes fundamental transformations inside national societies. Thus, the
notion of cosmopolitanisation reveals the extent to which globalisation has created
a new reality of cultural mixing and contradiction in heterogeneous and diverse
societies in which ‘local, national, ethnic, religious and cosmopolitan cultures and
traditions interpenetrate, interconnect and intermingle’ (Beck, 2006: 7). In this
context, the boundaries between home and abroad that Venuti still takes for
granted are increasingly confused and the very position of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’
is changed (Beck and Grande, 2010, pp. 417–418). It is precisely this that Mattea
Cussel alludes to when she argues that ‘Lawrence Venuti’s ethical strategy of
foreignization succumbs to methodological nationalism and is inapplicable in
contexts of multiple subject positionings where the domestic/foreign binary does
not hold’ (2021, p. 113). In her study of translations of US Latino/a migrant stories
into Spanish, Cussel describes one of such contexts with reference to hybrid texts
where categories of domestic and foreign are inextricably entangled, analysing
their reception by translocal networks of readers that do not belong to homo-
geneously conceived cultural groups.
The blurring of traditional distinctions between the domestic and the foreign
is not limited to hybrid genres of literature, which arguably reach a relatively
small number of readers, but is also widely perceivable in the mass media, which
increasingly cater for transnational audiences of various kinds that do not clearly
belong to fixed territories and national structures. Of particular interest in this
context are what Adrian Athique theorises as ‘non-resident’ audiences, to des-
ignate audiences that ‘engage with a media artefact in a context where the
diegetic world cannot reasonably be claimed to be “about here and about us”’
(2014, p. 10). Certainly, the unequal character of contemporary globalisation is
echoed in the rising global awareness of the cultural specificity of certain
countries and not others through the news. This is the case, for instance, of
international coverage of US domestic politics, which increasingly defies the
assumed need for domesticating translations that privilege fluency and the ex-
pectations of the target reader (after all, international news readers in many
different languages have become aware of the specific realities of US political life
through the use of very foreign English terms such as ‘impeachment’, ‘battle-
ground states’ or even ‘Rust Belt states’).2 However, the destabilisation of
previously taken-for-granted categories of domestic and foreign is also more
generally observed, at least with respect to what can be approached through
notions of ‘global domestic politics’ (Beck, 2012), from financial crises to cli-
mate change. Moreover, changing conditions of production and reception are
also widely perceivable in film, video and television, where the multiplication of
networks of voluntary and fan translators has generated new forms of cultural
and political activism that question traditional distinctions between producers
and consumers of texts. In the third section of this chapter, Walter Benjamin’s
early theorisation of the type of phenomenon that is today approached through
the notion of the ‘prosumer’ will be addressed in order to formulate a con-
temporary approach to the politicisation of translation that is inspired by his
account of the politicisation of art.
Before that, it is necessary to widen the scope of current debates on the politics
of translation within translation studies, which have tended to remain limited by a
privileged focus on textual strategies, traditional notions of author and text which
no longer correspond to the extensive variety of translation forms in the real
world, and a static approach to the distinction between text and context. This
means challenging the dominance of accounts that are primarily centred on tex-
tuality and going beyond the notion of texts and textual effects, on the one hand,
and current conceptions of the agency of translators in terms of individual textual
choices, on the other. To this end, three strategic changes are proposed. First, the
notion that translation is not primarily about texts, not even about texts in their
contexts, but about social relations. Consequently, a politics of translation is not
just about the deployment of textual strategies, but about social positioning with
respect to difference and strangeness, an important issue which is empirically
explored in relation to different types of translating strangers in chapter 8. Second,
the principle that translation is not about the transfer of meaning, but about
transformation. As I have already argued in chapter 2, the ideological primacy of

translation as transfer, based upon the central concept of equivalence, has been
convincingly challenged within translation studies. However, the great scope and
potential of a notion of translation as transformation, as opposed to transfer, is
more radically advanced in recent scholarship developed in other disciplines, such
as policy studies, international relations or human rights studies. The next section
discusses these perspectives and identifies their value for translation studies. Third,
structural factors and unequal power relations significantly condition the agency of
translators. Challenging the invisibility of translation requires reconceptualising the
structural positioning of translators, their productive role and their stakes, so as to
question still widely held individualistic views of translator’s choice and/or neu-
trality. An approach that articulates translator’s agency in this way is developed in
section three.
Interdisciplinary approaches to translation

as transformation
In the disciplines of policy studies, international relations and human rights
studies translation is primarily approached in terms of transformation, rather than
as equivalence or transfer. Moreover, the notion of translation is explicitly adopted
to critique conventional views of ‘policy transfer’, ‘policy diffusion’ or ‘policy
learning’, which assume a relatively straightforward and transparent process of linear,
top-down transmission (Merry, 2006; Freeman, 2009; Stone, 2012, 2017; Clarke
et al., 2015; Berger, 2017; Berger and Esguerra, 2018; Destrooper and Merry, 2018).
By contrast, approaches centred on translation highlight how policies acquire new
meanings in different contexts, often in unanticipated ways, how human rights –
which have become a social justice global lingua franca (Destrooper, 2021) – are
remade in the vernacular (Merry, 2006), bringing attention to the dynamism,
complexity and a priori unknowable outcomes when policies or human rights
norms move from one place to another. Movement is, in addition to transformation,
the other basic process associated with translation in these fields. As we have
seen above, movement is also a major element in conceptions of the politics of
translation within translation studies, which have directed attention to the fact that
translation leaves neither its object nor its agent unchanged. However, we are
dealing here with conceptualisations of movement not primarily in terms of textual
strategies and effects, but in terms of emerging social relations between previously
unconnected people, materials and things. Translation makes possible the estab-
lishment of new connections, often approached as networks and assemblages, be-
tween different actors or entities, human and non-human. Although entering
relations and becoming entangled in newly created networks through processes of
translation, these numerous entities are and remain inextricably different. Thus,
insights originally developed within the sociology of translation approach of Actor-
Network theory (Callon and Latour, 1981; Callon, 1984) are extended to other
fields in productive ways.
The conceptual move from transfer to translation is not a small change of

emphasis but has rather far-reaching consequences for how policies and norms
are conceived, the role of various types of social actors approached, the interplay
between the local and the global conceptualised, and even for a reflexive re-
consideration of these disciplines. First, through translation policies or norms
appear as unfinished processes, rather than as finished objects, and the ambiguity
that accompanies movement is highlighted. As Richard Freeman notes, ‘(w)hat
is central to both theoretical and applied discussions of translation (…) is the
acknowledgement of uncertainty, the centrality of practice, and the recognition
of complexity’ (2009, pp. 439–440). In this way, the assumed straightforward-
ness of policy transfer, viewed as a mechanical, technocratic or merely rational
operation of diffusion, is questioned. Discontinuities and disturbances that
challenge binary assessments of the ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of policy transfer (Stone,
2017) are brought into view, as is the innovation and creativity that translation
implies, while translators are approached as key agents that make possible the
successful adoption of policies or norms in the receiving context. Second, and
closely related to the first point, a whole wealth of non-state actors at the local
level suddenly gain not just visibility but also agency in determining the content
of policies and norms at the local level. Translation is seen as inherently political
because it opens up spaces of contestation and resistance that are downplayed in
notions of policy diffusion and policy learning. For instance, in his study of the
translation of ‘the rule of law’ in non-state courts in Bangladesh, Tobias Berger
discovers that the work of translation undertaken by employees of local NGOs
(fieldworkers and court assistants) alters established dynamics of conflict re-
solution; where this work is lacking and projects are implemented directly
through international agencies ‘the project’s artefacts simply turn into empty
ruins, devoid of meaning or impact in the landscape of local conflict resolution
in rural Bangladesh’ (2017, p. 9). In this context, the task of the translator is to
transform international norms, to give them new meaning in a way that re-
sonates with the background knowledge of the locals; it is precisely this re-
sonance that in turn promotes social and political change at the local level.
Third, in focusing on the construction of policy or norms as an unfinished
business, rather than on the transfer of rules from one place to the other, analyses
of policy or norm translation also question the methodological nationalism that
has led social scientists to construct the sites of policy/norm making and im-
plementation as stable bounded units and to take these units for granted, as well
as the implicit historicism of notions of diffusion. Approaches to translation
destabilise these units and presuppositions, referring to a two-way construction
process instead of a one-way linear process of communication. Finally, trans-
lation can serve to disrupt often unquestioned disciplinary categories and make
visible dynamics of change that have been ignored in policy studies, interna-
tional relations or human rights scholarship, as ‘an interest in how policy moves
unsettles taken-for-granted conceptions of ‘policy’ itself, rendering strange that
which is generally considered to be familiar’ (Clarke et al., 2015, p. 12).
These social scientific disciplines are borrowing insights on translation de-

veloped in postcolonial studies, translation studies and science and technology
studies in order to develop groundbreaking approaches that destabilise central
concepts referring to the transnational circulation of policies and norms, as well
as their taken-for-granted disciplinary orientations. It is my contention that
the discipline of translation studies can, in turn, learn from these borrowings
and articulations to develop a new perspective on its main object of study, a
perspective that, by engaging in wider social scientific concerns, provides
a clearer view of translation’s key role in society at large. This is a form of
interdisciplinarity that can deepen already existing calls for an enlargement
of translation (Tymoczko, 2007), as well as critiques to some of the discipline’s
long-established conventions. Furthermore, a perspective on how norms and
policies are translated when they move can help promote new approaches that
are more directly relevant to other disciplines in the humanities and the social
sciences, thus increasing the influence and scope of the discipline in the context
of a more general translational turn (Bachmann-Medick, 2009).
New insights for translation studies can be gained if we contemplate not just
norms in translation but the translation of norms. In addition to highlighting the
key notion of translation as transformation, attending to the movement of norms
helps to question the self-evident nature of concepts and texts, by focusing
instead on the social processes through which they are produced. On the one
hand, translation is never just about texts, but also about the social practices
in which texts are embedded. This concerns, for instance in Berger’s research,
a translation that goes beyond the intralingual/interlingual distinction and
which encompasses the following two processes: the translation of documenting
practices (in which the official documents that international agencies envisage as
neutral carriers of information become endowed with symbolic capital in fa-
cilitating the access of poor and marginalised people to local elected politicians),
and the translation of the liberal rule of law into a normative vocabulary that
is intelligible in rural Bangladesh through the language of Islamic law (2017).3
On the other hand, as various social actors translate in various sites and in
different directions, substantially transforming what is being translated, the
notions of source and target text become too narrow to capture this existing
multiplicity. Thus, Freeman describes translation as ‘the result of multiple
iterations by multiple actors’, referring to ‘complex and continuing commu-
nicative relationships’ in which ‘the sense of ‘source’ or ‘origin’ is simply a
translation we have failed to reconstruct’ (2009, p. 441).
Berger approaches the translation of norms in terms of the production of new
social, political and legal objects, considering it as a political task because it in-
tervenes and disrupts existing power relations (2017, pp. 28–29). This under-
standing not only challenges accounts in international relations, which would see
global norms as originals and local translations as mere derivates but also dominant
conceptions about source texts and target texts in translation studies. Thus, Berger
conceptualises a ‘translation circle’ that disrupts prevailing linear conceptions of
movement in international relations to highlight how norms ‘are translated in a

back and forth movement between different actors located in different contexts;
and none of these contexts can claim analytical primacy’ (2017, p. 30). The most
direct implication of this move is that claims to originality must be treated, first and
foremost, as claims to authority (2017, p. 31). Indeed, as Theo Hermans has also
convincingly argued, processes of authentication draw our attention to the fact
that equivalence cannot be obtained from texts but is rather created by institutional
contexts of intervention (2007, p. 6). In such cases, full equivalence, understood as
equality in value and status between a translation and its original, is the result of
endowing both with the same level of authority, which means that the translation
has ceased to function as such, that it has ceased to be a translation (2007, p. 7).
More generally, studies of policy and/or norm translation reveal that it is ne-
cessary to go beyond a consideration of translation as a process of mediating lin-
guistic and cultural differences in order to highlight how translation mobilises a
whole range of socially acquired knowledge that has been internalised and become
second nature (a dimension adequately captured in Bourdieu’s notion of habitus),
serves to create connections and establish new social relationships and is a form
of political intervention that significantly modifies existing power relations.
Approaches to cultural translation, which reflect on the significance of the cultural
turn and the cultural struggles brought about by the politics of identity (see, for
instance, the debate in Translation Studies, 2:2, 2009), do not go far enough in
adequately accounting for these basic social and political dimensions. If there is any
added value in a so-called sociological turn in translation studies, it is precisely in
arguing for a more sociologically aware conception of culture not as an essen-
tialised, fundamentally homogeneous and clearly delimited whole, but as a set
of highly diverse and unequally positioned signifying practices that are a major
constitutive element of the social order, which they communicate, reproduce and
explore (Williams, 1981).
Politicising translation
This section develops an approach to the politicisation of translation that extends
Walter Benjamin’s views on the politicisation of art, most clearly articulated in his
essays ‘The Author as Producer’ (1934) and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction’ (1935). Such an extension is justified on the grounds
of Benjamin’s own approach to the task of the translator as creative transformation,
as well as his views on the significance of technique and the masses in calling for a
functional transformation of art.4 The revolutionary change that Benjamin could
detect, nearly 100 years ago, in cinema audiences which absorbed films in a state of
collective distraction or in the readers who gained access to authorship in the
Soviet press, is expressed today in the impatience of fans who take the translation
of their favourite works into their own hands, as well as in the distracted con-
sumers who ordinarily make use of common translating apps. As in the case of art,
the functional transformation of translation emancipates translation from its ritual
function (the remnants of which are still very much present in conventional views
of the sacrality of the author and of the original text) and challenges, at the same
time, prevalent individualistic views of the translator as expert and owner of the
means of production.
In ‘The Author as Producer’, Benjamin examines the issue of political tendency
as inseparable from literary tendency not in relation to ‘rigid, isolated things as
work, novel, book’, but to the ‘living social contexts’ of which they are a part
(1999, p. 769). For him, this does not refer to vague notions of general social
conditions or even, in a materialist sense, to the work’s attitude towards the social
relations of production of its time. His ‘more immediate’, ‘less far-reaching’
question refers to the position of works within those relations: it ‘directly concerns
the function the work has within the literary relations of production of its time. It
is concerned, in other words, directly with the literary technique of works’ (1999,
p. 770). In this conception, technique is what ‘makes literary products accessible to
an immediately social, and therefore materialist, analysis’, and ‘literary tendency
can consist either in progress or in regression of literary technique’ (ibid.). A focus
on technical factors forces a reconsideration of prevalent conceptions of literary
forms and genres, as well as a historicisation of their dominance (such as in the case
of the novel) or apparent marginality (such as is the case of commentary or
translation). It also points in the direction of ‘a melting down in which many of
the opposites in which we have been used to think may lose their force’, most
notably that between author and reader (1999, pp. 771–772). It allows Benjamin
to identify, even in those who have shown a revolutionary tendency in their
attitudes, a counterrevolutionary function ‘so long as the writer feels his solidarity
with the proletariat only in his attitudes, not as a producer’ (1999, p. 772), such as
in the left-wing intellectual movements of Activism and New Objectivity.
For Benjamin, the alternative model of an artist who actively transforms the
forms and instruments of production in a progressive way is found in Brecht’s epic
theatre and its logics of Umfunktionierung (functional transformation), a term ori-
ginally coined by Brecht. The ‘decisive difference’ between Brecht’s revolutionary
intervention and the counterrevolutionary effects of widespread revolutionary
attitudes lies in ‘the mere supplying of a productive apparatus and its transfor-
mation’ (1999, p. 774). Moreover, in a context in which the existing apparatus
of production is capable of assimilating ‘astonishing quantities of revolutionary
themes’, the production of such themes, however well-intentioned, can only end
up having the opposite effect, namely the aestheticisation of politics, because it
possesses ‘no other social function than to wring from the political situation a
continuous stream of novel effects for the entertainment of the public’ (ibid.).
Benjamin seeks the politicisation of art precisely in the breaking-down of
barriers that technical progress allows: barriers between different genres, between
different expressive forms (such as photography and writing), and between readers
and writers. This is because ‘only by transcending the specialization in the process
of intellectual production – a specialization that, in the bourgeois view, constitutes
its order – can one make this production politically useful’ (1999, p. 775).
Politicisation thus implies the socialisation of the author’s means of production,

because what matters is ‘to induce other producers to produce’, with ‘an improved
apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better, the more consumers it is
able to turn into producers – that is, readers or spectators into collaborators’ (1999,
p. 777). Ultimately, Benjamin ‘presents the writer with only one demand: the
demand to think, to reflect on his position in the process of production’ (1999,
p. 779). However, this demand implies renouncing long-held beliefs in the author
as creator and advancing views for a more modest position. As Benjamin warns us,
the proletarianization of an intellectual hardly ever makes a proletarian.

Why? Because the bourgeois class gave him, in the form of education, a
means of production that, owing to educational privilege, makes him feel
solidarity with it, and still more it with him. (1999, p. 780)
Writers cannot become proletarians. Nevertheless, the politicisation of art leads

them to use their privilege – that is, their means of production – to betray their
class of origin:
In the case of the writer, this betrayal consists in conduct that transforms
him from a supplier of the productive apparatus into an engineer who
sees it as his task to adapt this apparatus to the purposes of the proletarian
revolution. (ibid.)
Today, a more distant perspective on the demise of the historical avant-garde

(Bürger, 1984), which failed to transform life and was successfully incorporated
into the museum instead, might bring us to consider the silence of Kafka’s
Josephine or the undisturbed peacefulness of ignored works of art (Bielsa, 2021) as
more realistic alternatives than Benjamin’s revolutionary optimism. Nevertheless,
I believe it is still possible to argue for the functional transformation not of art but
of translation, precisely because it is considered in our society a more instrumental,
less intrinsically valuable undertaking. Moreover, when Benjamin’s views on the
author as producer are applied to the translator a whole new landscape is revealed
which destabilises current approaches to the politics of translation, as well as to
translation’s most basic categories. In this case, the ‘melting-down’ of forms and
genres that Benjamin identified and related to the technical developments of his
present refers to long-standing distinctions such as that between source text and
target text, intralingual and interlingual translation, as well as to the fundamental
distinction between writers (now, specifically, translators) and readers. It thus
becomes necessary to reexamine the politics of translation in this direction.
Such a reflection starts by noting the adequacy of a dichotomy (whether in
Venuti’s concepts or in those of Schleiermacher) which is, from the start, for-
mulated in terms of (translating) technique, not of political tendency. This is the
reason why Schleiermacher insisted that only two translating methods are possible.
Because, as Benjamin asserts: ‘The best political tendency is wrong if it does not
demonstrate the attitude with which it is to be followed. And this attitude the
writer can demonstrate only in his particular activity – that is, in writing’ (1999,
p. 777). However, it is also necessary to radicalise existing approaches to the
politics of translation by referring the outcomes of translating technique not to
textual effects but to social transformations, to ‘living social contexts’. The in-
terdisciplinary accounts of the translation of policy and human rights norms dis-
cussed in the previous section provide an appropriate conceptualisation of such
transformations in relation to widely divergent local and transnational contexts.
Benjamin’s materialist approach led him to consider the writer’s position in the
process of production as central, and such a view is also compelling with reference
to translation. It implies conceiving the translator not as a mere supplier of the
productive apparatus in its infinite appetite for an ever-growing amount of
translations but, like an engineer, as someone who can change it in the direction
of giving users of translations more means through which to engage with them, of
turning consumers into producers. This is even more relevant today than in
Benjamin’s time when unprecedented numbers of people are using translation to
relate to others in a highly interconnected world and are demanding a more active
role as producers of translations through whatever means they can find. But the
demand to transcend intellectual specialisation and to approach the translator as
producer also challenges long-held beliefs about translation and might even be
seen to counter some existing vindications of the translator’s more prominent role.
Calls for the revaluation of the position of the translator can be counterproductive
if they are implicitly based on extending the sacrality of the author to the trans-
lator, because they are reminiscent of what Benjamin saw in terms of art’s ritual
function, to which the politicisation of art and translation is opposed. This is why a
consideration of the translator as producer calls for a more modest but highly
interventionist role of the translator in the direction of the overturning of the
cultural privileges which translators often share with authors, and the socialisation
of their means of production. Modesty is precisely what Benjamin saw in Brecht’s
epic theatre, which he considered as a model for the type of transformation sought:
Its means are therefore more modest than those of traditional theater;
likewise its aims. It is concerned less with filling the public with feelings,
even seditious ones, than with alienating it in an enduring way, through
thinking, from the conditions in which it lives. (1999, p. 779)
The next, final section of this chapter proposes a new conceptual framework that
can more adequately capture translation’s modest but far-reaching transformative
intervention.
Assimilatory and reflexive translation: an outline

Two alternative methods or translation techniques are proposed below in which a
similar contrast can be observed between a translation that ‘fills the public with
feelings’ and one that, through thinking, distances the public from the conditions
in which it lives, particularly those that directly relate to linguistic difference and
its mediation.
First, I propose the concept of assimilatory translation to refer to a type of
translation that mainly operates by applying tried and tested solutions to linguistic
difference, mostly in terms of preestablished equivalences. Assimilatory translation
has the great advantage of being the most effective form of communicating ideas
and of relying on preexisting routines, which enormously simplify translation
work. It seeks to fit cultural and linguistic difference to available conventions in
the translating culture, thus constructing an image of unmediated access to the
other which obscures that translation has taken place. Similar in this aspect to
Venuti’s notion of domestication, assimilatory translation has the important ad-
vantage of making visible its direct connection with extensive cultural and political
practices that have been the mark of modern capitalist societies. Assimilation is a
familiar term and has been widely discussed in the social sciences, particularly in
relation to the process of acculturation required of immigrants in order to adapt to
new societies. After its unquestioned acceptance in the 1950s and 1960s, its un-
derlying ethnocentrism was fundamentally challenged and new multiculturalist
policies were pursued to foster forms of integration that are considered more just
(Kymlicka, 1995). However, assimilation continues to be an important element
of contemporary cultural politics in persisting debates on the presence and ac-
commodation of Muslims in the West (Modood, 2013) or in renewed calls for
policing cultural homogeneity from populism and the far right (Traverso, 2019).
On the other hand, the concept of assimilation is not essentially foreign to
translation studies and has already been employed to highlight the significance of
prevailing translation strategies. Take, for instance, the following example relating
to the work of academic translators:
Our job is, essentially, to present the alien knowledge in a form that will enable
it to be assimilated into one or another of the ready-made categories existing
for the purpose, which means ensuring that it is properly structured, that it
makes use of the appropriate terminology and tropes – in short, couching it
in the accepted discourse. (Bennett, 2007, 154, emphasis added)
In this example, Karen Bennett refers to what it takes to make a text originating in
countries like Portugal or Spain suitable for publication in English, which ‘often
involves not only the elimination of characteristic lexical features and ornament
but also the complete destruction and reconstruction of the entire infrastructure of
the text, with far-reaching consequences as regards the worldview encoded in it’
(2007, p. 155), a process of assimilation which she describes as a form of episte-
micide. It is the mark of assimilatory translation that once it has taken place it
cannot be reconstructed or undone, as the heterogeneity of the original has been
effectively eliminated through a translating process that presents itself as both in-
visible and final at the same time.
A second, alternative method of translation that I will refer to as reflexive

translation fundamentally calls into question both this assertion of translation as
a finished and univocal process and the translators’ ownership of the decisions
and choices that translation entails. Reflexive translation constitutes a pro-
gressive form of translation in a postmonolingual world because it does not seek
to occlude the linguistic and cultural heterogeneity that are a mark of highly
diverse and interconnected societies. Moreover, by challenging the translator’s
ownership of his or her means of production and opening up translators’ in-
terventions to the scrutiny of users of translation, it works in the direction of a
functional transformation that not only turns consumers into producers but also
serves to better equip translation for the key mediating function it plays in the
contemporary world. Instead of offering a final interpretation of a complex
cultural object and hiding its partiality, by making itself visible in different ways
reflexive translation calls its users to reflect on the decisions facing the translator
and on how translator’s choices affect what is communicated and the way
translations are used. Through these means, reflexive translation challenges a
notion of translation as a mechanical process of word substitution, which is still
widely prevalent in society at large, thus contributing to the increased aware-
ness of translation’s social and political significance. As is the case of assimila-
tion, reflexivity is already part of the basic vocabulary of sociology (Giddens,
1991a, 1991b; Beck, 1992; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992; Beck, Giddens and
Lash, 1994; Archer, 2007, 2012), so that it directly speaks to social scientific
concerns.
I am not the first to suggest the notion of reflexive translation, but rather
benefit from a productive series of interdisciplinary borrowings through which it
is starting to take shape. Arguably, Benjamin himself already pointed in such a
direction in a mature text on translation written only a couple of years after ‘The
Author as Producer’. This text, entitled ‘Translation – For and Against’, is
analysed in some detail in the next chapter. The concept of reflexive translation
also appears in some of the approaches to policy translation discussed above.
Thus, Freeman has referred to translation’s fundamental epistemological un-
certainty as a source of innovation and creativity, specifying that ‘the translator’s
first task may be to identify not (or not only) the knowledge that is to be
translated, but the uncertainty that surrounds it’ and explicitly suggesting as a
role for theory ‘to make of translation a reflexive, conscious and critical practice’
(2009, p. 440). Similarly, Clarke et al. have identified a fascinating instance of
reflexive translation in an article by Ingrid Palmary (2011) where ‘the making
visible of possible translations created a reflexive moment where the very ca-
tegories of her research framework were brought into focus’ (Clarke et al.,
2015, p. 61).
Palmary’s account of how translation fundamentally shapes social research is
telling and can make a significant contribution to critical approaches to trans-
lation ethics within translation studies because it raises concerns regarding
professional conventions and how these might actually clash with ethical and
reflexive approaches to translation, an issue which has also been raised by Moira
Inghilleri in the context of legal interpreting (2012). Two different types of
interpreters contributed to Palmary’s fieldwork with migrant women in South
Africa: whereas the professionally trained interpreter provided her with trans-
parent translations that significantly limited researcher’s awareness of translator’
choices and her intervention in the negotiation of meanings that took place
between participants, interpreter and researcher, another interpreter who was
not formally trained in translation opened up complex words to overt nego-
tiations over meaning. This interpreter’s more modest practice set the stage for a
whole range of productive reflections that not only brought light on the actual
choices and meanings discussed but significantly impacted on the research
process as a whole:
These were unusual moments in a research process where decisions taken

by interpreters was [sic] typically unavailable to me – either because I did not
understand the source language and so could not evaluate the interpretation
offered, or because all of us in the interview took these choices for granted.
The moments where translation was difficult therefore provided productive
analytic starting points for this study and created new tensions in my
attempts to understand how, in researching migrant narratives, place-based
identity is reproduced and constructed. This functioned to highlight the
inevitability of these political practices in all of the interviews I conducted in
spite of them being predominantly invisible to me as the researcher.
(Palmary, 2011, p. 100).
Interestingly, reflexive translation also gave Palmary a new perspective on her own
unexamined assumptions stemming from a liberal humanist moment in western
feminism (2011, pp. 106–107).
This is, of course, not an argument for the use of untrained translators, but one
which foregrounds the need to unlearn some widespread conventional practices
that are currently taken to define the profession of translators and interpreters, and
which might actually be detrimental to reflexive, critical forms of translation that
seek to socialise what is currently still seen as the prerogative of professionals to the
users of translation at large. If, as Freeman noted, there is a role for a theory
of translation beyond Steiner’s notion of ‘narratives of translational praxis’
(2009, p. 440), it is precisely to reflect on the social conditions of possibility of
accepted practice, as well as to alert professionals to the inequalities that this
practice helps to reproduce.
Conclusion
There are increasing signs of what was, perhaps a little prematurely, welcomed
as a much expected translational turn (Bachmann-Medick, 2009), which would
establish the centrality of translation in the humanities and social sciences.
The discipline of translation studies is called to play a key role in this trans-
lational turn, but only if it can develop an enlarged conceptual apparatus that
directly speaks to wider interdisciplinary concerns about the transformative role
of translation in social life. In this context, it becomes necessary to rethink
long-standing debates and disciplinary orientations. This chapter has engaged
with views of translation as transformation developed in the disciplines of
policy studies, international relations and human rights studies in order to
question existing approaches to the politics of translation that are primarily
conceived in terms of individual translator choice and textual effects. Through
Walter Benjamin’s approach to the politicisation of art, it has argued for the
politicisation of translation based on an understanding of the translator as
producer. A politics of translation that socialises the translator’s means of
production contributes to raise social awareness of the complexity of translation
and makes users of translation complicit with the inevitable choices that all
translations entail. It also works in the direction of turning consumers into
producers in a context in which increasing numbers of people are seeking to
become the authors of the translations they use. The new concepts that I
propose to define the politics of translation in this direction – assimilatory
translation and reflexive translation – have also been chosen to directly address
major debates about the realities of contemporary societies in social scientific
disciplines.
The translational turn calls for a reexamination of some of the basic concepts
of the discipline of translation studies in a new light if it is to centrally con-
tribute to the development of the theoretical and conceptual apparatus of a
sociology of translation that would otherwise be in danger of becoming
a conception of translation without language, as I have argued in chapter 3.
One of translation studies’ key contributions is precisely in revealing the
centrality of processes of linguistic transformation for any notion of translation.
In so far as the translational turn also consists in a push to critique and reex-
amine basic disciplinary orientations and notions that have been systematically
ignored or taken for granted, reflexive translation, in the way it has been
approached in this chapter, can also become a key interdisciplinary practice
in this direction.
Notes
1 Derrida approached such forms of closure as leading to a logic of autoimmunity that
can only end in self-destruction (see, for instance, Borradori, Derrida, and Habermas,
2003).
2 For an empirical analysis of news reception with real readers that examines their re-
sponses to domesticating and foreignising approaches see Scammell and Bielsa (2022).
3 For another account beyond the intralingual/interlingual divide that not only considers
translation within the same language or between different languages, but also between
theoretical systems and paradigms, see Fruela Fernández’s study of translation in the 15M
movement and its afterlives in Spain (2021). This approach necessarily leads its author
to embrace a productive concept of ‘expanded translation’.
4 I have discussed Benjamin’s approach to the politicisation of art in ‘The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in chapter 4 of my book Cosmopolitanism and
Translation (2016). An interpretation of Benjamin’s essay ‘The Task of the Translator’ is
offered in chapter 7 of the present book.
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PART III
Translation and experience
7
TRANSLATION AND MODERNITY:
BENJAMIN’S BAUDELAIRE
… there is a philosophical genius that is characterized by a yearning for that language

which manifests itself in translations.
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1996b, p. 259)
Introduction
This chapter focusses on Walter Benjamin’s approach to the experience of
modernity through his long-term engagement with the poetry of Charles
Baudelaire. Benjamin translated Baudelaire and produced a theoretical reflection
on translation based on this experience in his famous essay ‘The Task of the
Translator’ (1996b). Years later, he would place Baudelaire at the centre of
his attempt to reconstruct the prehistory of modernity in Paris, capital of the
19th century, in his great unfinished work The Arcades Project (1999e).
In spite of the proliferation of interpretations, it is striking how Benjamin’s
early undertaking of translating Baudelaire and his late project of interpreting
Baudelaire have not been considered as fundamentally connected. Translation
studies scholars have repeatedly approached one of Benjamin’s most cryptic essays,
‘The Task of the Translator’, without relating it to Benjamin’s interpretation of
Baudelaire, even failing to ponder on how Benjamin’s thought experienced sig-
nificant changes in later years which bear on the interpretation of this early piece.1
Sociologists have focussed on Benjamin’s interpretation of Baudelaire for an ar-
ticulation of modern experience and a theory of modernity without pausing
to reflect on how the experience of translating Baudelaire feeds into this inter-
pretation and, more generally, on the significance of Benjamin’s approach to
language for such an undertaking. Given sociology’s overwhelming silence on
matters regarding multilingualism and translation, its lack of attention to
Benjamin’s practice and reflection on translation is not surprising. More puzzling is
DOI: 10.4324/9781003218890-11
116 Translation and experience
how even the most sophisticated and sustained engagement with ‘The Task of the
Translator’, Antoine Berman’s The Age of Translation (2018), a book-length
commentary on Benjamin’s key essay, fails to consider how Benjamin’s inter-
pretation of Baudelaire relates to what Berman calls the underlying systematicity
of Benjamin’s broken writing (2018, p. 32).
This chapter brings to light the relationship between translating and inter-
preting Baudelaire in Benjamin’s work, attempting to recover a systematicity in
his thought that escapes from traditional disciplinary borders and conventional
distinctions between translation, writing and critique. In order to do so, it reads
Benjamin’s key text on ‘The Task of the Translator’ in light of major issues that
can only be clarified with reference to his later adoption of historical materi-
alism, actualising Benjamin’s early essay so as to dispel partial interpretations
which are still dominant in the secondary literature (section 1). Conversely, it
approaches Benjamin’s interpretation of Baudelaire as the writer of modern life
as a revision of philosophical concerns that were first developed in his meta-
physics of language and translation (section 2). A concluding section explores
how Benjamin’s approach relates to a materialist physiognomics which puts
language and translation at the heart of a critique of modernity. Such an un-
dertaking must be seen as a key contribution to what I characterise as a trans-
lational sociology, which espouses a non-reductive approach to the multiplicity
of languages in social life.
By uncovering an essentially coherent view of the social significance of lan-
guage and translation throughout Benjamin’s intellectual trajectory, this chapter
also calls attention to a generally underresearched aspect of his theory of modern
experience, as existing scholarship has emphasised the graphic and visual elements
that are associated with dialectical images, rather than Benjamin’s linguistic ap-
proach. Indeed, as Beatrice Hanssen has argued, ‘for all the methodological and
ideological approaches Benjamin espoused over the years, his writings on language
as a whole displayed a remarkable unity; they all enacted – performed – an un-
wavering critique of rationalistic, instrumentalist, or aestheticizing conceptions
of language and rhetoric in the medium of language.’ (2006: 54).
Translating Baudelaire: articulating the task of translation

Benjamin’s interest in translation is at the centre of his early concern with the
philosophy of language. This is evidenced in the first essay where he considers
the subject, ‘On Language as Such and the Language of Man’ (1996a), written in
1916, where he employs a wide definition of translation, asserting that
knowledge originates in translation (and, specifically, in ‘the translation of the
language of things into the language of man’), reveals a simultaneous interest in
the multiplicity of languages (as opposed to a concern with origins), and offers a
view of translation as transformation. ‘The Task of the Translator’ differs from
this more general account because it originates as a reflexive engagement with
Benjamin’s own translation of Baudelaire’s ‘Tableaux parisiens’ into German.
Translation and modernity 117
It was originally published in 1923 as its foreword.2 Its focus is thus a more
restricted but, at the same time, more profound examination of the particula-
rities of translation in its interlinguistic dimensions. Written in 1921 after a long
intermittent engagement with the translation of poems from Baudelaire’s Fleurs
du mal which was initiated in 1914 (Eiland and Jennings, 2014), ‘The Task of
the Translator’ shows two major forms of continuity with the reflection on
language contained in Benjamin’s earlier text: a consideration of translation in
its non-instrumental dimensions and an appeal to its metaphysical and mystical
aspects. Against the ‘bourgeois conception of language’, the 1916 essay explicitly
rejected instrumentalism through the articulation of an alternative approach
which ‘knows no means, no object, and no addressee of communication’
(1996a, p. 65). Benjamin’s perspective of communicating ‘in language and not
through language’ (1996a, p. 63) is preserved in ‘The Task of the Translator’,
where an unsatisfactory emphasis on mental and linguistic being and an evo-
cation of an Adamic theory of naming in the earlier essay is reorientated towards
a concern with the historical character of languages.
It is customary to remark on Benjamin’s single-handed refusal to consider
reception as a relevant factor in any critical appreciation of the work and, con-
sequently, of (literary) translation (see, for instance, de Man, 1986; Benjamin,
2014; Berman, 2018). ‘The Task of the Translator’ starts, in fact, with the fol-
lowing statement: ‘In the appreciation of a work of art or an art form, con-
sideration of the receiver never proves fruitful’, in a paragraph that ends by
positing that ‘No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no
symphony for the audience’ (1996b, p. 253). This contrasts with Benjamin’s
position in his last text on Baudelaire, ‘On Some Motifs on Baudelaire’ (written in
1939), where he is positively approached as addressing a reader who can no longer
connect with lyric poetry. It is also difficult to avoid relating translatability, a
central concern in ‘The Task of the Translator’, to reproducibility, which
Benjamin sees as a key characteristic of cultural forms like photography and ci-
nema which, thanks to new technological means, serve to bring art closer to
the masses, eager to lay their hands on works which they receive in a state of
distraction.3 As Reiner Rochlitz has argued, coming into contact with the literary
and political avant-garde in 1924–25 (particularly surrealism, Proust, Kraus,
Kafka, Brecht, photography and Russian cinema) overturned Benjamin’s entire
philosophical perspective:
According to the central idea of his early philosophy, true language

communicated itself only to God or expressed human essence through the
authentic exercise of the faculty of naming. The avant-garde, on the
contrary, was seeking to affect the receiver. For Benjamin, traditional art
enclosed truth in its being or its substance; avant-garde art was related to truth
through its action on the receiver or through its function. Its addressee was no
longer God but, rather, the profane public, those who were open to
contributing to the transformation of the world. (Rochlitz, 1996, p. 115)
In light of subsequent developments in Benjamin’s thought, it is thus not the lack

of engagement with reception but rather Benjamin’s non-instrumental approach
to translation, which excludes any function of language as communication, that
should be taken as key to an interpretation of ‘The Task of the Translator’. This
leads Benjamin to consider translation as a form which is essentially related to the
original’s translatability. A translatable work calls for translation. This inverts
conventional wisdom on translation (the notion that it serves readers who cannot
understand the original) and has far-reaching consequences that point towards an
alternative conception. Like criticism, with which it is inextricably related,
translation manifests a ‘vital’ connection with the original: ‘a translation issues from
the original – not so much from its life as from its afterlife’ (1996b, p. 254). In this
conception, as derivative products, translations are not imperfect copies of works
of art, but rather mark ‘their stage of continued life’, their survival. And it is in
this respect that Benjamin’s key concern with history and becoming is formulated
at its fullest:
The history of the great works of art tells us about their descent from prior
models, their realization in the age of the artist, and what in principle should
be their eternal afterlife in succeeding generations. Where this last manifests
itself, it is called fame. Translations that are more than transmissions of
subject matter come into being when a work, in the course of its survival,
has reached the age of its fame. Contrary, therefore, to the claims of bad
translators, such translations do not so much serve the works as owe their
existence to it. In them the life of the originals attains its latest, continually
renewed, and most complete unfolding. (1996b, p. 255)
As ‘the unfolding of a special and high form of life’, Benjamin’s account of

translation recalls Goethe’s The Metamorphosis of Plants, which describes a process
of refinement of form and substance from coarse to purer liquids that holds the
key to the multiplicity of nature (2009).4 Benjamin had read it together with his
wife Dora in 1918 (Eiland and Jennings, 2014, p. 100). Indeed, it is a process of
metamorphosis that defines the relationship between original and translation, in an
image that in its focus on renewal and maturation also directly evokes Goethe’s
approach to translation:5
no translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for

likeness to the original. For in its afterlife – which could not be called that
if it were not a transformation and a renewal of something living – the
original undergoes a change. Even words with fixed meaning can undergo
a maturing process. (1996b, p. 256)
It is from such an understanding of translation as transformation and unfolding,

which denies a conventional understanding of translation as communication
or transfer of information, that translation’s purpose or task is formulated:
‘Translation thus ultimately serves the purpose of expressing the innermost re-
lationship of languages to one another. It cannot possibly reveal or establish this
hidden relationship itself; but it can represent it by realizing it in embryonic or
intensive form’ (1996b, p. 255). Translation represents or performs an already
existing kinship of languages, as ‘languages are not strangers to one another, but
are, a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated in what they
want to express’ (ibid.). Benjamin’s vision of the kinship of languages should be
interpreted neither in metaphysical terms, which his reference to an a priori ex-
istence of languages outside historical relationships would seem to suggest, nor as
a return to a ‘traditional theory of translation’. Benjamin himself warns us against
the second error by explaining that kinship does not refer to a resemblance, so
that translations do not demonstrate it by accurately conveying the form and
meaning of originals. Rather, he cryptically draws an analogy with a critique of
cognition that rests on the impossibility of a theory of imitation. In order to
understand the reason for this analogy, as well as to combat the first error, that
is, the inadequacy of metaphysics to grasp this relationship, we need to turn to
Benjamin’s later writings on language, where it is formulated with reference
to what Benjamin refers to as nonsensuous similarity.
It is primarily two key texts that incarnate Benjamin’s move away from a
metaphysical theory of language towards a materialist account: ‘The Mimetic
Faculty’ and ‘Problems in the Sociology of Language: An Overview’, written in
1933 and 1934 respectively. Benjamin rejected in ‘The Task of the Translator’ a
notion of the kinship of languages founded on apparent similarity (a narrow view
of both kinship and translation) or common origins (of languages in history).
However, he unsatisfactorily recurred to the notion of pure language, appealing
to the complementary character of the totality of languages.6 In its association with
both metaphysics and poetic language (Berman, 2018, p. 129), pure language
must be seen in terms of what Benjamin would subsequently describe as an ‘illicit
“poetic”’ formulation (Tiedemann, 1999, p. 937). This is why later writings are
rather centred on language’s mimetic and/or expressive character.
In ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’ (1999d) language is seen as the preserve of a
nonsensuous similarity that is associated with the mimetic faculty.7 If language
is not, Benjamin maintains, an agreed-upon system of signs, attention must be
paid to imitative behaviour in language, which has been acknowledged in ono-
matopoeia. Onomatopoeia produces signifiers that imitate extralinguistic sounds
in different ways in a multiplicity of languages, and is thus the most primitive
form through which nonsensuous similarity, a resemblance that persists through
difference, can be perceived:
For if words meaning the same thing in different languages are arranged
about that signified as their center, we have to inquire how they all – while
often possessing not the slightest similarity to one another – are similar to the
signified at their center. Yet this kind of similarity cannot be explained only
by the relationships between words meaning the same thing in different
languages, just as, in general, our reflections cannot be restricted to the

spoken word. (1999d, p. 721)
It is the written word – not orality, as Berman maintains (2018, p. 207–08) – that
more vividly illuminates the nature of nonsensuous similarity by the relation of its
written form to the signified. This is why Benjamin is interested in graphology,
which ‘has taught us to recognize in handwriting images that the unconscious
of the writer conceals in it’ (ibid.).
For Benjamin, the mimetic element in language does not develop in isolation
from the semiotic aspect:
Rather, the mimetic element in language can, like a flame, manifest itself
only through a kind of bearer. This bearer is the semiotic element. Thus, the
nexus of meaning of words or sentences is the bearer through which, like a
flash, similarity appears. For its production by man – like its perception by
him – is in many cases, and particularly the most important, tied to its
flashing up. (1999d, p. 722)
This conception is particularly important for a theory of translation which, for

Benjamin, similarly reveals the kinship of languages in flash-like form.8 More
generally, through a view of language ‘as the highest level of mimetic behavior and
the most complete archive of nonsensuous similarity: a medium into which the
earlier powers of mimetic production and comprehension have passed without
residue’ (ibid.), a theory of language that highlights its non-instrumental character
to the detriment of its communicative function is renewed in the light of historical
materialism.
In ‘Problems in the Sociology of Language’ (2002a) Benjamin’s concern is to
delineate the contours of a sociology of language as a border area that straddles
across disciplines, most clearly linguistics and sociology, but also child psychology,
animal psychology and ethnology. He offers an overview of how these disciplines
converge around the question of the origin of language, which is approached,
following Karl Bühler, through two different paths: a predominance of the
onomatopoeic principle, on the one hand, or of symbolic representation, on the
other. Lévy-Bruhl provided an influential account of the onomatopoeic theory,
conceiving primitive languages as descriptive vocal gestures which are attributed
magical qualities. ‘Sociology cannot isolate itself methodologically from any of
Lévy-Bruhl’s concerns’ (2002a, p. 73), Benjamin states, referring particularly to
the magical use of words and to the language of gesture. On the other hand,
Bühler proposes a symbolic theory of naming words to account for how linguistic
representation is emancipated from the concrete linguistic situation. Phylogenetic
and ontogenetic aspects appear in the language of chimpanzees, where tool-
thinking is seen as independent of language, and child language, who learns to
speak only because it lives in a linguistic environment. Piaget’s work on egocentric
childhood language interests Benjamin because it refers to a language that has no
communicative function and is only intelligible to oneself: ‘It is the precursor,

indeed the teacher, of thought’ (2002a, p. 83). Most significantly, it is ‘a mimetic
theory in a far wider sense’ than an already obsolete onomatopoeic theory that is
seen as the basis of a physiognomics of language (a term he adopts from the work
of Heinz Werner), which ‘makes it clear that the expressive means of language
are as inexhaustible as its representational means’ (2002a, p. 85). It is from such
physiognomic powers, from language’s inherently expressive character (which
those concentrating on its semantic function have overlooked), that a future lin-
guistic sociology must draw. And a patient suffering from aphasia is seen to
provide the most instructive model against a solely instrumental language:
this instrumental function presupposes that language is really something

quite different, just as it was for the patient before his or her illness … As
soon as human beings use language to establish a living relationship to
themselves and to others, language is no longer an instrument. (Goldstein,
quoted in Benjamin, 2002a, p. 85)
The purpose of translation is to express or represent the reciprocal relationship

between languages, an existing kinship of languages that is hidden by their in-
strumental, communicative function. Benjamin provides two key allegories in the
last part of ‘The Task of the Translator’ in relation to this task: translation as an
echo of the original, and translation and original as fragments of a greater vessel.
‘The task of the translator consists in finding the particular intention toward the
target language which produces in that language the echo of the original’ (1996b,
p. 258). In spite of its conventionality and ambiguity, the notion of echo is used by
Benjamin to identify the relationship of the translator with language, which differs
from that of the poet because it is orientated towards language as a whole, as it
were from its outside, in order to produce ‘the reverberation of the work in the
alien one’ (1996b, pp. 258–259). ‘The intention of the poet is spontaneous, pri-
mary, manifest; that of the translator is derivative, ultimate, ideational’ (1996b,
p. 259), and precisely because of this it conceals a language of truth that the
philosopher yearns for.
In light of Benjamin’s subsequent writings, the snapshot or the flash, rather than
the echo, would have perhaps more incisively expressed the momentary re-
conciliation of languages that can be achieved in translation.9 However, the echo
also subtly evokes the notion of aura that occupies Benjamin in several key essays
(most notably, ‘A Short History of Photography’, ‘The Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction’ and ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’), both in its
ambiguity as well as in its allusion to the positive significance of distance in our
relationships with things. The aura is related to the unique existence of the work
of art, to its presence in time and space. And it is not just the new techniques of
mechanical reproduction (especially photography and cinema) that foster its dis-
integration. Translations, which similarly respond to ‘the desire of the present-day
masses to “get closer” to things spatially and humanly’ (2003b, p. 251), substitute
the unique existence of works by a plurality of copies. Translation shares with

reproduction its association with transitoriness, continued survival and transmis-
sion, rather than permanence, authenticity and authority. It makes possible the
work’s emancipation from ritual and the assumption of ‘quite new functions’,
among which ‘the one we are conscious of – the artistic function – may subse-
quently be seen as incidental’ (2003b, p. 257). It is this achievement that makes
translation one of the great techniques of modernity at a time when auratic art and
the tradition on which it is based have been shattered.
The second, more enduring allegory that Benjamin provides towards the end
of ‘The Task of the Translator’, refers to the relationship between original and
translation as fragments of a greater language:
Fragments of a vessel that are to be glued together must match one another
in the smallest details, although they need not be like one another. In the
same way a translation, instead of imitating the sense of the original, must
lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s way of meaning, thus
making both the originaI and the translation recognizable as fragments of a
greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel. (1996b, p. 260)
The great longing that languages might complete each other, the purpose of
translation, is expressed precisely through difference (or nonsensuous similarity) in
fragmentary form. A good translation ‘gives voice to the intentio of the original not
as reproduction but as harmony’; it is transparent, ‘it does not cover the original,
does not block its light’ (Ibid.). How this view of the kinship of languages in their
fragmentary multiplicity is inspired in the mysticism of the Lurian Kabbalah has
attracted significant attention (Benjamin, 2014, pp. 97–98; de Man, 1986,
pp. 89–91; Hanssen, 2006, p. 57). Less thought has been devoted to its connection
with Benjamin’s theory of modernity, and particularly with the dialectical image as
a dialectic at a standstill, ‘the piecing together of what history has broken to bits’
(Tiedemann, 1999, p. 944).
In fact, the fragmentary harmony of languages that is reconstituted through
translation finds a remarkable correspondence in the fragmentary form through
which Benjamin will seek to construct a prehistory of modernity in The Arcades
Project. Indeed, Benjamin’s life project, which first emerged in the late 1920s as the
plan for an essay and progressively became the big unfinished philosophic structure
that has reached us, was consistently devised as an assemblage of fragments in
which nothing was deemed too insignificant; a collection of refuse, a montage of
trash (Benjamin, 1999e, pp. 459–60). The mode of construction was deemed as
important as the principle of inclusiveness and conceived from its very inception as
a form of ‘extreme concreteness’ in which the fragment remained the gateway to
the totality (Frisby, 1985, p. 190). Benjamin sought ‘to discover in the analysis of
the small individual moment the crystal of the total event’ (1999e, p. 461). The
image of the broken vessel or that of the mosaic, which he used in Origin of the
German Trauerspiel (1925), powerfully evoke how the lose fragments of languages
or history can be put together so as to offer a momentary glimpse of a greater

whole. Thus, rather than embracing the fragmentary, this form of construction
should be viewed in relationship with Benjamin’s outline of a linguistic sociology
around a materialist physiognomics, as will be argued in the concluding section.
Interpreting Baudelaire: the experience of modernity

Following Benjamin’s view of translation as the afterlife of the original, we can
approach his mature interpretation of Baudelaire as the afterlife of both
Baudelaire’s articulation of the experience of modern life and Benjamin’s own
reflections on translation in ‘The Task of the Translator’, metamorphosed into
his interpretation of modernity. It is not just that criticism and interpretation are,
like translation, important instances of the afterlife through which works both
survive and are transformed. Perhaps less visibly but no less remarkably, in
translating Baudelaire Benjamin made his a vision that he could later develop
and put to work in his analysis of modernity. In this he was not acting essentially
different from Baudelaire himself, who in translating Poe adopted the detective
genre, which he transposed to his lyric work.10 As Benjamin states, ‘Poe’s work
was definitely absorbed in his own, and Baudelaire emphasizes this fact by
stating his solidarity with the method in which the individual genres that
Poe embraced harmonize’ (2006, pp. 73–74). Benjamin’s use of the notion of
‘absorption’ is revealing, as is the term ‘harmonize’. The task of the translator
and the task of the literary historian as interpreter of the continued life of works
are, in fact, indissociably intertwined in a historical conception that uncovers
the past through its reverberations in the present:
What is at stake is not to portray literary works in the context of their age,
but to represent the age that perceives them – our age – in the age during
which they arose. It is this that makes literature into an organon of history;
and to achieve this, and not to reduce literature to the material of history,
is the task of the literary historian. (1999c, p. 464)
Not only does Benjamin in this 1931 essay entitled ‘Literary History and the Study
of Literature’ identify works (rather than individuals or problems) as key to this
task with reference to ‘their entire life and their effects’ (that is, ‘their fate, their
reception by their contemporaries, their translations, their fame’); he explicitly
points at the task of the interpreter in terms that evoke the task of the translator,
who cannot possibly reveal or establish the hidden relationship between languages,
but ‘can represent it by realizing it in embryonic or intensive form’. The objective
of such task is no longer conceived in terms of a mystical pure language, but as
a language in which history is sedimented.
The key to Benjamin’s interpretative work and cultural analysis is his attention
to a wide range of previously neglected phenomena, including popular culture
and practices like translation or photography, which maintain an ambiguous
relationship with art, on the one hand, and the search for a constructive method
that privileges the perceptible presence of cultural forms on the other. The con-
tours of this practice already appear in Benjamin’s early work on the baroque
Trauerspiel but receive their most mature formulation in the late writings associated
with The Arcades Project, in which Benjamin introduced ‘new and far-reaching
sociological perspectives’ (Benjamin, quoted in Tiedemann, 1999, p. 937), par-
ticularly its 1939 exposé, entitled ‘Paris, Capital of the 19th Century’. At the
centre of this brief text is the allegorical genius of Baudelaire, with whom ‘Paris
becomes for the first time the subject of lyric poetry’ (1999e, p. 21). However,
‘The gaze which the allegorical genius turns on the city betrays … a profound
alienation’ (ibid.).; it is the gaze of the flâneur, for whom the familiar city is
transformed into phantasmagoria and who has entered the marketplace ‘thinking
merely to look around; but in fact … already seeking a buyer’ (ibid.).
The study of Baudelaire offers a ‘miniature model’ of The Arcades Project
(Benjamin, cited in Tiedemann, 1999, p. 929). Benjamin’s last text on Baudelaire,
‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, was written in 1939 as a revision of an earlier
piece entitled ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, of 1938. It centrally
posits the transformation of modern experience in order to explain why Baudelaire
was the last lyric poet to successfully connect with the public on a mass scale:
Baudelaire envisaged readers to whom the reading of lyric poetry would

present difficulties. The introductory poem of the Fleurs du mal is addressed
to these readers. Willpower and the ability to concentrate are not their
strong points. What they prefer is sensual pleasure; they are familiar with
the “spleen” which kills interest and receptiveness. It is strange to come
across a lyric poet who addresses himself to such readers – the least
rewarding type of audience. There is of course a ready explanation for it.
Baudelaire wanted to be understood; he dedicates his book to those who
are like him. (2006, p. 170)
Benjamin approaches ‘the experience which presented itself undistorted

to Baudelaire’s eyes, in the figure of his reader’ (2006, p. 172) and to which
Bergson’s philosophy was a response (later put to the test in Proust’s magnum
opus11) in terms of the difference between long experience (Erfahrung) and
isolated experience (Erlebnis). Long experience is experience over time, where
elements of the individual past are firmly anchored in the collective past; as such,
recollection can be triggered at certain times and remains available to memory
throughout people’s lives (2006, pp. 174–75). The substitution of experience by
isolated information, for instance in newspapers, that can no longer be assimi-
lated expresses the increasing atrophy of experience, an insight which Benjamin
first formulated in his well-known essay ‘The Storyteller’ in 1936. In ‘On Some
Motifs’ Benjamin refers to Freud’s approach to the relationship between
memory and consciousness, expressed in the fundamental insight that ‘emerging
consciousness takes the place of a memory trace’, which sees becoming
conscious and leaving behind a memory trace as incompatible processes (2006,

p. 175). Thus, vestiges of memory never enter consciousness, while con-
sciousness is rather seen in terms of its important function of protection against
potentially destructive stimuli or shocks. For Benjamin,
That the shock is thus cushioned, parried by consciousness, would lend the
incident that occasions it the character of isolated experience [Erlebnis], in
the strict sense. If it were incorporated directly in the registry of conscious
memory, it would sterilize this incident for poetic experience [Erfahrung].
One wonders how lyric poetry can be grounded in experience [einer
Erfahrung] for which exposure to shock [Chockerlebnis] has become the norm.
(2006, p. 177)
Baudelaire places an inherently contradictory shock experience [Chockerfahrung]

at the very centre of his art (2006, p. 178). His mission or task is precisely
conceived in terms of bestowing the weight of long experience on the isolated
experiences that have become the norm in modernity. This demands a heroic
disposition on the part of the poet, who undertakes solitary writing as a fantasque
escrime (fantastical fencing), but also a profound connection with the urban
masses, conceived as ‘the amorphous crowd of passers-by, the people in the
street’ (2006, p. 180). Benjamin notes that ‘The masses had become so much a
part of Baudelaire that it is rare to find a description of them in his works’ (2006,
p. 183). The masses are the ‘agitated veil’ through which Baudelaire views Paris,
‘imprinted on his creativity as a hidden figure’ (2006, pp. 184, 180). As such,
they become ‘a phantom crowd’ in ‘the words, the fragments, the beginnings of
lines, from which the poet, in the deserted streets, wrests poetic booty’ (2006,
p. 181). As Antonio Aguilera points out reminding us of Benjamin’s non-
instrumental approach to language, which resists giving primacy to signification,
it is highly relevant that urban crowds are not thematised but rather appear as
internal to literature, a phantasmal mass of words:
The phantasmal mass of words necessarily implies an immense mass of

Odradek-like objects, a loss in the density of language which has already
been decomposed, as Hofmannsthal has shown, melting the thing into
words that are already almost empty and into objects. The pre-modern
world, where language and world seemed to harmonise, is decomposed
into sign materials (symbols and allegories) and objects … This division
relates to language as a mass, while the masses that irrupt socially
(industrialisation and urbanisation) and in the political sphere bring about
important changes for the historical subject and for desire, for truth itself as
having a temporal core. It is the mass of languages, without the hierarchy
of the old linguistic order, without the stratifying aristocracy. (2021,
p. 229, my translation)
For Aguilera this does not result in a decomposed language that no longer
allows a clear expression of values or opinions (as in Hofmannsthal’s ‘Letter
to Lord Chandos’), but rather in a thingness that can no longer be turned
into language (2021, p. 230). Baudelaire captures for poetry experiences that are
only known to a city dweller (such as love at last sight, in the poem ‘A une
passante’) and which would otherwise remain locked within the silence
of things.
Baudelaire’s poetry also responds to the new challenges posed by mechanisa-
tion, a development that in the middle of the 19th century affected widely di-
vergent areas in which a common element could be discerned: ‘a single abrupt
movement of the hand triggers a process of many steps’ (Benjamin, 2006, p. 190).
Mechanisation also changed the nature of art and the way it is received by its
public, a phenomenon which Benjamin analysed in detail in his key essay ‘The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, of 1936. ‘On some Motifs
in Baudelaire’ relates mechanisation to the experience of shock, most clearly
perceivable in the ‘snapping’ of the photographer, which fixes an event for an
unlimited period of time through a touch of the finger giving the moment a
‘posthumous shock’, or in film, where a perception conditioned by shock is es-
tablished as a formal principle (2006, pp. 190–91). Whether in production (ma-
chine work, the conveyer belt) or in reception (amusement parks) mechanisation
replaces experience with training, as different from practice, and is therefore in-
timately related to isolated experience. ‘The shock experience [Chockerlebnis]
which the passer-by has in the crowd corresponds to the isolated “experiences”
of the worker at his machine’ (2006, p. 192). These are perhaps nowhere more
evident than in the figure of the gambler, presented as a counterpart to the
labourer, whose actions are equally devoid of substance and marked by reflexive
impulses, fragmentation and empty but never-ending repetition. Both are ex-
cluded from the realm of experience (an experience ‘that accompanies one to the
far reaches of time, that fills and articulates time’) as ‘the antithesis of time in hell,
which is the province of those who are not allowed to complete anything they
have started’ (2006, p. 195).
Deeply ambivalent towards photography, which is associated with isolated
experience in its extension of what Proust approached as mémoire volontaire,
Baudelaire nevertheless does not succumb to nostalgia of a bygone age. To the
correspondances that signal towards an experience that is already irretrievably lost as
the data of prehistory, he adds his spleen poems that express ‘something extreme
with extreme discretion’; the very inability to experience which is not only his but
also that of his contemporaries, his readers:
In spleen, time is reified; the minutes cover a man like snowflakes. This time
is historyless, like that of the mémoire involontaire. But in spleen the
perception of time is supernaturally keen. Every second finds consciousness
ready to intercept its shock. (2006, p. 201)
Through spleen, which ‘exposes the isolated experience in all its nakedness’,
Baudelaire ‘holds in his hands the scattered fragments of genuine historical ex-
perience’, whereas Bergson’s durée ‘has become far more estranged from history’
(ibid.). Only an acute consciousness that is able to parry the shocks of what Simmel
described as the intensification of nervous stimulation caused by ‘the swift and
uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli’ characteristic of modern life
(1997, p. 175), has the capacity to develop beyond isolated experience
(Chockerlebnis) into a genuine shock experience (Chockerfahrung). From this per-
spective, Baudelaire’s feat is not that he has given artistic form to the private
experiences of urbanites, or of an increasingly alienated sector of the intelligentsia,
but that he has reconnected these experiences to a collective experience of urban
modernity.
‘No breath of prehistory surrounds [spleen] – no aura’ (Benjamin, 2006, p. 202).
In his essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’,
Benjamin had defined the aura as ‘the unique apparition of a distance’ however
near an object may be (2003b, p. 255). In ‘On Some Motifs on Baudelaire’ he
foregrounds an experience which
arises from the fact that a response characteristic of human relationships is

transposed to the relationship between humans and inanimate or natural
objects. The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks
at us in turn. To experience the aura of an object we look at means to invest
it with the ability to look back at us. (2006, p. 204)
What is most significant in Baudelaire’s poetry are not the forests of symbols which
look at him with familiar glances, but rather the description of human eyes that
have lost the ability to look. The disintegration of the aura is evoked not just in the
wild eyes of the prostitutes also drawn by Constantin Guys but, more generally, in
the mirrorlike blankness of the eyes of urbanites who need to protect themselves
from the preponderance of rapidly changing visual stimuli. Baudelaire ‘has yielded
to the spell of eyes-without-a-gaze, and submits to their sway without illusions’
(2006, p. 206). However, the flâneur who readily succumbed to the phantasma-
gorias of urban life has also found in these fragmentary experiences the source of
poetic expression, thus renewing lyric poetry and redefining the role of art in
modernity. The price he willingly pays is the loss of his halo, the vanishing of the
poet in the city crowd.
The disintegration of the aura makes possible the emancipation of art from
tradition and a redefinition of its social role. It is not only brought about by the
new techniques of mechanical reproduction and the most advanced art, like that of
Baudelaire, which embraces without illusions the fragmentary character of modern
experience, but also by translation. Translation’s connection with the notion of
aura has already been briefly discussed in relation to Benjamin’s view of translation
as an echo of the original in ‘The Task of the Translator’. Like the aura, the echo
evokes a ‘unique apparition of a distance’. However, it also foregrounds transla-

tion’s derivative and transitory character, thereby producing significant ambi-
guities. These ambiguities are also expressed in Benjamin’s comparison of the
relationship between content and language in the original and the translation:
Whereas content and language form a certain unity in the original, like a
fruit and its skin, the language of the translation envelops its content like
a royal robe with ample folds. For it signifies a more exalted language than
its own and thus remains unsuited to its content, overpowering and alien.
This disjunction prevents translation and at the same time makes it
superfluous. (1996b, p. 258)
Translations can no longer be translated, as translatability, like reproducibility, is

linked to the work’s uniqueness, its presence in time and space, its authenticity as
‘the quintessence of all that is transmissible in it from its origin on, ranging from its
physical duration to the historical testimony relating to it’ (2003b, p. 254). The
naturalness (or authenticity) of an original, expressed in the metaphor of the unity
of a fruit and its skin, cannot be reproduced in translation, which necessarily
implies not only displacement but also disjunction, the enveloping of content in a
loosely fitted robe. However, rather than as a sign of its inherently inferior nature,
Benjamin interprets this fact in the opposite direction: ‘Thus, ironically, translation
transplants the original into a more definitive linguistic realm, since it can no
longer be displaced by a secondary rendering.’ (1996b, p. 258).
Fifteen years after writing ‘The Task of the Translator’, Benjamin wrote a
second short text on translation which closely resonates with the concerns of his
mature work in The Arcades Project. Apparently a sketch for an unrealised radio
script, the piece was never published; to this day it has been neglected by
Benjamin’s scholarship. Entitled ‘Translation – For and Against’, it adopts the form
of a dialogue between two friends. One of them describes coming across a French
translation of a German philosophical book (we later learn that it is a book by
Nietzsche) while passing an open-air bookstall on an urban stroll: ‘Leafing through
it, as one does with books on the quais, I looked for the passages which had often
engrossed me. What a surprise – the passages were not there.’ (2002b, p. 249). The
remembered passages had not simply disappeared and could still be found in the
translation, ‘But when I looked them in the face, I had the awkward feeling that
they no more recognized me than I did them.’ (ibid.). Translation appears here as a
text that does not return our gaze, much like the self-absorbed urbanites depicted
by Baudelaire. Benjamin examines the reason for this without nostalgia:
what disconcerted me about the passages that had been familiar to me was
not a deficiency in the translation but something which may even have been
its merit: the horizon and the world around the translated text had itself
been substituted, had become French. (2002b, p. 249)
In translating a linguistic situation into another, translation is described as a tech-

nique, significantly modifying Benjamin’s approach to translation as a form in ‘The
Task of the Translator’. Crucially, Benjamin now argues that (in combination with
other techniques like that of the commentary) translation can be used to ac-
knowledge its own role and make ‘the fact of the different linguistic situation one
of its themes’, effectively becoming, through this reflexive exercise, ‘a component
of its own world’. On the contrary, in taking the opposite route, ‘The translation
of important works will be less likely to succeed, the more it strives to elevate its
subservient technical function into an autonomous art form.’ (2002b, p. 250).
We should not rush to deplore what is lost in translation. As a technique, like
photography or film, translation directly connects with the collective experience
of modernity, with the desire of the masses to get closer to things spatially and
humanly. This is why it can better resist the temptation of bad poets who might
pick up Baudelaire’s lost halo from the muddy asphalt pavement. Beyond the
mirages of authenticity, it is precisely translation’s derivative nature, already po-
sitively interpreted in ‘The Task of the Translator’, that provides the key to much-
needed reflexivity on the linguistic materials that mediate our relationship with
others in a postmonolingual world, where the role played by linguistic multiplicity
in our ordinary social experience can no longer be ignored.
Recovering a philological attitude

In summarising his CV, Benjamin once referred to his engagement with French
literature as part of ‘a programmatic attempt to bring about a process of integration
in scholarship – one that will increasingly dismantle the rigid partitions between
the disciplines’ (1999a, p. 78). In the various CV outlines that have reached us,
written at different moments of his trajectory, translation remains consistently at
the centre of this endeavour, both through the undertaking of a number of
translations of key modern writers (most notably Baudelaire and Proust) as well as
through a recurrent interest in problems of translation associated with the philo-
sophy of language. More generally, it could also be said that ‘Benjamin’s intention
in his prehistory of modernity of reading the reality of the 19th century like a text
that speaks to us’ (Frisby, 1986, p. 230) constitutes essentially an act of translation
between the language of mute things and human language in the non-
metaphorical sense that Benjamin specified in his very first essay on the subject
(‘On Language as Such and the Language of Man’). However, if we go by existing
interpretations, Benjamin has never ceased to fail in his attempt. The present
chapter has sought to do justice to the essential continuity in Benjamin’s task of
translating and interpreting Baudelaire by analysing Benjamin’s early essay on
translation in light of his more mature materialist approach, while also connecting
it to his late work on Baudelaire, through which he sought to arrive at a critical
understanding of 19th-century modernity. In this concluding section I will briefly
elaborate on how what Benjamin refers to as his philological approach relates to an
original materialist methodology that interprets the most diverse materials of

reality without subsuming them under theoretical totalisations or abstractions.
The tense exchange between Benjamin and Adorno on ‘The Paris of the
Second Empire in Baudelaire’ is the most illustrative text in this respect. In a letter
written in November 1938, Adorno formulated an extensive critique of
Benjamin’s piece in which he attacked its lack of theoretical interpretation as
well as its inadequate mediation between cultural and economic phenomena.
Benjamin’s response is especially telling, not only because he tacitly accepts
Adorno’s second point (of which every trace has disappeared in ‘On Some Motifs
on Baudelaire’), but also in the way it explains the perceived lack of theorising
as ‘the proper philological attitude’, rather than an ‘ascetic discipline’, as Adorno
maintains. Indeed, on this point Adorno and Benjamin are diametrically opposed.
In ‘The Task of the Translator’, Benjamin had written that a true translation
does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure
language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the
original all the more fully. This may be achieved, above all, by a literal
rendering of the syntax which proves words rather than sentences to be the
primary element of the translator. For if the sentence is the wall before the
language of the original, literalness is the arcade. (1996b, p. 260)
Adorno, by contrast, does not sufficiently attend to the linguistic materials which
are so paramount to Benjamin in referring to the abstention from theorising as
‘blockading the ideas behind impenetrable walls of material, as your ascetic dis-
cipline requires’ (Eiland and Jennings, 2003: 100). Moreover, the ideas to which
Adorno alludes in this fragment come dangerously close to ‘the inaccurate
transmission of an inessential content’ which Benjamin defined as the hallmark of
a bad translation (1996b, p. 251).
After several references to a concept of theory that illumines objects like a
lightning flash and that ‘comes into its own in an undistorted way’ (Eiland and
Jennings, 2003, p. 107), Benjamin turns in his reply to an underlying central
problem of construction that derives from the existing antagonism between his
‘most personal production-interests’ and dialectical materialism, an antagonism
that he has ‘no wish to escape … even in dreams’ (ibid.):
When you speak of “a wide-eyed presentation of facticity” you are in fact

describing the proper philological attitude. It was necessary to adopt this,
not just for its results, but for its role in the essay’s construction. The non-
differentiation between magic and positivism, as you aptly formulate it,
must indeed be liquidated. In other words, the author’s philological
interpretation is to be sublated by dialectical materialists in the Hegelian
manner.– The philological approach entails examining the text detail by
detail, leading the reader to fixate magically on the text. That which Faust
takes home in black and white, and Grimm’s veneration of the minuscule
[Kleinen], are closely related. They have in common the magical element,
which it is left to philosophy … to exorcise. (Eiland and Jennings, 2003,
pp. 107–08)
Benjamin does not contemplate the possibility of a critique of myth that is not
properly grounded on the object, constituted as a monad: ‘In the monad, the
textual detail which was frozen in a mythical rigidity comes alive’ (Eiland and
Jennings 2003, p. 108). This is why only a ‘genuine reading’ can ‘open up the
material content, from which the truth content can then be plucked off historically
like petals’ (ibid.). The genuine reading through which Benjamin sought to cap-
ture the truth of an epoch as it was silently expressed in its most diverse cultural
manifestations was to be achieved through the procedures of a materialist phy-
siognomics of language that recognises both its semiotic as well as its expressive
aspects. Long before he articulated its principles in the outline of a future linguistic
sociology, Benjamin was already familiar with its practice through the fastidious
work on words that is associated with translation. In its attention to concrete
objects no matter how small, such practice can be said to lay the foundations of a
translational philosophy or, indeed, sociology of modernity.
Notes
1 A relevant exception is Niranjana (1992), who focusses on the relationship between
‘The Task of the Translator’ and Benjamin’s critique of historicism, most notably in his
essay on Edward Fuchs, where a materialist account of historiography is offered.
Benjamin’s notion of afterlife, introduced in ‘The Task’, is developed in the text on
Fuchs more fully. For an account and periodisation of the English reception of ‘The
Task of the Translator’ in translation studies circles see Ingram (1997).
2 In contrast with his theory of translation, Benjamin’s work as a translator of Baudelaire
has not attracted a significant degree of attention. Thus, Berman refers to ‘The Task’ as
the 20th-century text on translation, but to the Baudelaire translation as a failure,
characterising it as formulaic and quasi-scholastic (2018, p. 37). In fact, Benjamin’s own
essay distinguishes itself from what is customary in translators’ forewords because it does
not contain any single mention of his Baudelaire translation.
3 Benjamin deals with the consequences of technical reproduction in his essay ‘The Work
of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. For an analysis of photographic re-
production that develops a comparison with Benjamin’s essay on ‘The Task of the
Translator’ see Aguilera (2004).
4 For an analysis of this text in relation to a notion of translation as transformation see
chapter 2.
5 For an account of Goethe’s approach to translation as regeneration and revival see
Berman (1992) and Bielsa (2014, 2016).
6 Antoine Berman identifies in Benjamin’s reference to pure language the central phrase
of ‘The Task of the Translator’ (2018, p. 128). This, together with his appeal to
Heidegger to interpret the essay, against Benjamin’s own disparaging remarks on the
latter, constitutes the biggest shortcoming of his otherwise profound and rich inter-
pretation, to which this account is opposed.
7 Benjamin addresses as the mimetic faculty what Elias Canetti considers in terms of
transformation or metamorphosis, the gift for producing and recognising similarities,
which is abundant in primitive societies and children but diminishes greatly in the
course of history so that ‘the perceptual world [Merkwelt] of modern man contains
only minimal residues of the magical correspondences and analogies that were
familiar to ancient peoples’ (1999d, p. 721) (see Canetti, 1979, 1981; see also Bielsa,
2021).
8 This significant relationship between mimesis and translation is denied by Andrew
Benjamin, who asserts that ‘The connection between original and translation does not
lie … in a domain dominated by mimesis but rather one orchestrated by what Benjamin
describes as the ‘kinship’ of languages. ‘Kinship’ involves the essence of language not a
mimetic relation made possible by the commonality of language.’ (2014, p. 91, see also
p. 96). This view remains locked within a conventional theory of mimesis as apparent
similarity, which Walter Benjamin opposes, and does not perceive the latter’s appeal to
the mimetic faculty as a move to overcome linguistic essentialism.
9 In the 1933 essay entitled ‘Doctrine of the Similar’ Benjamin states: ‘The perception of
similarity is in every case bound to a flashing up. It flits past, can possibly be won again,
but cannot really be held fast as can other perceptions. It offers itself to the eye as
fleetingly and transitorily as a constellation of stars.’ (1999b, pp. 695–696). The image of
the flash is reworked in ‘The Mimetic Faculty’ in the fragment cited above. It is also
at the heart of Benjamin’s conception of the dialectical image, through which he at-
tempts to show how history crystallises in the present, in The Arcades Project. In the
theses ‘On the Concept of History’ it receives Benjamin’s most mature formulation:
‘The past can be seized only as an image that flashes up at the moment of its re-
cognizability, and is never seen again’ (2003a, p. 390).
10 Like Benjamin, Baudelaire not only translated the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, but wrote
several interpretative pieces on the American author, with whom he closely identified,
as a way of reflecting not only on Poe’s approach and ‘philosophical technique’ but
also on his own (Baudelaire, 1988).
11 See Bielsa (2021b) for an account of Proust’s approach to memory and forgetting in
relation to ignored works.
References
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Aguilera, A. (2021) Paisajes benjaminianos. Barcelona: Ediciones del Subsuelo.
Baudelaire, C. (1988) Edgar Allan Poe. Translated by C. Santos. Madrid: Visor.
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and Jennings, M. W. (eds) Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1. Translated by
E. Jephcott. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Belknap Press, pp. 62–74.
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(eds) Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 3. Translated by E. Jephcott. Cambridge
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8
TRANSLATING STRANGERS
Introduction
In elaborating perspectives for engaging with the needs and views of others in
heterogeneous societies cosmopolitanism has contributed to specify the key social
and political relevance of the stranger today. In this context, democracy has been
defined as a politics among strangers (Honig, 2001, pp. 39–40,72), while ‘the
rights of others’ (Benhabib, 2004) and ‘the inclusion of the other’ have led to
rethinking the boundaries of a political community that is open to all (Habermas,
1998). More generally, philosophical and psychoanalytical insights have been
deployed to formulate an ethics shaped by otherness (Levinas, 1991), to show how
we all carry strangers within us (Kristeva, 1991), and to describe how the trace of
the other and the opacity of translation challenge the assumed stability of both
individual and collective identities (Sakai, 1997; Derrida, 1998; Ivekovic, 2005).
Sociological approaches, on their part, have sought to reappraise classical defini-
tions of the stranger as a key figure of modernity in light of what has been ap-
proached as the cosmopolitanisation of reality, as well as the proliferation of social
uncertainty and risk and the blurring of the once taken for granted boundaries of
groups and communities.
The purpose of this chapter is to articulate a view of the cosmopolitan stranger
centred on the stranger’s subjective experience of the foreign. Cosmopolitan
strangers’ biographical trajectories and existential conditions, particularly what
Edward Said once described as a profound and painful ‘discontinuous state of
being’ that marks the experiences of all migrants (2002, p. 140), have led them to
embrace reflexivity towards their own views and most ingrained beliefs. In this
understanding, although cosmopolitan strangers may not be convinced cosmo-
politans, they can nevertheless be considered purposive agents of cosmopolitanism,
as they communicate their experiences and influence many others. Such a notion
DOI: 10.4324/9781003218890-12
of the cosmopolitan stranger actualises Simmel’s prototypical stranger with a view

to preserving his objective of capturing the modes of experiencing modern life
(Frisby, 1986, 2002). However, it differs from accounts based on Simmel in that it
emphasises openness, rather than non-belonging, as the basis of the stranger’s
experience of the foreign.
In this light, four basic features of the cosmopolitan stranger can be outlined.
First, the cosmopolitan stranger must be theorised somewhere in between the
cosmopolitan, who is at home everywhere in the world, and the contemporary
stranger as an eternal wanderer, ‘homeless always and everywhere, without hope
of ever ‘arriving’’ (Bauman, 1991, p. 79). I propose a focus on the cosmopolitan
sociability of migrants that stresses simultaneous rootedness and openness, as well
as cultural difference as the source of individual creativity for adapting and building
a new home in a different environment (cf. Glick Schiller, Darieva and Gruner-
Domic, 2011; Sennett, 2009; Beck, 2006, p. 104; Agier, 2016). In this approach,
the stress falls on cultural hybridity rather than on homelessness or detachment,
pointing not to the dissolution of local bonds and forms of belonging but rather
to the existence of various, sometimes conflicting attachments and a certain degree
of in-betweenness.1
Second, the cosmopolitan stranger is distinguished by his or her excellent
translation skills. This is a key aspect in order to consider the stranger as an active
agent of cosmopolitanism from below that often tends to be either underestimated
or simply forgotten. It is related to how the stranger adapts to a new cultural
context in a way that is meaningful and relevant not only to him or herself but also
to locals. The emphasis lies here not on what is lost in translation, but on what
is gained, relying on an understanding of translation not as transfer or commu-
nication of meaning, but to a much wider notion of translation as a social relation
across linguistic difference. Although the sociological literature has paid little at-
tention to this significant aspect, Alfred Schütz explicitly identified how, to the
stranger, ‘the cultural pattern no longer functions as a system of tested recipes at
hand’ (1976, p. 96) as it does for the locals, so that strangers have to undertake a
translation of the terms of the cultural pattern of the approached group into those
of the home group. However, I propose to reverse Schütz’s insights in considering
this fact not a source of inadequacy that makes the stranger uncertain and socially
handicapped, but mostly a source of creativity that can be used in a cosmopolitan
direction – by successfully translating some elements from the cultural pattern of
the home group into the terms of the approached group.
Third, the cosmopolitan stranger is a mediated stranger, increasingly relevant
not just with reference to face-to-face interaction with an approached group but
to wide and heterogeneous mass publics that no longer belong to clearly defined
communities with an inside/outside divide. Thus, a discussion of the cosmopolitan
stranger needs to address the significance of the mediated public space, in which, as
Roger Silverstone indicates, ‘the mediated images of strangers increasingly define
what actually constitutes the world’ (2007, p. 4). As we will see, successful cos-
mopolitan strangers can become relevant and inspiring to international audiences
Translating strangers 137
across linguistic and cultural divides. They are not just the ubiquitous face of the
other that is made visible but seldom heard (or even less understood), but rather
prominent characters who have been able to communicate through the media
to different publics in remarkable ways.
Fourth, the cosmopolitan stranger is not the only, or even the most prevalent
kind of stranger today. Flawed consumers (Bauman, 1997, p. 14) and refugees,
whom Bauman sees as outcasts and outlaws of a novel kind who ‘lose their place
on earth and are catapulted into a nowhere’ (Bauman, 2007, p. 45; see also
Bauman, 2016), abound. Instead, I seek to identify a particularly relevant type of
stranger, strangers whose survival skills are improved precisely because they have
learned to communicate their experiences to other strangers.2 These strangers
not only manage to make themselves heard but also challenge a world that has
become second nature, leading to reflexivity and change in light of the difference
of the other. Precisely because of this, this type of stranger can make an important
contribution in a cosmopolitan direction.
In the next two sections, a reconstruction of sociological theories of the
stranger and a conceptualisation of the cosmopolitan stranger are offered. After
that, a detailed analysis of two cases is undertaken. These refer to two cosmo-
politan strangers who have succeeded in articulating a compelling, if somewhat
peculiar, experience of the foreign, making visible and responding in exemplary
ways to challenges and trends that are ubiquitous and with which all of those who
live in heterogeneous societies are increasingly faced. They represent two opposed
strategies for mediating the foreign, relating to what I approach in this book as
assimilatory and reflexive translation. This dimension is briefly discussed in a
concluding section with reference to the key notions of distance and strangeness
as the two constitutive elements of the social experience of the stranger.
Strangers in the midst of generalised strangeness

In 1908 Georg Simmel defined the ‘sociological form’ of the stranger as the unity
between wandering and fixation as its conceptual opposite, a potential wanderer
whose presence in the social group is basically determined by the fact that he
brings qualities into it that cannot stem from the group itself (Simmel, 1950,
p. 402). In this classical essay, which is still very much the starting point for most
contemporary formulations on the stranger, Simmel distinguishes between dis-
tance and strangeness as constitutive of the social experience of the stranger.
Distance refers not to spatial but primarily to cultural distance: to the fact that ‘he,
who is close by, is far’ (ibid.). More cryptically, strangeness ‘means that he, who is
also far, is actually near’ (ibid.). According to Simmel, rather than the product of
difference and incomprehensibility, strangeness is due to the generality that lurks
even in the most singular relationships – for instance between lovers, as they realise
that the feelings they profess and once believed unique can similarly be found
in thousands of other couples. There is a kind of strangeness that disallows
the stranger’s specificity and humanity in the name of generality, thus signalling a
non-relation: as a group member, the stranger ‘is near and far at the same time’
(1950, p. 407). Even if strangers become meaningful to us when they enter our
social circle, we are led to ignore their singularity and specificity by the general
attributes that accentuate everything that differentiates them from ourselves. For
Simmel, it is strangeness rather than distance that is the key to the stranger’s
ambivalence, because whereas cultural distance can also be attributed to a world of
dead objects, strangeness exclusively refers to relationships between subjects.3
Simmel lived in Berlin’s city centre at the time of the capital’s most accelerated
period of growth. His stranger literally embodies the very qualities that were
coming to define city life, above all, the social and political diversity that led to
a fragmentation of narratives and challenged clarity of vision (Fritzsche, 1996), as
well as the fugitiveness and ephemerality that define metropolitan modernity more
generally (Baudelaire, 1964; Benjamin, 2006). ‘An alien in his native land’ and a
‘stranger in the academy’ (Coser, cited in Frisby, 2002, pp. 8, 9; see also Bauman,
1991, pp. 160–69, 185–90), Simmel emphasised freedom as a basic characteristic
of the stranger, approaching it as both a freedom of movement and a freedom of
thought, linked to the capacity for thinking outside the confines of the habits
of social groups.
Significantly, Simmel also remarked on the active fostering of a certain stran-
geness or reserve as a negative attitude towards self-preservation induced by the
city’s constant stimuli, perceived as an attack to the autonomy and individuality of
its inhabitants. Thus, he maintains in his seminal essay on the metropolis that an
attitude of reserve is characteristic of urbanites, often perceived by small-town
people as cold and heartless, and that
the inner aspect of this outer reserve is not only indifference but, more often
than we are aware, it is a slight aversion, a mutual strangeness and repulsion,
which will break into hatred and fight at the moment of a closer contact,
however caused. (1997, p. 179)
If the stranger is a social figure that combines nearness and remoteness, strangeness
introduces social distance in an urban context of extreme physical closeness, while
disassociation is for Simmel an elemental form of socialisation in the metropolis
(1997, p. 180). Strangeness is both a form of guarding individuality in front
of overwhelming social forces (in Simmel’s view antipathy protects from both
indifference and indiscriminate suggestibility) and a condition that makes it pos-
sible to live together by avoiding the conflicts that closer contact with others
would generate.
It is Simmel’s merit to have grasped the centrality of strangeness to social re-
lations in modernity, even if he left his intuitive account of its role largely un-
explored. Contemporary authors are faced with the challenge of reconceptualising
the stranger in the context of what can be approached as the universalisation
of strangeness when the closed boundaries of the communities against which the
stranger was traditionally defined can no longer be maintained.
The most sustained attempt to develop an analysis of contemporary strangeness

is that of Chris Rumford, already briefly referred to in chapter 1. In Cosmopolitan
Spaces (2008), Rumford argues that processes of globalisation have led to an in-
creased sense of strangeness, particularly with reference to political spaces, in re-
lation to the undermining of the familiar territoriality of a world of nation-states.
Strangeness refers to social spaces or political domains ‘which have an unsettling,
destabilizing, or disorienting effect in the sense that they are difficult to com-
prehend or assimilate’ (2008, p. 69). In this account, global connectivity generates
not simply the idea of a smaller world, but also leads to realising its potential
dangers, accounting for growing trends to the reinforcement of borders and to
securitisation of everyday life.
The subject of Rumford’s later book, The Globalization of Strangeness (2013),
is no longer the increasingly unfamiliar spatiality that emerges as a product of
globalisation, but sociality itself. It approaches social theories of the stranger in the
light of contemporary developments, while also centrally addressing current trends
towards the universalisation of strangeness. The author argues that,
Strangeness is encountered when there exists the realization that the social
world is unrecognizable in many ways, and where familiar reference points
no longer exist (or are far from reliable) … In other words, strangeness is a
type of social disorientation (resulting from an experience of globalization)
as a result of which we are no longer sure who ‘we’ are, and we find it
difficult to say who belongs to ‘our’ group and who comes from outside.
(2013, xi–xii)
In the context of mobile and increasingly ambiguous borders, Rumford highlights

how it has become impossible to identify who the strangers are with reference to a
clearly defined cohesive community, thus making the conventional sociological
figure of the stranger impossible. Moreover, strangeness becomes unavoidable, but
also a matter of perspective: ‘it is no longer possible to stand outside of societal
strangeness; everyone is a stranger to someone else’ (2013, p. 48). Strangeness is
viewed essentially as a form of dis-connectivity as familiar reference points are
eroded (2013, p. 34), pointing to a significant experience of globalisation that is
often neglected in the literature. Therein also lies the fundamental link between
cosmopolitanism and strangeness: cosmopolitanism is a political strategy that
mobilises subjective experience to open up new possibilities for human sociality
under the constraints imposed by strangeness (2013, p. 107).
The significance of the cosmopolitan stranger

There are at least three important reasons for examining the significance of the
stranger in relation to contemporary cosmopolitanism. These relate to the need to
consider individual lived experience as a key aspect of cosmopolitanism, to the
prominent role of the stranger – rather than the cosmopolitan – in the
cosmopolitanism debate, and to the possibility of viewing strangers as a test for

the degree of cosmopolitan openness in society. Each is briefly commented upon
below.
First, by putting individual experience at the centre (in addition to Rumford,
2013, see also Agier, 2016), the notion of the stranger allows for a concretisation of
cosmopolitan themes in the lives of individuals who, because of their particular
circumstances and not without many contradictions, can be said to have embraced
cosmopolitan openness to the world and to others. Perhaps more significantly, the
relevance of lived experience in responding to generalised societal strangeness
should also be emphasised, as the latter is precisely characterised by the fact that
it increasingly jeopardises meaningful individual experience. The experiences,
learning processes and skills of the cosmopolitan stranger can be used as an antidote
or a protection against social conditions that put in danger the individual’s capacity
for meaningful experience itself, much in the same way as Walter Benjamin sought
to describe in Baudelaire’s experience of shock a combative response to the
atrophy of experience in modernity, as discussed in the last chapter.
Second, it is the stranger, rather than the cosmopolitan, that is at the centre of
contemporary debates about cosmopolitanism. The main reason for this is that the
concept of the cosmopolitan has remained rather narrow and linked to traditional
definitions that alluded to the perspective of an upper-class (mostly male) in-
dividual who travelled frequently and possessed as a result a personal knowledge
and experience of the diversity of the world. Even if this notion of the cosmo-
politan is questioned and an alternative definition that contemplates not just
knowledge but especially engagement with diversity and otherness is proposed,
the concept remains far too restricted to refer to all of those who are today living
cosmopolitan lives.4 Arguably, an openness that is primarily conceived in aesthetic
terms is in our society not available to all, but only to those who are freed from
necessity, thus excluding the majority of the population (Bourdieu, 1986). If the
figure of the cosmopolitan cannot get rid of an elitist cosmopolitanism primarily
based on the aesthetic attitude, the stranger speaks to us about ordinary lived
experience. Here, we are attending not just to those of privileged backgrounds
who have learnt to appreciate and live with cultural differences, but also to the vast
numbers of migrants who become skilled cosmopolitans (Sennett, 2009), who may
not be fully convinced cosmopolitans but perhaps unwilling or unconscious ones,
but whose complex, creative and often contradictory experience of the foreign
can nevertheless be used in a cosmopolitan direction.
A third reason for paying attention to the stranger is that strangers are a test for
the degree of cosmopolitan openness in society. The significance of this aspect
is clearly perceivable in Jacques Derrida’s approach to cosmopolitan openness as
unconditional hospitality to the foreigner, an absolute hospitality that does not ask
for reciprocity or even for the stranger’s name (Derrida and Dufourmantelle, 2000,
p. 25). Absolute hospitality may be unattainable, or even undesirable because it can
recklessly put our life-world in danger (Bielsa and Aguilera, 2017), but it points in
a very different direction than approaches based on recognition (Taylor, 1994;
Honneth, 1995), often at the centre of multiculturalist debates. Recognition al-

ways implies a degree of previous comprehension, an apprehension of others in
terms of their relation to ourselves, which is inevitably a reduction. Hospitality is
a more radical practice, preserving an existence of and creating an involvement
with something we still do not understand. Recognition is not the key to the
cosmopolitan challenge posed by the stranger, but rather hospitality and respect
in the face of incomprehensible, unrecognisable difference (Aguilera, 2015).
Strangeness, very much in Simmel’s sense of a rejection of the stranger’s spe-
cificity and humanity in the name of generality, of the fostering of a non-
relationship in an increasingly small world, is at the centre of Europe’s refusal of
solidarity with refugees, or of authoritarian responses to migration flows, most
visible in Trump and Brexit, or in Australia’s border-industrial complex, as dis-
cussed in chapter 1. Strangers, chosen to epitomise strangeness, offer a scapegoat to
the anxieties provoked by rising uncertainty, unfamiliarity and opacity (Bauman,
2007, p. 85). However, the incapacity to acknowledge and deal with strangeness
can only lead to its further proliferation. Cosmopolitan strangers represent an al-
ternative strategy that finds in an experience of the foreign the resources to
productively engage with the constraints imposed by strangeness.
What are the features of the cosmopolitan stranger? In which ways does he or
she differ from the prototypical stranger, once described by Simmel as ‘the person
who comes today and stays tomorrow’ (1950, p. 402), a potential wanderer who
retains the freedom to come and go, a person who ‘is near and far at the same time’
(1950, p. 407)? Simmel’s essay was written at a time when strangers elicited a
reaction they no longer produce today, when they were still felt as an extra-
ordinary presence, and in part derives its penetrating force from this fact. The
stranger confronted a group with well-defined boundaries by being at a distance
from it, and it is this aspect of Simmel’s approach that most requires rethinking
in the contemporary context, even if we preserve a notion of cultural distance
as fundamental for a definition of the cosmopolitan stranger.
As Zygmunt Bauman maintained, ‘all societies produce strangers; but each kind
of society produces its own kind of strangers, and produces them in its own in-
imitable way’ (Bauman, 1997, p. 17). On these grounds alone, an exploration of
the figure of the cosmopolitan stranger is already justified. However, this chapter
seeks to articulate a stronger claim for the social and cultural significance of cos-
mopolitan strangers concerning their privileged experience of the foreign, which
can be put to work politically towards cosmopolitan ends. In this approach, the
cosmopolitan stranger’s reflexive journey can serve as an exemplary instance of the
cosmopolitan imagination, of a cosmopolitan openness concerning ‘shifts in self-
understanding and self-problematization in light of the encounter with the Other’
(Delanty, 2009, p. 83). Thus, cosmopolitan strangers are bearers of key forms of
ethical and political learning of a cosmopolitan potential that can be generalised
and transmitted to others.
Bauman himself, who conceived strangerhood as a central aspect of his so-
ciology of modernity, identified key social developments that directly contribute
to a characterisation of the stranger in the contemporary context. Bauman’s

stranger is fundamentally defined by ambivalence, rather than distance, expressing
both the inherent contradictions of assimilatory attempts in the liberal tradition,
where strangers are called to individually resolve a strangeness that is always
collectively defined, and the experience of the holocaust as the most sustained
attempt to eliminate ambivalence from social life. Thus, Bauman approached
strangers as ‘the true hybrids, the monsters – not just unclassified, but unclassifiable’
(1991, p. 58), representing ‘an incongruous and hence resented ‘synthesis of
nearness and remoteness’’ (1991, p. 60). He also crucially pointed to the uni-
versalisation of the social experience of strangerhood from the Jews as prototypical
strangers to the rest of society. This has to be taken not only in the sense that we
must now all be confronted with the ambiguity and relativism that once marked
the social experience of the Jews, but also as putting in doubt that coherent, well-
defined home group that classical authors such as Simmel and Schutz could still
take for granted.
Ulrich Beck has noted that strangers are ‘neighbours of whom it is said that
they are not like ‘us’’ (Beck, 1998, p. 127), particularly referring to second-
generation migrants. Beck, who shares Bauman’s view of the stranger as am-
bivalence personified, places the emphasis on the effects of cosmopolitanisation
of reality on individual lives. He also explicitly breaks away from traditional
views of the stranger that assume the relative clarity of the local world against
which the stranger is defined, particularly by pointing to generalised mobile
individual existence and to the universalisation of the place polygamy that was
once characteristic of the stranger. Thus, he approaches processes of globalisa-
tion of biography (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002, p. 25) and of cosmopo-
litanisation of biography in the context of an experiential space in which local,
national and global influences interpenetrate (Beck, 2006, p. 43) and where
cultural difference and the coexistence of rival lifestyles are internalised. He also
explicitly refers to the average migrant, who becomes ‘an acrobat in the ma-
nipulation of boundaries’, as ‘the model of an experimental cosmopolitanism of
the powerless in which the capacity to change perspectives, dialogical imagi-
nation and creative handling of contradictions are indispensable survival skills.’
(2006, p. 104).
For Rumford, as I have already indicated, a conceptualisation of the cosmo-
politan stranger must attend not only to the universalisation of the social experi-
ence of strangerhood, but also to the generalisation of societal strangeness in
the contemporary context. In the midst of generalised strangeness, it is more
appropriate to see the stranger as one who can pop-out anywhere, anytime, not
previously observed arriving (2013, p. 43). Thus, the cosmopolitan stranger
is approached as the paradigmatic stranger figure of the global age and defined
as a person who is ‘here today and gone tomorrow’ – in opposition to
Simmel’s stranger, who ‘comes today and stays tomorrow’. The cosmopolitan
stranger is made possible by modern technology, which offers the capability to
connect globally without leaving home: ‘whereas the cosmopolitan is a figure
considered … to be at home everywhere, the cosmopolitan stranger is ‘every-

where, at home’’ (2013, p. 121). Rumford’s examples of cosmopolitan strangers
(which include the superhero Phoenix Jones, public artists, as well as collective
actors such as the flash mob, 2013, pp. 124–35) underline their role in generating
new forms of social solidarity through connecting people with distant others,
thus opening up possibilities under the restrictive conditions of strangeness.
This chapter articulates a notion of the cosmopolitan stranger centred on the
stranger’s subjective experience of the foreign, an aspect which is left largely
unexamined in Rumford’s account.5 Here, the means by which strangers relate
to new environments and make this experience also meaningful to others are
investigated. The universalisation of strangerhood would seem to indicate that
strangers have lost the social distinctiveness they once possessed because, as
Bauman observed, ‘if everyone is a stranger, no one is’ (1991, p. 97). However, it
is precisely in this context that the social experience and skills of the cosmopolitan
stranger become more relevant to us all in the conduct of our ordinary lives
in conditions of generalised strangeness. This is what makes the cosmopolitan
stranger the paradigmatic stranger figure of the current age. The two cases analysed
below provide singular instances of how this social significance can be achieved.
The interpreting stranger: Cesar Millan

Cesar Millan’s television series, Dog Whisperer, became hugely successful first in the
United States and other English-speaking countries, later also in other linguistic
regions. It is, in fact, episode after episode, a programme about a stranger telling
Americans how they have to change in order to treat their dogs properly. In
Millan’s show we do not see a foreigner trying to adjust6 and become as little
distinguishable, as little marked by foreignness as possible, but one who makes use
of his strangerhood to effectively explain what is wrong in an over-civilised
America that has lost touch with basic facts of nature and offer recipes for im-
provement. To this end, he not only uses his Mexican background but also what
I view as Millan’s most extraordinary cosmopolitan communication skills. He
diagnoses American dogs and their owners making unashamed use of a heavily
accented, sometimes ungrammatical English and of a peculiar vocabulary and
expression (in the way he uses terms like ‘human’ and ‘dog’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong
energy’, ‘following pack leaders’, etc.). He even seems able to speak dog! Very
conscious of what his body language communicates to dogs, Millan not only
manages to obtain obedience from them even in the most extreme cases. In fact,
he often comes across as an interpreter between humans and dogs, mimicking dogs
in order to make their canine point of view understood to their human owners.
The basic conviction underpinning Millan’s practice comes from the realisation
that the cause of many (if not all) of American dogs’ recurrent problems is due to
their owners’ ingrained practice of humanising dogs, which comes at the price of
ignoring their particular animal needs. According to Millan, only an effort to
understand and fulfil the dog’s natural needs can produce a happy and stable
connection between humans and dogs. Millan does not adopt the role of detached
observer, whose objectivity of thought is projected onto a critical, but ultimately
sterile vision, but actively seeks to intervene. He purposely goes against deep-
seated attitudes and practices, so that the dog psychologist’s task is understood as
concerning and changing humans as much as dogs. It implies persuading owners
to look inside themselves and re-examine their habits and ingrained beliefs
so that they can learn to behave differently and become good pack leaders to
their dogs. Therein comes Millan’s famously repeated motto: ‘I rehabilitate dogs,
I train people’.
This is also clearly articulated in his first book, Cesar’s Way (2006), although in
a somewhat less strange manner, as Millan’s English has been polished and, to a
great extent, assimilated by contributor Melissa Jo Peltier. The volume is a peculiar
type of self-help guide to understanding dogs’ needs and behaviour, where nar-
rating the personal history and background of the author is placed on an equal
footing with giving relevant advice to dog owners. Indeed, the weight of the
autobiographical dimension is not accidental, as it is precisely Millan’s stranger-
hood, his childhood experience of living with Mexican farm dogs, and even the
culture shock that he suffers when he first witnesses how dogs are treated in
America, that place him in a unique position to articulate his point of view.
Millan illegally entered the country in pursuit of his childhood dream of
becoming the world’s greatest trainer of famous movie dogs like Lassie and Rin
Tin Tin (2006, pp. 56, 2). But it is not after a substantial exposure to life in the
United States and a relatively long period of learning that he is able to conceive
his mission and put his Mexican background and knowledge to use towards
cosmopolitan ends. Significantly, this entails both its successful articulation in
English, his adopted tongue, and a reformulation of the old dream of becoming
a dog trainer into a pledge to help troubled American dogs to become happier
and healthier. Dogs need, in Millan’s own words, to ‘unlearn’ the ways of life
taught to them by ‘humans who love too much’ in order to be able to relearn
how to be dogs. This is as much a task for dogs as it is for their owners, who
have to be convinced of a different, more natural way to love and care for their
dogs, ‘a way that promises you the kind of deep connection you always dreamed
of having with a nonhuman animal’ (2006, p. 23). Millan pleas with his readers
to ‘please, open your mind to the possibility that your dog may be missing some
of the things she needs in her life to be happy and fulfilled as a dog’ (2006, 57). He
also urges them to learn to interpret their dogs’ body language, significantly
comparing this task to mastering English for a non-native speaker. Thus, Millan
describes his mediating role as follows: ‘by teaching my clients how to “speak”
their dog’s language – the language of the pack – I open up a whole new world
for them’ (2006, p. 3).
In fact, it could be argued that Millan adopts what could be characterised as a
form of interspecies cosmopolitanism7 that is articulated around three key points:
understanding, respect and hospitality. Understanding how dogs are different from
us and learning to see the world through their eyes: ‘I want you to learn a deeper
understanding of how your dog sees the world … after applying my techniques,
you may even begin to understand yourself better’ (2006, p. 4). Respect in terms
of recognising dogs’ different needs and committing to their fulfilment, even if
it sometimes means having to hold back our human need for affection, because
what might be ‘incredibly therapeutic for the human … can be psychologically
damaging for the animal’ (2006, p. 70). According to Millan, ‘when we humanize
dogs … we’re never going to achieve a deep communion with them. We’re never
really going to learn to love them for who and what they truly are’ (2006, p. 85).
By contrast, ‘you are offering another living creature the highest form of respect, by
letting that creature be what she is supposed to be’ (2006, p. 85). Last, Millan’s
hospitality, this time argued by advocating the prevalence of an exclusively human
understanding that explicitly rejects the natural law of survival of the fittest, is
enacted through the large pack of residents at his Dog Psychology Center (‘they
are a motley crew – a ragtag mix of injured, rejected, thrown-away rescued dogs’
(2006, p. 10)), where no aggression is tolerated towards the handicapped and the
weak, who are given another chance at a full, happy life.
Millan’s popular success has in part been driven by the celebrities, including
Jada Pinkett and Oprah Winfrey, who quickly realised the beneficial effects of this
stranger’s intervention on their dogs and on themselves. Of course, his remarkable
story as an illegal immigrant who made it from rags to riches is in fact not so
foreign in the United States. However, it is built on the effective translation of
foreign knowledge to US dog owners and audiences without attempting to dis-
guise its strangeness, and the peculiarity of this should not be underestimated. This
is a translation that has changed Millan himself as much as it is designed to change
the lives of many adept dog owners, providing him with critical, self-reflexive
thought and a new way to articulate his views in a language that became his own.
It is this what makes him, in my view, an extremely successful cosmopolitan
stranger, able to offer American dog owners an account of themselves in light of
the difference of the other and to communicate this process to mass audiences
across linguistic and cultural borders.
The stranger as ventriloquist: Tania Head

Tania Head became a remarkable popular figure whose recognition is also intri-
cately associated with her cosmopolitan skills. However, unlike Cesar Millan’s, her
status was short-lived. Her trajectory reveals a more tragic, contradictory, even
sinister aspect, which is in fact not uncommon to female heroines in the Western
tradition, from Medea to Hedda Gabler.
Head acquired notoriety as a survivor of the 9/11 attacks who then went on
to tell others about her experience of loss and survival, eventually becoming the
public voice of the living victims as president of the World Trade Center
Survivors Network. She first appeared in a meeting of the then recently created
group in early 2004, having slowly revealed in an online support group during
the previous months the harrowing details of her story, which combined her
own miraculous escape from the 78th floor of the south tower and the si-
multaneous loss of her fiancé in the north tower. In the months that followed,
she would dedicate increasing amounts of her time and energy to further the
public cause of survivors, who had been marginalised and made invisible, be-
coming widely admired for her tenacity and dedication, and for the passion with
which she fought so that their stories would be heard. A first battle was that of
obtaining private access to ground zero, which had been granted to family
members of the deceased but denied to survivors, succeeding where others had
failed and securing a visit in May 2004. Then came emerging press coverage of
the ordeal survivors still faced three years after the attacks and initiatives for the
production of a book and a documentary with survivors’ stories. In 2005,
survivors’ increasing recognition was mirrored in their very successful campaign
for saving what became known as the Survivors’ Stairway during the rebuilding
of the World Trade Center. Tania Head became that year their most visible face
when she led the New York authorities in the inaugural walking tour around
the site for the Tribute WTC Visitor Centre just before the fourth anniversary
of the attacks.
Only two years later her story came to an abrupt end when The New York
Times, which had been seeking to interview her for a feature story to mark the 6th
anniversary of the attacks without success, published a front-page article where
it was revealed that none of its details could be verified (in a piece entitled ‘In a
9/11 Survival Tale, the Pieces Just Don’t Fit’, published on 27 September 2007).
Two days later, another piece appeared in Barcelona’s newspaper La Vanguardia
with further details on this ‘impostor’s transatlantic fraud’ that revealed Tania
Head’s real identity as Alicia Esteve Head, a Spanish citizen who, at the time of the
attacks, resided in Barcelona (‘La ‘impostora’ del 11-S es barcelonesa’, 29
September 2007). While The New York Times article insisted that Head had not
financially profited from her claimed status as victim or from her position in the
Survivors’ Network, La Vanguardia disclosed that she was known by childhood
friends and former colleagues in Spain by her formidable fantasy and her habit
of making up incredible tales about her life.
Tania Head’s implausible deceit has become the object of several doc-
umentaries, a film and a book, The Woman Who Wasn’t There (Fisher and
Guglielmo, 2012), by filmmaker and former friend Angelo Guglielmo. These
accounts describe the enormous appeal of her heart-gripping tale and the wide-
spread admiration everyone felt for an inspiring figure who had found in her
misfortune a source of self-sacrificing zeal to help others who suffered. As Fisher
and Guglielmo state,
Tania didn’t just talk the talk. That’s one of the things the others admired
about her. She lived the philosophy. There didn’t seem to be anything she
wouldn’t do for the survivors or the network. She gave and gave of herself
and asked nothing in return but a little appreciation and a commitment from
the others that they follow her lead. (2012, p. 103)
However, these accounts also reveal how the person who had become ‘America’s
most famous survivor’ was suddenly turned into a total stranger and quickly re-
defined into what Bonnie Honig describes as the ‘taking foreigner’ (2001). In
her book Democracy and the Foreigner, Honig convincingly argues for a re-
conceptualisation of this figure in a cosmopolitical direction that approaches taking
not as the criminal activity of an outsider, but rather as an honorific democratic
practice. As she notes,
The iconic taking foreigner puts foreignness to work on behalf of

democracy by modelling forms of agency that are transgressive, but (or
therefore) possessed of potentially inaugural powers. Carried by the agencies
of foreignness, this revalued “taking” stretches the boundaries of citizenship
and seems to imply or call for a rethinking of democracy as also a
cosmopolitan and not just a nation-centered set of solidarities, practices
and institutions. (Honig, 2001, p. 8)
Head’s tale was larger than life, but it expressed the suffering of thousands. Her
courage widely inspired survivors, the family members of victims and many others,
contributing to their healing process and to the public memorialisation of the
event. Even the 9/11 survivors who had been close to Head and felt personally
betrayed by her deceit found it hard to deny what she had left behind as a gift, and
it is in this gift that the cosmopolitan value of her contribution is contained. The
determination and resilience for which Tania had been so admired were the
product of an illusion that she had embraced as more real than reality itself. It
is precisely the fact that Tania was a stranger and the fabricated nature of her
imaginary tale that hides the secret of how she succeeded in providing a heroic
story of survival that helped many people to come to terms with the tragedy that
had befallen them. Whether conceptualised as a cosmopolitan stranger, a taking
foreigner or, simply, an impostor, Head’s story reveals the profound ambiguities
that sustain the social order, which are not simply dissolved when the deceit is
discovered and the impostor is named.8
This is just one of the many paradoxes surrounding this highly contradictory
stranger. Moved in part by her love and admiration for America (a childhood friend
describes that Head displayed a large American flag in her bedroom) she also
poignantly illustrates the real power of the media in making it possible not only
to know about events that take place at the other side of the world but actually to
experience them as if you had been there yourself, thanks to the media’s fabricated
appearance of immediacy. The notion of cosmopolitan empathy (Beck, 2006) falls
very short in adequately capturing this puzzling phenomenon. Tania Head’s figure
is in many ways opposed to Cesar Millan’s. She is of upper-class background and
practically accentless – until her fraud was discovered people believed her to be
American. Instead of from rags to riches, her story is a strange replication of her
Spanish family’s social descent a decade earlier, when a financial scandal was un-
covered and her father and older brother were charged with prison sentences.
Unlike Millan’s obvious strangeness, Head succeeded in giving Americans the

tale they wanted to hear exactly in the language they wanted to hear it: like a
ventriloquist who offered the mirror in which people wanted to see themselves,
she became the most inspiring of Americans. She was, however, the stranger
lurking within, and the discovery of the Spanish nationality of this chameleonic
stranger became one more disturbing element of her deception. Perhaps another
source of cosmopolitan learning can be found precisely in these more troubling
aspects of her story that lay bare the paradoxes of assimilation and the constructed
nature of Americanness, and reveal, at the same time, that the stranger is always
already within.
Conclusion
Contemporary globalisation has witnessed the apparent overcoming of distance
and a concomitant generalisation of strangeness, which calls for a reappraisal
of the figure of the stranger as a peculiar unity of nearness and remoteness. This
chapter has presented the cosmopolitan stranger as the paradigmatic stranger
figure of our age and elaborated an account that places individual lived ex-
perience at the centre: the stranger’s experience of the foreign. It is cosmopo-
litan openness, rather than non-belonging, that distinguishes the cosmopolitan
stranger from other stranger figures, both past and present, and that is also the
key to an experience of the foreign that can be transmitted to others and put
to use towards cosmopolitan ends.
Such an approximation does not renounce a focus on cultural distance, which
has not disappeared as a consequence of the significant transcendence of spatial
distance. Like all strangers, cosmopolitan strangers face multiple conflicts and in-
adequacies that are precisely a product of distance – of the fact that, in spite of
being close, they are far – and find original and creative ways of dealing with their
often conflicting attachments. As Sennett memorably put it with reference to
the Russian exile Alexander Herzen, he had to learn to be Russian somewhere
else (Sennett, 2011, pp. 76–92), and it is this uncertain confrontation with and
displacement of what since childhood has sedimented in our most inner self that
is the key element of the stranger’s freedom. Herein lies the source of the cos-
mopolitan stranger’s emblematic character and also of the stranger’s objectivity,
celebrated by Simmel as a mixture of indifference and involvement, as a freedom
from prejudice and from habit that can be put to use at the service of locals. This is
also why the cosmopolitan stranger belies the assumptions underlying notions
of an abstract universal citizen, or of a cosmopolitan who feels at home in the
world, or of a global elite of frequent travellers as phantasmagoric presences of
unattached individuals – ‘individuals without an anchorage, without borders,
colorless, stateless, rootless, a body of angels’ (Fanon, 2004, p. 155).
Simmel also identified the significance of strangeness in social relationships with
strangers and in modern urban life. Since Simmel’s time, strangeness has been
generalised, destabilising a familiar world of nation-states and challenging human
sociality itself. We have all been turned into strangers, who need to relate to one
another in an increasingly unfamiliar world. As Simmel clearly perceived, distance
and strangeness are unavoidably related, and it is here that a consideration of the
central significance of translation can offer one of its most revealing contributions.
This chapter has portrayed the cosmopolitan stranger as an excellent commu-
nicator across linguistic and cultural divides. Translation is, in fact, a way of
mediating distance. Yet, there are different strategies for achieving this according
to the way in which strangeness is approached. Cesar Millan and Tania Head
represent the opposed alternatives of what I have conceptualised in this book in
terms of reflexive and assimilatory translation. Whereas Cesar Millan underscores
the strangeness of his account by placing his own foreignness and the work of
translation at the centre, Tania Head denies strangeness and the very fact that
translation has taken place, offering an image of herself as the most inspiring of
Americans. If cosmopolitanism is conceived as ‘a strategy for living under con-
ditions of strangeness’ (Rumford, 2013, p. 107) only Millan’s strategy is orientated
towards cosmopolitan ends. Head’s ultimate failure is not principally related to her
deceit or not even only to herself, but mainly to the circumstances that led her and
all the people who were inspired by her to fall into the trap of identity, thus finally
obscuring the strangeness that is all around, and which requires us to mobilise
the qualities of human experience that are increasingly threatened by it in new
meaningful ways.
Notes
1 On the in-between stranger, see Marotta (2010), but see also Rumford’s justified critique
of the assumption that this leads to a privileged perspective. As Rumford argues, cos-
mopolitanism seeks to encourage multiverspectivalism rather than ‘high point’ thinking
(2013, pp. 116–18).
2 In chapter 1 I have already examined Behrouz Boochani as one prominent stranger
figure in this respect.
3 In its categorical distinction between subject and object, Simmel’s approach can also be
used to identify the key difference between a banal cosmopolitanism as the product of
an ossified objective culture (eg. Indian cuisine or world music) and the vitality of a
subjective culture that is entrapped by the former, embodied in the lived experience
of the cosmopolitan stranger, as I elaborate in this chapter.
4 This was the path followed by Ulf Hannerz, who underlined ‘intellectual and aesthetic
openness toward divergent cultural experience’ (1996, p. 103). More recently, it can also
be found in Skrbiš and Woodward’s approach (Skrbiš and Woodward, 2013).
5 For a critique of Rumford’s approach to the cosmopolitan stranger, see Bielsa (2016).
6 For a critique of the notion of adjustment in relation to his own personal experience
of exile see Adorno (1998).
7 The invisibility of nonhuman animals in the cosmopolitanism debate is the product of
a wider silencing that prevails within sociology (Irvine, 2008; Wilkie, 2015; Carter and
Charles, 2018). Yet this is arguably a dimension that needs to be urgently incorporated
into a revised notion of critical cosmopolitanism.
8 For an approach to the analytic value of the impostor for social theory in this light
see Woolgar et al. (2021).
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9
HOMECOMING: AN AUTO-ANALYSIS
In this auto-ethnographic triptych I reflect on my experience of homecoming

from different perspectives and at different moments over a ten-year period. It
contains three separate texts which, together, articulate a story of academic mo-
bility and displacement. The first text was written in 2012, two years after my
return to Spain, in the context of a collective mobilisation of Ramon y Cajal
(RyC) research fellows. It was published, along with two other auto-ethnographic
accounts, in a co-authored article entitled ‘Homecoming as Displacement’ (Bielsa,
Casellas and Verger, 2014). The second text was written in 2019 to celebrate 50
years of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminology at Glasgow University, where
I did part of my undergraduate degree and my PhD. It was delivered in a cultural
sociology panel at a conference that took place in Glasgow in September 2019 to
mark the occasion and has not been previously published. The last text of the
triptych reflects on my experience of securing tenure through the Spanish system
of competitive examinations. It has existed in draft form for over two years and
I have finished it for the purpose of publishing it within this book. The different
parts have been left in their original form and no intent has been made to weave
them together or to erase the initial purpose for which they were written. The
discontinuities, gaps and overlaps that appear in them are an important part of
this story.
Homecoming as an unfinished project

I returned to Barcelona in 2010 after a long intermittent trajectory abroad which
spans 20 years, involves two European countries – Belgium and Great Britain –
and five different cities; this very intermittence, composed of multiple move-
ments back and forth, being an example of what Nikos Papastergiadis has
described in terms of the multiplicity of directions and the complex patterns of
DOI: 10.4324/9781003218890-13
Homecoming: an auto-analysis 153
contemporary migration (2010, p. 247). Therefore, this is not my first or only

homecoming. The first return, and still the longest, was on finishing a first
degree in Sociology at Glasgow University, after having spent six years abroad.
I had benefited in the late 1980s and early 1990s from the incipient policies that
greatly facilitated free movement within countries of the EU, at least for stu-
dents. Both in Belgium and Scotland, European students were for the first
time treated as home students for the purpose of university fees. I also obtained,
while still a student in Brussels, an Erasmus grant for a stay of six months at the
University of Glasgow, after which I decided to transfer and finish my degree
at Glasgow, which became my intellectual home.
On my return to Barcelona after my first degree, I struggled with the realities of
work while trying to continue my studies at the postgraduate level. My research
interests were in the sociology of culture, which did not exist, and I ended up in a
PhD programme on the philosophy of culture, which seemed the most closely
related field. In retrospect, and even if I was not successful at the time in finding a
home in the Spanish university system, I did unwittingly find the most suitable
place for my research. My focus became the work of Walter Benjamin and
especially of Theodor Adorno, who is often too readily dismissed as a cultural
elitist by a strong cultural studies tradition in Britain. A fees-only award from
the ESRC for European students, combined with a maintenance scholarship from
Glasgow University, enabled me to embark on a PhD back in Glasgow. Having
found my intellectual home made me no less a stranger,1 who was able to thrive in
the unusual freedom that being an outsider grants, and to build on the ambiguities
of involvement and detachment. This led to the writing of a thesis on a hybrid
genre of literary journalism in Latin America which charted peripheral modernity
through its fragmentary narratives, applying and questioning the relevance of
European theories about the division between high and low culture. I later
worked as a researcher in an interdisciplinary research centre in England, before
obtaining a lecturer position in a sociology department where nearly half of its
members were like me, foreigners.
One of the critiques directed against ‘flow speak’ within some globalisation
theory points to the fact that it emphasises the lure of global options to the
detriment of factors linked to existential possibilities that effectively limit these
options. This ‘lived selectivity’ refers to the opportunities provided by the life
cycle of individuals and families, which counterbalances the intrinsic risk of
‘chronic disembeddedness’ associated with mobility in search of self-assertion
(Bude and Durrschmidt, 2010, p. 487). Thus, family commitments at different
moments of the individual life cycle will determine one’s choices when facing
global options. In my instance (and in the stories of many others with similar
trajectories) this has certainly been the case. Education was the main purpose of
moving as a young, unattached individual and continued to weigh heavily on the
scale even at a later stage, leading to what Beck and Beck-Gernsheim have ap-
proached in terms of the individualising forces that converge in the post-familial
family, marked by the difficulty of coordinating the centrifugal biographies of
individuals in search of self-development (1998). In this context, breaking with

what these authors consider today’s market demands for individual, totally mobile
persons becomes an act of explicit refusal of one’s global options, which in-
creasingly threaten a sustainable family life, among other social bonds. The birth of
my son and the difficulty of maintaining transnational family arrangements thus
finally made homecoming the only viable option.
Edward Said has defined migrancy and exile as a discontinuous state of being
(2002). Yet, to me this only fully resonates when I reflect on the experience of
homecoming, not on that of being away from home. To the fact that my past
history seems to become obliterated and only resurfaces as distant fragmentary
memories that an all-encompassing present cannot fully accommodate is added
an essential lack of comprehension, of being able to find my way in a situation
and context which I am only slowly starting to master. This is what Alfred
Schütz primarily referred to as the experience of the stranger, not of the
homecomer (1976). Thus, I still find myself applying schemes of perception that
I have learned in British universities and lacking the adequate knowledge of
situations that continuously make me feel out of place. In a reversal of Schütz’
insights, I felt like a fish in water when I was a foreigner, but have become a
stranger on my homecoming.
Being a stranger at home has definitely less advantages than being one abroad,
leads not to enjoying a great deal of freedom that can be creatively exploited but to
inadequacy, and represents a handicap that can significantly limit one’s possibilities
of survival. Part of this inadequacy can be directly attributed to the particularities
of my current position as RyC researcher [in 2012]. Francisco Tapiador describes a
‘Cajal’ researcher as a parachutist: ‘Someone unknown, paid by the government,
who falls from the sky into a research group with the objective of reinforcing it.’
(2011). Feeling a stranger is thus not just a subjective matter but context-related,
and derives from occupying an uneasy and ambiguous position in a university
system that favours the organisation of relatively self-enclosed, highly hierarchical
research groups. In this context, Tapiador stresses that it is not just good work,
publications and securing research funds but a lot of savoir-faire, some good luck
and the ability to navigate within the system that will be essential for guaranteeing
one’s permanence.
It is true that, as one of the co-writers of this article insists, our particular
position also enables us to have a much greater impact than we would have if we
stayed abroad. This is not just about ‘the responsibility of trying to improve the
system from within’, as Tapiador notes, but essentially a matter of introducing
newness and a fundamental dynamism that is seen to be still relatively foreign in
the Spanish higher education system. Our teaching and research, however out-
landish and out of place, transplant what is common practice at the institutions that
occupy a central position in the global higher education system at a time when
internationalisation and global competitiveness are meant to be the way ahead for
Spanish universities. Conversely, homecoming and reconnecting with our mother
tongue and the world of our childhood, even with the backwardness that marks
Spain’s semi-peripheral position in the global economy, can revert productively

in the nature of our work, especially given the fluid relationship between social
scientific disciplines and our own existential realities. This is an aspect not con-
templated in Bude and Dürrschmidt’s argument for a shift from routes to roots
(2010, pp. 491–93), but can nevertheless prove decisive in the life of social sci-
entists, as for example in Adorno’s decision to return to Germany in the 1960s
(Adorno, 1998).
The experience of being a foreigner in my own home has been counter-
balanced by the pleasures of lecturing in Catalan, my mother tongue. Without the
inadequacy of accent, the inferiority complex of speaking a borrowed tongue,
assuming an immediacy and transparency that are in fact no less deceptive.
Lecturing in Catalan I have been able to feel at home, in a momentary escape from
what Julia Kristeva approached as the silence of polyglots (1991). On the other
hand, with respect to writing I am, and intend to remain, at least for the time
being, a translated writer. Global asymmetries and inequalities work here in my
favour: my weak position as a stranger is reversed when we come to publishing in
an international field dominated by English, a fact which, not without some
reason, can provoke a certain resentment.
I would like to finish this account of my homecoming with a question and a
reflection on hospitality. Will the Catalan university be as hospitable as the
British university has been to me? I am grateful for unconditional hospitality in
allowing me to enter, in a context in which entrance if you are a stranger to the
system and the individuals involved is by no means easy. Yet, by necessity this
hospitality can no longer be forthcoming to someone who is, after all, not a
foreigner. The question should then be rephrased as to how permeable will this
environment be to the unfamiliar views and practices which I bring on my
return. The success of my homecoming will depend on the ability to find a
space that allows for some degree of recognition of this difference, a space that
can again become a home even when its immediacy and unquestionability have
been fundamentally shattered.
On becoming a cultural sociologist in Glasgow

It is a great pleasure to come to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Sociology in
Glasgow and to speak in this context today. I am going to use the little time I
have to reflect on the academic and intellectual experience that the Department
of Sociology and Anthropology, as it was called when I was a student here,
provided me and how this experience shaped my sociological outlook. I believe
that this type of exercise in reconstruction and reflexivity is interesting not just
from a biographical (or autobiographical) point of view, but that it can also
provide valuable clues that are indicative of the type of sociological insights and
sensibilities that have developed and found a fertile ground in the department,
and which have then spread through individual movements and trajectories to
other places and contexts.
In an essay I wrote some years ago on homecoming, where I reflected on my

experience of return and of entering the Spanish university system, I referred to
Glasgow as my intellectual home. I was, in Glasgow, very much like Simmel’s
stranger, a ‘person who comes today and stays tomorrow’ (1950, p. 402). I arrived
in 1991 as an Erasmus student for a six-month stay but decided to transfer to
Glasgow University to finish my undergraduate studies. After the first attempt at
homecoming on finishing my Sociology degree, I returned to Glasgow in 1998 to
do a PhD, thanks to a fees-only scholarship from the ESRC and a maintenance
scholarship from Glasgow University. I have thus been a beneficiary of Glasgow’s
hospitality to strangers at all levels, a gift of hospitality that has made me perma-
nently indebted, which is the most productive form of debt I can conceive.
The key formative years spent at the University of Glasgow determine my
sociological outlook in powerful ways that have only become more distinct over
the years. Having been looking to work in the sociology of culture, it was only
when I arrived in Glasgow and followed Bridget Fowler’s module on the
Sociology of Art and Literature that I was able to find the conceptual and theo-
retical means to do so. Through this module, and other modules on theory and
urban modernity, and particularly productive overlaps between them, I became
acquainted with Marxism, critical theory and cultural materialism through the
work of Benjamin, Raymond Williams, Bourdieu, Bakhtin and others. In
Glasgow I pursued the study of widespread practices of cultural borrowing and
overlap in Latin America, first through the analysis of the incorporation of ele-
ments of popular culture in the novel during the second half of the 20th century,
later through the study of the Latin American urban crónica, a very popular form of
literary journalism in the whole region. The intention behind that research was to
investigate the space of overlap between high and low culture, which is often
downplayed in Bourdieusian approaches to the field of cultural production. In the
department I not only found the necessary support for the study of this little-
known, remote genre of everyday literature but also the conditions of possibility
for a type of research which was from the start orientated towards a form of deep
interdisciplinarity which combined the study of Latin American narratives of
urban modernity and the close reading of literary texts with sociological meth-
odologies and research questions. Another precious memory which I treasure from
these formative years is precisely the notion of a diverse but closely knit intellectual
community (not just within but also beyond the department) that gave support
and stimulation to these heterogeneous interests and pursuits, something which
is fundamental to the young scholar and the significance of which tends to be
obscured in current measures of impact.
Glasgow not only provided me with my basic sociological language and toolkit.
I also learnt English here, which has become, to a great extent, my working
language. As the level of English with which I first arrived was very basic, in
my experience the learning of English and of sociology are very closely related.
I initially depended on the help of friends, who proofread my undergraduate essays
and later benefitted from the generosity of my PhD supervisors in this respect.
As Mead once said, ‘a person learns a new language and … gets a new soul’, she
becomes a different individual (1934, p. 283). The experience of living and
thinking in the language of the other also prepared me for another definitive
influence I would find on leaving Glasgow: that of research in the field of
translation studies.
I am currently engaged in a type of cultural sociology that, without succumbing
to the allure of commercial culture and the apparent respectability of the culture
industry, is prepared to examine all kinds of things, no matter how insignificant or
marginal they appear to be; that is not afraid to focus on ‘the object riddled with
error’ (Benjamin, 2006, p. 129). The empirical work I first pursued here in
Glasgow on the mixture of high and low in the context of Latin American lit-
erature and journalism has later found new objects, such as the production and
circulation of news in a global context (Bielsa and Bassnett, 2009) or the reception
of the work of Roberto Bolaño in different languages and countries (Bielsa, 2013).
In these investigations, a theoretical intention is combined with close reading
of empirical materials. Cultural artefacts are approached not as instruments that
allow the researcher to respond to sociological hypotheses or questions, but rather
as guides that provide valuable articulations of reality. This social aspect can be
unearthed by a sociological inquiry that is attentive not just to contents but also
to form, which, as Lukacs and Adorno already made clear, is also deeply social.
On the other hand, I have attempted to make explicit the theoretical, meth-
odological and empirical significance of translation for sociology and the social
sciences more widely. Contrary to its most widespread definition, translation is
never simply a process of linguistic transfer but primarily a social relation, what
Antoine Berman referred to as the experience of the foreign (1992). Through
translation we come to terms with and respond to the strangeness of others and
of ourselves, and the way we do it – our politics of translation – can make us
more open or fundamentally prevent us from engaging with people who speak and
think otherwise. In a context marked by the need to confront common problems
with others whom we do not understand, translation appears thus a key process
in a cosmopolitical sense. I have also pursued the study of translation empirically,
trying to specify the ways in which the transformation of texts when they travel
to new contexts offers a productive account of the processes of cultural globali-
sation. This work refutes simplistic views of global diffusion or homogenisation,
whether in the circulation of translated news, literature or of sociological texts
(Bielsa, 2016).
Translation can also offer novel views on key themes of sociological interest.
One of the figures I am particularly interested in is that of the cosmopolitan
stranger, whom I have approached as an excellent translator of the foreign. Of
course, my first memories of a sociological approach to the stranger come from
David Frisby’s description of the stranger as an example of the individual in
movement in Simmel’s founding reflections on the sociology of space. Simmel’s
notion of the stranger as a particular synthesis of nearness and remoteness is still key
in many ways, but the well-defined boundaries of social groups that he could still
take for granted have today been blurred. In this context, the cosmopolitan
stranger appears as a privileged type of stranger that has learnt to relate to new
environments and heterogeneous social groups by making her experiences of the
foreign relevant to them in meaningful ways. Instead of focusing on the tragedy of
translated men, as Pascale Casanova (2004) would do, we are led here to consider
the skills of translating strangers in elaborating accounts that can lead to ‘shifts in
self-understanding and self-problematization in light of the encounter with the
Other’ (Delanty, 2009, p. 83). Cosmopolitan strangers come in many shapes and
are familiar to us not only through high cultural texts but also in the growing
numbers of mediated strangers that become relevant to heterogeneous mass publics
with no clear inside/outside divide. One of my preferred examples is Cesar Millan,
the Dog Whisperer, who tells American dog owners how they have to change
in order to treat their dogs properly. Other relevant examples of cosmopolitan
strangers are foreign correspondents, especially those that excel in communicating
to different audiences across linguistic and cultural divides like, for instance,
John Carlin.
My interest in the cosmopolitan stranger directly reflects my own intellectual
trajectory and experience of the foreign, which is centrally marked by the process
of becoming a cultural sociologist in Glasgow and, more recently, by that of re-
maining a stranger on my return to the city where I was born. After all, an elective
affinity can be found between this experience and a discipline whose point of
departure is making familiar things strange. This affinity is also at the root of my
defence of a politics of translation based on linguistic hospitality, a politics of
translation that does not simply seek to assimilate the foreign to the domestic, thus
preserving a space for what Alfred Schutz once referred to as the magic fruit of
strangeness. And recognising and reflecting on the centrality of translation in the
constitution of languages, traditions or cultures, as well as in processes of meaning-
making and interaction in local and global contexts, is increasingly becoming
unavoidable for cultural sociology today.
The end of homecoming

When Freud, aged 45, finally obtained an associate professorship, his feeling
of triumph was countered by a concurrent expression of ambivalence and guilt.
‘I have made my first bow to authority’, he reported in a letter to a friend, alluding
to his ‘strict scruples’ against cultivating the powerful (Schorske, 1981,
pp. 182–183). When, at a similar age, I gained a permanent position eight years
after my homecoming, the ambivalence was related to the experience of a process
through which I had been turned into a total stranger, even though I finally
managed to obtain the post without departmental support and only as a result of a
series of developments against all odds, and the determining role of several in-
dividuals who acted with dignity. Just as Freud’s response, according to Carl
Schorske, can illuminate his life-long struggle with the Austrian socio-political
reality and, particularly, the counterpolitical aspect in the origins of psychoanalysis,
I’d like to reflect on this difficult episode that puts an end to my homecoming,
which is connected in significant ways to my approach to the experience of
the foreign.
The process began, in fact, several months before the actual concurso (a
competitive examination to enter the public service) took place, after the po-
sition was publicised and announced at a departmental meeting. The opening
was related to the post I had already been occupying for two years (after having
been employed for five years as an externally funded research fellow), which
would thus be officially confirmed or, alternatively, rescinded in favour of an-
other candidate, as application was open to all. I soon realised that my presence
in the department became accompanied by a heavy silence and started to feel
increasingly uncomfortable when I was physically present in the building. As
a colleague who was successfully ousted by a similar process observed at the
time, we had become like pariahs.
There were more tangible signs that confirmed that I had reasons to be wor-
ried. The research profile specified for the post differed in significant ways from
my own, although the university had explicitly committed to creating a position in
my area of research when I first entered as a RyC research fellow to facilitate my
appointment to a permanent post. I later learned that the research profile approved
by the departmental executive commission had originally kept to this requirement
by specifying a broad profile in cultural sociology, but this was subsequently
changed. Five people initially applied for the opening, which to many also con-
stitutes a significant anomaly in a context where usually sole candidates apply and
go through the concurso with no competition (three of them subsequently with-
drew and did not take part in the examinations). Two of the three members of the
selection panel declined to participate and substitute members had to take their
place. However, I did not actually seriously doubt my ability to win the post until
the very last day. It was after having unravelled the complex set of circumstances
that surrounded the whole event and in the face of the unusually prolonged de-
liberations of the panel when I finally realised that my academic qualifications and
performance (which I had always thought would give me a firm advantage against
a much weaker candidate) were not really what was at stake in this process.
A colleague who observed the public defence later told me that my inter-
vention was like that of a francotirador (freelance hitman). In Spanish-speaking
countries, this figure has been traditionally associated with the independent in-
tellectual, whose role is to ‘tell the truth to power’ (Said, 1996). At the start of my
academic career it had become unforgettably linked with the urban crónica writer
Emiliano Pérez Cruz and his portrayal of daily life in Mexico City’s slums (Bielsa,
2006, p. 109). Yet, I cannot associate myself with such a figure. Since my arrival
my position has rather been purposefully Kafkian: I have tried to make myself
small, to occupy just the little space that I need to exist, initially within a research
group, until that became no longer possible. I never openly challenged the au-
thority of what are hierarchically structured research groups, which occupy a
pivotal place in academic departments and serve to collectively regulate not only
the research topics and activities of their members but also the allocation of
teaching and the supervision of PhD students. However, by mostly pursuing my
own independent research, I had not submitted to their power. I had not bowed
to their authority. It was the lack of support from a research group that directly led
to my untenable position at the key moment of securing a permanent post, al-
though I had no grievances with the head of the department at the time, whereas
colleagues with whom I had been on friendly terms simply seemed to vanish. My
solitary position was appropriately performed by my witnessing the sizeable group
attending the public defence in support of the other candidate, and particularly the
announcement of the result of the panel’s deliberations.
The endogamic character of the Spanish university is notoriously well known.
‘Give me three votes and I will turn a telegraph post into a professor’, quotes Jordi
Llovet in his memoirs, unashamedly reflecting on his own position as a telegraph
post at the Universitat de Barcelona (2011, p. 108). I also had direct knowledge
of a similar case of departmental backing for the least competitive candidate from
a close relation. But the experience of undergoing this process myself has pro-
foundly changed my outlook. I’m conscious that this text is faced with the
impossibility of adequately conveying it, in a sense brilliantly captured by Alfred
Schutz when he asserted that ‘reminiscences and graves are neither conquerable
nor transferable’ (1976, p. 97). However, perhaps it can feed into a more distanced
reflection on the persistence of a system that subordinates knowledge to power and
resists change, even with the increasing absorption of Spanish universities in the
global neoliberal arena.
At the time of finishing this text, the Spanish state is legislating to reduce the
proportion of temporary employment in the public sector, following European
Union demands.2 To a large extent, this involves many thousands who are occupying
their posts in an ‘acting’ capacity (interinos). Their prominent presence is the result of a
widespread use of temporary contracts for jobs that are normally attached to per-
manent posts. This effectively means that the people who have already been occu-
pying these posts, sometimes for many years, have to compete with others in highly
ritualised public examinations, which often require a year of intensive preparation.
They are the only candidates that have anything to lose with an unfavourable out-
come: their jobs, which are extinguished when the permanent appointment is made.
While this process takes place at all levels in the education sector (and others
like health and public administration), within the university system it is parti-
cularly perverse, revealing what in many ways can only be approached as a
double trap. On the one hand, the new permanent positions are formally but
seldom truly open to all, because they are attached to the jobs of precarious
lecturers who are already occupying these positions. On the other hand, through
this effective delay of access to a permanent post, power groups within academic
departments acquire unprecedented control of their members not only on entry,
as in the normal workings of endogamic institutions, but also many years be-
yond. In this way, academics who are often well into their 40s and have spent
their whole professional lives at the university remain dependent on
departmental support for their eventual tenure. Thus, this practice functions as a
hidden, self-regulating mechanism through which existing power groups are
reproduced and perpetuated. There is no widespread notion of fair competition
on academic merit. The sense of having to abide by these unwritten rules weighs
heavily on even the most successful and productive academics, who can never
be certain that their prospects of permanence will not be jeopardised if they fail
to conform. Compliance is, on the other hand, rewarded with departmental
support, which takes the form of allowing the inside candidate to choose the
research profile of the post (frequently with definitions of very narrow profiles
that make it highly improbable that any other candidate can fulfil the require-
ments) as well as the members of the selection panel. Hence the double trap – or
double fiction – of the creation of academic posts which in most cases are
destined to academics already occupying those posts, but which can also be used
to get rid of those who are considered to be too individualistic, or too detached,
independently of their actual competence, even if they have fulfilled all the
formal requirements for tenure. In such cases, the open competition serves
to legitimise the victory of a different yet equally endogamic candidate.
A pernicious and lasting effect of this mode of operation is that it becomes almost
impossible not to be complicit with this system, which has normalised obedience and
cronyism at large. Most established academics owe their positions not just to their
merits, but to the support that has been granted to them on other grounds. They can
in turn be called to participate in similar collective rituals of legitimation, which have
become so ingrained that they are seldom called into question. University governing
bodies and trade unions are unable to challenge the micro power structures that
prevail at the departmental level, even when faced with evidence of flagrant ma-
nipulation of the rules against particular candidates with long-acquired rights.
Individual responsibility for participating in this system is seldom acknowledged and
its existence is often attributed to the ills of bureaucracy, in a characteristic act of bad
faith. However, at the same time, most also feel trapped and have suffered from it in
episodes that they prefer to forget, but which have left in them an undissolvable
sting. A basic mechanism that Elias Canetti examined in Crowds and Power (1981), is
that it is precisely the attempt to get rid of this sting by passing it on to others
what contributes to the perpetuation of the system.
It is not just flexible capitalism (Sennett, 1998), but also a nepotism that is
characteristic of traditional forms of authority that threatens to corrode people’s
character by jeopardising both their sense of self and their relations with others. In
my experience, Spanish academic life is infinitely impoverished not just by the
fragmentation and animosity that prevails in academic departments, but especially
by the lack of a collegiality that is distinctively associated with knowledge, not
power. Paradoxically, in this Mediterranean setting, a systemic coldness that pe-
netrates all personal relationships among its members leads to self-distancing and
reserve, as opposed to the warmth that I found (but that is also increasingly
threatened) in colder climes. This is why, after many years of living abroad, I have
only become an exile now that my homecoming is complete.
Notes
1 The term stranger is semantically wider than that of foreigner, generally associated with
legal citizenship. Moreover, as Richard Sennett has argued, the stranger has been seen in
certain contexts marked by profound social change identified as an unknown rather
than as an alien or foreigner (1978, pp. 48–49). This section plays with these semantic
ambiguities in order to build a view of the complexities of strangeness, both at home
and abroad.
2 According to the newspaper El País, the proportion of temporary employment in the
education sector is currently about 25%. The objective is to reduce this for the public
sector as a whole to 8% (Zafra, 2022).
References
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CONCLUSION: TRANSLATION
AND REFLEXIVITY
I hope this book has effectively shown why translation is so important in relation
to what Margaret Archer has described as the reflexive imperative in late mod-
ernity, which drives us towards more reflexivity in our everyday conversations
with ourselves and with others (Archer, 2012). Fast-paced structural change and
the increasing unreliability of tacit knowledge and habit on the part of social actors
are not the only significant factors here. In a context of heightened cultural mixing
and multilingual exchange, it is necessary to challenge still widespread notions that
take linguistic homogeneity for granted and move towards a plurilingual vision in
order to face proliferating global challenges within and beyond national societies.
The ordinary process of sustaining social relationships across linguistic dif-
ference, of attempting to overcome lack of understanding, has traditionally es-
caped sociological attention, including accounts centred on communicative
action after the linguistic turn. Reflexivity on translation is made difficult be-
cause it is characteristically an invisible process that we either take for granted or
reduce to a mechanical operation of word substitution, reflecting the over-
whelming predominance of a notion of translation as the transfer of pre-
established meanings, which is idealist and reductionist at the same time. Yet this
reflexivity holds a relevant key to the sociological aim of making society strange.
Translation makes strange that which we think is more natural in ourselves: our
native language. We are not born with our native language. It is a still widely
prevailing monolingual vision that has led us to think of language in this way
and silenced extensive plurilingual practices in ordinary social exchange. Just as
the foreigner has been constructed as a person who cannot be herself (Sennett,
2011), translators have been traditionally seen as traitors and translation decried
as a loss. However, a whole new social landscape appears in front of us if we turn
our attention to proliferating difference and transformation through inter-
linguistic exchange, away from the silence of polyglots (Kristeva, 1991) to the
Conclusion 165
pleasures of bilingual games (Sommer, 2004). I have tried to draw the contours
of this fascinating landscape, which offers in many ways a still new and un-
explored field to the sociological eye.
In order to examine this existing multiplicity of widespread but often over-
looked forms of translation I have embraced an interdisciplinary practice that can
adequately be conceived in terms of translating between disciplines. This points
to an additional methodological dimension of translation as ‘a largely unexploited
model for connecting and creating overlaps between disciplines, with a view
toward the possible transformation of these disciplines and their conceptual sys-
tems’ (Bachmann-Medick, 2016, p. 189). Translational sociology effectively de-
velops new methodological perspectives beyond existing disciplines and contains a
critical call to disciplinary rethinking through translation. In sociology this largely
concerns drawing attention to the constitutive role of translation in our ordinary
social interactions and connections with others, as well as in existing power re-
lations and democratic practices, beyond simplistic and instrumentalist concep-
tions. In translation studies it relates to unexamined and often implicit views of
cultures as homogeneous bounded wholes, and to a reductionist foregrounding
of textual translation processes as distinct from the social contexts in which they
take place. More generally, translation allows for the articulation of a systematic
critique of both methodological nationalism and a methodological globalism that
underestimates the processes that mediate the global production and circulation
of practices and texts.
This book also contains a call for a form of translation that is becoming in-
creasingly relevant in our present: what I have approached as reflexive translation.
Reflexive translation is made possible by a new consciousness on translation that
appears with European modernity, a consciousness that establishes a reflection of
translation on itself, which since German Romanticism has become inseparable
from translation practice (Berman, 1992, p. 176). It allows us to make explicit
the resistance to translation that, according to Berman, is present in every culture,
a structural ethnocentrism by which every society dreams of becoming a pure and
unadulterated whole (1992, p. 4), or the violence of translation to which Venuti
has also drawn attention (2008).
In the 21st century, I have argued, it is necessary to radicalise this practice
by extending it to all users of translation, providing us with a means of re-
flecting on the linguistic heterogeneity with which we are ordinarily involved
and allowing us to become the reflexive authors of the translations we use
to make sense of the world. This is by necessity an interdisciplinary endeavour
which involves the humanities and the social sciences towards a much an-
ticipated translational turn. Sociology is well placed to enact and lead the way
in such a turn, and this book has explored some of the ways in which it might
do so. Underlying this proposition is the conviction that this affects sociologists
not only as users of translations but often also as producers of translations in our
work. Because only a translational sociology is a reflexive sociology in the true
sense of the word.
166 Conclusion
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GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cited references have been listed at the end of each chapter. This is a list of
recommended bibliographical sources on the social and political dimensions
of translation.
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Kenney. Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press.
Berman, A. (2018) The Age of Translation. Translated by C. Wright. London and New
York: Routledge.
Bermann, S. and Wood, M. (2005) Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation. Princeton:
168 General bibliography
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doi: 10.1177/1749975514546235
Routledge.
Bielsa, E. and Hughes, C. W. (eds) (2009) Globalization, Political Violence and Translation.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bielsa, E. and Kapsaskis, D. (eds) (2021) The Routledge Handbook of Translation and
Globalization. London and New York: Routledge.
Blommaert, J. (2010) The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University
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Chakrabarty, D. (2008) Provincializing Europe. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University
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Cronin, M. (2006) Translation and Identity. London and New York: Routledge.
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P.-A. Brault and M. B. Naas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
University Press.
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doi: 10.1146/annurev-anthro-102214-013806
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General bibliography 169
Meschonnic, H. (2011) Ethics and Politics of Translating. Translated by P.-P. Boulanger.

Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
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and London: Duke University Press.
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Minnesota Press.
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Dryden to Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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University Press.
Tymoczko, M. (2007) Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators. Manchester and
Kinderhook: St. Jerome Publishing.
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London: Routledge.
INDEX
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.
absolute hospitality 71, 140 BBC Radio 4, 70

activism 10–11, 39, 97 Beck-Gernsheim, E. 73, 153
Actor-Network theory 2, 50, 98 Beck, Ulrich 19, 32–33, 42, 67, 69, 142;
Adorno, Theodor 11, 20, 21, 37, 56, 130, The Metamorphosis of the World 32
153, 155, 157 Benjamin, Walter 2, 3, 51, 94, 101–104,
The Age of Translation (Berman) 116 106, 108, 115–132, 129–131
Agier, Michel 11 Bennett, Karen 105
Aguilera, Antonio 125, 126 Berger, Tobias 99, 100–101
Alexander, Jeffrey 49 Berman, Antoine 2, 41, 69, 116, 120,
Al Qaeda 70 131n6, 157
Anderson, Benedict 84–85 bilingualism 55, 83, 84, 165
The Arcades Project (Benjamin) 115, 122, Black Lives Matter movement 13
124, 128, 132 ‘Black Power’ movement 12
Archer, Margaret 164 Bolaño, Roberto 157
Archibugi, Daniele 78–81 Boltanski, Luc 31
assimilatory translation 104–107, 108, 149 Boochani, Behrouz 22–26, 27n5
Assmann, Aleida 23, 27n5 Borchgrevink, Axel 57
Athique, Adrian 97 border 2, 18, 19, 58, 73, 74, 80, 86, 89, 96,
‘The Author as Producer’ (Benjamin) 116, 120, 139, 141, 148; bordering 2, 15;
101–102, 106 border thinking 80
auto-ethnographic triptych 152 border-industrial complex 23, 141
automatic translation 1, 46, 59n2 born-translated literature 22, 23
Brisset, Annie 49–50
bad translations 69, 130 Brubaker, R. 12, 15, 16, 19, 26
Baker, Mona 17 Bude, H. 155
Balibar, Étienne 68, 74, 86 Bühler, K. 120
Barrios, Nuria 10, 11 Busch, Brigitta 55
Bassnett, Susan 3 Butler, J. 14–15
Baudelaire, Charles 115–132, 132n10
Bauman, Zygmunt 13, 17–18, 22–23, cancel culture 13
27n4, 137, 141–143 Caneda, Teresa 21
Index 171
Canetti, Elias 37–38, 131n7, 161 De Standaard 10

Casanova, Pascale 158 de Swaan, Abram 47
Castells, Manuel 47 Deul, Janice 9, 10
Catalan speakers 84, 90n3, 155 de Volkskrant 10
Chiapello, Eve 31 discursive explosion, identity 11–13
The Civilizing Process (Elias) 31 displacement 20–21
Clark, J. 106 division of labour 41–42
climate change 30, 32, 97 ’Doctrine of the Similar’ (Benjamin) 132n9
colonisation 22, 35 Dog Whisperer (Millan) 143–145
community 18, 19, 22, 38, 53, 55, 72–74, domesticating translation 95–96
77, 79, 80, 83, 84, 85, 89, 90n4, 85, Doorslaer, Luc Van 10–11
135, 136, 138, 139, 156; durée 127
see also Gemeinschaft Dürrschmidt, J. 155
concurso 159
Connell, Raewyn 35 Edwards, Tim 4
Cooper, F. 12, 15, 16, 19, 26 Elective Affinities (Goethe) 36
cosmopolitan democracy 1, 77–78, 81, elective affinity 158
85–88; see also democracy Elias, Norbert 16, 31
cosmopolitanisation 94, 96, 135, 142 El País 10, 162n2
cosmopolitanism 19, 69, 77, 80, 85–89, equivalence 30, 31, 38, 39, 52, 53, 71, 73,
135, 136, 139, 140, 142, 144, 149; 98, 101, 105
artistic 81; critical 46, 80, 149n7; and essentialism 14–15, 80, 81, 85
democracy 1, 68, 77, 78, 79, 81, 85, 87, ethical objective, translation 69, 87, 95
88, 89, 147; interspecies 144–145; new ethnocentrism 69–70, 74, 87, 95, 105, 165
67; openness 140–141 ethnographic research 57, 59n1
Cosmopolitanism and Translation (Bielsa) 2 Eurobarometer survey 90n5
Cosmopolitan Spaces (Rumford) 139 Eurocentrism 45, 80
cosmopolitan strangers 3, 135–136, exile 20, 21, 26, 148, 154, 161
139–143, 148, 157–158
The Cosmopolitan Vision (Beck) 73 Fisher, R. G. 146–147
Covid-19 pandemic 31 flâneur 124, 127
creolisation 49, 58 flawed consumers 137
critical cosmopolitanism 46, 89, 149n7 Fleurs du mal (Baudelaire) 117, 124
critique of myth 131 flexible capitalism 13, 161
crónica 159 foreigner 16, 20–22, 73, 82, 140, 143, 147,
Crowds and Power (Canetti) 37–38, 161 153, 154, 162n1, 164
Cruz, Emiliano Pérez 159 foreignising translation 95–96
cultural/culture analysis 123–124; artefacts Fowler, Bridget 156
157; diversity 48; entanglements 46; francotirador 159
homogenisation 47–49; materialism 156; Fraser, Nancy 17
mixing 1, 164; pattern 136; sociologist Freeman, Richard 99, 107
155–158; sociology 3, 157, 159; Freud, Sigmund 124, 158–159
translation 45; turn 30, 94 Frisby, David 56, 157
Cussel, Mattea 96
Gemeinschaft 18
Deane-Cox, Sharon 24, 25 Gesellschaft 18
Delanty, Gerard 67, 69 German Romanticism 165
democracy: cosmopolitan 77–78, 81, Gibb, Robert 58
85–88; language of 78–81; linguistic global asymmetries 48, 72, 155
hospitality 85–88; monolingual vision global communication 47
81–85; social role, language 77; global English 67
translation 87 globalisation 18, 19, 46–49, 58, 67, 73, 79,
Democracy and the Foreigner (Honig) 147 83, 96, 97, 139, 142, 148, 153, 157;
Derrida, Jacques 50–51, 70–71, 108 theory 67, 153
172 Index
The Globalization of Strangeness in-between stranger 136, 149n1

(Rumford) 139 Inghilleri, Moira 72, 107
global language system 47 intercultural communication 49, 67–68
global literary space 48 interdisciplinarity 1–3, 39, 46, 74, 78, 94,
glocalisation 49, 58 98–101, 104, 106, 108, 153, 156, 165
Goethe, J. W. von 35–38, 40, 42, 58, 118 international circulation 2, 55
Gorman, Amanda 9, 10, 11, 22 ‘international English’ 68, 87
Guglielmo, Angelo 146–147 Interpreting Justice (Inghilleri) 72
intersubjective processes 13, 74
Hall, Stuart 11, 14, 15, 18–19 intralingual/interlingual distinction 100, 108n3
Hannerz, Ulf 149n4 isolated experience 124–127
Hanssen, Beatrice 116 Ivekovic, Rada 15, 72–73
harmony, languages 122–123
Head, Tania 145–148, 149 Jakobson, Roman 2
Heilbron, Johan 48 ‘just’ translation 53
Hermann and Dorothea (Goethe) 41
Hermans, Theo 39, 47, 101 Kabbalah, Lurian 122
Herzen, Alexander 21, 148 Kant, I. 70–71
heterogeneous mass publics 136, 158 Kemple, Thomas 56
‘The Hill we Climb’ (Gorman) 9 kinship 132n8; of languages 119, 121, 122
Holocaust memory transmission 23–24 Kristeva, Julia 155
homecoming 158; family commitments Kymlicka, Will 78–81, 84, 85, 89
153; Spanish university system 156–158,
160; stranger at home 154–155, 162n1 language: nation 81–82; of geology 34; of
‘Homecoming as Displacement’ gesture 120
(Bielsa) 152 Lash, S. 47
homogeneous communities 95 Latour, Bruno 2, 33–34
homogenisation 47–49, 56, 58, 90, 157 La Vanguardia 146
Honig, Bonnie 147 Lévy-Bruhl 120
Honneth, Axel 17 linguistic boundaries 47
hospitality 22, 70–71, 72, 85–88, 140, 141, linguistic diversity 55, 78, 81, 85, 86
144–145, 155, 156; see also absolute linguistic heterogeneity 165
hospitality; linguistic hospitality linguistic homogeneity 164
human rights 1, 2, 12, 23, 68, 71, 75, 98, linguistic hospitality 70–72, 85–88, 87
99, 104, 108 ‘Literary History and the Study of
hybrid identities 20, 89 Literature’ (Benjamin) 123
hybridization 49, 58 literary journalism 153, 156
lived experience 3; of language in 55
idealism 49–52, 58, 69, 74, 79, 80 Llovet, Jordi 160
identity: age of strangeness 18–22, 27n4; long experience 124, 125
contemporary salience 12; discursive Lovelock, James 36
explosion 11–13; essentialism 15; ethnic
11, 12, 25, 26, 83; historical Manus Prison 23, 24
transformation 13; hybrid 20, 89; Margulis, Lynn 36
national 11, 78; multiculturalism 13; Marx, K. 74–75
politics 11–13, 16, 17, 19, 21, 25, 26, 72, materiality of language 3, 49–51, 79
73, 85, 101; positioning 15–17; racial 25; Mead, George Herbert 13, 40, 53–54, 157
recognition 17–18; self-construction meaning-making activity 52–53
12–13; sexual 11, 12, 25; social mechanical reproduction techniques
constructivism 14; white translator, 121–122, 127
Gorman’s poetry 9–10 Media and Morality (Silverstone) 70
Iglesias, Julien Danero 58 media translation 2, 31
Index 173
mémoire volontaire 126 Obiols, Víctor 9

metamorphosis 32, 118; Beck’s notion ‘On Language as Such and the Language of
32–33; division of labour 41–42; Man’ (Benjamin) 116
knowledge beyond disciplinary onomatopoeia 119
boundaries 35–38; Latour’s views 33–34; ‘On the Concept of History’ (Benjamin)
material nature, translation 39; 33, 75, 132n9
shortcomings 34–35; translation 38–43; Origin of the German Trauerspiel (Benjamin)
unity and multiplicity, translation 40 122–123
The Metamorphosis of Plants (Goethe)
35–38, 118 Palmary, Ingrid 106–107
metaphysical theory of language 119 ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in
methodological globalism 48, 165 Baudelaire’ (Benjamin) 124, 130
methodological nationalism 54, 58, 59, 96, Parsons, Talcott 31, 59n3
99, 165 particularistic categorical attributes 16;
Millan, Cesar 143–145, 147–148, 149, 158 nationalism and cosmopolitanism 80
mimetic element, language 120–121 Peltier, Melissa Jo 144
modernist writers 21 philological attitude 129–131
modernity 1, 18, 19, 27n4, 45, 46, 56, 67, philosophy of language 4
115–116, 135, 138, 140, 141, 164; Piaget 120–121
Baudelaire 116–131; nationalism 16; plurilingualism 1, 83, 84, 89, 90n2
philological attitude 129–131; urban 156 Poe, Edgar Allan 123, 132n10
modesty 104 politics: Benjamin’s approach 94;
monolingual paradigm 1 disciplinary borders 74–75;
monolingual vision 81–85, 89, 164 ethnocentrism 69–70; intercultural
Moran, Marie 15 communication 67–68; interdisciplinary
mother tongue 73, 81–83, 88, 90n5, approaches 94; language 77–78;
154, 155 multiculturalism 72–74; recognition 11;
movement 2, 12, 13, 16, 47, 52, 98–102, reconceptualisation 94; reductive
108n3, 126, 138, 152, 153, 155 tendency, culture 70–72; translation 68,
multiculturalism 13 94, 95–96; translation, politicisation of
multilingualism 56, 67, 68, 77 101–104, 108; Venuti’s formulation 94,
multimedia translation 2 95–98; verbal message, transfer of 68–69
multiplicity 1, 2, 36, 37, 39–41, 67, 77, 100, Portmann, Adolf 36
116, 118, 119, 122, 129, 152, 165 positioning 13–17, 20, 71, 96–98
myth of Babel 52–53 poststructuralist critiques 2
‘Problems in the Sociology of Language’
narrative theory approach 96 (Benjamin) 119, 120
nationalism 80, 81 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
nature/culture: ‘ideology of nature’ 35; Capitalism (Weber) 59n3
intimate knowledge of 36–37 Proust 124, 126
Negative Dialectics (Adorno) 20
New Climate Regime 33, 34 Rafael, Vincente 86
The New York Times 146 Ramon y Cajal (RyC) 152, 154, 159
Nicholson, Linda 12 reader 17, 25, 48, 52, 55, 69, 87, 88, 95–98,
No Friend but the Mountains (Boochani) 101, 102, 108n2, 117, 118, 124, 126,
22–26 130, 144
non-identity 20, 22, 73 recognition 1, 11–13, 17–18
non-instrumental approach 3, 118 reflexive translation 25, 104–107, 108
non-native speakers 82, 144 reflexivity 1, 51, 57, 80, 85, 88, 89, 106,
nonsensuous similarity 119–120, 122 129, 135, 137, 155, 164–165
norm 2, 71, 83, 95, 98–100, 101, 104, responsibility 23, 71, 72, 154, 161
105, 125 revolution 32, 34, 74, 75, 101, 103
174 Index
rewriting 25, 31 taken-for-granted beliefs 51

Ricoeur, Paul 52, 70 Tapiador, Francisco 154
Rijneveld, Marieke Lucas 9, 10 ‘The Task of the Translator’ (Benjamin)
Rochlitz, Reiner 117 115–116, 123, 128
Rumford, Chris 19, 139, 140, 142, 143, Taylor, Charles 17–18
149n1, 149n5 Temple, Bogusia 57
Terrestrial 33, 43
Said, Edward 154 Tofighian, Omid 24, 25, 26
Sakai, Naoki 73 traditional theory of translation 119, 120
Sakai, Naomi 2 transculturation 45, 49, 58
Santos, Boaventura de Sousa 68 transfer 21, 25, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 68, 74,
Sayad, Abdelmalek 51–52 86, 118, 136, 153, 156, 157, 160; of
Schleiermacher, F. 87, 95, 96, 103 information 3, 86–87, 118–119;
Schorske, Carl 158 instrumentalism 31, 39, 40; interlingual
Schütz, Alfred 54–55, 136, 154, 158, 160 transfer 2; policy transfer 98, 99;
second-generation migrants 142 translation as transfer 73, 94, 98
self-reflexivity 21, 46, 51, 145 transformation 1, 13, 17, 20, 27, 30–43, 46,
self-translations 56 50–53, 58, 73, 80, 88, 94, 96, 98–108,
Sennett, Richard 16, 18, 20–21, 27n6, 116–118, 124, 157, 164, 165; cultural
162n1 manipulation 30–31; interdisciplinary
Shoah (Lanzmann) 27n5 approaches 98–101; radical 31;
shock experience 125–127 translation 108
Silverstone, Roger 70 translanguaging 83
Simmel, Georg 3, 136, 137–138, 141, Translation and Conflict (Baker) 17
148–149, 149n3, 157 translation 1–3, 9–27, 30–43, 45–59,
‘simple translation’ 2, 45, 53 67–75, 77, 85–89, 94–108, 115–132,
social constructivism 14 157, 158, 164–166; intersemiotic forms
sociology: circulation 55–58; cultural 2; intralingual forms 2
homogenisation 47–49; culture, ordinary translational sociology 1, 45–59, 116, 165
52–55; culture to translation 46; translators: ethnic identity 26; linguistic
knowledge 57; materiality of language management 17; reflexive process of
49–51, 58; production 55–58; social life engagement 25; transform international
46; translation 45–46 norms 99; untrained 107; white
Spanish university system 154–155, translator 10
156–158, 160 transnational public space 68, 87
Spivak, Gayatri 68, 71, 72
strangeness 18–22, 54, 69, 70, 71, 73, Umfunktionierung 102
85–89, 97, 137–143, 148–149, 157, 158, universalisation of strangerhood 13, 138,
162n1 139, 142, 143
strangerhood, social experience 142 universalism 68, 80
strangers 3, 21, 22, 54, 73, 86, 88, 89, 97, Universitat de Barcelona 160
119, 135–149, 153–158; and change to University of Glasgow 156
Head’s view 54, 145–148; cosmopolitan University of Leicester 3–4
135–136, 139–140; as enemies 86; University of Warwick 3
generalised strangeness 137–139; Urry, J. 47
mediated stranger 136–137; Millan’s utopian idiom 21–22
view 143–145; sociological
approaches 135 ventriloquist 145–148
superdiversity 55, 83 Venuti, Lawrence 48, 69, 94, 95–98
Survivors’ Stairway 146
Susam-Saraeva, Sebnem 24, 25 Walkowitz, Rebecca 22
symbolic theory 120 Western sociology 45
Index 175
Williams, Raymond 46, 52, 53 World Trade Center Survivors

The Woman Who Wasn’t There (2012) 146 Network 145
‘Women’s Liberation’ movement 12
‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Yildiz, Yasemin 82–83
Reproduction’ (Benjamin) 101, 109n4, Young, Iris Marion 15–16
126, 131n3

2023 A Translational Sociology - Interdisciplinary Perspectives On Politics and Society

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A TRANSLATIONAL SOCIOLOGY

A Translational Sociology provides an interdisciplinary investigation of the key

Esperança Bielsa is an Associate Professor and ICREA Academia Fellow at the

Translation is increasingly becoming a broad topic of scholarly reflection in the

• An association of translation with movement and transformation.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

ISBN: 978-1-032-11212-1 (hbk)

1 Translation and identity 9

2 Translation and transformation 30

3 For a translational sociology 45

6 The translator as producer 94

7 Translation and modernity: Benjamin’s Baudelaire 115

8 Translating strangers 135

9 Homecoming: an auto-analysis 152

Conclusion: translation and reflexivity 164

This book outlines the contours of a sociology that is centrally defined by an

narrow definition that conceives it strictly in terms of an interlingual transfer (what

At the level of subjective lived experience, translation mediates our relationship

Can only a Black person translate a Black person? (P. Corroto, El

Is the act of translation also an extension of a particular identity? Is the

By contrast, activism imposes an ‘overriding, ideological perspective’, forcibly

The discursive explosion of identity

category of analysis in scientific research (Brubaker and Cooper, 2000; Alasuutari,

conceptions and promoted a reconceptualisation of individual selves and

Critical issues and debates

internal coherence of the subject, so that ‘the “coherence” and “continuity” of

conversations between particular people on particular occasions, positioning has

survival’ or to the ‘integrity of cultures’ as valid collective goals are inherently

Identity and translation in the age of strangeness

Identity has contributed to a positive reconceptualisation of the social particularity

These hybrid identities, if they can be so approached, refer not to enduring

account of the foreigner’s experience of displacement as an experience beyond

derivative’ (2008, p. 66). Thus, Joyce’s translational poetics of hospitality

By repositioning readers in their relationship to language, the polyglot Irish

Today, the experience of estrangement, boundary trespassing and displacement from

embodiment of human waste’ (2007, p. 41, 2016). Moreover, in the context of a

In its decolonial intention of ‘speaking back’ to the metropole by dislodging the

principle refers to respect and solidarity (neither empathy nor identification)

Translation is removal from one language into another through a continuum of

cultures of destination (Bassnett and Lefevere, 1990). In this context, notions

to become artists in quick improvisation and creative adaptation as a matter of

Two sociological approaches to metamorphosis

because there is no Earth capable of containing its ideal of progress,

Caught up in a system of production, humans are alone in having the

by colonial rule. This is why a notion of metamorphosis might actually become

Metamorphosis and/of knowledge beyond disciplinary

Goethe’s approach to metamorphosis also underpins his mature literary in-

that intentionally limits itself through method in order to produce knowledge as

the second sense in which the writer is considered a keeper of metamorphosis I

In a world of achievement and specialization, a world that sees nothing but

Translation and metamorphosis: a universal practice of the

(Hermans, 2007), or the instrumentalism of transfer (Venuti, 2019), is becoming

As Antoine Berman has noted, the coherence of Goethe’s thoughts on translation

at hand. Most translators have an ordinary experience of bypassing the division

In spite of the significance of these contributions, which engage with

Translation questions simplistic views of cultural

to access cultural and informational goods or to participate in international ex-

transcription, translation necessarily refers to two different aspects or sets of

different or even contradictory images of authors and works in different lin-

Translation avoids idealism by focusing on the materiality

The sociology of translation that dominates today focuses largely on a

The opacity of a language that is not immediately comprehensible is perhaps

monolingual neo-Babelian designs), we acknowledge the positive role that