In the Ottoman-Palestinian intellectual Muḥammad Rūḥī al-Khālidī's Tārīkh ʿIlm al-Adab ʿind al-Ifranj wa-l-ʿArab, wa-Fīktūr Hūkū (1904, 2nd ed. 1912; History of the Science of Literature among the Europeans and the Arabs, and Victor Hugo), the figure of Victor Hugo marks the uneven chime and dissonance of select notes in Arabic and French literary epistemes and histories. Tracing Hugo's dictum that poetry inheres not in forms but in ideas to Arab-Islamic antiquity, al-Khālidī incarnates in Hugo the lost “nature” to which a fallen, “artificial” Arabic literature must return. In this regime of comparability, words must be cut to the measure of their meaning, and meter—poetic measure—tuned to the “natural” rhythms of speech. With al-Khālidī's translations of meter across time and language, this essay reads his translations of Hugo's theory and poetry (“Grenade”) to argue that the underlying concept of measure encodes a drive to equate the world's literatures and empires.

Following recent suggestions that multilingual narratives be studied for their narratological features, this essay reads Yoko Tawada's Memoirs of a Polar Bear (2011) as one instance where narratological features are refashioned to allegorize postmonolingual translation. In lieu of relying on narrative perspectival shifts, the novel merges the voices of its animal and human characters. Examining the consequent deconstruction of numerous binaries—animal/human, speech/writing, past/present—the essay tracks the novel's disarticulation of countable languages as they have been imagined in biological, phonocentric, and genealogical terms. The uncounting of languages alongside the novel's rethinking of maternity enables a reading of Memoirs as an antinarrative that counters the linguistic family romance (as articulated by Yasemin Yildiz) encapsulated by the trope of the mother tongue. A narratological reading of Memoirs reveals the structure through which monolingualism is undermined and the emergence of a postmonolingual subject made possible.

This essay argues that the translation controversy surrounding the South Korean novelist Han Kang's Man Booker Prize–winning novel, The Vegetarian, offers a useful model for thinking about both the politics of translating into English and what the stakes of these politics are for scholars of world literature invested in questions of globalization and empire. Positing a model of “reading like a translator” as a way of engaging meaningfully with a text from a source language that one does not have a foundation in—and applying this practice to a reading of The Vegetarian that turns on an understanding of a Korean untranslatable, han—this essay argues that the task of the reader of The Vegetarian in English is to take seriously the “textured moments” that populate the text, in order to reflect on the larger histories of encounter and violence that color South Korea's geopolitical entanglements and shape the literature of its diaspora.

What is the international literary history behind Xi Chuan's Chinese prose poems, and what is the literary history behind translating them into English as prose poems? Did Hegel's belief that poetry can be “translated into other languages without essential detriment to its value” contribute to the birth of prose poetry, through a synthesis with poetic form? If so, what does this notion say about Hegel's idea that China lies “outside the World's History”? In the light of the historical association between China and prose poetry in the literary history of French (Judith Gautier, Victor Segalen, Henri Michaux) and English (Allen Upward, Nathaniel Tarn, Ron Silliman, Bob Perelman, Joan Retallack, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, Sarah Howe, Ken Chen, Cathy Park Hong, Eleanor Goodman, Jennifer Kronovet, and Nick Admussen), I discuss prose poetry as an outcome of what Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson call a translational “deformation zone,” to argue that translating Chinese prose poetry demonstrates China to be inside, not outside, the history of the world.

This piece acknowledges the MLA's many initiatives in support of translation while also advocating for even greater visibility for translation as a mode of combatting language injustice in disciplines across the university. Translation offers opportunities for inclusiveness, information sharing, and collaborative knowledge production across linguistic, social, economic, and geographic divides. It also offers a form of hands-on apprenticeship in intellectual and scholarly rigor for undergraduate and graduate students alike. And by translating the texts of colleagues writing in other languages, scholars working in languages of the Global North can help further goals of language justice and access by facilitating exposure to and for other traditions of knowledge production. This piece proposes that, instead of treating translation as a threat to an individual's academic viability, we embrace translation as a means of increasing the vitality and equity of our intellectual communities.