An Alphabet of Avant-Garde Perspectives on World Literature and the Translator’s (In)visibility

This whimsical dialogue explores some avant-garde alternatives to current normative thinking prevailing in global translation studies, especially perhaps the visible-invisible, foreignization-domestication, and national-world literature binaries. It challenges the prevailing idea that a submissive, self-abnegating translatorial stance aims at fluency on target-cultural terms, so that target readers will feel at home in the translation, because it challenges none of their expectations; its counterstance suggests that “ninja invisibility” can be mobilized to aggravate target readers by, as Boris Groys put it, “using their nominal identities as ready-mades—and [by] organiz[ing] a complicated play with them.” The dialogue ends with a full fifth English translation of Walter Benjamin’s famous 1923 essay on the task of the translator, following the Hölderlinian avant-garde strategy for which Benjamin himself advocated.