Balkan Babel: Translation zones, military zones

Public Culture

Volumn 13, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 65-80

  Apter, Emily ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^b Department of Comparative Literature ^*  (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 25444489879     PISSN: 08992363     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/08992363-13-1-65     Document Type: Article

References (46)

1. I discuss the term translational transnationalism in more detail in my essay "On Translation in a Global Market" (in this issue of Public Culture).
2. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
3. For broader applications see, for example, David Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
4. For an example of the new translation, see Franz Kafka, The Castle: A New Translation Based on the Restored Text, trans. Mark Harman (New York: Schocken Books, 1998).
5. Michel Tremblay, The Guid-Sisters, trans. William Findlay and Martin Bowman (Toronto: Exile Editions, 1988);
6. Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting (London: Minerva, 1994).
7. "The Text in Joual," in "Trainspotting" at http://www.literarytranslation.com/index2.html, available as recently as June 2000.
8. "The Text in Joual," n. 2.
9. Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
10. Maria Todorova in discussion of her book, University of California at Los Angeles, 25 May 2000.
11. For a discussion of the marketing of translations of non-Western literature and the historic difficulties these works have in breaking into the global literary canon, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "The Politics of Translation," in Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, ed. Michèle Barrett and Anne Phillips (London: Polity Press, 1982);
12. Edward Said, "Embargoed Literature," in Between Languages and Cultures: Translation and Cross-Cultural Texts, ed. Anuradha Dingwaney and Carol Maier (Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995);
13. Emily Apter, "'Untranslatable' Algeria,"parallax 7 (April-June 1998): 47-60.
14. Ismail Kadare, The Three-Arched Bridge, trans. John Hodgson (New York: Vintage International, [1978] 1997), 71. Hereafter cited as TB.
15. Bernard Lewis has identified this translator as a dragoman or turgeman, an interpreter-middleman specialized in relaying information between the Holy Roman and Ottoman empires. See Lewis, "From Babel to Dragoman: The Tortuous History of the Interpreter in the Middle East," British Academy Elie Kedourie Memorial Lecture for 1998, Times Literary Supplement, no. 5012 (23 April 1999): 12-14.
16. Ismail Kadare, Broken April, trans. John Hodgson (New York: New Amsterdam Books, 1990).
17. Ismail Kadare, Albanian Spring: The Anatomy of Tyranny, trans. Emile Capouya (London: Saqi Books, 1994), 34.
18. First published as Kadare, Printemps albanais (Paris: Librairie Fayard, 1991).
19. If at times border wars are fueled by the lack of official recognition accorded small linguistic differences, in other instances it is the threat of sameness that sparks discord. The political motivations of linguistic separatism are no more clearly in evidence than in the post-Bosnia decision to break Serbian and Croatian into separately classified tongues, despite their overriding grammatical homologies. As George Steiner noted in 1963, decades before the Berlin Wall would come down, language divisionism could be most acute where homonymy was greatest. Observing the way in which "The East German language is developing its own jargon and dialect," Steiner concludes: "The words may continue to sound alike, but have contrary definitions. A young East German might come to be more at home, in the syntax of his politics and feelings, in Peking or Albania, than in Cologne." Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, [1958] 1998), 348-49.
20. Ivo Andrić, The Bridge on the Drina, trans. Lovett F. Edwards (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1945] 1977), 86. Hereafter cited as BD.
21. Manuel de Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (New York: Zone Books, 1991).
22. Ismail Kadare, The Palace of Dreams, translated from the French of Jusuf Vrioni by Barbara Bray (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1993), 13-14. Cited passage italicized in the original text.
23. Pierre Clastres, Archeology of Violence, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Semiolext(e), 1994), 55.
24. Translation of Clastres, Recherches d'anthropologie politique (Paris: Seuil, 1980).
25. Georges Bataille, "Structure et fonction de l'armée" (1938), in Denis Hollier, Le collège de sociologie: 1937-1939 (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 255-67.
26. George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), vii.
27. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), 87.
28. Wilson Harris, "Creoleness," in Selected Essays of Wilson Harris: The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination, ed. A. J. M. Bundy (London: Routledge, 1999).
29. Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer, Pure War, trans. Mark Polizotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983).
30. Harris, "Creoleness," 238-39.
31. Antoine Compagnon, "Pourquoi le français devient une langue comme les autres," le débat, no. 104, March-April 1999: 103 (my translation).
32. José Montoya, Information: 20 Years of Joda (San Jose, Calif.: Chusma House Publications, 1992).
33. Virilio and Lotringer, Pure War, 2-3.
34. Randolph Quirk, "International Communication and the Concept of Nuclear English," in English for International Communication, ed. C. J. Brumfit (Oxford: Pergamon Institute of English, 1982), 19.
35. Renée Balibar, L'institution du français: Essai sur le colinguisme des Carolingiens à la République (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985);
36. Clastres, Archeology of Violence;
37. Louis-Jean Calvet, Language Wars and Linguistic Politics, trans. Michel Petheram (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
38. Originally published as Calvet, La guerre des langues et les politiques linguistiques (Paris: Payot, 1987).
39. Clastres, Archeology of Violence, 49.
40. Calvet, Language Wars and Linguistic Politics, 155-56.
41. Ernest Renan, De l'origine du langage (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1859), 95-96 (my translation).
42. Alistair Pennycook, English and the Discourses of Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1998);
43. Pennycook, The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language (London: Longman, 1994).
44. Nicholas D. Kristof, "Stateside Lingo Gives Japan Its Own Valley Girls," New York Times, 19 October 1997, 33.
45. Kristof, "Stateside Lingo," 33.
46. A New York Times editorial on Internet hacking is foreboding: "The Internet is nearly impossible to police, for the same reason that it is so difficult to define. It is not owned or regulated by the government. Nor is it 'owned' by private businesses or individuals. It consists of telephone lines and countless computer sites linked together in a system through which anyone can navigate anonymously. In this environment, freedom of expression, commercial transactions, political activity and the simple pleasure of gathering information and communicating have come to flourish in ways few thought possible only a few years ago. These very qualities are what make the Internet vulnerable to anonymous attack. . . . Even more insidiously, the hackers have apparently enlisted unknowing allies in the attacks by invading vulnerable computer systems and using those computers to help carry out the assaults." Editorial, "Hacker Attacks on the Internet," New York Times, 11 February 2000, A30.