Today, AI transforms how we produce and engage with knowledge, marking the start of a new epistemological era. What will truth mean when algorithms will govern our understanding of the world? How will society evolve when humans will no longer be the central authority of knowledge production? As Katherine Hayes suggests in “How We Became Posthuman” (1999), this marks the end of the Cartesian cogito, of a vertical epistemic paradigm, centred on the individual as the primary source of knowledge. Yet, as observed by Rosi Braidotti “We should approach our historical contradictions not as some bothersome burden, but rather as the building blocks of a sustainable present and an affirmative and hopeful future, even if this approach requires some drastic changes to our familiar mind-sets and established values” (2019).

In response to Braidotti’s call, this paper argues that literary translation, rather than being rendered obsolete by machine intervention, serves as a fertile space for reimagining epistemology and constructing an “affirmative and hopeful future” in the age of AI.

Focusing on Anne Carson’s creative translation of Catullus’ Poem 101 in NOX (2010) and her metanarrative engagement with the notion of “untranslatability,” this paper examines how Carson challenges the hegemony of Logos in the movement between languages. By foregrounding the inherent instability of meaning and the limits of linguistic transfer, NOX catalyzes a shift toward a horizontal epistemological paradigm—one that embraces dialectical exchange and decentralization in knowledge production. This reconfiguration offers a critical framework for addressing the complexities of the posthuman era, underscoring the transformative potential of translation as a site of epistemic renewal.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed the popularization and transformation of the culture and literature of electricity in China. This chapter considers hypnosis in The Fantastic Story of Electricity as core to capturing how the technical knowledge of electricity and the literary imagination shaped each other to present the unpredictable culture of electricity in China. In this way, this chapter explores how a translated novel can settle down in the local Chinese context.

The translation and creative writing of The Fantastic Story of Electricity mirrors the epistemological background of electricity in late Qing China. The novel not only reveals that the dissemination and acceptance of electricity in China had to rely on the local cognitive framework, but also shows the complex situation where different knowledge competes and coexists in this process. At the same time, the literary narrative is not entirely passive; it is also constantly responding to, and even shaping, the knowledge system and cultural mechanism of electricity. Through analogies, The Fantastic Story of Electricity participates in the construction of a network of mediums around electricity and interprets it as a channel for affective expression, redemption, and fulfilment. This allows electricity to go beyond scientific and material phenomena and become an important medium for literary and ideological ideas. At the same time, the commentaries of novel also reveals its full self-awareness in taking up the role of ideological and philosophical expression.

In short, through translation, creation, and commentaries, The Fantastic Story of Electricity guides readers to think about how knowledge is disseminated and how it is intertwined with the cultural imagination, resulting in new understandings and interpretations of technology. In fact, then, this novel is not only a translation of a literary work, but also a presentation of the cultural history of electricity and the creative cultural responses that China has produced in this history.

The fluid relationship between natural philosophy and theology was deeply embedded within the knowledge systems of the late 16th and 17th centuries. The Moon, as a celestial body beyond earthly bounds, provided a fertile ground for literary explorations of rational thought during this period. As a pioneer of European science fiction, Godwin authored 《The Man in the Moone》, the first lunar travel narrative in the English literary tradition. Inspired by Godwin, Cyrano crafted 《Histoire comique des États et Empires de la Lune》, the first and perhaps most satirical lunar utopian novel in French literature. Building upon the knowledge framework inherited from the Renaissance, both authors engaged with emerging cosmological discussions to narrate ascension journeys that implicitly addressed theological purposes. Through the depiction of a morally idealized orderly society and a godless inversion of terrestrial norms, the two works chart distinct intellectual trajectories of 17th-century modernity: one rooted in an empiricist technological pathway, the other embracing a godless materialist relativism.

This proposal explores the relation between fiction and knowledge in the work of Brazilian poet João Cabral de Melo Neto. A forerunner of Brazilian post-modernism, Cabral voiced a "psychology of composition" - title of one of his books of verse, in dialogue with Poe - centered around reason and order, rather than inspiration and imagination.

For example, In Cabral's rather personal account of the myth of Amphyon, founder of Thebes - a theme he took from Paul Valéry's play -, the hero does not strike his lyre purposefully and watch as the stones move by magic. He instead travels the desert in search of silence and stillness, a landscape that matches his interior search for asceticism. Yet, by Chance, his lyre sounds and a city rises from the air. Within its walls, the hero laments his involuntary creation and longs for the lost purity of the desert. He then throws his instrument to the ocean in disappointment, closing the poem with a gesture that has been understood by many as a confession of the insufficiency of poetry as a mean of representing reality.

His next book, "The dog without feather", is the first of a series of long dramatic poems about the Capibaribe river and the peoples that live along its course, battling the arid conditions of Brazil's north-east and the social exploration that marks the region until today. The image of a "dog without feather" is explained to be that of an animal from which everything was taken, even what he does not have. In a second sense, "without feather" works as a negation of ornament and conspicuousness in the object represented - the Brazilian title brings "plumes" instead of "feather", which further conveys notions of lightness, rarity and beauty. The dog without feather is the dog "as it is", with no lyrical excesses that either cover it up or drift it away from truth.

This kind of historical dramatic poetry, at the same time sophisticated in its use of language but claiming for itself a documentary relation to social reality, found enormous success and cemented João Cabral as arguably the most important poet of his generation. Such success is an indication of how deeply rooted a notion of fiction as knowledge of the "otherness within" is in our cultural system.

What I'd like to bring to discussion is: at what cost can fiction be considered knowledge? What constraints - conceptual and actual - have been made to fiction in our literary tradition in order to make it work as an indispensable mean of knowledge of our social reality? Part of the answer, I believe, can be found in the trajectory of João Cabral de Melo Neto and in the development of his self-proclaimed rationalistic, "anti-lyrical" poetry. His disenfranchisement of lyrical poetry - and, in the same gesture, his attempt to rehabilitate it in a different conceptual basis - helps us understand the intricate relations between reason, referentiality and the elusive nature of human language, as well as our attempts to control it.