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Emily Apter. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton: The Princeton University Press, 2006. xii + 298 pages.
In an age of globalization characterized by the elasticity of borders and multiple and frequent exchanges between governments, businesses, and cultures, translation has become increasingly paramount as that which enables these exchanges to take place. In the context of war in a post 9/11 age, translation or mistranslation can be a matter of life or death. This raises the stakes of translation theory and practices.
Emily Apter's The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature, looks to the foundational method of philology in order to treat important contemporary themes of translation studies. The book traces the history of philology and comparative literature in the twentieth century, language wars, the effect of translation on world literature, and the increasingly technological methods of translation. Apter sets forth twenty provocative theses ranging from "Everything is Translatable" to "Nothing is Translatable" (xi), broaching the onerous task of contemporary translation theory and turning it into what she calls a new way of looking at comparative literature.
Apter's treatment of "translation studies" is highly ambitious. She calls for replacing the category of the subject with the category of the "human" as an emergency measure in a time of war in order to go beyond the post-structuralist consensus that had reigned from the late sixties to the nineties.
Apter focuses extensively on foundational figures of comparative literature such as Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach, exiles and émigrés from war-torn Europe who were apprehensive of nationalism. She goes on to trace the history of Spitzerian and Auerbachian humanism, underscoring the role that their sojourn at the University of Istanbul played in the history of comparative literature. As Apter argues, the human is linked to translation because the category of the human is a way of undoing the relationship between language and nation. Apter cites Leo Spitzer's famous statement that "Any language is human prior to being national: Turkish, French, and German languages first belong to humanity and then to Turkish, French, and German peoples" (41). Apter maintains...