Emily Apter

On Translation in a Global Market

�� ranslation in a Global Market” focuses on the extent to which global artists, video makers, and writers consciously or unconsciously build translatability into their art forms. This special issue of Public Culture finds inspiration in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s midcentury critique of the American “culture industry” in the famous chapter, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” of their Dialectic of Enlightenment.1 But whereas Adorno, Horkheimer, and the Frankfurt School more generally focused their critique on how emergent capital logics were encoded in mass cultural forms, they paid little attention to questions of translatability across the complex cultural and social terrains of capital. The question of how one achieves a mass cultural object—a cultural object that can be translated across linguistic, cultural, and social contexts —still begs to be answered. This special issue explores a number of interrelated problems that arise from the question of a global market in cultural and aesthetic forms. These problems include the marketing of national literature, the politics of publishing (with emphasis on the postcolonial dominance of Anglophone or standard-language publishing houses), and the question of an emergent internationalized aesthetics. When the problem of a globalizing mass culture and public culture is approached from the perspective of translatability, new and important

Global Translatio: The “Invention” of Comparative Literature, Istanbul, 1933

253 This essay grew out of dialogue with Aamir Mufti, whose own essay “Auerbach in Istanbul” provided crucial inspiration. I also acknowledge with profound gratitude the contribution of Tulay Atak, whose discovery and translation of Spitzer’s “Learning Turkish” article proved indispensable. The interview with Suyehla Bayrav was arranged by Tulay and her friends. Thanks are also due to Fredric Jameson, who put me in touch with Sibel Irzik and her colleagues at the Bosporos University. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Andreas Huyssen, and David Damrosch offered invaluable suggestions when a version of this essay was presented at Columbia University. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht was kind enough to share his manuscript “Leo Spitzer’s Style,” a rich source of literary history for this period. Global Translatio: The “Invention” of Comparative Literature, Istanbul, 1933

Crossover Texts/Creole Tongues: A Conversation with Maryse Condé

B orn in 1937 in Guadeloupe’s Pointe-à-Pitre, Maryse Condé stands as one of the premier Caribbean writers on the global scene, sharing space with a distinguished cohort that includes Derek Walcott, Caryl Phillips, Daniel Maximin, Frankétienne, Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, Jean Bernabé, and Edwidge Danticat. After obtaining university degrees in Paris and London, Condé began a multifaceted career in literature, journalism, criticism, and education. Before taking up her current position at Columbia University as professor of French and Francophone literature, Condé taught in Guinée, Ghana, Senegal, the University of Paris III, the University of Virginia, and the University of California at Berkeley. Condé’s compelling first novel Hérémakhonon (loosely translated as either “Welcome house” or “Awaiting good times”) draws on her early experiences in West Africa. Published in 1976, the novel has a startlingly contemporary bite, opening with an acerbic deflation of the “Africa chic” sweeping Europe and the United States in the form of a tiermondisme that flattens cultural nuance in its cloying identification with the Other: “Honestly! You’d think I’m going because it is the in thing to do. Africa is very much the thing to do lately. Europeans and a good many others are writing volumes on the subject. Arts and crafts centers are opening all over the Left Bank. Blondes are dying their lips with henna and running to the open market on the rue Mouffetard for their peppers and okra.”1

Balkan Babel: Translation Zones, Military Zones

A s the field of translation studies begins to respond to new directions in transnational literary studies, there has been a foregrounding of topics such as the “dependency” of minoritarian languages on dominant, vehicular ones; the links among linguistic standardization, nation-building, and the colonial export of European languages; the ways in which a global economy reinforces the imperium of English; the emergence of an international canon of books that are translation-friendly (in a market sense); and the definition of a “translational transnationalism” in terms of diversal relations among minoritarian languages.1 This last conceptual area is clearly indebted to the pioneering study of Franz Kafka by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature.2 In a seminal chapter entitled “What Is Minor Literature?” Deleuze and Guattari analyzed Kafka’s German as a pastiche of the “vehicular” tongue—meaning, in this case, the impoverished bureaucratese, the hollow state language imposed on Czechoslovakia by the Prussian state. According to their reading, Kafka subverted the vehicular by freighting it with unwelcome baggage, from Yiddish inflections to scraps of Czech vernacular. Now, even if the newly edited and translated Malcolm Pasley and Mark Harman editions of Kafka reveal a very differently textured use of the German language from the one characterized by

A questionnaire on materialisms

Recent philosophical tendencies of “Actor-Network Theory,” “Object-Oriented Ontology,” and “Speculative Realism” have profoundly challenged the centrality of subjectivity in the humanities, and many artists and curators, particularly in the UK, Germany, and the United States, appear deeply influenced by this shift from epistemology to ontology. October editors asked artists, historians, and philosophers invested in these projects—from Graham Harman and Alexander R. Galloway to Armen Avanessian and Patricia Falguières to Ed Atkins and Amie Siegel—to explore what the rewards and risks of assigning agency to objects may be, and how, or if, such new materialisms can be productive for making and thinking about art today.

Biography of a translation Madame Bovary between Eleanor Marx and Paul de Man

Eleanor Marx, the daughter of Karl Marx, published the first major English translation of Madame Bovary in 1886, the same year in which the first volume of Das Kapital would appear in English. This essay explores a number of related themes: the impact of a signature translation on the literary history of a classic; the “Marxist” theory of translation that can be adduced from Eleanor Marxs introduction to the early editions; the situation of the woman translator as a literary “worker”; and the status of a genre of textual history and theory characterized as “biography of a translation.” In 1965 Paul de Man reprised the Eleanor Marx Aveling translation for the American Norton edition and in 2004 the same edition was republished by Norton. The essay examines the curious survival of this early translation despite a long history of criticism, including a famous attack by Nabokov. The story of the translation took a tragic turn when, in a manner reminiscent of Emma Bovary, Eleanor Marx committed suicide with poison procured for her by her maid. Beyond parallels between the lives of Emma and Eleanor, the essay explores the question of a suicide drive in Flauberts text that may have drawn Eleanor to its most nuanced psychic undercurrents.

What is Yours, Ours, and Mine: Authorial Ownership and the Creative Commons*

OCTOBER 126, Fall 2008, pp. 91–114.

Translation at the checkpoint

This article provides an overview of the contemporary theoretical and artistic landscape related to the material borders of state sovereignty. It opens by exploring Palestinian multimedia artist Khaled Jarrar’s At the Checkpoint (2007, 2009), an exhibition of photographs physically installed at the Howarra and Qalandia checkpoints in the West Bank. With reference to the aesthetic refunctioning in Jarrar’s work of such sites of control, the article draws a distinction between the “harder borders” that literary cartography often ignores in favour of the “soft, hospitable border” of flows, migrations and hybridity. Assessing Antoni Muntadas’s conceptual art projects On Translation: Warning (1999) and On Translation: Die Stadt (1999–2004), Claire Denis’s films Nenette et Boni (1996), Beau Travail (1999) and L’Intrus (2004), and various Palestinian cultural texts, I argue that by foregrounding the laws of linguistic circulation and mobility, such works also inscribe the possibility of a multilingual, translational community beyond borders and checkpoints. I conclude, very much in the spirit of my book, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013), that translation theory must pay closer attention to the linguistic checkpoints erected by states to maintain their sovereignty, and rethink translation as a counter-hegemonic practice.

what is yours, ours and mine

Item: New York City, 28 June 2009. The streets are blaring ‘‘Thriller’’ and are full of people ‘‘being’’ Michael Jackson. What’s the ownership stake of Michael impersonators in his image? Do Jackson impersonators who make their living off copying his dance moves and songs (e.g., Joby Rogers or Britain’s NAVI) infringe on the star’s legal title to his selfand creative property? Are there conditions under which impersonation qualifies under the law as a form of identity theft or celebrity-plagiarism?

Fore-skin and After-image: Photographic Fetishism in Tournier's Fiction

Let us recall that the historic impetus that rendered the shroud of Turin visible—or more precisely, figurative—is found in the history of photography. When Secondo Pia immersed in the chemical bath his last attem pt to produce a clear photograph o f the holy shroud—his earlier attem pts had all been underexposed—this is what happened: there in the dark room, the moment the negative image took form (the inaugural glimpse), a face looked out at Pia from the bottom of the tray. A face that was, he said, unexpected. And seeing it he almost fainted. The event took place during the night of the 28th to the 29th of May, 1894. [. . .] The holy shroud became the negative imprint o f the body of Christ, its luminous index miraculously produced and miraculously inverted in the very act of resurrection, henceforth to be conceived o f in photographic terms.