Some of these ideas, especially the importance of “moving beyond models of translation as secondary,” were explored in “Rethinking Translation, Origination, Originality” at MLA 2020 in Seattle and are of renewed urgency with the increasing prominence of machine translation. This panel additionally emphasizes the importance of diasporic subjectivity in thinking about translation culture and its entanglement in structures of capitalism, empire, nation-building, and decolonization. Our timely panel underscores the importance of translation culture at a moment when multilingualism in the United States is politically under attack. Our privileging of diasporic perspectives, we hope, will also resonate with the rich multiculturalism of Toronto, the host city of MLA 2026.
Our three panelists will be strictly limited to 17-minute papers, which will leave plenty of time for informal discussion within the 75-minute session.
Authorship. Some prominent authors are also known as translators, but the translations are usually considered secondary to their creative works. Jennifer Y. Pan turns this familiar hierarchy on its head by approaching translation as an immanent feature of authorship. In the case of Joseph Conrad, idiomatic writing served as a technology of belonging, proof of mastery not only of language but of the translator’s integration into a culture’s unspoken conventions, with which he could flaunt his command of his third language and also ridicule the British. Pan goes on to show how, in the context of Polish diaspora politics at the turn of the century, Conrad’s work stages translation as a site where the problem of complicity must be negotiated. This allows us to explore the various affordances of diasporic complicity across translation and authorship.
Adaptation. The blurred line between adaptation and translation is further complicated when there is no stable site of original enunciation, as is often the case with figures whose diasporic lives are inadequately documented. We Jung Yi traces the memory of Alexandra Petrovna Kim-Stankevich (1885–1918), the first Korean Bolshevik and a rare female leader of the anti-colonial movement in Siberia. Yi compares three versions of her biography. The first is the 1958 North Korean translation of a Russian text drafted by a survivor of the forced migration to Central Asia. The second is the 2009 novel by a South Korean journalist. The third is the book’s 2020 graphic novel adaptation. The multiple legacies of Kim-Stankevich speak to how the account of a seminal diasporic life may return in numerous forms to the so-called homeland. Like translations, adaptations can simultaneously be forces of deterritorialization and reterritorialization.
Affective labor. Social reproduction theory (SRT) has explored how capitalism relies on different forms of care work to produce the workers that the system goes on to exploit. Per Nancy Fraser, boundary struggles appear in periods of crisis of accumulation where “social actors struggle over the boundaries delimiting economy from society, production from reproduction, and work from family.” Jae Won Edward Chung leverages the family resemblances across translation culture and social reproduction to examine how recent Asian-American texts, notably Soje’s translation of Lee Soho’s Catcalling (2021) and Lin King’s translation of Yáng Shuāngzǐ’s Taiwan Travelogue (2024) embody comparable “boundary struggles,” where the lines separating creation from recreation and artwork from everyday life are being redrawn while reworking the triadic relationship of translator-work-author.
When these resemblances are taken together, they show themselves to be more than uncanny reflections or refractions of translation. Each element can become integral to the counterpart’s transnational chain of production and reproduction. Authorship becomes impossible without the complicity of translation; adaptation across genre or media becomes necessary for a translation to circulate more impactfully; the translingual affective labor of diasporic subjects in their everyday lives (i.e., outside the system of capitalist production) becomes a condition of possibility for literary translation.