Living Translation

A collection that brings together Spivaks wide-ranging writings on translation for the first time. Living Translation offers a powerful perspective on the work of distinguished thinker and writer Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, revealing how, throughout her long career, she has made translation a central concern of the comparative humanities. Starting with her landmark Translators Preface to Jacques Derridas Of Grammatology in 1976, and continuing with her foreword to Mahasweta Devis Draupadi and afterword to Devis Chotti MundaandHis Arrow, Spivak has tackled questions of translatability. She has been interested in interrogating the act of translation from the ground up and at the political limit. She sees at play at border checkpoints, at sites of colonial pedagogy, in acts of resistance to monolingual regimes of national language, at the borders of minor literature and schizo-analysis, in the deficits of cultural debt and linguistic expropriation, and, more generally, at theorys edge, which is to say, where practical criticism yields to theorizing in untranslatables. This volume also addresses how Spivaks institution-building as director of comparative literature at the University of Iowaand in her subsequent places of employmentbegan at the same time. From this perspective, Spivak takes her place within a distinguished line-up of translator-theorists who have been particularly attuned to the processes of cognizing in languages, all of them alive to the coproductivity of thinking, translating, writing.