In the fall of 2018, I was invited to chair a panel of distinguished literary translators on my campus. The conversation ran smoothly, circling lovingly around commas, onomatopoeias, and the International Booker Prize for works in translation. Then — inevitably — a belligerent man piped up from the audience to explain that translating foreign literatures into English reinforced the imperial ignorance of Anglophone elites and commodified non-Western literary works by rendering them more readily consumable in a global book market. How did everyone feel about that? he wanted to know.

The accusation sounded like those I’d often heard wielded against world literature. World literary canons, the logic goes, tend to replicate the imperial dynamics and entanglements that make certain texts more likely than others to migrate toward the centers of international networks. This charge is more correct than not — but does it just as easily apply to literary translation as such?

Imagine a beginner-level language course. By the end of the term, students’ understanding of the language will have progressed in only extremely rudimentary ways: they will be able to order a glass of wine but won’t be able to decipher a software user agreement, let alone a modernist novel. A handful will move on to higher-level courses; eventually, one or two might come close to a native speaker’s intuitive fluency. The majority won’t get beyond fixed phrases and half-dispelled stereotypes, the details of which will begin to fade from their memories as soon as exams are done.

Some might say that these beginner students aren’t learning anything except a few commodified expressions. But anyone who has actually taken a language course knows that the process feels very different: humbling and confusing, an exercise not in mastery but in intellectual and interpersonal vulnerability.

One could hesitate to celebrate this linguistic and cultural disorientation, and the clumsy, improvisatory communication to which it reduces language learners. Sure, humanists love ambiguity and confusion, but aren’t the lessons in introductory language courses much too basic to create intellectually meaningful confusions and ambiguities?

The reasons for such hesitations are partly historical. Most scholars of literature working today were trained in a relatively essentialist Western framework that is based on the idea of a nation-state and that assumes people generally grow up speaking and self-identifying with a single language — to understand their cultural production, one must enter into that presumed monophony as faithfully as possible. The “native” speaker looms over the “non-native” multilingual scholar as an implicit, seemingly unmatchable ideal. Since its nineteenth-century emergence, this essentializing view of language has had its detractors. Over the past few decades, writers and scholars from the Global South — Akshya Saxena, Amitav Ghosh, and many others — have pushed against it with special vigor. Their writing underscores that the majority of the people alive today, just as in centuries prior, are not monoglots fluent in a “native” language; much of the communication that happens throughout the world takes place through creoles, pidgins, local dialects, and chains of mutual interpretation. A language classroom — even, perhaps especially, a beginner language classroom — is a window into, and a form of training in, this experience of language and culture as always already transitional, translingual, provisional in its communicative compromises.

At its best, literature in translation models these more improvisatory multilingual exchanges. In a relatively safe, simplified setting, it confronts readers with echoes of a half-suppressed strangeness, of a “conversation,” as Elizabeth Bishop puts it, “not concerning us / but recognizable, somewhere.” Are there ways of decentering one’s cultural and linguistic perspective more dramatically? Of course: migration, long-term stays abroad, reading literature in its original language, and so forth. But on a smaller scale, translated texts begin some of this work through murmurs of transcultural and translinguistic negotiation that remain audible under the typically polished prose. In a world riven by essentialisms, I am wont to be generous toward these hints and nudges of partially conveyed otherness that literature in translation gives us, just as I am wont to be generous to the foreigner who stammers his way through my famously difficult Slavic tongue. Przepraszam, czy mówi pani po angielsku?