In recent decades, authors who address the plurilingual experience in fiction, such as Yoko Tawada, Nancy Huston, Elif Şafak and Junot Díaz, have not only achieved global visibility, but have also become fully integrated into the Anglophone world literature canon. In conjunction with this development, much critical writing has emerged on how literature responds to today’s ‘post-monolingual’ condition (Yildiz 2012), and scholars in comparative literature have become concerned with the way in which the publishing industry regulates literary engagement with multilingualism (Gramling 2016; Walkowitz 2015; Apter 2013, Yildiz 2012; Lennon 2010; Grutman 2006). Overall, this scholarship agrees that, to become publishable, a plurilingual experience must come to terms with the monolingual paradigm that still conditions national literary markets. As David Gramlin has demonstrated, the monolingual paradigm also regulates the international circulation of fiction, and plays a pivotal role among the factors that determine which books have access to world literature circuits. This is especially relevant for authors for do not come from an Anglophone setting, for whom translation into English becomes a precondition for international visibility (Casanova 2007; 133; Lennon 2010; 37). On the one hand, multilingual texts are increasingly considered ‘worldly’ texts, texts which, by containing translation from the outset, challenge the boundaries of languages, cultures and nations (Hiddleston and Ouyang 2021). On the other hand, such texts are difficult to translate, and challenge the identification of language and nation that still underpins international literary markets (Grutman 1998, 159). In what ways do multilingual texts challenge established world literature models? Under what circumstances do they travel beyond national boundaries, and how are they transformed in the process? Presenters draw on literary studies, translation studies, sociology of literature as they discuss specific case studies of multilingual texts from a World Literature framework.

Marianna Deganutti investigates the editorial constraints behind the publication of multilingual texts. Taking into consideration examples from different literary traditions, from Vladimir Nabokov’s The Life of Sebastian Knight, Italo Svevo’s Zenos Consciousness, and Danilo Kiš, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, she examines the role of editors and publishers in negotiating multilingual practices.

Drawing on Rebecca Walkowitz’s influential definition (2015), Nishtha Pandey examines Olga Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night as a ‘Born-Translated’ Novel, a novel written for translation from the start. Set in a small town near the Czech border which has seen widespread resettlement under Polish, Bohemian, Prussian and German rule, Tokarczuk’s novel is a patchwork of loosely related stories, sketches, recipes and essays about the town’s past. By refusing to match language to geography, it occupies multiple places and addresses multiple audiences, thereby building “translation into its form” (Walkowitz, 6). Pandey argues that, despite the transnational focus, Tokarczuk’s novel is not produced in a vacuous globalized space: multilingualism is politically charged and essential to the construction of the ‘local.’

Elisa Segnini’s paper examines another “born translated” work, Alba de Céspedes Cuban novel, Con grande Amore [with Love], which interweaves autobiography and politics, episodes from the author’s life and homages to Fidel Castro. This novel was a life-long project, on which De Céspedes worked with renewed enthusiasm in the second half of the 1970s. After writing a novel in French, and self-translating it into Italian, she faced the question of how to render the ‘taste of creole words’ in a text that, after some hesitation, she decided to write in Italian. The result is a densely multilingual text which remained unfinished but for which, paradoxically, a Spanish translation already existed. What are functions of multilingualism in the novel? Is there a relationship between the choice of multilingualism and the novel’s (strong) political message? How is the intense multilingual texture rendered in the Spanish translation?

In the concluding paper, Gigliola Sulis focuses on translations into English, the hegemonic language of the 21^st century. She returns Walkowitz’s definition to use it as a counterpoint. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s novels, she argues, stand at the opposite end of Walkowitz’s ‘born translated’ novels as they are often perceived and described as ‘untranslatable’ because of their linguistic irregularity and local specificity. While Pasolini’s vision of Rome has travelled internationally with his early films, the global reception of his novels has been slower, due to the linguistic specificity and the peripheral urban ‘rootedness’ of the stories. Sulis compares and contrasts the reception in semi-central languages to the two translations into English.

Together, these four papers initiate a debate on multilingualism and World Literature, and uncover the pivotal role of translation in the construction and circulation of multilingual texts.