Introduction: Global landscapes of translation

A paradigm shift?

Metaphors are powerful theoretical tools: they have the power to change our perception and thus to create a new reality (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 145). Following Richard Boyd (1979), James St André argues that a root or “constitutive” metaphor may produce a whole subset of related metaphors and thus lead to a new theoretical perspective or “paradigm shift”, influencing not only how translation is viewed but also the status of both translator and translation (St André 2010b, 6). For this very reason, St André warns us of the risks of proposing metaphors without having thought through the implications of viewing the phenomenon under consideration under this new guise (ibid., 3–4). With this warning in mind, in this introduction we endeavour to explain how the landscape metaphor interacts with other metaphors already introduced in the literature, such as transfer, source, target, field, flow and wave, undermining certain perspectives and reinforcing others, and in this way contributing to the advancement of translation theory.

Metaphors for the process of translation have been extensively and productively used, and questioned, in translation theory (Hermans 1985; Chamberlain 1988; D'hulst 1992; Roy 1993; St André 2010a). Translation studies is currently experiencing a renewed interest in the ways in which metaphorical language shapes our understanding of translation (St André 2010a) and an effort is being made on different fronts to “shift the metaphorical ground” (Hermans 2007, 137) so as to provide a more fertile source of analogies that better reflect current understandings of translation. “Old” metaphors – such as those of transfer, mirror and bridge, which tend to portray translation as mechanical and translators as relatively passive participants – are criticized, and new ones suggested which portray translation as a creative activity and empower translators. The landscape metaphor refers to the environments in which translations are produced and received, and challenges images of such environments as stable substances within fixed boundaries. While this idea is in itself anything but new, we still lack a sufficiently sophisticated set of analytical concepts to describe the production and reception of translations in such a way that the dynamism and heterogeneity of the producing and receiving environments (landscapes) becomes an underlying assumption rather than something to be rehearsed and clarified in each new publication.

The landscape metaphor presents two overarching advantages which, in our view, make it suitable for developing new ways of theorizing the contexts in which translation takes place. Firstly, it is embedded in a conceptual apparatus – developed by, among others, Arjun Appadurai (1996) and Anna Tsing (2000) – that has been successfully adopted to describe the dynamism and the disjunctures characterizing the flow of cultural goods in a globalized society. Translation is a key element and often a precondition of these flows, although it can remain invisible to even the sharpest of observers. When Appadurai himself quotes a text by the Argentine author Julio Cortázar, he introduces it as “in Cortázar's own irreducibly spare words” (1996, 59) without commenting on the fact that the words are not Cortázar's, but his translator's. Secondly, the landscape metaphor can work productively alongside a whole range of both well-established and newly coined metaphors that portray translation as “a cultural activity that produces ‘new’ spaces” or “creates new ‘imaginative geographies’” (Italiano 2012, 1). This understanding of translation is part of what Federico Italiano (ibid., 1) calls the spatial turn.

Whilst we do believe that geographical metaphors, such as landscape, can help us to think creatively about the contexts of translation, in proposing this metaphor we are not necessarily endorsing the use of the term “spatial turn”, for two reasons. Firstly, we would question the need to describe every new set of ideas about translation as a turn, since this vocabulary risks portraying translation studies as a discipline going round in circles. Secondly, the dominant conceptual metaphors in Western theory based on the TRANSLATION IS TRANSFER metaphor are in any case also spatial (see Halverson 1999, 204; Martín de León 2010), and so the idea cannot really be said to constitute a fresh “turn”. Nonetheless, the notion of space has acquired a new relevance in translation studies. The analysis of space has been an important strand in critical theory since the late 1960s, as a recent study by Verena Andermatt Conley (2012) demonstrates. In 1998, surveying theoretical work on “the new cultural geography”, Sara Blair noted that over the preceding two decades, “temporality as the organizing form of experience has been superseded by spatiality, the affective and social experience of space” (Blair 1998, 544). Recent analyses of migrant writing, postcolonial literature and travel writing all engage extensively with notions of space. In translation studies, the interface between various types of mobility and translation has been the focus of several studies (Cronin 2000; Polezzi 2001, 2006; see the entry on “Mobility” by Polezzi in Baker and Saldanha 2009, 172–8); one might also cite Sherry Simon's recent book Cities in Translation (2012). We therefore recognize that in elaborating the usefulness of the concept of landscape in translation theory, we are not proposing a radically new conceptual metaphor, but rather a set of different metaphorical structurings that enable us to highlight different aspects of the concept of translation. In fact, given the resilience of conceptual metaphors and the ways in which they systematically pervade our language, it is doubtful that we will replace the TRANSLATION IS TRANSFER metaphor any time soon. This does not mean, however, that we should take it for granted. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson suggest that related metaphors can be inconsistent in terms of the images they represent (1980, 44–5) while remaining coherent with the underlying image schema (i.e. the recurring structure that motivates conceptual metaphor mappings). The use of geographical metaphors for describing the process and contexts of translation is generally coherent with the image schemata supporting the TRANSFER metaphor, while at the same time pushing the boundaries of that metaphor.

When we discuss translation and migration, postcolonial literature, travel writing or translated cities, we are discussing geographical spaces – that is, space in a real geological and political sense, and the way human activities relate to those spaces. Landscape can therefore productively be understood as both metaphor and geography. For Blair, the object of the “new cultural geography” is “to elaborate space in the abstract, as well as specific places, as sites where individuals negotiate definitively social relations” (Blair 1998, 544–5). The “geography of translation” (the study of translation flows through new linguistic and cultural landscapes) and the “translation of geographies” (the representation and translational re-presentation of real spaces) cannot ultimately be separated since, as Federico Italiano suggests, “geopoetic features” (narrative representations of the Earth) are determined by the real geographical locations and the associated discursive conventions in which they are conceived (Italiano 2012, 2, 6). The geography of translation posits translational activity as a natural and political force in the transformation of landscapes; the geography of the landscape posits meaningful spaces which do not respect the delimitations – national and linguistic – of borders.

The metaphors we live by

Much has already been said about the limitations of the TRANSFER metaphor (see, for example, Chesterman and Arrojo 2000, 153) and its naive assumptions about the nature of intercultural communication. However, most discussions of metaphor – whether criticizing old metaphors or suggesting new ones (see the articles and bibliography in St André's collection) – concern either the activity or product of translation per se and, in this sense, deal with only one aspect of the TRANSFER metaphor. Celia Martín de León (2010, 82) notes that the basic structure of the TRANSFER metaphor combines two image schemata: SOURCE-PATH-GOAL and CONTAINMENT. The first schema sees translation as movement along a route from one point in space to another. The second schema, that of CONTAINMENT, “arises from experiences of spatial boundedness” and “consists of an inside, an outside and a boundary between them” (ibid., 82). Martín de León further explains that “[c]ontainers can be mapped onto languages, texts, or cultures” (ibid., 83). As well as reinforcing the simplistic inside/outside dichotomy that the concept of borders produces, the CONTAINMENT schema also reinforces a false dichotomy between substance and form in relation to languages and texts, one that has already been challenged within linguistic approaches to translation. The understanding of culture as substance is also problematic, but has been less debated within translation studies. Appadurai's theory of the cultural dimensions of globalization provides us with a strong argument for the substitution of culture as substance by the cultural as dimension:

Implying a mental substance, the noun culture appears to privilege the sort of sharing, agreeing and bounding that fly in the face of the facts of the unequal knowledge and the differential prestige of lifestyles, and to discourage attention to the worldviews and agency of those who are marginalized or dominated. (Appadurai 1996, 12)

Appadurai argues that the most valuable feature of the concept of culture is that of difference, which is defined as “a contrastive rather than a substantive property of certain things” (ibid.). He thus privileges the use of the adjectival form “cultural” to refer exclusively to “those differences that either express, or set the groundwork for, the mobilization of group identities” (ibid., 13). This understanding of what counts as cultural difference is echoed in Pym (1992) in relation to the mobilization of translational energies. Pym argues that “if a text can adequately be transferred [moved in space and/or time] without translation, there is cultural community. And if a text has been translated, it represents distance between at least two cultures” (ibid., 25–6). The publishing industry is becoming increasingly attuned to the fact that cultural differences are not consubstantial with language differences, as is evidenced by the production or adaptation of translations in the same language for different “cultures” (e.g. American and British translations of the same book), or the case of intra-national translation discussed in Sanchez (2011) where a dominant national language (English) is transferred to a major-minor language (Spanish), commissioned and published by a national publisher in the same nation state.

According to Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 30), landscapes (as visual fields) are also conceptualized in terms of containers, on the basis that

when you look at some territory (land, floor space, etc.), your field of vision defines a boundary of the territory, namely that part that you can see. Given that a bounded physical space is a CONTAINER and that our field of vision correlates with that bounded physical space, the metaphorical concept VISUAL FIELDS ARE CONTAINERS emerges naturally.

While landscape as a metaphor for conceptualizing the settings in which translations take place does not replace the CONTAINER image, it prioritizes perspective over boundaries. Landscapes are necessarily partial views whose horizons are relative to the viewer's position (but see Buffery, in this volume, for a criticism of the prioritization of the visual and the “occularcentrism” embedded in this notion). In Appadurai's words, landscapes “are not objectively given” but rather “deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of different sorts of actors” (1996, 33). The same landscape feature (a desert, a mountain range) can be viewed differently from different perspectives. Retaining the image of containment, landscapes suggest “fluid, irregular shapes” (ibid., 33) and are therefore more apt to represent translations as part of global cultural processes in a “a world in which both points of departure and points of arrival are in cultural flux, and thus the search for steady points of reference […] can be very difficult” (ibid., 44). Landscapes provide a momentary stabilizing perspective from which to view cultural flows (ibid., 46), but are not in themselves permanent. While landscape features (such as a river) are often used as convenient matrices upon which political borders can be superimposed, landscapes do not respect national borders. In relation to the study of translations, the problems of a “binary conceptual geometry” (Pym 2003, 45) suggested by the idea of borders – and retrospectively reinforced by translation which participates in the construction of borders by drawing a clear demarcation line along grey areas – have already been pointed out (Pym 2003; Gentzler 2012). This dissatisfaction with the image of translations as crossing borders, particularly strong among scholars adopting a poststructuralist approach to translation studies and borrowing mainly from Homi Bhabha's understanding of hybridity, led to the development of the metaphor of translators inhabiting an in-between space that is outside both the source and target cultures but where those cultures meet and interact in conflicting but creative ways. As Maria Tymoczko points out (2010a), those in-between spaces are problematic in that they are presented as privileged (supra-cultural) sites for a critical but disengaged stance. Besides, the idea that hybridity resides in these in-between spaces actually reaffirms the idea that cultures are homogenous constructs (Tymoczko 2010a, 225).

Appadurai's theory focuses on the rupture caused by the effect of media and migration on the work of the imagination as a constitutive feature of modern subjectivity (Appadurai 1996, 3). Thus, he proposes to think of “the configuration of cultural forms in today's world as fundamentally fractal, that is, as possessing no Euclidean boundaries, structures or regularities” and as “overlapping” (ibid., 46). This view of source and target cultures and languages as “fractal” is echoed by Maeve Olohan who contributes the “faultlines” metaphor to the group of geographical metaphors used to describe the process of translation in current literature:

the natural concept of the geological fault may help us conceptualize the virtual boundary between cultures and languages – volatile and shifting – as a line along which minor or major displacements can occur, horizontally or vertically, suddenly and with drastic consequences or very gradually and almost imperceptibly. (2000, 1)

According to Appadurai, media and migration create specific irregularities “because both viewers and images are in simultaneous circulation. Neither images nor viewers fit into circuits or audiences that are easily bound within local, national or regional spaces” (1996, 4). According to Tymozcko, “Western conceptions of translation are heavily influenced by the tight connection of language and nation in Europe, which privileges the view that a nation should be united around a single language and that ‘normal’ cultures are monolingual” (2010b, 120). Svetlana Skomorokhova (in this volume) considers the limit case of Belarus, and all the articles in this collection challenge, in one way or another, the conflation of landscape with national identity and therefore with national cultures (within and outside Europe) and thus go beyond “[t]he claim that landscape and people are morphologically akin, constructed, as it were, from common clay, and that they constitute in some primal cultural sense the nature of each other” (Schama 1991, 11). In historical periods in which the assertion of a coherent identity has been a national priority, such a concept has underpinned certain cultural representations, such as landscape painting, which sought to contribute to the affirmation of national cohesion, often in the face of other hostile nations (see also Schama 1995).

The SOURCE metaphor is not in itself particularly unsuitable to the description of a geographical metaphorical shift since the term is used to designate the spring from which a flow of water takes its beginning. Pym (2011) criticizes SOURCE for the same reasons that “original” has fallen into disuse within the translation studies literature: because it promotes the illusion of primacy and thus ignores the fact that all texts incorporate elements from previous texts. Pym suggests as more logical “start text” (ST) “which at least indicates that we are only talking about the text from which a translation process begins”. While the benefits of “start” as opposed to “source” in terms of suggesting or not suggesting primacy are debatable, it is important to note that the place of publication of the source text does not necessarily coincide with the point of departure for the translation process (compare the case of an export-driven translation discussed by Buffery and cases such as those described by Baldo, both in this volume). The TRANSFER metaphor makes us think of one, single, if multidimensional (linguistic, cultural, etc.) source when, in fact, there is no guarantee that there will be an overlap between, say, the “source culture” – in the sense of the culture reflected in the source text – and the “source language” in the sense of the language in which the “source text” is written. Interestingly, the TARGET metaphor on its own does not evoke the image of a container, and only links to the CONTAINMENT schema through the transfer which it clearly reinforces. As Martín de León (2010) points out, the TARGET metaphor highlights the goal in the SOURCE-PATH-GOAL schema. In fact, the image invoked by TARGET as a metaphor is even more narrowly circumscribed than that of a container. The main problems associated with the TARGET metaphor are that apart from implying a dichotomy (see Bergam, in this volume), it suggests both unidirectional movement and one dimensional causality. Targets are something to be reached or attained: the underlying assumption is that the force is exerted from the source in the direction of the target, rather than vice versa. In the geography of translation, however, translation operates not only as an export item funded to disseminate cultural images but also as an import item, selected by the target culture to fill specific gaps or suggest solutions for socio-cultural problems (von Flotow 2007). We could even argue that it is due to the highly suggestive power of the TARGET metaphor that, despite long-standing descriptivist and functionalist calls for understanding translations in terms of the target culture, translations are still mainly described and evaluated against their source texts rather than in the context of other “target” cultural productions. The articles in this volume are refreshing in that they employ a different set of parameters of reference, from published reviews to more ephemeral sources such as blogs, Facebook pages, and book launches, highlighting the transient and subjective nature of any landscape assessment. Ira Torresi (in this volume) discusses how Ulysses – and James Joyce himself – came to be a dominant figure in the Irish and Anglo-American literary landscape thanks partly to the earlier journeys of Ulysses and its accumulation of symbolic capital through other European landscapes (while censored across the Anglo-American world after an obscenity charge). The Italian translations of Italian-Canadian writing discussed by Baldo (in this volume) are framed within the receiving landscape as narratives of return whereby the author returns home to the original “source”. These examples suggest that translation flows are neither linear nor unidirectional.

The idea of a target also suggests stability, precision and accuracy. A search for verbs that collocate with the word “target” in the British National Corpus brings up, in order of frequency and excluding modal verbs and those that can be used as auxiliaries:1 set, hit, meet, reach, achieve. These collocates, which denote material processes, are all associated with the sense of target as goal, and while we could argue that these collocates also suggest the idea of success combined with the idea of effort, this is an either/or success; targets are hit or missed. The same search for collocates for “source” results in verbs that denote verbal processes (said, comment), existential processes of transformation (become, became) and material processes related to supply (provide, used, provided, come).2 As we have already seen, the landscape metaphor does not offer a substitute for the SOURCE and TARGET metaphors: the term “landscape” refers to the actual spaces in which translations circulate, and “source” and “target” refer to a way of characterizing those spaces in terms of whether they are attached to non-translated or translated texts. However, we believe that talking about these spaces in terms of landscape gives rise to a series of images that are inconsistent with the notion of cultures or languages as clearly demarcated receptacles or goals. On the basis of the verbal collocates (see, changed, set, become, dominated, made, seen)3 we can argue that landscapes can be associated with processes of transformation (change, become) and creation (make), while also allowing for stability (set) linked with certain points of view (see, seen) and for the description of power relations (dominate). The landscape metaphor thus helps to shift the focus away from stable points of reference to the transformations generated by constantly shifting perspectives. We are then inclined to focus on dynamics rather than systems: “we will need to ask not how these complex, overlapping, fractal shapes constitute a simple, stable (even if large-scale) system, but to ask what its dynamics are” (Appadurai 1996, 46).

The need better to account for the dynamic forces acting upon and generated by the process of translation has already led to changes in the conceptual metaphors used to describe the context of translation: SYSTEM has been replaced by FIELD, at least within sociological approaches to translation (e.g. Heilbron 1999; Inghilleri 2005; Buzelin 2007; Wolf and Fukari 2007; Sapiro 2009) which draw largely on the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1996). Bourdieu's “literary field” is a metaphor for the national space (various attempts to extend this notion to conceptualize an international field of literature or translation notwithstanding, e.g. Heilbron 1999; Casanova 2004). The objective of the FIELD metaphor is to facilitate analysis of the mutually constituting relationship between text and context. As Bourdieu maintains: “The notion of field allows us to bypass the opposition between internal reading and external analysis without losing any of the benefits and exigencies of these two approaches which are traditionally perceived as irreconcilable” (1996, 205). The agricultural resonance of Bourdieu's terminology is not unmotivated – the cultural artefact, like a plant, arises out of its environment and alters that environment. However, it can ultimately be difficult to stretch the FIELD metaphor far enough to analyse the processes which determine the movement of texts. It is here that the concept of “flow” developed in work on globalization and culture by Appadurai and Tsing is particularly helpful. Appadurai's framework relies on five scapes, each representing a different aspect of transnational movement in the globalized world. The notion of an ethnoscape designates the central importance of the migration of people; that of a technoscape refers to the speed and boundary-crossing potentialities of technology; the financescape is the circulation of global capital; mediascapes are the narratives and images via which reality is represented and communicated; ideoscapes are the repertoires of political images via which ideologies are constituted and disseminated (Appadurai 1996, 33–6). The point of Appadurai's theory of scapes is to “stress different streams or flows along which cultural material may be seen to be moving across national boundaries” (ibid., 45–6) and to provide a vocabulary via which to describe these disjunctive flows, that is, to demonstrate that “people, machinery, money, images and ideas now follow increasingly nonisomorphic paths” (ibid., 37). Appadurai refutes the notion that transnational movement is ordered, structured and stable, arguing rather that the various types of flow move in volatile and potentially contradictory ways. Tsing (2000) uses the landscape metaphor in order to problematize and extend the idea of “flow” which, she suggests, has become ubiquitous in studies of globalization. Tsing resists an excessive valorization of “flow” by focusing not only on movement but also on how the flowing river changes the landscape that surrounds it. The river makes channels, changes the terrain, and this terrain-making is just as important a focus for analysis as the movement evoked by “flow”: “[…] I am arguing that we can study the landscape of circulation as well as the flow. How are people, cultures and things remade as they travel?” (ibid., 346–7). Tsing's terrain-making rivers and Appadurai's disjunctive scapes are metaphors designed to point to the radical unpredictability of the outcomes of globalized transnational movement. Both Tsing and Appadurai call into question the argument that globalization necessarily results in cultural homogenization. The landscape metaphor as a means of describing the migration of texts via translation combines the spatial designation “field”, which alone is too static, with the dynamic notion of “flow”, which, as Tsing argues, risks discarding place altogether in its focus on global “forces” (ibid., 337, 352). In this sense, the use of landscape as a geographical metaphor can join forces with that of translation as a wave, proposed by Ubaldo Stecconi (2010) and elaborated as a tool to describe translation in Belarus by Skomorokhova, in this volume. This metaphor suggests that translation is essentially a dynamic process, although it can also be viewed in static and relational ways, using different metaphors – of “particle” and “field” respectively – which can nevertheless form a coherent system with the wave metaphor (ibid., 55). According to the metaphor of translation as wave, what moves is not content but energy. The wave “originates from the energy used by the translators and all the other agents involved in the translation process. The wave then propagates all the way across semiotic systems until fresh signs (books, Web pages, TV programmes, etc.) are released in the target environment” (ibid., 55).

Reception

The release of these “fresh signs” into a new landscape raises the crucial question of their reception. All of the articles collected here engage in one way or another with questions of reception. “Reception studies” is a term used to describe a range of analytical processes which, though interrelated, are in fact quite different from one other. In a recent overview of the question of reception and its pertinence for translation studies and comparative literature, Lucile Arnoux-Farnoux and Anne-Rachel Hermetet (2009) identify three distinct trends: literary reception studies; theories and histories of reading; and social scientific studies4 of reception. In the first category we find studies in the aesthetics of reception and reader-response theory, after the Constance school of H.R. Jauss and Wolfgang Iser. Such approaches were initially text-focused, positing the reader as an abstraction, and they did not explicitly deal with issues of translation and international circulation of texts. As Elinor Shaffer points out, Jauss's work nonetheless had its “‘sociological’ side” insofar as it encompassed the social situation of readers and their “horizon of expectation”, which spawned studies of readership, particularly in the US (2006), 191). Another aspect of literary reception studies is the study of the critical reception of translations and of authors abroad. Examples include the theoretical work of José Lambert (Delabastita et al., 2006), Shaffer's multi-volume empirical project on “The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe” (see http://www.clarehall.cam.ac.uk/rbae/) and various single studies such as Leo Tak-hung Chan's Readers, Reading and Reception of Translated Fiction in Chinese: Novel Encounters (2010), Jane Koustas's Les Belles Étrangères: Canadians in Paris (2008) or Mohja Kahf's “Packaging ‘Huda’: Sha'rwi's memoirs in the United States Reception Environment” (2010). Literary reception studies are then no longer exclusively text-focused, but also encompass intellectual and cultural history and the material conditions of literary dissemination. Indeed, we would contend that an exclusively text-focused approach is not within the purview of reception studies. Walter Benjamin begins his essay “The Task of the Translator” by rejecting reception as a means of “appreciating” – or “knowing” (the word he used was “Erkenntnis”) – the text and, correlatively, its translation:

In the appreciation of a work of art or an art form, consideration of the receiver never proves fruitful. Not only is any reference to a certain public or its representatives misleading, but even the concept of an “ideal” receiver is detrimental in the theoretical consideration of art, since all it posits is the existence and nature of man as such. Art, in the same way, posits man's physical and spiritual existence, but in none of its works is it concerned with his response. No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener. (Benjamin 1999, 70)

Whilst few today would argue that the cultural products circulating in contemporary markets regulated by globalized financescapes are produced without any regard for their readers, beholders or listeners, Benjamin's point is still an important one. The object of reception studies is not – or not exclusively – a single text or a single author, but rather, culture itself. As Arnoux-Farnoux and Hermetet note, studies which use a loose notion of “reception” only to say something more about the author or the text are ultimately unsatisfying (Arnoux-Farnoux and Hermetet 2009, 11, citing Verdrager 2001). The essays collected here use the landscape metaphor in order to articulate their analyses of the effects produced by texts on culture as they circulate via translation.

Arnoux-Farnoux and Hermetet's second category includes studies of the practice of reading – to be distinguished from accounts of the way in which the public reacts to a given work – and histories of the material conditions of reading. Here they cite cognitive approaches, as well as more historical (and partly autobiographical) approaches such as Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading (1996). In the third category, we find studies of cultural transfer and its complexities, the most useful of which are perhaps those which, like Simon's Cities in Translation, use place as an analytical focus. In this category we also find the sociology of reception, exemplified by the work of Bourdieu and, more recently, Pascale Casanova in The World Republic of Letters (2004), and approaches derived from cultural studies, such as Janice Radway's seminal Reading the Romance (1984) and David Morely's work on audience research (e.g. 1992). Our approach to reception locates itself at the point where sociocultural readings meet literary ones. The essays presented here do not address the cognitive processes or personal practices of reading, nor do they engage with the aesthetics of reception. Their concern is rather with the ways in which the meanings of the translated text are constructed and negotiated by the multiple agents involved in its reception. These processes of reception are observed at the micro as well as the macro level: Buffery sees perceived translation “failure” and language “errors” in translated Catalan theatre as productive moments of cultural exchange; Cristina Marinetti and Margaret Rose present conflicted negotiations between translator, author and theatre director over vocabulary choices as evidence of the way multiple agents mediate the reception of intercultural theatre; and Baldo cites the rejection of code-switching and non-standard Italian in texts by Italian-Canadian migrants translated into Italian as micro-level evidence of the dominant macro-level discourses on migration. The individual contributions and the range of topics they cover demonstrate that micro- and macro-level are imbricated. Skomorokhova relates reception to language choice in the conflicted political environment of Belarus, demonstrating the importance of multilingualism and code-switching in the construction of a national literary field; Bergam relates the microstylistic choices of Vasko Popa's translators to issues of cross-cultural communication that are both political and aesthetic; and Torresi considers the problematic relationship between the supposedly “obscene” content of Ulysses and its various positions in literary polysystems over the course of its history as a proscribed text, a “classic” and now a “staple” in educational contexts. This collection thus sees the question of the foreign reception of literature as embedded in issues of complex cultural transfer which go far beyond any binary relation between “source” and “target” cultures, and whilst it views foreign reception as sociologically explicable, it does not exclude textual analysis from its purview.

The authors in this volume seek to examine ways in which, under globalization, the reception of a work in translation can be understood as another form of production. Many studies have pointed to the changes in meaning and function which can result when a given text is received in a different place (and time). Susan Bassnett writes:

So, for example the significance of Ezra Pound's translations, if they can be called such, of Chinese poetry that resulted in his Cathay lies in how the poems were read when they appeared and in the precise historical moment when they were published. As Hugh Kenner points out in his book The Pound Era, the Cathay poems may have started out as translations of ancient Chinese verse, which is what Pound intended them to be, but in the way they were received they were transformed into war poems that spoke to the generation coping with the horrors of the trenches in Flanders. (2006, 8)

Such studies have tended to focus on the exceptional case, examples where a very obvious shift in signification has taken place such that the text becomes something entirely different in the receiving culture. Emily Apter's provocative analysis of pseudotranslations (2006, 210–25) takes this line of inquiry one step further. Pseudotranslation – the absence of an original – is presented as a limit case which facilitates “shifting the ethics of translation away from questions of fiability and fidelity (crucial to determinations of pseudotranslations), and towards debates over the conditions of textual reproducibility” (ibid., 225). Apter draws on Benjamin in order to propose that “translation in its most scandalous form” is “a technology of literary replication that engineers textual afterlife without recourse to a genetic origin” (ibid., 225). In these approaches, reception is radically disconnected from notions of transfer.

The implication of theories of global cultural circulation or flows such as that developed by Appadurai is that these shifts and transformations define what culture is under globalization – globalized culture is by definition dynamic, and change is creative. Appadurai contests the type of argument which reflects the thinking of the Frankfurt School, equating mass communication with arrested intellectual and creative development. “It is wrong”, he argues, “to assume that the electronic media are the opium of the masses”:

There is growing evidence that the consumption of the mass media throughout the world often provokes resistance, irony, selectivity and, in general, agency. [… T]he images of the media are quickly moved into local repertoires of irony, anger, humor, and resistance. (Appadurai 1996, 7)

Appadurai's approach offers a riposte to the suggestion, frequently based on less-than-sophisticated applications of Venuti's concept of domestication, that the globalized market for translated literature produces only consensual, commercialized products. The main issue posed by the cultural dimensions of globalization is not MacDonaldization or Americanization, but rather “the tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization” (ibid., 32). Translation is one of the processes that contribute to the creation of what Appadurai calls “uncertain landscapes” (ibid., 43). Global landscapes of translation are uncertain because they are unpredictable – the products of disjunctive global flows – and because, once established, they continue to be subject to change. Reception, then, is the productive and creative tension between homogenization and heterogenization. Reception is the active process of creation of new meanings which results from the collision of sameness and difference that is translation.

In order to take account of this sort of meaning creation, all of the essays collected here confront translation in its performative dimension. In his discussion of “cultural translation”, drawing explicitly on Benjamin's “The Task of the Translator”, Bhabha equates “the performative nature of cultural communication” with “translation”:

Translation is the performative nature of cultural communication. It is language in actu (enunciation, positionality) rather than language in situ (énoncé, or propositionality). And the sign of translation continually tells, or “tolls” the different times and spaces between cultural authority and its performative practices. The “time” of translation consists in that movement of meaning, the principle and practice of a communication that, in the words of de Man “puts the original in motion to decanonize it, giving it the movement of fragmentation, a wandering of errance, a kind of permanent exile”. (2007, 326)

Bhabha is arguing that cultural communication is performative in the sense that it enacts and creates identities, is constructivist rather than essentialist, and entails interactions between embodied subjects. So “translation” is the name he gives to the movement of meaning that occurs when (inter)cultural communication happens. Bhabha's formulation, which resonates with Appadurai's discussion of “the cultural” in terms of difference, also suggests a definition of translation itself as the staging of difference: as Benjamin tells us, translation proves that reciprocity – or transparent communication – between non-identical languages is possible, even as it demonstrates the obvious fact that languages are different. Translation creates new meanings by “staging cultural difference” (ibid., 325), since, as Benjamin remarks, “no translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original” (Benjamin 1999, 73). The contributors to this volume are interested not only in performance per se (and for a recent discussion of performance as a metaphor for translation, see Benshalom 2010), but also, and crucially, in the shift from performance to performativity – that is, the point at which (intercultural) performance results in the creation of what Bhabha might call “newness”. Three of the articles which follow address the close relationship between actual stage performance and the performativity of translation as the construction of intercultural communication and personal identity. Buffery shows how intercultural spectatorship is both facilitated and problematized by recourse to the visual as a means of performing the possibility of intercultural communication: whilst the visual opens up the possibility of non-linguistic identification with the foreign text, it also potentially occludes or flattens out linguistic difference. Marinetti and Rose demonstrate how conflict over the acceptability of non-standard language can threaten the very possibility of performing migrant identities on the stage. Skomorokhova illustrates how multilingualism is essential to the performative construction of Belarusian national identity through theatre and music. Bergam, Torresi and Baldo all highlight ways in which acts of cultural communication perform written texts in order to enact different forms of transcultural or migrant identities. Bergam notes that the influence of Eastern European poetry on the British post-war literary landscape was mediated by the Poetry International Festival, established in 1967, which brought Eastern European poets into actual contact with English poets and English readers, thus facilitating the renewal of English poetry at a time when the events of the Second World War suggested a need for a new focus and function for poetry. Torresi shows how James Joyce performs not only Irish identity, in a postcolonial context in the country of his birth, but also a Triestine identity in the Italian town he made his home, through multimodal public discourses including banknotes, statues and tourist memorabilia. Baldo explores the ways in which the enacting of Italian-Canadian migrant identities through literature and its translation is embedded in “discursive events” and performances such as book launches and interviews, as well as television adaptations. All the contributions thus demonstrate the role of performance in enhancing the capacity of translation to enact identities.

Identities are enacted, as Benedict Anderson (2006) has taught us, in part through the telling and retelling of our histories. The articles collected here open up questions about the ways in which translation is inevitably part of the construction and mobilization of cultural memory. As Appadurai remarks:

The past is not now a land to return to in a simple politics of memory. It has become a synchronic warehouse of cultural scenarios, a kind of temporal central casting, to which recourse can be taken as appropriate, depending on the movie to be made, the scene to be enacted, the hostages to be rescued. (1996, 30)

The “imagined communities” of globalized culture are not, as we now well know, geographically determined, and migrant communities have recourse to radically de-territorialized repertoires of images – mediascapes – in order to construct their identities. This is as true of the migratory subjects in Baldo's and Marinetti and Rose's studies as it is of Belarusians who stay still whilst borders move around and between them, disrupting established relationships between language and territory (Skomorokhova). Europeans do not share a common language but their identities are inseparable from each other's historical traumas, be it the Franco dictatorship in Spain (Buffery), the Tito dictatorship and the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s (Bergam) or the English colonization of Ireland (Toressi). The global landscapes of translation are sites where such “cultural scenarios” are renegotiated and redefined. To cite Apter: “The landscape as archive of human history and memory is an old idea, of course, compatible with the Freudian analogy between the unconscious and the dark continent” (2006, 195). Translation is a crucial – yet often unacknowledged – process which subtly shifts the contours of the sedimented layers of memory which form the landscape of the past.

Notes on contributors

Angela Kershaw is a senior lecturer in French studies at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of two monographs, Forgotten Engagements: Women, Literature and the Left in 1930s France (2007) and Before Auschwitz: Irène Némirovsky and the Cultural Landscape of Inter-War France (2010), and co-editor of Women in Europe Between the Wars: Politics, Culture, Society (2006) and Parcours de femmes: Twenty Years of Women in French (2011). Her research interests include twentieth-century French literature, women's writing, travel writing, and the translation and reception of French war and holocaust literature.

Gabriela Saldanha is a lecturer in translation studies in the department of English, University of Birmingham, where she convenes the MA in translation studies. She has previously lectured at Imperial College London and at Dublin City University. Her research has focused on gender-related stylistic features in translation and on translator style, using corpus linguistics as a methodology. She has written a book on Research Methodologies in Translation Studies, co-authored with Sharon O'Brien, to be published in 2013. She is co-editor of the second revised edition of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (2009). She is also an editor of the online abstracting service Translation Studies Abstracts.

Notes

1. Verbs were chosen because they denote processes: the aim was to consider with what other types of processes, apart from translation, these metaphorical expressions were associated. The actual forms excluded were: is, was, be, are, has, will, have, been, had, were, would, can, could, may, should, 's. Results were obtained using the BYU-BNC interface (http://corpus2.byu.edu/bnc/, last accessed 18^th October, 2012) and searching for verb collocates within four words to the right and four words to the left of the form “target”.

2. The actual forms excluded were: is, be, was, are, been, has, can, have, will, were, had, would, may, could, being, should, 's.

3. Again, modal and auxiliary verbs were excluded: is, was, has, be, are, have, been, had, can, would, will, were, 's, may, being, should, could, does

4. The term used is sciences humaines, which covers social sciences and the humanities.