Speaking in Tongues: Translation Visible and Invisible in Stratis Tsirkas's Drifting Cities

Abstract:The multiracial world of Drifting Cities is constructed through frequent language transfers. The various strategies used to make languages audible or visible in the trilogy (including narrative comments, quotations in different languages, and transliteration) highlight the themes explored in the novels: the refugees' experience of displacement, the culture of colonization, and the resistance to imperial power. Throughout the work, one senses a process of translation that is secretly at work. The specific modes of translation operating in the narrative suggest two opposing motifs: of confusion (the Tower of Babel metaphor) and of the attempt to override linguistic and cultural barriers. While the former is accented by the language of politics, the latter is introduced through the language of poetry, which, as incorporated into the narrative, recalls Benjamin's idea of translation as linguistic complementation. Robbie's epigram in The Bat literalizes the critic's notion of translation as the afterlife of a work.