TRANSLATION IN HISTORY AND METAHISTORY1

Abstract

Theo Hermans's Translation and History: A Textbook offers an insightful, clear, and sophisticated account of debates in translation history as a transdisciplinary field that remained, until recently, at the margins of historiographical debates. It discusses essential theoretical and methodological tools through which historians of translation may wrestle with the problem of defining their object; with modalities of historicizing associated with specific fields and perspectives (including, for instance, memory studies, microhistory, and the history of concepts); and with questions of context, temporality, space, and agency by accounting for translation's transformative movement, migration, and metamorphosis. This review essay follows the book's journey in and out of disciplinary and conceptual borders in order to discuss some of the stakes at play in it, especially problems pertaining to the delimitation of translation as a differential, but distinct, object of historical research, one that lays bare the power of translations to mobilize cultural works and frontiers. By the same token, it attempts to inscribe a translation paradigm into historical theory and, crucially, into debates that shift our focus from rigid historiographical borders toward mobilizing and transformative motifs, identities, and domains of history. This focus grants a new orientation to (translation) history, setting malleability, thresholds, mobility, and resistance to movement at the center of ongoing attempts to configure alternative spatialities, temporalities, subjects, and worlds of the past beyond conventional accounts of contextualizing, periodizing, and only human history.