The Uneven Travels of World Literature

Abstract

The essay engages with possibilities of translating Creole in Anglophone world literatures and investigates the socio-political frames within which translations occur. It has been argued that it is impossible to translate, read and understand the connotations of Creole without their historical and cultural contexts, from which these linguistic varieties are derived and which they conversely help produce. Texts thriving on Creole, such as Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, are highly context-sensitive and call for close, historically and locally grounded readings. The translation and translatability of Creole begs crucial questions concerning the common understanding of world literature as travelling texts. The essay discusses these questions with an eye to the role of English as a global literary vernacular, before moving on to examine Miriam Mandelkow’s recent German translation of Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners.

Innovation and Constraint

“…These opposite forces structure the literary field in the UK for it is organised along national parameters while simultaneously being inflected by global factors. Moreover, as Graham Huggan (2001) and Sarah Brouillette (2007) amongst others have argued, the intersections between locality and globality also affect the production, marketing and circulation of postcolonial literatures (Neumann 2020). The global literary market is to a considerable extent dominated by agents located in the global North and is thus not so global as its name might suggest.…”