Translation and analogical reasoning

This article argues that the dissemination of literatures across historical and cultural divides follow partly random analogical pathways, not least pushed by translations. By contrast, within traditional comparative literature hierarchical centre/periphery models for literary transmissions were to a large extent based on the idea of a unilateral influence moving from dominant source cultures and their canonical writers and texts to other cultures. With the aim of revising this model I will as necessary suggest analogical reasoning, understood as a bi‐directional and non‐hierarchical approach to literary dissemination as it is embedded in translatory, aesthetic and performative practices across languages and cultures. My examples are two: an early nineteenth‐century direct Danish translation from 1805 of William Shakespeare's Hamlet; and an early twentieth‐century case of cross‐media use of an indirect German translation of Chinese poetry in Gustav Mahler's symphonic work Das Lied von der Erde (1908–1909).