Circulation by Translation

If we follow David Damrosch’s influential definition of “World Literature” as a ‘mode of circulation and reading’ Full reference in Zotero Library, then a particular way of thinking about circulation as a parameter to “World Literature” insists on the speed and range of transmission, on its unhampered distribution, and on analysing, by implication, the factors that trigger or hinder the circulation of literary works beyond their geographic, linguistic, temporal and cultural borders. This is a specific figure of movement and distribution that is wedded to particular (liberal) regimes of the cultural mobility and expansive dissemination of literature.

The sociologist of literature, translation and intellectual life Gisèle Sapiro, from a more institutional perspective, has drawn specific attention to the conditions and obstacles of the circulation of literary works, other than linguistic or value-related factors, and named four domains which direct and structure the actions of all agents involved in transnational cultural exchanges: cultural policy and state control, the economic logic and self-organisation of the “market”, the special interests and local norms of the literary field as a receiving institution, and the changing power relations between social groups which affect their position in the ‘centres of the global literary market’ Full reference in Zotero Library .

This strand of the ‘sociological approach to World Literature’ could easily give the impression that it is ultimately an elaborated apparatus, which is manipulating the relations of forces that design, determine, control or secure the ways in which ‘literary works cross borders (or not)’ Full reference in Zotero Library. The following insight on the circulation of literature, which is informed by a case study about the novel Zorba the Greek from the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis Full reference in Zotero Library, does not depart from the definition of structural arrangements, such as the super/poly/macro systems and the implemented discourses and practices through which circulation takes effect and gains quality on a global or local scale. Instead, it takes its starting point from Bruno Latour’s redefinition of the ‘social [as] something that circulates in a certain way’ in his Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory Full reference in Zotero Library,¹ Latour elaborates on the insight developed by Gabriel Tarde who ‘considered the social as circulating fluid that should be followed by new methods and not a specific type of organism’ Full reference in Zotero Library. to develop a different conceptual and methodological take on the notion of “circulation” within the broad perspective of “World Literature” as a ‘border regime’ Full reference in Zotero Library.

Circulation, indeed, is difficult to register and to analyse as long as it is confused, as aptly stated in the introduction to this curated collection, with the notion of an unbounded movement; with the sum of activities, such as dissemination or transfer, within a certain structure and prior to reception; or with a self-evident process that is independent from concrete actors, as if it were the duty or nature of works of literature to circulate. To understand the workings of World Literature, I suggest that we need more of a praxeology than a phenomenology of circulation and might, therefore, pay more attention to the particular roles and interactions of different actors, dispatchers, connectors and other agents of circulation within this framework of analysis. As Latour remarks in his account of ‘the circulation of the social’, the ‘scale [of circulation] does not depend on absolute size but on the number and qualities of dispatchers and articulators’ Full reference in Zotero Library.

If the methodological focus on ‘following the actors’ (as ANT’s famous maxim goes) informs one approach to localising global circulation, another one certainly is the praxeological assessment of circulation. This involves revisiting the particular sites where the global, the suprastructural and the infrastructural are being assembled in the first place, and specific circuits are mapped out, commissioned, connected and/or operated.²In a similar way, Michel Espagne has proposed analysing the function of such gateways as hubs of cultural transfer through the specific interactions that take place there: ‘Toutefois, s’il est facile de reconnaître des lieux où se rencontrent de nombreux espaces culturels, des lieux qu’on pourrait considérer, en utilisant un néologisme, comme des “portails de globalisation”, la description ne peut s’opérer que sur des rencontres d’un nombre réduit de termes. La représentation de croisements généralisés reste inopérante’ Full reference in Zotero Library. However “global” we may account for the circulation of a work of literature, we cannot perceive it as being ubiquitous. It becomes tangible, contoured and intelligible when it is obstructed, discontinued, relayed, responded to etc. or, in more general terms, when it is subject to a difference. The global circulation of literary works is local at all points: it emerges from and at the interstices of (entangled) circuits, networked hubs and relay stations that have specific coordinates in space and time, and are (being) connected in some way.

Circulation, rather than being a “mode” by which a particular work becomes “World Literature”, thus becomes more comprehensible to us as one type of historically contingent and sometimes even ephemeral effect of particular translation, networking and relay practices, which affect works of literature at local passage points. From the perspective of the literary work as an ‘open-ended input network’, Wai Chee Dimock similarly has demonstrated that literature is ‘less an object than a vector, a forward momentum’. In her thoughtful article on ‘Epic Relays’, Dimock conceived of this literary ‘work-in-progress’ in practical terms as a ‘multi-author undertaking’, which involves and concatenates ‘multiple players, perhaps multiple tangents’ that co-constitute the transtemporal qualities and affective resonances of literary works as circulating assets Full reference in Zotero Library.

The impulses set out by these practices, transactions and relational activities of course permeate a greater region than they themselves occupy, but their specific situatedness helps the literary scholar to assess retrospectively the relative value of those relay stations and to take them as reference points in developing an analytical perspective. We cannot possibly know the sum total of all circuits and ramifications of circulation or how exactly they are connected, but we can state, as a new default position for the investigation of “circulation”, that all the translation operations deployed in analysis connect in such a way that, to follow the conceptual lead of Dimock, they give insight into the ‘long-running, not necessarily recuperative, but fairly reliably incremental relays’ which shape the sequential manifestations of a work of literature beyond its initial appearance Full reference in Zotero Library. Such a “living” or drawn-out profile of literature through space and time emerges from the situated play of interaction and transformation between (re-)production, transfer, performance and reception, and is meaningful to literary history, not only as a measure of (non-)equivalence but mainly as a matter of resonance and differentiation. Deployment is not the same as “mere description”, nor is it the same as “unveiling” the relay operations at work. If anything, it looks more like a modelled amplification and critical outlining of the practical interventions (and their traces) by which human and non-human actors enacted translation processes at particular relay stations. Within such a research design, these relay stations emerge as epistemic objects in their own right at the intersection of multiple actor-networks, where what is to be circulated takes (specific) form and expression and is directed towards particular circuits with translocal capacities—in other words, where the subsequent translation acts develop a perspective.

To follow the relay operations is not the same as to invoke structures or infrastructures of circulation or to lean on invisible agencies or other aggregates. Although Actor-Network Theory, by its methodological program, refrains from (re-)constructing underlying or overarching hidden structures, this is not to say that there is no critical space for structuring templates, such as the ones implemented and materialised by licensing agreements and practices (e.g. Book Club editions), material arrangements (e.g. pocket edition), publication series etc. Rather, these implementations are, I would maintain, the products of concrete actions to design and mobilise (non-human) actors so as to afford, sustain and amplify supportive circuitry. From this background, Latour claims that ‘circulation is first, the landscape “in which” templates and agents of all sorts and colours circulate is second’ Full reference in Zotero Library .