Living Translation

En savoir plus sur le livre

This volume gathers Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's extensive writings on translation, highlighting its significance in her career and the comparative humanities. Beginning with her influential "Translator's Preface" to Derrida's Of Grammatology in 1976, and continuing with her "Foreword" to Mahasweta Devi's "Draupadi" and "Afterword" to Chotti Munda and His Arrow, Spivak explores translatability from foundational and political perspectives. She examines issues at border checkpoints, colonial pedagogy, resistance to monolingual national languages, and the challenges of minor literature and schizo-analysis. The text delves into cultural debt, linguistic expropriation, and the intersection of practical criticism and theory in Untranslatables. Additionally, it reflects on Spivak's role in institution-building as the director of Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa and her subsequent positions. This context positions her among notable translator-theorists like Walter Benjamin, George Steiner, and Jacques Derrida, all of whom are attuned to the complexities of language and the interconnectedness of thinking, translating, and writing.