Bassnett, Susan, ed. (2018): Translation and World Literature. London/New York: Routledge, 202 p.

In the era of accelerated globalization and a “multicultural turn” in comparative literature, much attention has been paid to world literature, a field in which translation plays a constructive, complex, and crucial role. Just as Venuti (2013) claims, world literature cannot be conceptualized apart from translation. Although the same thought has been echoed by other scholars (for example, Brodzki 2007; Gentzler 2017), translation has been, until very recently, given an inferior status in the literary field as it has historically been stigmatized as a form of reproduction, imitation, a “second-order representation” (Venuti 1995/2008: 6). Against this backdrop, Susan Bassnett’s Translation and World Literature, a new volume in the New Perspectives in Translation and Interpreting Studies series dedicated to translation and interpreting studies, has been timely planned and published since it affirms and legitimizes the value of translation in forging the field of world literature. This volume under review consists of an introduction and 11 separate chapters, probing into diverse issues and topics pertinent to translation and world literature. Susan Bassnett opens the eleven-chapter collection with an overview of the “rocky” relationship between translation studies and world literature, as well as a concise description of the main content of each chapter, setting the stage for the following chapters. As Susan Bassnett acknowledges in the Introduction, it is a shared belief of the contributors to this volume, regardless of their starting point, that “translation matters” (p. 7) in the dissemination of literatures around the world and that “the time has come for literary and cultural studies to acknowledge the significance of translation” (p. 6). With this common contention, the following chapters were written from a vast and varied range of perspectives. Placing the issue of translation and world literature in the Anglophone and Francophone contexts, respectively, the authors of Chapters 1 and 2, Harish Trivedi and Charles Forsdick, share a concern about monolingualism in world literature. Based on the investigation of Indian formulations of world literature, which is mainly written in or translated into English, Trivedi argues that the term world literature is already “somewhat contaminated” (p. 16) by the global dominance of English, which involves colonial and neocolonial overtones. In Chapter 2, Forsdick first traces the emergence and evolution of the notion of littérature-monde en français (world literature in French), then reveals the inherent contradiction in juxtaposing world literature with in French as it indicates a monolingual and Francocentric agenda, and finally acknowledges the positive role of translation in pursuing “transcultural, transnational and translingual” (p. 41) approaches to literary history. With Chapter 4 we move from the Anglophone and Francophone worlds to the Portuguese context. In reference to the marginalization of literatures written in Portuguese, a language considered “minor” despite its major role in imperial and colonial history, Paulo de Medeiros probes the correlation between translation and cosmopolitanism. He argues that world literature is inherently cosmopolitan and translation “not only enables such a cosmopolitan perspective, but also ensures that difference, linguistic, contextual, and historical, never is elided” (p. 61), which is then corroborated by two cosmopolitan writers, Fernando Pessoa and Mia Couto. Taking the discussion of the interrelation between translation and world literature further, Chapters 3 and 10 explore the significant role of community and media in the study of translation and world literature. In Chapter 3, Azucena G. Blanco transforms the totalizing Romantic idea of Weltliteratur into contemporary notions of world literature by virtue of the concept of a pluralistic and cooperative community, and examines the role of translation in creating such a community. In Chapter 10, Karin Littau focuses on the constructive role of the media …