“An English That Is Sometimes Strangely Interesting”

This chapter uses one case study of a translated text to investigate how issues of translatability may be highly complex in practice. It engages with Emily Apter’s recent interventions in the field of World Literature, which have suggested that, globally, an assumption of the translatability or the cultural substitutability of texts predominates. This chapter turns to the Belfast poet Ciaran Carson, and his translation of Dante, published as The Inferno (2002). Using Carson’s text as a case study, it seeks to explore how individual translations may in fact oscillate between translatability and untranslatability, even in the translation of significant canonical texts. This chapter will show that Carson’s translation, in particular the heterogeneous language used, deals with issues of translatability in a subtle and complex manner. Moreover, the chapter suggests that the process of grappling with the translatability of a foreign text may become a personal negotiation—an idiosyncratic encounter which yields strangely interesting results as it ponders and complicates matters of cultural substitutability.