This chapter reads writings on and in Arabic in the Moroccan avant-garde journals Souffle and Anfās (1966–1971) between national and transregional scales for literature. After 1969, this movement produced itself as a periphery within transregional literature by plugging into literary networks with the Mashreq, particularly Beirut. Contributors experimented with various forms of fuṣḥā – from iconoclastic, futurist poetics to dogmatic Marxist-Leninist prose – to found the written Arabic to express Moroccan literature’s belonging in an unfolding Arab revolution and to shatter the Moroccan monarchy’s monopoly over the language as the sign of permanent, sacred, Arab-Islamic national culture. For Souffles–Anfās, Morocco’s connection to transregionalism lay in the people’s emotional connection to the Arabic language and their Arab nationalist sentiments. This avant-garde movement sought – but never found – a Moroccan poetry to launch into the transregional system. The chapter reads issues of Anfās as transregional literature, Arabic poetics in bilingual Souffles, and translational engagements in French with a future Moroccan Arabic.

This chapter examines the applicability of the term “cosmopolitanism” to Indian Ocean contexts through the question of language, asking: How does one represent a multilingual past using the medium of historical fiction? It examines the use of multilingualism and translation in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008) and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise (1994), novels that draw on multilingual nineteenth-century sources to tell stories of cross-cultural encounters in the Indian Ocean. These novels use various textual strategies, such as direct inscription of multiple languages or indirect description of linguistic difference, to portray a multilingual Indian Ocean encounters. Closely examining these textual moments alongside the novels’ sources reveals the limits of liberal cosmopolitanisms constructed both within and through the texts. They articulate a politics of language that shapes cosmopolitan intercourse in the Indian Ocean, and in doing so, self-reflexively critique the Anglophone text as a medium of cosmopolitan exchange today.

This chapter introduces Arthurian translations and adaptations originating in medieval Scandinavia, from the earliest translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth to a late ballad version of the story of Tristan and Isolde. It considers the translations of Marie de France’s Arthurian and Tristan-related works and the three romances of Chrétien de Troyes that made their way into Old Norwegian. The chapter demonstrates how this material had impact on the pre-existing Old Norse literary system, introducing new emotional expression into the saga repertoire, and providing popular motifs that were adopted in later indigenous romances.

This chapter discusses the phenomenon of Hebrew-Yiddish self-translation, and offers it as a central practice in the formation of modern Jewish literature. Self-translation, that is the writing and rewriting of the same work time and again in different languages by the same author, was crucial to the very ability to write modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature. In the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, self-translation was the practice that allowed Hebrew and Yiddish to grow as robust literary languages. To exemplify this, the chapter discusses a case study; in a close reading of a self-translated work, a novella by Zalman Shneour (1886–1959), this chapter offers a demonstration not only of the history and national settings of self-translation, but also of the unique poetics of self-translation. The novella, A Death (1905–1923), is a prime example of self-translation practices and poetics, a poetics that privileges openness, counterfactuals, instability and indecisiveness. In the ongoing and prolonged writing and rewriting of this novella, I offer that Shneour works as both practitioner and philosopher of self-translation, thematizing in the work of art its modes of composition.

This chapter focuses on a relatively unknown Jewish/German jurist, Dr Walter Schwarz. Schwarz returned to Berlin in the 1950s and practiced as a restitution lawyer. He was one of only a few Jewish lawyers working in Berlin at this time. Schwarz set up a legal journal, where he also published ‘glosses’ under pseudonyms. Found in a library in Berlin, I translate and analyse a selection of these glosses written by Schwarz. Going beyond the legal representation he could offer to his clients, I contend the writing of the glosses is a different method for Schwarz to take responsibility for the conduct of the restitution program. This chapter sets up the way giving an account of restitution can be an ethos – of writing, but also of conduct, of practice.

Between 1499 and 1502, Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci surveyed unknown lands across the Atlantic, sparking European interest in new territories. His letters, describing a gigantic island, reached cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, who named the landmass "America" on a 1507 map. This story highlights the power of early modern maps to create realities through naming and representation. The Introduction to Connected Cartographies contrasts this model of discovery with the understanding of China, which was not "discovered" in the same way. Instead, knowledge about China emerged through cross-cultural cartographic exchanges, involving translations and synthesis of Chinese and European maps. These exchanges began in the late sixteenth century and continued into the nineteenth century. This process resulted in translated maps that combined features from both traditions, challenging the traditional narrative of exploration and emphasizing the importance of translation in shaping global geography.

This chapter offers a description of the late phase of modernization of Hebrew literature, from the 1860s with the rise of the Hebrew press, to fin-de-siècle modernist poetics as expressed namely by the genre of the short story. It holds a double perspective, regarding the development of the infrastructure of both Hebrew print and editorial initiatives (the daily Hebrew press, the feuilliton, the Hebrew “penny books”) and the modernist poetics of representation (the figure of the alienated modern Jew in the early poetics of David Frishman, Reuben Brainin, Micha Josef Berdyczewski, Ben-Avigdor and Hayim-Nahman Bialik). Finally, this chapter discusses the cultural positions of influence and imitation in nineteenth-century Hebrew translation (Kalman Shulman, translator of Eugène Sue; Meir Halevy Leteris, translator of Goethe; Eduard Zalkinsohn, translator of Shakespeare; Nahum Slouschz, translator of Emile Zola).

On the map of modern Hebrew literature, the American Hebrew center remains largely a terra incognita. The chapter considers this often-neglected center from a local perspective by examining the cultural and literary interactions of Hebrew writers in New York City with their non-Jewish environment. By expanding the scope of these interactions to include American literary Naturalism and modern Yiddish literature, I show how Hebrew writers in the United States engaged with and benefited from other literatures and cultures. The chapter focuses on the literary works of Simon Halkin and Abraham Zvi Halevy, particularly their representations of New York City. Halkin’s and Halevy’s oeuvres exemplify the various identity conflicts, ideological polemics, and linguistic possibilities that took place within the multicultural and multilingual space of Interbellum New York. Understanding their literary projects within a broader Jewish American context enriches our understanding of American Hebrew literature.

This chapter makes the case for “Global Haskalah,” an expansion and revision of Jewish literary history that investigates connections among Haskalah projects throughout the Jewish world as well as relationships between Hebrew and Jewish vernacular languages. While focusing on multilingual Jewish literary circulation and exchange in the global Jewish diaspora, my approach also emphasizes translation and rewriting as its primary mode of expression; the role of Hebrew as a mediator of intra-Jewish exchange and bridge from foreign languages to Jewish vernaculars; the relationship of Jewish literary revival to global trends and forces; and the colonial dynamics of world literature vis-à-vis the Haskalah. After outlining the Global Haskalah as a historical phenomenon and a scholarly methodology, I offer summaries of two case studies based on novels that circulated within Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, Ladino, and Yiddish. The first, Robinson Crusoe, illustrates the strategies used by Jewish translators in domesticating a quintessentially European Christian text while the other, The Love of Zion, demonstrates the mix of cultural diversity and diasporic interconnection exemplifying the Global Haskalah. In both cases, I show how tracing routes of circulation, juxtaposing multiple Jewish-language translations, and reading them comparatively and contextually can generate new insights into the formation of Jewish literary modernity.

Chapter 4 first tackles the early reception of the concept of Weltliteratur in German criticism. I argue that these discussions, informed by the emergent economic and cultural nationalism of the 1830s-40s, offered a protectionist critique of free trade cosmopolitanism. Based on the conviction that untrammelled exchange assisted the exploitation of less developed trading partners, protectionists such as Friedrich List agitated for the temporary restriction of imports in support of domestic productive forces. Echoing these doctrines, world literature was associated with an overgrown translation industry that advanced the expansion of already hegemonic foreign literatures, wiping out demand for home-grown products in budding national markets. This combination of commercial self-protection and cultural self-defence was taken up in wider regions of East-Central Europe, especially in Hungary. The second part of the chapter discusses the shifting positions of world literature in Hungarian criticism between the 1840s and 1860s, as represented by the work of János Erdélyi and Hugó von Meltzl and their alternate strategies of self-assertion and self-expansion from a minor-marginal position.

This chapter focuses on foreign language books and asks what it means to own books that can’t be read. It analyses the difference between a book that a given individual can’t read and a book which nobody can read. It argues that Sloane did not just collect books in foreign languages as curios, but that there was a value given to the potential knowledge contained in them, regardless of his ability to access it. It looks at the presentation of polyglot books such as dictionaries and grammars, which have a ‘framing language’ that is very often Latin – suggesting their intended audience – and compares them with monolingual books. It expands this to include the seventeenth-century desire to construct an ‘ideal language’ and the creation of fictional languages by Thomas More and George Psalmanazaar, arguing that the collection created a context in which all languages were smaller pieces of a larger whole.

This chapter begins with outlining the repeated appeal from non-Indigenous Australians to share in the heritage of First Nations people without recognition of the ongoing impact of colonialism. It argues that one devastating consequence was the loss or endangering of many first languages of Australia. The chapter considers the relationship between poetry, language and Country, described by Alexis Wright as ‘library land’. Foregrounding the immeasurable significance of these archives of land and lived cultural practice, the chapter details the differences between Aboriginal oral traditions and the translation of Indigenous song poetry into a written context. Aboriginal women’s poetry of mourning and lament, milkarri, is discussed, the chapter pointing out that the power of such songs remains with those to whom the songs belong and the Country that has created the songs. It turns attention to attempted translations of Aboriginal song into English by Eliza Dunlop and then more contemporary translations of Indigenous oral traditions, such as John Bradley’s bilingual book co-authored by Yanuwa families, Stuart Cooke’s translation of Kimberley song cycles, and the Queensland University Press bilingual anthologies of Aboriginal song cycles. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the translation history of the Moon Bone cycle.

This chapter examines specifically oriented poetry anthologies of the twenty-first century, observing their interstitial and multivalent nature. It argues that they fall into two kinds. one is deployed towards institutional consolidation; the other, which is the principal focus of the chapter, is a strategic gathering around a cultural identity, or a thematic, aesthetic, formal or dialogical imperative. The chapter discerns that many such anthologies extend recuperative, topical or other discursive trajectories established in the late twentieth century. Many exceed national-historical formations, track evolving conceptual frames of literary and cultural studies, and map material changes in, and significant structures of feeling around, social, political, intellectual and artistic life. It also includes a discussion of the challenges and significance of translation.

This chapter summarizes the conlanging process described throughout the book and provides suggestions on how to continue to build a conlang, including composing and translating fictional texts, and developing vocabulary and grammar further. It also discusses the extent to which conlangs need to be consistent with patterns attested in natural languages and provides a full translation and gloss of a fictional text for the Salt language.