ABSTRACT
A. K. Ramanujan (AKR) is the point of departure for this discussion of the library as a site of translation. A second library will also be discussed, this one in a small bookish city in Central Europe. It is the personal book collection of a certain Rosa Roth Zuckerman, a Jewish resident of the city of Czernowitz in today’s Ukraine. Both sites underscore elements of the library as a site of translation – but from contrasting perspectives. AKR’s relationship to the library is that of a person who has moved across continents and regimes of knowledge, from India to America in the 1950s. Rosa Zuckerman in Czernowitz, by contrast, has not moved. She has remained in this city, though political and linguistic regimes have transformed the landscape around her. In both cases, the library crystallizes the shifting relationships of proximity and distance that link language and knowledge.
