Place: Italy

The Choice to Write: A Review of A Fictional Inquiry by Daniele Del Giudice

January 14, 2026  |  in Reviews  |  by Ria Dhull

Del Giudice recreates an existing landscape in miniature to play around with his protagonist.

A Fictional Inquiry by Daniele Del Giudice, translated from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel, New Vessel Press, 2025

A Fictional Inquiry, Daniele Del Giudice’s first novel, is called Lo Stadio di Wimbledon (Wimbledon Stadium) in its original Italian—a reference to the end, when the protagonist journeys to Wimbledon to finish his, as translator Anne Milano Appel puts it, “inquiry.” The English title is clever; it places the conundrum of Del Giudice’s story right on the cover.

The titular inquiry is regarding the Triestean writer Roberto Bazlen, whose novels were published posthumously. The unnamed protagonist of A Fictional Inquiry travels first to Trieste and then to London, trying to understand why Bazlen did not or could not write while he was alive: “‘How did he hit upon the fact of not writing?’ I ask. ‘I mean the fact that he only wrote in private?’” Obviously, this inquiry concerns a writer of fiction, but it is not solely a question about what it means to write fiction; in a double meaning, the man’s inquiry is itself fictional, tossed out to the reader to cover up the protagonist’s (or Del Giudice’s) other, hidden, purpose.

This character arrives in Trieste with the supposed goal of interviewing Bazlen’s surviving friends and colleagues. He claims, during these encounters, to be gathering information in order to figure out why Bazlen never revealed himself as a writer, and as a result, these conversations map out his subject’s literary life. For some reason, however, the man is continually uninterested in the conversations he’s having. While speaking to a poet in her hospital room, he thinks: “I don’t care to listen to anymore; I want to leave, but I’m anxious about the formalities.” Before and during other meetings, he is just as hesitant. When asked if he is available to see a person of interest on that day, he responds: “Yes of course,” even while admitting to us that: “Truthfully I don’t know if I want to.” READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: January 2026

January 12, 2026  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Anna Mebel, Dan Shurley, Fani Avramopoulou, Hilary Ilkay, Mandy-Suzanne Wong, Nicole Yurcaba, Randle Browning, and Xiao Yue Shan

New titles from China, France, Peru, Italy, Romania, Brazil, South Korea, Mexico, Sweden, and Japan!

Looks like 2026 isn’t coming in slow. Despite the chaos, we’re looking forward to another year of illuminating the best of what world literature has to share—and we’re starting off with plenty to go around, with thirteen titles from ten countries. Find in the mix a new translation of one of the Peruvian canon’s most dazzling and convulsive works; a novel depicting the delicate indigenous customs of a region between Siberia and northeast China; a shocking, propulsive novella from a Japanese cult writer; a story of transformative grief from an enthralling Romanian voice, and so much more.

The Last Quarter of the Moon by Chi Zijian, translated from the Chinese by Bruce Humes, Milkweed Editions, 2026

Review by Mandy-Suzanne Wong

The opening lines of Chi Zijian’s wondrous novel, The Last Quarter of the Moon, set a carefully measured tone for this enchanted story of Evenki nomads: “A long-time confidante of the rain and snow, I am ninety years old. The rain and snow have weathered me, and I too have weathered them.” t6his rich and essential passage gently, and with deference, opens a window into a world where humans confide in rain. Chi and translator Bruce Humes indulge the word weather in at least three of its meanings, conveying the narrator’s resilience and hinting at her costly intimacy with other-than-human energies.

A word exchanging its meaning for other meanings—as if adopting different bodies to slide between existential contexts—invokes the dynamism of the shamanic Evenki cosmos, wherein earth and sky, humans and nonhumans, the embodied and the disembodied, dance together in precarious balance and tender reciprocity. Everything is alive in the Evenki’s animist multiverse, every entity ensouled, each Earthling an embodiment of the Spirits, and every human owes a debt to the Spirits for the lives of nonhumans killed for food. In turn, when a human child goes missing, in danger of freezing to death, a reindeer child must go “to the dark realm on [the human’s] behalf,” in a mimetic exchange.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

January 9, 2026  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Hongyu Jasmine Zhu, and Kathryn Raver

The latest literary news from France, China, and the Philippines!

This week, our editors report on the cancellation of a controversial comics festival in France; the Arabic-language launch of an important literary account of Spanish colonization; and the awardees from one of China’s most prestigious prizes in children’s literature. Read on to find out more!

Kathryn Raver, Assistant Managing Editor, reporting from France

The fifty-third annual Angoulême International Comics Festival—a renowned celebration of comics and graphic novels slated to take place January 29 – February 1, and which I have written about for Asymptote twice in the past—has been cancelled for 2026. Save for one cancellation due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this is the first time in the festival’s history that it will not be taking place.

The festival’s organizers, a group called 9e Art+, announced the news in early December, asserting that this cancellation is due to lack of funding. However, authors and contributors—including Anouk Ricard, the winner of the festival’s grand prix last year—have been raising calls to boycott the festival for the past few months following multiple ignored sexual assault cases, un-transparent business practices, and commercial excess. Over four hundred authors called for a boycott in April of 2025, and multiple others have joined the call in the time since. READ MORE…

Our Top Ten Articles of 2025, as Chosen by You: #8 The House of Termites by Ubah Cristina Ali Farah

December 24, 2025  |  in News  |  by Haajar Abu Ismail

Whether displacement is forced or voluntary, there is one prevailing symptom: loss.

Coming in at number eight, “The House of Termites” is a poetic essay from our Winter 2025 issue by Somali-Italian writer Ubah Cristina Ali Farah (tr. Brandon Michael Cleverly Breen) that paradoxically succeeds at being both unique and universal. As she reflects on a life between borders, from Somalia to Italy to Belgium, Ali Farah ponders a question close to all migrants: What does it mean to live in exile?

This work is a treasure trove for the reflective reader. Sure to be bookmarked, there is a goldmine of pensive moments to glean wisdom from. One of many to start us off: “Migrating means disappearing into yourself, dying and being reborn, running the risk of becoming invisible, or rather, of being seen in another way.”

Whether displacement is forced or voluntary, there is one prevailing symptom: loss. There is a constant undercurrent of disconnection from the physical space one inhabits and their distant home. Ali Farah draws on the wisdom of James Baldwin to describe this condition:

My obsession had always been that of reimagining Mogadishu, my “Garden of Eden,” even if it was anything but a terrestrial paradise. “Maybe life only offers the possibility of remembering the garden or forgetting it,” Baldwin writes in Giovanni’s Room. “One thing or the other: you need strength to remember, you need another kind of strength to forget, and you need to be a hero to do both things together.” 

READ MORE…

No One All the Way Down: A Review of One, None, and a Hundred Grand by Luigi Pirandello

December 4, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Jordan Silversmith

. . . in One, None, and a Hundred Grand that Pirandello turns inward, eyeing the abundant fragments that compose each of us.

One, None, and a Hundred Grand by Luigi Pirandello, translated from the Italian by Sean Wilsey, Archipelago Books, 2025

Luigi Pirandello’s final novel, One, None, and a Hundred Grand, begins with a nose; the slight tilt of it, casually noted by a wife, sets off one of the most vertiginous descents into selfhood in all of literature. For Vitangelo Moscarda (meaning maggot, one of the many signifying names in this book), this offhand observation shatters a presumed unity: if his wife sees him differently from how he sees himself, who—or what—is he? What follows is a tragicomic unraveling of identity that, nearly a century later, reads with the vitality of a modern parable. In Sean Wilsey’s supple and stylish new translation, published by Archipelago Books, Pirandello’s masterpiece finds new life in an era that is just as fragmented as Moscarda’s mirror.

Though best known in the Anglophone world for his revolutionary plays—especially Six Characters in Search of an Author, which famously broke the fourth wall and dismantled the illusion of coherent identity onstage—Pirandello began his career as a philologist and prose writer, and this training in dialect and etymology shaped his understanding of identity as both an artifact of language and a performance of speech. In the theater, he would go on to stage this view with uncanny force: characters who refuse their scripts, actors who rebel against the author, spectators forced to confront their own role in meaning-making. But it is in One, None, and a Hundred Grand that Pirandello turns inward, eyeing the abundant fragments that compose each of us. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “To Banvard’s Madness, Everyone” by Paola Silvia Dolci

November 18, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Paola Silvia Dolci

The encounter / is fleeting / and momentary.

How closely can a poem capture the experience of seeing a film, and seeing one cut up at that? For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you an answer: a cycle of seven poems by Italian poet Paola Silvia Dolci, translated into English by the author herself. In these almost-ekphrastic verses, Dolci seeks not to describe the literal content of the film, but rather to capture the experience of seeing a film fragmented, reduced to a string of disconnected images—by damage to the film itself or constant interruption of the audience, we do not know. What we know, instead, is the hypnotic effect of the sequence, the dreamlike state induced by each isolated vignette, the plangent feeling that lingers as each slips away. Read on!

In the cinematic text, the scenes are fragments of a film; reality is never whole, but always broken down into details, movements, images that slip away.

It is a meeting between strangers, there’s a sense of waiting, of possibility, that intersects without ever belonging to one another.

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In this scene of the film,
the two strangers
meet
at an abandoned little table
in front of the Splendid Mayer.

It’s almost winter, it’s cold,
and the sails are in regatta.
“By now November feigns nothing.”

READ MORE…

Fall 2025: Highlights from the Team

November 3, 2025  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Find out what our very own team members have to say about our bountiful Fall issue!

I found that Nay Thit’s “The Language I Don’t Speak,” translated from the Burmese by Thiri Zune, was the perfect way to begin exploring the new edition. Like it, the rest of the poetry section is provocative and urgently alive—especially Olivia Elias’s verse about Gaza in Jérémy Victor Robert’s translation from the French. Moving from her work to that of Faruk Šehić, translated from the Bosnian by Ena Selimović, in “Who Came Back,” takes us from the action of war to the scars of postwar life. Then on to prison, with Başak Çandar and David Gramling’s translation from the Turkish of Kemal Varol’s “Dark Mist.” I found this piece unexpectedly amusing. Jen Calleja’s interview (conducted by Sarah Gear), is a delight, full of thought-provoking reflections on what we do as translators. There are so many other translations shining in this issue—I wish I could list them all.

—Ellen Elias-Bursac, Contributing Editor

Pablo Palacio’s “The Cannibal” (tr. José Darío Martínez from the Spanish) is my favorite piece from the new issue—fast-paced, vividly written, and replete with gruesome physical detail and haunting character psychology. As someone who likes to write about cannibalism, I found it both a wonderful point of reference and an object lesson in how obscene desire can be rendered in literature.

In “Vassal of the Sun” (tr. Tobias Ryan from the French), I was overjoyed by Patrick Autréaux’s descriptions of the natural world and his evident love for Melville.

Faruk Šehić’s “Who Came Back” (tr. Ena Selimović from the Bosnian) demonstrates how repetition, properly employed, can become a devastating poetic device. The scarcely varied refrain of “came back” hammers the losses of the Yugoslav Wars into the reader’s mind, while the sparse yet vivid language—“dandelions-cum-parachutes,” “white bark of birch saplings in living rooms”—emphasizes what war takes away, even from those who escape its bullets. It is essential reading for a world drunk on fantasies of righteous violence.

Palacio returns in “The Double and the Singular Woman” (tr. Thomas Taylor from the Spanish), a story that most cheap “twin horror” tales wish they were—though it’s not a horror story at all. Instead, it’s a superbly eerie study of difference and intimacy: how intricately a writer can render lives utterly unlike their own, and how such acts of imagination approach the question of what it means to write across unbridgeable experience. Using the extreme example of twins conjoined for their entire lives, Palacio transforms “monstrosity” into empathy. What a relief, in a world that so often wields that word against the oppressed, to encounter a story that refuses to dehumanize.

Finally, Johanna Drucker’s “Attention as Predation” remains, to my mind, the best framework for thinking about the phenomenon of Trump and other authoritarian figures turned cult icons. It is supremely bleak, but in an era when the democratic counteroffensive has so spectacularly failed, we need such correctives to naïve optimism. Reading Drucker’s essay, I felt a kind of cruel joy—the shock of recognition that comes when one is reminded of the essential brokenness of human beings, their eagerness to become both recipients and agents of predatory attention.

—Julia Maria, Digital Editor

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

October 31, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Bethlehem Attfield, Carol Khoury, and Veronica Gisondi

The latest from Nigeria, Palestine, and Italy!

In this week’s round-up of global literary news, our editors cover a progressive writing workshop in Milan, an honouring of a major Palestinian poet, and a celebration of African writing in Lagos. Read on to find out more!

Veronica Gisondi, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Italy

When engaging with texts and their authors’ experiences, distance often becomes the instrument through which meaning is managed and subjective responses modulated—whether in reading, writing, criticism, or translation. Through the conflation of the personal with the private (and the classification of the latter as a “non-political” domain), the innermost truths of human experience have largely been excluded from public discourse. Lea Melandri’s scrittura di esperienza (experiential writing) offers a radical alternative to this logic—which stems from the same matrix that historically split mind and body, reason and emotion—by reuniting personal life and social language.

In a one-day workshop hosted by Milan’s Collettivo ZAM (Zona Autonoma Milano), Melandri—a leading Italian feminist thinker, journalist, and writer—introduced a small group of participants to a method born out of her involvement with non-authoritarian pedagogy and feminist movements in the late 1960s and 1970s. In the wake of feminism’s autocoscienza, which first revealed the systemic origins of individual struggle, Melandri treats “the self” as an archive containing “millennia of history,” acknowledging that most of it lies beyond our awareness. “The self has been reduced to the particular experience of an individual,” noted Melandri as she briefed us on the day ahead. “Feminism has taught us that personal lives aren’t history’s waste, but constitute its core.” READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2025

October 27, 2025  |  in News  |  by Hilary Ilkay, Sophie Benbelaid, and Xiao Yue Shan

Thoughts and inspirations from our latest issue!

Our latest—and fifty-seventh—issue draws together work from thirty-one countries and twenty-one languages, from antiquity to the boldly contemporary, the comedic to the compassionate, the historic to the experimental. To help you navigate this compendium, our blog editors offer up their favourites.

In one of the many street art pieces embroidering the surfaces of Athens, a black sign reads: ‘A memory of a memory that we are all left with.’ Greece’s capital is bound in all directions: to the bodies that live within its confines, the oblique and omnipresent archive, the dynamism of recollection, the strategies of function, the desperation of loss, the translucency of power, reality’s elasticity and its collapse. To be within it, then, is to acknowledge that no space is neutral—that the collective illusion of fixed borders, fixed pasts, and fixed stratagems of everyday life are gossamer comforts. There is nothing stable in the city. The condition of its existence is nothing less than a mass hypnosis.

‘When my parents told me we lived in Athens, I believed them.’ Amanda Michalopoulou writes in ‘Desert‘, translated with great emotional heft by Joanna Eleftheriou and Natalie Bakopoulos. Through a combination of confession and elucidation, the piece seeks to delineate the living morphology of present-day Athens from its manipulated dreams of cohesion and glory, earmarking the ‘transcendent’ objectives of the ancient city as a catalyst for its current fragility, the very definition of transcendence gesturing at an inoperable unreality, a beyond that persists only in attempts and potentialities. ‘A city that would invent cities and governments, language and liberty,’ so Athens grew with immovable conjectures of goodness and intelligence, until: ‘Step by step, they created a society that matched their insatiable vision of absolute power and control.’ The converge of experience and concept is chaotic, and space does not hesitate to dislocate itself from our comprehension. Thus, as Michalopoulou describes her ‘investigations,’ the city can perhaps be only understood via the fragmented origins of our most ancient texts, in those long-gone years where our present certainties had been amended, invented, reconstituted, and dismembered ceaselessly. The instability of today’s Athens resents the wonders and heights of its own birth, yet this shakiness is also evidence of another strength, for it is as David Graeber said: ‘The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.’  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Lord of the Waters by Giuseppe Zucco

October 14, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Antonella Lettieri

So, this was where all the rain we’d been missing for months had got to...

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a story of the calm before the storm. Picture the sky moments before a fierce downpour: dark, oppressive, hanging over your head like a threat. This excerpt, taken from Italian writer Giuseppe Zucco‘s novel Lord of the Waters, imagines a life suspended in that moment, where the rain never comes. As the external world slows to a standstill, one family’s internal world begins to change. Freed from the obligations of social conventions, work, and school, they quickly descend into a chaotic, easy existence of games, junk food, and neglect, rewriting their familiar dynamics. Beneath their frantic cheerfulness is a persistent anxiety, as they wonder when the amassed rain will finally hit. Translator Antonella Lettieri smoothly captures these currents, refracted through the child narrator’s unaffected voice.

Amongst all the children, I was the first to look up at the sky and see it rear up. I didn’t quite see but rather felt a vast wave soar above me.

I ducked immediately, covered my head with my arms, and, thus crouching, prayed that that wave would not pull me under and wreck me upon the lamp posts and the buildings.

As I closed my eyes, I tried to picture my mother and father, hoping it would help me muster up some courage. All I could see, though, was that gurgling scene, which yet had a certain cheerfulness to it: all the other children and I doing mad somersaults inside the roiling heart of a wave fallen from the sky, our little heads bobbing atop the horrific crests of that brilliant white foam.

My sorrow lasted a second or two; then, since no water came upon us and no dreadful flood crashed down on my head, I opened my eyes again.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: October 2025

October 13, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Eva Dunsky, Liliana Torpey, Mandy-Suzanne Wong, Regan Mies, Sofija Popovska, and Timothy Berge

New titles from Haiti, Argentina, the Netherlands, Japan, Germany, Italy, Norway, Turkey, Mexico, Taiwan, Hungary, South Korea, and Latin America!

This month, we bring you thirteen reviews from thirteen countries: a poetry collection that reimagines friendships with long-gone revolutionaries, a tender and incisive rumination on disappearance, the latest novel on the inexplicability of love from a Nobel laureate, a story of Silicon Valley-fueled descent, a compilation of Latin American feminist thought, and much much more!

duels

Duels by Néhemy Dahomey, translated from the French by Nathan H. Dize, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Timothy Berge

Néhémy Dahomey’s Duels is set in 1842, thirty-eight years after Haiti’s independence—a storied liberation that came through one of the largest slave uprisings in history. France withdrew, but issued an absurd debt of one hundred and fifty million francs. Paying off a debt while attempting to modernize a new country was a tough balancing act, so Haiti imposed high taxes on its citizens and forced them into unpaid labor.

Duels takes place in Böen, a small town in the Cul-de-Sac Plain that evaded a census for several years. As a result, no one in the town had fallen victim to the government’s schemes—until a local official decides that he needs laborers for a new project. From there on, in the context of freedom, economic entrapment, and postcolonial growing pains, the events of Duels unfold. Nathan H. Dize’s translation reads like a yarn spun out by an old relative with a deft deadpan humor, aptly navigating the tense shifts between past and present, and generating a sense of perpetuity for these characters and their stories. Here, the historical and the contemporary connect and blur. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

October 10, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by José García Escobar, Linnea Gradin, and Veronica Gisondi

The latest from Italy, Sweden, and Central America!

This week, our editors from around the world bring news of Palestinian solidarity and the necessity of individual action against genocide, debates surrounding culture and national identity, and the latest laureates of prestigious literary prizes. 

Veronica Gisondi, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Italy

Calls to end Italy’s complicity in Israel’s genocidal politics have intensified in recent weeks. While Italy’s economic and political ties to the Zionist regime are well known, citizens have been reclaiming public spaces with renewed unity and force. From statewide demonstrations on September 22—which drew more than half a million to the streets—to the general strike on October 3, many Italians have reached a breaking point underpinned by enduring forms of political grief. As the genocide in Gaza reaches its most advanced stages, the commitment of scholars such as Majed Abusalama reminds us why continued discussion is crucial: first, to anticipate how the neocolonial project will unfold—not only Israel’s, but that of its global allies—and second, to question our own role in it at “the harshest time of erasure,” both within and beyond cultural work.

Abusalama’s talk, titled “Il futuro di Gaza, la Palestina e noi” (The future of Gaza, Palestine and us), took place at CSA Vittoria, one of Milan’s squats—part of a network facing increasing threats (Leoncavallo’s eviction being a clear example) from municipal and state policies that accelerate urban privatization and erode the city’s relationship with its people. Abusalama, an award-winning journalist, human rights defender, founder of Palestine Speaks in Germany, and president of the Coalition of Lawyers for Palestine in Switzerland, described our present moment as the “last stage” of “a timeline of colonial violence” that has crushed past and future, scarring generations of Palestinians for nearly a century. By refusing to normalize their oppression, Palestinians have become experts in resistance and agency, effectively shaping models of struggle that had been later taken up by movements such as the Black Panthers and South Africa’s anti-apartheid groups. For Abusalama, to never know peace means to know one’s enemy well: for those who stand with Palestine, the enemy is imperialism, it is fascism; a fascism that “did not start on October 7,” but “has been there all the time, from the founding of Zionism until today.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

September 19, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, René Esaú Sánchez, and Veronica Gisondi

The latest from the Philippines, Italy, and Mexico!

This week, our editors report on a workshop centred around disaster writing in Mexico City; a literary festival with themes of urbanism, gentrification, personal history, and war narratives in Milan; and the passing of two groundbreaking translators in the Philippines. 

René Esaú Sánchez, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Mexico

I used to live with my mother in a small apartment in the eastern part of Mexico City. One day, my bed suddenly shook. I attributed it to a passing truck—but the movement started to feel suspiciously long and, when I realized what was happening, I grabbed Cookie, my dog, and ran out of the building. That day was September 19, 2017, when a 7.1 magnitude earthquake shook central Mexico, taking the lives of more than three hundred and sixty people, affecting over thirty thousand; it caused the collapse of thirty-eight buildings in the city, and damaged more than twelve thousand. Strangely enough, the earthquake struck on the same date as another historical quake in Mexico City thirty-two years prior, and, worse still, just a few hours after the ceremony commemorating the thousands who had died back then.

Writing from disaster is strange: it is an exercise in personal memory, in archiving, a hybrid between literature and journalism. What matters are the hours, the clothes you were wearing, what people told you, what you held in your hands. And precisely because this year marks forty years since the 1985 earthquake and eight since that of 2017, the Institute of Geophysics and Literatura UNAM—both institutions of the National Autonomous University of Mexico—have organized the workshop Zona de riesgo (“Risk Zone”), which seeks to recover, through creative writing and sound production, the collective memory of two of the most significant events in the country’s recent history. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2025

September 15, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Christopher Alexander, Liliana Torpey, Mandy-Suzanne Wong, Regan Mies, and Xiao Yue Shan

New publications from Palestine, Afghanistan, Italy, Senegal, France, Belgium, Serbia, Russia, Poland, and Kyrgyzstan!

Ten titles, ten countries! This month, we’re presenting reviews of a wide-ranging text of image philosophy in the age of virtual reality; a Russian master’s memoirs of his infamous literary friends; poetry anthologies featuring testimonies from the genocide in Gaza and the bold voices of Afghan women; a delicate and revelatory Serbian novel parsing lineage and dementia; and so much more. . .

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From Language to Language: The Hospitality of Translation by Souleymane Bachir Diagne, translated from the French by Dylan Temel, Other Press, 2025

Review by Xiao Yue Shan

Power is domination—at least, that’s how it’s been overarchingly conceived. Though the concept abstracts out to a vast array of actualities, from the centralized to the diffused, the individual to the plural, the Foucauldian and the Weberian, the most immediate and base display of human power is that of one subject being undermined by another. Translation, then, as an intersectional arena between two bodies that are as similar as they are different, is an optimal stage by which to study the varying dynamics of power; but especially within the postcolonial context, it has commonly begun with the premise that translation is a dominating act, with one more powerful language exercising its patterns, definitions, and cultural values over another. In From Language to Language, the Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne wants to build his theories on a different foundation.

It may seem that the closer one looks at translation, the less feasible an equilibrium seems—at least, from the outside. For bilingual or multilingual persons, however, the idea of equal values for different languages is simply fact; the hosts of multiple languages are likely to regard them as equally essential components, regardless of any diglossic differences in fluency, utility, or geographical relevance. As a speaker of Wolof, French, and English, Diagne is in this camp, and opens this English edition of From Language to Language with a personal anecdote on his family’s migration, which ends with the determination that his children should “live out their different identities and the languages that expressed them with self-assurance as pride.” His own multilingualism therefore places him at a position more primed to think of translation less as a sequence of conquests, and more as a rendezvous of common goals, whether that be the making of a fully-fledged individual, or of a more varied and generous world. There is, he says, a “gratitude and equality within a shared humanity, which is at the very heart of translation.” READ MORE…