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Translation, Publishing, and World Literature: The Strangeness of Minority

Minor literatures, when translated into major languages like English, possess a distinctive strangeness. Minority means marginality, defined by narrow circulation and restricted knowledge, which can in turn prevent a translation from being published in a major language. Yet the translation can also prove strange because it challenges both dominant values in major languages and values the source text supported in its originary language. Minority complicates theories of world literature as well as the publishing practices that world literature. Taking as a case study the English translation of modern Catalan writer J.V. Foix’s prose poems, this lecture will explore these issues so as to address the question: How should a minor literature be translated into a major language?

Lawrence Venuti, professor of English at Temple University, won the Buffett Institute’s Global Humanities Translation Prize for J.V. Foix’s Daybook 1918: Early Fragments. He is the author, most recently, of Contra Instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic.