InFugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels relates translation to questions of forgetting and remembrance, belonging and exclusion, understanding and confusion. For her protagonist, Jakob, life becomes a matter of translation: having escaped the Nazis as a Jewish child living in Poland, he makes a new life for himself in Greece, and learns to speak Greek and English. This linguistic gain enables him to survive the traumas of his past, but only by erasing his memories of that past: the experience of moving from one language to another, Michaels implies, involves an escape that is also, always, an erasure. In the extract...

In his essay ‘Superficies de la literatura vasca’, Bernardo Atxaga discusses the persistent line of questioning which accompanies his decision to write his texts primarily in the Basque language, also known as Euskera. Referencing the territorial asymmetry between a planet and an asteroid, Atxaga emphasizes a similar disparity which exists linguistically between those languages conceived as major – Spanish or French, for example – and those conceived as minor, such as Basque. Encircled by the more dominant linguistic territories of French and Spanish, Basque – a language with fewer than one million speakers worldwide – only developed as a unified...

As his somewhat contradictory definitions of translation quoted above suggest, Milan Kundera has a complicated relationship with translation. Kundera’s ‘authorization’ of the French translations of the texts he produced before he began writing only in French in 1993 suggests an approach to translation concerned with translatability and absolute fidelity to an original text. But in his texts themselves, Kundera is fascinated by issues of semantic instability and miscommunication, exploring the inevitable betrayals of meaning which arise as we seek to understand one another and ourselves. How can we interpret this paradox between Kundera’s approach to the translation of his texts...

In the prelude toLe Langage est ma patrie, a series of interviews given to the cinematographer Franck Appréderis in 2010, Jorge Semprún summed up his personal moral approach in a French translation of a quotation from F. Scott Fitzgerald’sThe Crack-Up: ‘Ainsi, il faudrait comprendre que les choses sont sans espoir et être pourtant décidé de les changer’/‘One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise’.² This phrase elucidates not only Semprún’s moral perspective, but also the texture of the literary and political interrogations through which he develops...

Translation deterritorializes the rigidity of our national, linguistic and historical positions. Translation reveals the possibility of approaching otherness in the spirit of recognition rather than appropriation. And translation allows us to confront the impulse to synthesize the complexity of the past into a uniform narrative in the present. The three journeys of translation which I have pursued in this book open onto aesthetic and ethical landscapes which take form through a shift from singularity to plurality. One voice becomes multiple voices, drawn from the past as well as the present, each offering divergent perspectives. One language becomes many languages, offering...