ABSTRACT
The international circulation of literature depends to a great extent on translations that consecrate national authors, texts and traditions in the international sphere. In recent years, the term Weltliteratur, coined by Goethe (Eckermann 1998, 165–166), has reemerged in the wake of theorisation on globalisation (Saussy 2006), and scholars have paid increasing attention to the migration and mobility of literary products (Moretti 2003; Damrosch 2003; Casanova 2004). This renewed interest in “world literature”, together with a rapidly growing interest in “transnational literatures”, has led to a reconsideration of the crucial role played by translation in the circulation of literature. Aijaz Ahmad, for instance, draws attention to the worldwide network of interrelations that are inherent to the conditions of contemporary literary production: “By the time a Latin American novel arrives in Delhi, it has been selected, translated, published, reviewed, explicated and allotted a place […] That is to say, it arrives here with those processes of circulation and classification already inscribed in its very texture” (1992, 45). A translation can be seen at each level of the movements of the text described by Ahmad. The process of transfer described includes choices, interventions and explanatory stages which could all be considered forms of translation. In this context, translation becomes “a shaping force in the construction of the ‘image’ of a writer and/or a work of literature” (Bassnett and Lefevere 1990, 10), and internationally acclaimed writers necessarily occupy a dual position: “each writer is situated once according to the position she or he occupies in a national space, and then again according to the place that this occupies within the world space” (Casanova 2004, 81).
