Piotr Blumczynski. Experiencing Translationality: Material and Metaphorical Journeys. New York, Routledge, 2023, 210 p.

With his latest monograph, Blumczynski adds his voice to those chipping away at the conventional wisdom in translation studies that interlingual translation constitutes “translation proper.” He does this to prepare the way for a phenomenology of translational experience that includes both matter and metaphor. Blumczynski announces his agenda for this ground-breaking work on the very first page. He wants to argue for a translation studies that does not “largely ignore […] or gloss […] over the greater, more profound entanglements of matter and meaning, space and time, past and future” (p. 1). With this sentence, he situates his work not only within the debate about an expanded conceptualization of translation but within the highly relevant interdisciplinary debates about new materiality (Barad, 2007) and ecology (Cronin, 2017). Concerning the first argument on an expanded conceptualization of translation, Blumczynski signals that he is not first and foremost interested in studying translations (products or processes) or translators; rather he is interested in studying translationality, i.e., he has a phenomenological take on translation. Hence, he sets about the task of a semiotic approach to translation, namely, the experience of negotiating and constructing meanings (p. 2). Concerning the second argument on materiality, he aligns his work with the “material turn” arguing that “we need to accept that linguistic and textual ‘translations’ are metaphorically modelled on material translations, whatever they might be” (p. 3). He thus turns Jakobson’s notion of translation on its head. Linguistic translation is not translation proper. Rather, Blumczynski argues, linguistic translation is a metaphorical derivation from translation proper, the movement of bodies! In the first chapter, entitled “What does translation do?,” Blumczynski conceptualizes his views on translation in dialogue with a number of scholars from different fields. While his aim is to provide a phenomenology of translation, that is, how translation is experienced, this experience is, for Blumczynski, not an idealist endeavor. He argues for a materialist and realist approach when conceptualizing translation, citing new materialist thinkers like Karen Barad. In a translation studies dominated by idealist epistemology, this is indeed a breath of fresh air. By engaging with the conceptual work of several translation scholars and philosophers, Blumczynski paints a picture of a field with a bias towards language/text and idea, which he hopes to amend to include body and matter next to language/text and idea (pp. 21-25). He aligns himself with a semiotic conceptualization of translation, and helpfully suggests that Marais’ (2019) deductive approach needs to be supplemented by an inductive approach, which he intends to supply in the book. The core concepts (pp. 37-44) in Blumczynski’s conceptualization are therefore the way in which matter and culture are entangled, an argument he bases on John Deely’s (2001, 2009) insightful work on this issue as well as on Barad’s agential realism (2007). Both Deely and Barad take the phenomenon, i.e., reality as experienced, as their point of departure, arguing that neither reality nor the experience enjoys privilege. Rather, the phenomenon is the weaving together of matter and idea (Deely, 2009) or the entanglement of observer and observed (Barad, 2007). Blumczynski closes the chapter with a brief, sensitive reflection on his positionality in time, space, and language. Blumczynski’s insistence on a translation studies that deals with both matter and mind is aligned with recent work in the field that he acknowledges in the chapter. His are, however, not the last words on this topic, and it is to be hoped that this chapter will stimulate much more debate. It should raise philosophical questions (epistemological and ontological ones, at the very least) about materiality and the humanities, as well as methodological questions such …