Presentation

In recent years there has been increasing interest in the connection between translation and politics, with a number of publications providing an initial mapping of a territory that is still to a large extent neglected (Gagnon, 2010; Fernandez and Evans, 2018; TTR’s special issue edited by Gagnon and McDonough Dolmaya, 2019), especially from a diachronic perspective. This focus on the political dimension derives, of course, from a general interest in the relations between culture, power and ideology which found their expression in translation studies, in particular in relation to literary texts, in the “cultural turn” of the 1990s (Álvarez and Vidal, 1996; Tymoczko and Gentzler, 2002). This turn towards the interface between translation and politics has been characterized by a significant widening of the field of research and a strong interdisciplinary approach within which, however, it is possible to identify some specific areas of research. One of these is the increasing interest in translation policies in specific historical contexts and their political impact (e.g. Rundle, 2010; Baumgarten and Cornellà-Detrell, 2018). Another is the theme of activism and translation, especially in terms of translators’ agency in relation to issues of social justice and asymmetrical power structures in both Western and non-Western contexts (Tymoczko, 2010; Boéri and Maier, 2010; Baker, 2013; Gould and Tahmasebian, 2020). The ways in which translation can function as resistance under totalitarian regimes has also received much attention (Rundle and Sturge, 2010; Sturge, 2004; Popa, 2010; Sherry, 2015) while the role played by translators and interpreters in situations of war and conflict has become a fast-growing field of research (Inghilleri and Harding, 2014; Baker, 2006; Bielsa and Hughes 2009; Wolf, 2016; Ruiz Rosendo and Persaud, 2016; several works in the Palgrave series “Languages at War”, such as Kelly and Baker, 2012; Franjié, 2016; Guo, 2016; Laugesen and Gehrmann, 2020; Pantuchowicz and Warso, 2020). The relation between translation and political activity in a particular historical framework has also been a subject of interest (Chappey, 2013; Leech 2020), as well as the ways in which classics in political thought have been translated (Zancarini, 2015; Piselli and Proietti, 2017). The accumulation of these studies on the political dimension of the act of translation has contributed to a general move away from a focus on literary texts alone towards a more inclusive consideration of texts which can be literary, political, philosophical or journalistic. The work presented in the two special issues of TTR follows this generally interdisciplinary framework, moving beyond a primarily literary methodological approach and towards one which highlights specific questions relating to the historical contexts in which these translations take place (Rundle 2012, 2014, forthcoming 2021). The present issue has a more marked diachronic focus, with papers ranging from the early modern period until the early 19th century in Europe, whereas the following issue will present examples relating to the 20th century and contemporary questions in Western and non-Western contexts. The essays presented here cover a wide variety of translation events, and, of course, thus answer questions which are often specific to the particular historical context, as we have said. They share, however, a view of translation as a particular form of political doing, as a particular means by which a political act can be carried out. They share, in other words, a perspective that highlights the performative aspect of translation, its “doing something” and having an effect in the world through “the doing of translators, readers and audiences” (Bermann, 2014, p. 288) at a particular time and in a particular place. As such, translation is action in the same way as was indicated many years ago by Edward …