ABSTRACT
As we have seen in the new wave of translations and rewritings of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the new age of new media and digital communication has ushered in a new era of not just translation studies but of World Literature as well. Certainly the movement of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Germany through Russia, then back to the Englishspeaking world via music, ballet, and film helps illustrate the manner in which texts circulate. While I am heartened by the place of importance accorded to translation in the new discussions of World Literature by scholars such as David Damrosch (2003, 2009), Theo D’haen (2012, D’haen et al. 2013), and Emily Apter (2005, 2013), despite redefinitions and the broad range of languages being considered, cultural biases and imperialistic aspects to the new definitions remain. For example, in “The Globalization of the Novel and the Novelization of the Global: A Critique of World Literature” (2010), Mariano Siskind talks about the Modern Language Association’s (MLA) goal of publishing 100 texts in their Teaching World Literature Series. Through 1997, however, out of the 95 titles published, 65 were in English, 14 in French, three each in Italian, German, and Spanish, three in classical Greek and Latin, and one each in Russian, Norwegian, Japanese, and Hebrew (2010: 343): all European with merely two exceptions. In this chapter, I would like to push the boundaries of such definitions and add translation, rewritings, and the multidirectional circulation of texts in both postmodern and postcolonial terms. In addition to a synergy and cross-fertilization process involved in translation and rewriting that is very invigorating, there are also ideological considerations with regards to the texts included in the World Literature paradigm. Translation, retranslation, and rewriting have been used to critique the criteria establishing such a canon.
