Introduction

Summary

Writing to her father from the Gurdjieff Institute only weeks before she died, Katherine Mansfield announced delightedly, ‘One very pleasant thing here is that I have to speak Russian consistently and shall I hope get as fluent in it as I am in French and German. After that I should like to rub up my Italian. Languages fascinate me.’ Even allowing for her putting on a perky voice to please her parents, or perhaps to convince herself that a medical cure could still be found, there is no mistaking the sparkling sincerity when expressing her passion for languages. Mansfield was doubtless one of the most multilingual artists of her London-based peers, delighting not only in foreign language acquisition, but also in the unexpected tensions and discrepancies of shifting language-codes which do not quite match, and in the pitch and rhythm of dialects, sociolects and idiolects. Her writing deftly captures all of these – whether in sparkling, polyphonic stories, in scribbled notes to herself in her notebooks, or in the comic patter and theatricalised dialogism of her letters. Such a fascination with the peculiar expressivity of languages as they cross borders or transgress their own rules from within is an ideal example of what Arno Renken calls ‘the pleasures of Babel’. In his rich, challenging work, Renken revisits the founding myth of translation – the story of the tower in Genesis, in which mankind is supposedly punished for over-ambition by having its common language confiscated and replaced by an array of mismatched tongues to impede all future understanding. Deconstructing consequent representations of translation as inevitably condemned to a derivative, impure or reduced status, Renken rereads Babel and the now-classic essay by Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, alongside works by contemporary philosophers such as Derrida and Deleuze to insist that the proliferations of language are one of humanity's great treasures, guaranteeing the after-lives of literary works when they are shared, reread and recreated through translation.

There has been a wealth of scholarly studies over the past decade similarly reinstating translation theory and praxis within the crosscultural, transpositional energies of the modernist era, to reveal vibrant interlinks between modernist formal experimentation, cross-national cultural networks and transnational political thinking.