Ma Carmen África Vidal Claramonte. Translation and Objects: Rewriting Migrancy and Displacement through the Materiality of Art. New York and London, Routledge, 2025, 142 pp.

Migration, as a metaphor for translational acts across boundaries, languages, and cultures, has been invoked for some time in translation and interpreting studies. Scholars rely on these images to interrogate not only how translation practices are performed, but also how cross-language and cross-cultural negotiation shapes interactions between language, mobility, and social practices. As Brigid Maher, Loredana Polezzi, and Rita Wilson (2025) note in their introductory remarks to The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Migration, the juxtaposition of these two terms presupposes an urgency to discuss the interplay of these linguistic and geographical phenomena with wide-ranging scope. Simona Bertacco’s (2025) handbook contribution on translation as “the language of migration” puts an even finer point on the interconnected nature of these concepts, in some ways echoing Polezzi’s (2012) recognition of language activity being inherently linked to migration. It is within this scholarly landscape that the volume under review in this essay, namely África Vidal’s latest contribution to the field, Translation and Objects: Rewriting Migrancy and Displacement through the Materiality of Art, is published, representing an important and boundary-challenging contribution that responds to these calls for reflection and engagement while pushing readers to consider how material objects can be understood translationally and as instantiations of displacement, transfer, and potential re-imagination. To frame this review, it would be pertinent to recognize the approach taken to reading the volume. My approach took a metaphorical, and unironically material, page from Piotr Blumczynski’s experience described in the volume’s preface – reading the volume slowly to appreciate Vidal’s expansion of her previous work. Reading the volume in this way was particularly fruitful, insofar as it allowed me to move along the path laid out for readers; however, it also enabled me to review other texts and works referenced along the way. At times, the conceptual density and richness required a slower read in order to more fully appreciate Vidal’s argument. In scholarship that is seemingly quickening in pace, Blumczynski’s advice was much appreciated as a guide to this text. The next chapters, “Traveling,” “Migrant Objects,” and “Translationality and Translatio in Contemporary Art,” not only question the metaphorical movement across space and time, but also incorporate new perspectives on political movement, affective dimensions of objects, and tangible translation. Vidal’s choice of objects to discuss in the volume moves beyond those that are tools of translation (e.g., dictionaries, notebooks) to incorporate those imbued with meaning and emotion, invoking Tal Goldfajn’s idea that objects “function as expressions as well as sources of emotions between people” (2023, p. 3). These ideas are coupled with a theoretical understanding drawn from Polezzi’s (2012) work that both objects and agents of translation are situated within specific sites, thereby allowing readers to appreciate not only material objects as acts of translation, but also as being reciprocally influenced by their context. This approach assumes an additive nature of translation as opposed to being exclusively conceptualized in terms of transfer, with translation not positioned as somehow subservient to its original station or time – rather translation expands our view through each reading of an object in its displaced state. This additive approach to translation is also seen in the sensorial nature of experiencing an object in translation, wherein the experience of viewing or engaging with an object links the material present with the shadows and shades of another time or space. Here, there are ready links to some of Vidal’s earlier work on translation as a form of repetition (Vidal, 2023), particularly since this volume challenges readers to imagine how translation can be re-written. Vidal does not take up this thread, perhaps as a result of …