ABSTRACT
The idea of pseudotranslation sharpens some central concepts of comparative literature. “World literature,” according to David Damrosch, is “always as much about the host culture’s values and needs as it is about a work’s source culture”. Pseudotranslation as a mode of reading has much to contribute to questions of translatability, representation, voice, authorship, authenticity, and multilingualism. It further strengthens, arguments for a transnational history of literature and genres since, as Srinivas Aravamudan , Ballaster, and Lombaz have shown, pseudotranslation shapes the development of the novel and the prose poem. The overabundance of terms coincides with a scarcity of cross-references between the individual contributions, which often show little awareness of the developing field. Pseudotranslation opens up a new approach to literary texts spanning languages and periods, among them Miguel de Cer Cervantes’s Don Quixote, MacPherson’s Ossian, Markoe’s Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania, Merimee’s Guzla, Holz/Schlaf’s Papa Hamlet, Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, and Makine’s Fille d’un heros de l’Union sovietique.
