Untranslatability

Shaden Tageldin

Impasse and imposture—if not sheer impossibility—haunt the dream of translatability. If translatability has underpinned “efforts to revive World Literature” within and against the discipline of comparative literature over the last decade (3), as Emily Apter has argued in Against World Literature (2013), surely its obverse—untranslatability—is a ghostwritten word of that decade and a watchword of the next.