Previous Issue

Living in Languages

Volume 3 · 2024

Volume 3 examines translation amid authoritarianism, displacement, contested histories, and ecological crisis. Across criticism, poetry, fiction, and multilingual practice, its contributors explore translation’s entanglement with power, identity, memory, and survival while attending to the fractures, ambiguities, and possibilities that resist seamless linguistic mastery.

Contents

Introduction

Andrew Z. Brooks

Volume 3 opens by considering translation in the context of authoritarianism, displacement, ecological crisis, and the weaponization of language. Rejecting ideals of seamless mastery and transparency, the introduction approaches translating as an unfinished practice shaped by mediation, opacity, multiplicity, and the possibility of new forms of relation.

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Essay

Between Languages and Religions: Omar ibn Said’s Voice in the Arabic Narrative and English Translations

Rumi Coller-Takahashi

Examining the Arabic autobiography of Omar ibn Said and its successive English translations, Coller-Takahashi traces the ways Christian interpretation and translators’ decisions have mediated the voice of an enslaved Muslim writer. The essay foregrounds the multiplicity of Omar’s voice at the intersection of Arabic and English, Islam and Christianity, and American literary history.

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Poetry · Translation

Translations of Victoria Guerrero Peirano

Ilka Kressner

Ilka Kressner presents translations of poetry by Peruvian writer Victoria Guerrero Peirano across English and German. Moving among languages as well as spaces of movement, encounter, and perception, the translations foreground the relationship between sound, syntax, geography, and the shifting possibilities of multilingual poetic experience.

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Essay

Odesa Will Never be a ‘Russian’ City Again

Ian R. Singleton

Ian R. Singleton examines the relationship of contemporary Odesan writers to the Russian language after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Reading writers including Galina Itskovich through a decolonial framework informed by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the essay considers how translation can articulate the unstable relationship between language, colonialism, literary identity, and Ukrainian sovereignty.

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Essay

Untangling Memories of Violence: The Khipu in El rincón de los muertos

Jonathan J. Oliveri

Jonathan J. Oliveri reads Alfredo Pita’s El rincón de los muertos through the Andean khipu, the knotted mnemonic system used to record and communicate information. The essay argues that the novel metaphorically translates the khipu through its polyphonic structure, reconstructing fragmented memories and neglected histories of violence in the Andes.

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Media · Translation

For The Love of Subtitling: Analysing The Challenges in Audio-Visual Translations of Rocky aur Rani kii Prem Kahani

Haritima Sharma

Through the subtitles of the Bollywood film Rocky aur Rani kii Prem Kahani, Haritima Sharma examines the challenges of audio-visual translation. The essay considers how subtitlers negotiate linguistic meaning alongside cultural references, visual signs, pragmatics, and socio-linguistic identity, asking how culturally specific meanings can travel to linguistically diverse audiences without being flattened in translation.

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Fiction · Translation

On Translating Fadhy Mtanga

Jay Boss Rubin

Jay Boss Rubin reflects on translating Tanzanian writer Fadhy Mtanga from Swahili into English. Through Mtanga’s fiction and its distinctive narrative texture, the piece considers the practical and literary decisions involved in carrying voice, rhythm, cultural reference, and linguistic specificity between languages.

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Essay

Beyond Gaining and Losing: A Thematic Approach to the Translation of Washington Square

Jin Li

Jin Li approaches literary translation as a form of criticism through a comparative reading of Henry James’s Washington Square and its Chinese translation. Focusing on the recurring theme of gaining and losing, the essay considers how translation reshapes narrative voice, interpretation, and the novel’s critique of material value and utilitarian judgment.

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Essay

Benjamin’s estranged Heim

Andrew Z. Brooks

Andrew Z. Brooks examines Walter Benjamin’s engagement with Heim—home—during the early 1920s, tracing its relationship to friendship, intellectual community, catastrophe, and translation. From Benjamin’s plans for Angelus Novus to the memory of Fritz Heinle, Heim develops from an imagined site of communion into an estranged and speculative space for thinking language and belonging.

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