Interview with Prof. Dr. Emily Apter

Abstract

M y work for some years has centered on the politics of translation, on "theorizing in untranslatables" (or what it means to "philosophize in translation" as the French philosopher and translator Barbara Cassin put it). Cassin and I collaborated on the English edition (APTER; CASSIN, 2014) of the Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, a kind of new history of philosophy told from translation's point of view. There is no consensus on what an Untranslatable might be: (a mistranslation? A non-translation? A constant re-translation? A word that runs interference? A border zone/warzone in the world of language wars?), but such questions lent impetus to several books: