Walter Benjamin, in his essay Das Kunstwerk in Zeitalter der Reproduzierbarkeit, explored the link between technical reproducibility and the demise of authenticity and tradition. The concept of an original, central to traditional translation theories based on fidelity, also erodes. Benjamin wrote:

"The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity. [...] The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical—and, of course, not only technical—reproducibility. Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the original preserved all its authority; not so vis à vis technical reproduction."

"One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions, it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition."

Cinema, as the apex of reproductive technology for Benjamin, entails “the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage.” How, then, can we rethink translation in a post-tradition world, where the distinction between original and copy has lost meaning?

Vilém Flusser suggests we have shifted from the era of technical reproduction to synthetic images and life. If so, we are also in a post-reproduction and post-translation culture. Translation once relied on historical culture and an individual detached from the public sphere. Now, in the era of synthetic images, new self-images of humanity emerge, surpassing not just historical perspectives but also modern translation. Thus, translation has, over the 20th century, become a literary genre.

To post-tradition, we must add post-translation. This is clear when a screen touch produces instant text versions in nearly any language, or when films on streaming platforms launch in dozens of languages at once. Often, we cannot identify the “original language” of these works.

Yet, as languages circulate synthetically, merging in a boundless process of multi-circulation that fosters cultural porosity, the opposite occurs with human bodies. Borders increasingly exclude, turning into quasi-concentration camps. Dead bodies drift in the Mediterranean, stereotyped as unacceptable and undesirable.

This paper links these two phenomena: the absolute hospitality of post-translational synthetic versions, enabled by new technologies, and the hostile bordering of the world, fostering racism and deadly zones of untranslatability.

This paper aims to examine the links between memoir-writing, imagination and translation, particularly when the latter is understood as an experience of exile. Building on past work on the intersection between the concepts and narrative experiences of ‘translation’ and ‘exile’, (Lopes 2016, 2020, 2021), the reflection now proposed will continue the enquiry focusing, this time, on Out of Place. A Memoir (2000), by Edward Said. The memoir will be read against the author’s considerations about exile.

The paper will discuss the ways in which memoir and exile (re)create a diverse geography of experience, enhanced by the deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation of existence that are impulses – sometimes metaphorical (values, habits, rituals, ways of life), sometimes literal (languages) – for a form of translation that brings together memory and imagination.

Said’s work, significantly entitled Out of Place, summons up the concepts (and experience) of ‘displacement’, ‘deterritorialisation’ and ‘banishment’, to translate the idea (and experience) of loss: ‘Out of Place is a record of an essentially lost or forgotten world’, as the author states in its preface (2000: xiii). To this extent, Said's memoir, written during a period marked by other vulnerabilities, evokes a world that only exists in memory (and/or imagination) and in its verbalisation – processes that I read as acts of translation, which (re)imagine, in different circumstances and languages, an otherwise unrecoverable past.

Particularly relevant to this (attempt at) recovery is the search for a home that has been lost as a sign of identity and stability, because ‘[e]xile is [...] the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted’ (Said 2002: 174). Salman Rushdie calls this sadness a double feeling of unbelonging – homelessness results from a literal translation in space, exposing the displaced person to a daily life inhabited by (potential) untranslatability and, paradoxically, the need for constant processes of linguistic, cultural and experiential translation, as well as constant reimagination of the self.

Spatial displacement causes an emotional slippage condemning exiles to an ‘elsewhereness’ of experience - a kind of deictic wandering, for they never fully belong ‘here’ nor ‘there’, a state of perpetual translation between ‘here’ and ‘there’ –, making them at once vulnerable and a sign of late modernity. By attempting to recover a lost world, Said is arguably reinventing it, ‘creat[ing] fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands’ (Rushdie 1991: 10) – as such, re-membering is arguably always in itself an act of translated, imaginative, and provisional reassemblage.

The scholarly tradition that links notions of translation and hospitality has frequently focused on the linguistic and philosophical connections between hospes and hostis, the host and the enemy. The negative connotations of this approach and its imagery become all the more powerful – indeed, dramatic – as technology comes to play an increasingly powerful role both in managing practices of translation and in mediating processes of hospitality. A possible alternative route seeks to avoid or at least mitigate such binary, confrontational models by pointing instead towards (imperfect, unfinished) forms of translation as copresence and collaboration. Following suggestions that emerge from philosophical approaches to linguistic hospitality (especially Ricouer, Sur la traduction, 2004) as well as experiential accounts of translation practices (such as Mireille Gansel’s Traduire comme transhumer, 2012), this paper will reflect on the ‘hopeful’ reading of translation as a form of (ongoing, incomplete) hospitality based on the acknowledgement that ‘otherness’ is always already here, always already present.

Nietzsche has reportedly stated that “[o]ur writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts” (qtd in Carr, The Shallows, 2010: 19). If this is so, it affects a writer’s performance and perception of both the text and the surrounding world.

Drawing on Thomas O. Beebee’s transmesis – a term which refers to “literary authors’ use of fiction to depict acts of translation” (2012: 3) – this paper explores literary fictions of translators as sites of human imagination that engage with public perceptions, expectations, and collective images of translation and translators, and how we deal with “the foreign and the domestic”, “understand ourselves and others” (Kaindl, “The Remaking of the Translator’s Reality”, 2018). Interest in these fictions has been growing in the field of translation and translator studies, especially over the last decade. Scant attention has, however, been paid to translators’ writing tools and how they may shape notions of translation, translators' working habits and methods, and translators’ affective response to their work, otherness, and the world around them. Whether semi-organic (pen) or technology-mediated (computer), writing tools allow translators to express a double voice and subjectivity, theirs and that of the author they are translating, and to perform their own creativity. In this sense, translators’ writing tools can make translation a site of hospitality or, by contrast, of hostility.

This exploratory study conceptualises translators’ writing instruments as a plot device by comparing through a close reading approach three literary representations of translators into, from, and somehow related to the Japanese language: Hotel Iris (Y. Ogawa, 1996); The Translator (N. Schuyler, 2013); and The Extinction of Irena Rey (J. Croft, 2024). The first narrative portrays the translator’s pen as a haptic experience that eventually symbolises destruction, that is, the translator’s ability to inflict harm on others and his translation through his hands. Schuyler’s novel openly questions translation as “a mechanical process” (23) and explores the power of chalk on a blackboard as the metaphorical enactment of the translator’s “black box”, one which challenges the authorial auctoritas. Croft’s novel has no Japanese translators, but Japanese hovers as a fetish language of international consecration into which the author “most earnestly” desired (16) to be translated. The author, who goes missing, and her eight translators all use computers in contrast to the natural environment of the forest where they are translating. Despite the presence of the digital, suspicion arises as to its reliability.

In a nutshell, the aim is to assess how fictional translators’ different writing tools shape conceptualisations of translation and ways of feeling, perceiving, and hosting otherness – i.e., the foreign language, the source text, and translation itself.

This paper explores pseudotranslation as a mode of composing texts, proposing it as a specific way of positioning the writing self as fluid in terms of culture, language, geography, and identity. This proposal builds on B. Rath’s (2014) suggestion to conceptualize pseudotranslation within Comparative Literature as a mode of reading. Departing from Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721), Rath urges World Literature scholars to explore pseudotranslation in relation to imagination and hospitality.

I wish to extend Rath’s proposal so as to explore how pseudotranslation may also serve as a mode of composing a text and, consequently, a way of conceiving authorship. The analysis will focus on Montesquieu’s text and two of Voltaire’s Oriental fables (1746 and 1747), examining the image and positioning of the textual author. These three narratives share a common setting in imagined Oriental spaces — namely, (an invented) Persia, Persepolis, and ancient Babylonia. Voltaire wrote The World as It Goes and Zadig or the Fate during a period of Oriental vogue at the French court, epitomized by the 1745 event where the entire court dressed à la turque for the wedding of the heir apparent (Pomeau, 1996: 93). Notably, the concept of masquerade has recently been linked to pseudotranslation (Lopes, 2016; Moniz, 2024).

Thus analysis is grounded in historical data on 18th-century French literary pseudotranslations and contemporary reflections on the embodied nature of translation. Allthree pseudotranslations under discussion were published anonymously, and both Montesquieu and Voltaire never officially claimed authorship, as convincingly demonstrated by Michael Cardy (2021). This reluctance to own the texts, even after their names appeared in paratextual frames (issued by the publishers), may be interpreted as evidence that their writing was shaped more by a translational imagination than by reliance on domestic repertoire. This approach inherently entails an experience of disguise and otherness.

Cardy, M. 2021. Le monde comme il va: critical edition by Michaer Cardy. In: Voltaire 3B Oeuvres de 1746-1748 (II). Voltaire Foundation.

Lahiri, J. 2022. Translating Myself and Others. Princeton University Press.

Lopes, A. 2016. “Invisible man: sketches for a portrait of Mário Domingues, intellectual and (pseudo)translator”. In Authorizing Translation, ed. Michelle Woods, 61-79. Routledge.

Moniz, M. L. 2024. “Pseudotraduções em Portugal (1930-1989)”. In Tradução e tradutores em Portugal: um contributo para a sua história (séculos XVIII-XIX), org. Teresa Seruya, 347-393. Tinta da China.

Pomeau, R. 1996. “Note sur Le Monde comme il va”. In Voltaire. Romans et Contes, 93-94. GF Flammarion.

Rath, B. 2014. "Pseudotranslation." In ACLA. State of the Discipline Report.