Living in Languages 2024

Since our last issue, authoritarian regimes have risen and gained footing around the world, genocidal violence has erupted, mass displacement has continued unabated, and ecological and climate catastrophes have grown in both severity and frequency. These three years have seen the increasing weaponization of information, misinformation, and disinformation—an insidious use of language and texts to spread confusion and reinforce systems of control. In the shadow of these realities, we bring the third edition of Living in Languages.

What does translation mean under such a shadow? Translation, historically framed by myths of “mastery” and “transparency,” reinforces the illusion of seamlessness—a domestication that erases difference, flattening complexity into reduced consumable meaning. Such translation shares a troubling logic with the foundations of authoritarianism. This logic emphasizes control, mastery, and an unbroken, unmediated, transparent relationship with a source, reenforcing authoritarian impulses to subsume multiplicity under singular, dominant narratives rooted in fixed hierarchies and seemingly immutable origins. In such myths, translation becomes a tool that privileges uniformity, suppresses difference, and consolidates power. For as with all forms of representation, translations shape interpretation, reproduce consciousness, engage affective economies, reinforcing dominant epistemologies and ontologies of the inter-constitutive systems of power and domination that shape our present. So bounded, translation—ostensibly benign, “masterful,” “transparent”—metastasizes the cells of authoritarianism.

And yet, translating—in a pharmonic aporia—counters the spread through encountering uncontainable possibilities. Resisting the hegemonic drive for seamless mastery, fracturing the illusions of control, translating verbs anew: creating grammars resisting, interpretations disrupting, encounters unsettling. Fissures widen. Cracks illuminate. Myths destabilize. Seamless transfer becomes untenable; the authoritativemythos fractures—exposed as contested, unstable terrain. Translating foregrounds the incompleteness of carrying meaning across languages: gaps resisting closure, overlaps disrupting precision, slippages defying mastery. Ruptures do not signal failure. Instead, spaces emerge. Spaces for grammars fluxing. For meanings shifting. For relationships forming anew. Refusing illusions of mastery, translating foregrounds agencies of those who act: the translator, the reader, the word itself. Layers of mediation surface. Limits of language stand revealed. As praxis, translating unsettles. Readers, translators, and audiences are called to dwell in opacity, to confront the irreducibility of otherness, to navigate fractures of representation. Closure dissolves. Multiplicity insists. Containment resists. Reckonings unfold. Translating transforms from task to praxis. Ethical. Political. Unfinished.

The essays and translations in this edition illuminate the complexities of translation as both a site of tension and possibility. They refuse simplistic resolutions, instead foregrounding the entanglement of language with power, identity, and history. While each author approaches translation from their own perspective, their works collectively explore how translation navigates survival, reimagines possibilities for connection, and grapples with the systems it inhabits—resisting, reshaping, and sometimes reinforcing them.

This edition spans a broad range of national and linguistic contexts—from Ukraine and Peru to Tanzania, China, and Germany—while also engaging multilingual realities within a single national context, as in Rumi Coller-Takahashi’s essay on Omar ibn Said. Said’s Arabic writings, produced while enslaved in 19th-century America, confront layers of erasure and reinterpretation, raising profound questions about agency and survival in translation. Ian Singleton’s exploration of translation as resistance in Odesa similarly engages with questions of survival and identity, showing how linguistic belonging becomes a battleground for sovereignty against imperial erasure. Both essays demonstrate how translation is implicated in shaping identity and asserting agency within oppressive systems.

Jonathan Oliveri extends these concerns to the historical stakes of translation in Peru, examining how Alfredo Pita’s El rincón de los muertos reconstructs memory through the Andean khipu, a pre-Columbian system of knot-recording that embodies both narrative and epistemological complexity. Oliveira delves into how the khipu serves as a counter-narrative to colonial historiography, translating silenced Indigenous histories into a contemporary literary framework in Pita’s text. Translation, in this context, becomes a means of reckoning with silenced histories and contested narratives, connecting Oliveri’s work to Coller-Takahashi’s and Singleton’s shared focus on how translation mediates identity, memory, and survival, while also gesturing toward Kressner’s and Rubin’s engagement with the preservation of multiplicity and ambiguity.

Displacement emerges as a central theme in Ilka Kressner’s translations of Victoria Guerrero Peirano’s poetry, which preserve the ambiguities of the source text while navigating the fluid boundaries of belonging. Jay Boss Rubin foregrounds cultural specificity in his translations of Fadhy Mtanga’s Swahili flash fiction, creating space for dialogue without erasing difference. Together, these contributions highlight translation’s potential to embrace multiplicity and tension, positioning it as a site where alternative grammars and relationalities can emerge. Oliveira’s engagement with the khipu as a site of cultural resistance complements

Haritima Sharma shifts the focus to globalized media, critiquing how Bollywood subtitling often flattens cultural nuance for accessibility. Yet Sharma also explores subtitling’s potential to mediate cultural differences, balancing local specificity with global reach. Her analysis intersects with Rubin’s and Kressner’s explorations of how translation negotiates preservation and accessibility without succumbing to homogenization.

Jin Li examines how the Chinese translation of Henry James’ Washington Square reshapes ethical and aesthetic dimensions, challenging conventional notions of fidelity. Paired with Li’s work, Andrew Brooks revisits Walter Benjamin’s reflections on language, community, and translation during times of crisis. By connecting Benjamin’s personal relationships, intellectual projects, and the motif of Heim (home), Brooks illuminates how translation can navigate catastrophe and open possibilities for envisioning new forms of communal belonging. Both authors foreground translation’s role in exposing the limits and contradictions that define its practice, echoing broader concerns with opacity, multiplicity, and disruption.

Together, these works refuse the myth of translation as seamless mastery, instead engaging with its fractures and tensions as productive spaces for critical inquiry. By addressing diverse geographies, histories, and linguistic realities, this edition underscores translation’s dual role as a tool of power and resistance. In dialogue, these contributions challenge us to reimagine translation not as a process of erasure but as a reckoning with the complexities of our world—its histories, identities, and possibilities.