ABSTRACT
The monk’s cell resists dissonance while the hotel room invites language disturbances. In the passage across the Dead Zone separating Turkish from Greek Nicosia, another kind of measure fixes the distance between languages. The Dead Zone offers itself to the wanderings of translators. It extends hospitality to those engaged in the tentative linkings of translation, those like Joseph Roth’s Inspector Anselm Eibenschutz who have lost the capacity to impose the authority of imperial weights and measures and who find themselves caught up in the unruly spirit of borderlands. Sites of translation foster exchange, but they also license transformation. The conversations that take place in translation sites are often arguments. Sites of translation are frames of “againness”, where repetition comes with a shift in perspective. Against apathy, inertia and indifference, they enhance engagement with the vital energies of difference.
