Translation Studies has traditionally relied on binaries such as source/target, original/translation, and translation/retranslation to frame textual relationships as hierarchical and unidirectional. These frameworks often privilege the authority of the original text, emphasizing fidelity and stability while marginalizing the fluid, collaborative processes inherent in translation. Drawing on the theories of Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Rosemary Arrojo, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and David Damrosch, this panel critically examines these binaries to position translation as a dynamic act of cultural negotiation and mutual transformation. Benjamin’s notion of “pure language” and Derrida’s deconstructionist critique challenge traditional hierarchies by emphasizing the interdependence of texts. Arrojo’s focus on fictional translators highlights the agency of translators as co-creators. Appiah’s cosmopolitanism and Damrosch’s framework for literary canons interrogate translation’s role in shaping global cultural dialogues. Together, these perspectives offer innovative approaches to reimagining translation beyond limiting binaries and toward creative reinvention.

Jenny Bhatt’s paper explores Umberto Eco’s labyrinthine novel, The Name of the Rose, as an alternative model of textual kinship, drawing on Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive critique of logocentrism and Rosemary Arrojo’s theories on the fictional turn in translation. She discusses how the narrative, framed as a palimpsest of nested translations—a 20th-century Italian “version” of a fictive 19th-century French translation of a medieval Latin manuscript—positions translation as a dynamic network, where texts coexist in mutually constitutive and dialogic relation. Bhatt examines how the novel portrays translators as co-creators who reinterpret texts, echoing Derrida’s assertion that meaning emerges through perpetual recontextualization. She highlights how the novel’s clever use of multilingual fragments echoes another Derrida claim that translation thrives in the tension between impossibility and necessity and aligns with Arrojo’s arguments about translation being an act of creative agency, where translators are productive readers who construct new cultural meanings. Bhatt argues that this novel’s model of textual kinship challenges traditional limiting binaries, such as source/target and original/translation, and empowers translators as narrative collaborators who construct new cultural meanings. In doing so, it enriches scholarly discourse by embracing the ambiguity and hybridity of postmodern, multilingual, and culturally marginalized translation practices.

Clara Burghelea examines Walter Benjamin’s assertion that translation embodies “the most intimate relationships among languages,” emphasizing intention and supplementation as key elements of textual kinship. She analyzes Ali Araghi’s bilingual translation of Arash Allahverdi’s ConQuest, which uses commentary, marginalia, glosses, and annotations alongside the final version of the translation to address the complex relationship between the original Persian poems and their English translations, bridge cultural gaps, illuminate the intricacies of the translation process, and reveal the shared intimacy between author and translator. Burghelea also analyzes Sawako Nakayasu’s Mouth: Eats Color, a performative multilingual work that features translations, anti-translations, and re-translations across languages (Japanese, English, Chinese, French, and Spanish) to capture the energy of the cultural context that the poet Sagawa Chika was part of and to challenge the translator/author binary. Drawing on Kwame Anthony Appiah’s concept of “thick translations,” Burghelea highlights the kinships between source and target languages, and translator and author to emphasize how experimental approaches promote tolerance, respect, and understanding of the “autonomy of the Other.” Such experimental or performative works go beyond interrogating traditional translation norms, Burghelea concludes, to expand the field’s possibilities and summon collaborative invention.

Patience Haggin’s paper examines two English translations of Anna Maria Ortese’s Il mare non bagna Napoli, completed 63 years apart, to explore how the book has been reinterpreted through the lens of a bestselling contemporary author’s prominence. She posits that the 2018 translation by Ann Goldstein and Jenny McPhee, Neapolitan Chronicles, is a wholesale repackaging of Ortese's work by subduing its unique, “feverish” style to appeal to Elena Ferrante fans. Using digital stylometry, Haggin compares this translation with Frances Frenaye’s 1955 version, The Bay is Not Naples, as well as other English translations of Ortese and Goldstein’s translations of Ferrante. This stylometric analysis reveals that Ortese’s Neapolitan Chronicles is more akin to Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet than to Ortese’s earlier translations—effectively a “Ferrantizing” of Ortese. Haggin positions her study within David Damrosch’s framework of hypercanon, countercanon, and shadow canon to highlight the evolving dynamics between translation, literary canons, and cultural reception. She argues that Ferrante’s success has influenced the revival and reinterpretation of Ortese so that readers, publishers, and translators now read Ortese through a Ferrante lens. Haggin highlights how this case reflects broader translation trends, in which commercial considerations and cultural kinship now reshape how authors are read and studied.