Migrant translators hold the position in world literature of not just carrying texts across languages but also reshaping literary and historical memory. While David Damrosch argues that texts “gain in translation” (What is World Literature), Emily Apter in Against World Literature argues that world literature relies on a “translatability assumption” (14): the tendency to endorse cultural equivalence. In contrast, Longxi Zhang argues for the importance of translation by stating that it establishes human relationships. To consider world literature texts in translation to be a loss due to the idea of ‘transferring meaning’ would be to disregard the historical and political negotiations that occur as texts such as River of Fire (2019) by Qurratulain Hyder, embody the position of a migrant text in motion.

Translation is not merely a process of linguistic transfer. Instead, as a migrant world-literary text, Hyder’s self-translated novel River of Fire is an act of world-making: the narrative is encoded with displacements, cultural negotiations, and epistemic ruptures that not only reflect the history and lived realities of the Partition of 1947 but also urges us, as world literature critics, to consider the role of migrant translators in shaping world literature (as texts circulate and translate across borders).

This paper considers River of Fire, through the lens of self-translation (Gyatari Spivak and Susan Bassnett), and world literature (David Damrosch and Amir Mufti) to argue that the text is a form of refugee poetics: where the fractured structure, polyphonic voices, and temporal and linguistic shifts mirror the refugee’s ongoing translation in the world. This creates a nuanced understanding of self-translation as the novel becomes a mirror of the refugee and displaced experience during the Partition of India and Pakistan. Thus, this paper analyzes how Hyder’s self-translation makes visible the transnational literary movement's pressures (and burdens) on migrants. As Hyder’s novel enacts Partition linguistically and narratively, her work urges us, as world literature critics and readers, to consider self-translation as an active site of cultural and historical mediation that should be regarded as a space of resistance and confrontation.

This paper explores Ha Jin’s self-translation in his poetry collection A Distant Center (2018), interrogating the concepts of national identity, literary translingualism, and performative hybridization in the context of diaspora and displacement. Despite extensive scholarship on Ha Jin’s idiosyncratic “translation literature” (Gong 2014) characterized by his nativized English discourse that exhibits remarkable linguistic and cultural Chineseness, as well as some limited attention directed at his sporadic efforts to self-translate his own English-language works “back” into his native language, there remains a marked absence of scholarly inquiry into the reverse direction of transfer within his self-translation oeuvre later in his career, where he began to compose poetry in Chinese for the first time to “enrich” the subsequent English versions. For a writer who has built his career exclusively in English and who has been embraced by the American literary establishment, the bittersweet nature of this linguistic homecoming is manifested in a “short-lived” and “vacation-like” respite from the existential burden of writing in a non-native language. Through close readings of his selected poems in English against the Chinese originals, the article explores the ways in which Jin’s self-translations reflect and negotiate the tensions, ambivalences, and hybridities of diasporic subjectivity amid his poetic engagement with the painful realities of China’s state violence and his thematic preoccupations with rootlessness, nostalgia, and the search for belonging in his self-imposed political exile. Writing Chinese original poems with English translations in mind, Jin’s anticipatory orientation has embedded the very genesis of his poems with a jarring Anglicism deeply informed by his extensive readings of Western literary canons, such as Hardy and Yeats, while his use of rhyme and meter in the originals is replaced by alternative means of creating poetic resonance in English. Positioning the translated collection within the institutional and publication context of the leading American poetry publisher Copper Canyon Press, this article examines how Jin’s attempt to claim a place within the poetic canon in the hostland simultaneously involves a resistance to its assimilationist pressures through foreignization strategies of literary allusions to Ancient Chinese poet Li Po, and linguistic restlessness and ungrammatical phrasing that deviates from standard American English. As a "born-translated" autobiographical poetry (Walkowitz 2015), it creates a “third space” (Bhabha 2004) that challenges monolithic paradigms of national literature, the arrogance of U.S. monolingualism, and the essentialist notions of Chineseness or Americanness through cross-cultural fertilization and hybridization. In exploring concepts of transculturalism, transnationalism, and translingualism, it sheds light on how diasporic writing gains in translation as a piece of world literature.

The Ganges, a vital conduit of migration, trade, and cultural transmission, has profoundly

shaped the literary and oral traditions of Bengal. Among these, Bhatiali (boatmen’s songs)

and Bhawaiya (pastoral ballads) stand as emblematic folk genres that encapsulate the rhythms

of riverine and agrarian life. These genres depicts the symbiotically entangled relationship

between the people and their environment. This paper investigates the problems in translation

of these songs, where the songs have a deep connections with the specific riverine and

pastoral locality. A major obstacle is the loss of local imagery, where evocative metaphors

tied to the land and water lose their cultural resonance in target languages. Furthermore,

Rajbanshi and Kamrupi phonetics often resist standardization thus the linguistic fluidity of

folk dialects complicates translation. The improvisational essence and melodic structure of

these oral traditions complicate direct linguistic translation, as rhythm and meaning are

inextricably linked. Additionally, the colonial ethnographers distorted them by romanticized

these songs as ‘mystical Eastern ballads’. In postcolonial scenario nationalist translations

reframed them to fit political narratives.

This paper thus argues that the Ganges functions as both a metaphor and a mechanism

for the movement of texts, where translation becomes an act of negotiation rather than mere

linguistic substitution. A truly faithful translation of these traditions must recreate the

experiential, rhythmic, and existential depth embedded in their original performance contexts,

acknowledging the fluidity of meaning, migration, and memory that defines Bengal’s riverine

literary landscape.