Introduction

The diversity of approaches to the subject of literature and translation in these pages challenged us as editors to find the right title for this volume. While theories of translation are touched on here and there, what unites this volume is the theme or motif of translation, the expressive, ethical and intercultural potential of translation in and across a range of intellectual, historical and cultural contexts. Our working title "literature and translation", however, suggested little more than proper names, casting the very illusion of separate and distinct species we were at pains to avoid. We soon dropped the identity thinking behind such a suggestion as itself an inferior mode of translation that stamps "bare" phenomena with the insignia of the concept. The impossibility of translation in the sense of a copy or replica seemed to us the condition not just of literature but of culture too. The densely cultured zones of meaning traversed by translation cannot be circumvented with the lexical ratios of the dictionary. The medium of translation is not abstract equivalence but the creative understanding of another culture that preserves the foreignness produced by temporal and cultural distances. As the etymological and semantic roots of translatio ("transferral", "transportation") are entwined with those of metaphor, our next attempt at a title, "translation and metaphorical play", tried to capture the elephant in the room-metaphor-with a butterfly net, leaving untouched the initial problem of the separate identities implied by "literature and translation". What interested us was the "play" that occurred at the border of literature and translation that enabled the one to be thought in terms of the other, even as we failed to locate the junction between the literary element of translation and the translational element of literature. If definition can do no more than spot family resemblances amongst phenomena, as Ludwig Wittgenstein suggested, then literature and translation might yet be regarded as twins. "Literature as translation/translation as literature" thus refers to this double or twinned identity that resists the ratio of the abstract concept.