This chapter examines how achievement books produced by Egyptian state institutions have narrated and re-narrated the 1952 revolution. These books were centrally published by the Information Department, a crucial yet seldom studied organ in the emerging Ministry of Culture and National Guidance, as well as public relations units across different ministries. After a brief institutional history of the Ministry of Culture and National Guidance as a whole, in which I demonstrate how ‘culture’ and ‘media’ were originally intertwined in administrative terms, I argue that the state’s achievements were narrated according to a changing conception of the revolution between 1954 and 1970. This rhetoric cemented a distinctive version of history among Egyptian bureaucrats, in which long lists of achievements came to articulate the bureaucratic corps’ contributions to the revolution. Moreover, it aimed to counter colonial propaganda via a systematic presentation of ‘the true Egypt’ in numerous European languages. In short, achievement books recorded, disseminated, and embodied the revolution’s accomplishments for a domestic and an international audience.

This chapter analyzes Pablo Neruda’s engagement with the English-speaking world. Neruda’s presence made an indelible mark on the cultural spheres in the United States, United Kingdom, and other countries where English is used, notably through his English translations, international travels, and engagement with Anglophone literature. His Nobel Prize in 1971 solidified his status globally, yet his reception in the United States and United Kingdom was affected by Cold War politics. Neruda’s vast literary network, knowledge of Anglophone poetry, and cultural exchanges shaped his impact in the United States and United Kingdom, in particular. Exploring these aspects, supported by the poet’s own memoirs, literary studies, translations, and lasting influence in popular culture, highlights his legacy in the English-speaking realm. Neruda’s intercultural interactions therein emphasize the complex political atmosphere during many major events of the twentieth century in which Neruda played a crucial role and became well-known as both Chile’s greatest poet and a hero for the political Left.

This essay explores the significance of modern French writers, especially Flaubert, Maupassant, and Proust, for Bowen’s thinking and writing. It traces the influence of these figures on her short stories, essays, and novels. Across her career, she reviewed, translated, and cited these and other French authors. In Maupassant, she found a way of mapping the relation between short story and novel onto the division between poetry and prose. From Flaubert, she borrowed a close attention to pacing and rhythm, as well as an interest in the more indirect ways that history might intervene in the novel. Most obviously, perhaps, Proustian notions of memory inflected her own plots and narrative structures, as well as her prose style. Modern French fiction offered Bowen a series of models – and foils – for her own developing theories of character, style, and form. These intertextual resonances reveal how Bowen situated herself in a broader European tradition, rather than British, Irish, or English alone.

This chapter examines Pablo Neruda’s participation in a translation program implemented in Romania during the Cold War years. In the 1950s and 1960s, Neruda established a literary-political connection with the Writers’ Union and accepted the invitation to translate the anthology 44 poetas rumanos (1967). His translations relied on French translations, as he did not know Romanian. With 44 poetas, both unknown poets and known poets, such as Hélène Vacaresco, Benjamin Fondane, and Ilarie Voronca, were read in Spanish for the first time. The collective nature of the project led to the exclusion of 44 poetas from Nerudiana dispersa II (2002). Through an examination of translations, letters, memoirs, and archival material, this chapter argues that the inclusion of 44 poetas in Neruda’s complete works would contribute to a nuanced exploration of his view on translation and his role as an agent of international literary transfer.

This chapter addresses Pablo Neruda’s poetry as world literature. It discusses the prominence that models such as Franco Moretti’s assign to the novel and to Paris or other Western capitals as centers of canonization. It examines the circulation of Neruda’s poetry in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc in the late 1940s and early 1950s to conclude that it is inaccurate to claim that Latin American literature did not enter the international market until the 1960s when the novel received attention in the West. The conclusions argue that a study of the international circulation of literature that is not politically biased or Eurocentric requires an analysis of the translation and publication itineraries of poetry and beyond Europe and the Anglophone market.

This essay focuses on Elicura Chihuailaf’s 1996 bilingual Mapuzugun/Spanish anthology of Neruda’s work. The translation and selection in the anthology titled Todos los cantos/Ti kum ul reveal a creative and ambitious rereading of Neruda’s virtues and flaws in understanding the Mapuche world. A close reading of Chihuailaf’s Todos los cantos/Ti kum ul shows how Neruda’s poetry can be reinterpreted in ways that allow for the presence of Mapuche voice and ethos. Chihuailaf’s rereading of Neruda’s work expands and redefines the idea of the “National Poet” in the twenty-first-century Chilean context.

The chapter examines anthropology’s first explicit engagements with Wittgenstein through the rationality debates and British structuralism. It shows how these developments reflected aspects of Wittgenstein’s transitional thinking about context, particularly regarding questions of cultural translation and understanding. The chapter argues that these debates turned on problems of contextual form that continue to animate anthropological theory.

In covert surveillance operations, police monitor the activities of suspected individuals to gather investigative information, which is then used by public prosecutors and judges in legal proceedings. This practice presents multiple challenges when suspects use different languages and intercept interpreters/translators (IITs) support the process of conveying intercepted communications from investigative stages to court proceedings. This chapter fills a significant knowledge gap regarding the activities, responsibilities and competences of IITs. The authors show how communication surveillance unfolds in three temporally staggered phases each involving different participants: (1) suspects’ original communication, (2) IITs’ translation in collaboration with police and (3) integration of written translations into legal documents by police, public prosecutors and judges. Communication in these phases undergoes significant shifts to extract core information crucial for judicial decision-making, while IITs remain invisible in the process. The chapter concludes with an imperative for a clearly defined delineation of roles and responsibilities for IITs within the criminal justice system.

The treatment here of a major Romantic poet, William Wordsworth, takes its initial and final bearings not from any composition in Latin but from the poet’s English translations from Latin: his abandoned late career Aeneid, and early versions of lines from the Georgics in his student sketchbooks. In between, two mid-career lyric narratives are discussed. Throughout, the kind of verbal push-and-pull that is a common element in all this book’s studies finds a new immediacy through privileged access to the ebb and flow of Wordsworth’s transactions with the classical in his own successive redrafts and re-edits, and in the commentatorial interventions of his friends and family (including Coleridge’s minute and unsparing marginalia on the attempted Aeneid). The middle of the chapter explores the Laodamia, whose up-close Virgilianism is obsessively worked and reworked over a thirty-year period, and then the Dion, another oddly framed lyric narrative that originates in Plutarch as an exemplary Greek ‘life’ parallel to that of the Roman Brutus. Trace elements of Wordsworth’s distinctively autobiographical poetic of lake and landscape are everywhere in play, sometimes unexpectedly.

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.