The Urgency of Translation

Translation is far more than the merely instrumental activity of making the literary productions of one language available in another. It opens the doors of the imagination to a diversity of cultural possibilities. It is also a political act, since it stretches the reader’s imagination by introducing it to degrees of affinity and difference, expanding the reader’s capacities for curiosity, empathy, criticality and openness to the Other. Indeed, translation could well be seen as one of the guarantees of the imagination against the narrowing of cultural resources enforced by hard-edged identitarian ideologies. Translation thus assumes a vital and urgent role today, in a world where linguistic practice must confront the homogenising effects of digital culture, as well as repressive forms of politics that demonise the Other and impose unitary conceptions of culture on societies that have been characterised by diversity.

In this lecture, Ranjit Hoskote will discuss how the practice of translation can embody three major gestures: anamnesia, resistance, and cosmopolitics. Anamnesia is a refusal to forget, a drawing on memories of dissent and inquiry encoded into various languages, a refusal to accept the subordinate and spurious position of the dialect in relation to the officially sanctioned version. By revealing language as a key battleground in the war over history, by sustaining plurality of expression and retrieving literatures from oblivion, translation also acts as a vital form of resistance. By recourse to key moments in the global history of translation, Hoskote will suggest that translation can be more than an assurance of a complacent cosmopolitanism; instead, it can be the vehicle of an insurgent cosmopolitics.