Across Time and Language: Bakhtin, Translation, World Literature

Galin Tihanov

Abstract: This paper is an attempt to understand how the work of a thinker travels across time, and what journeying through language(s) has to do with these peregrinations. There is more at stake in this process than the certainty of canonisation would suggest. I want to examine the principal trajectories of appropriating Bakhtin in the West since the 1960s; this will allow me to revisit the question of Bakhtins longevity, and the potential of his work to gain traction in current debates on literature in the classroom and beyond. My approach to Bakhtins legacy is sustained by a wider theory of translation which understands translation both more globally and more historically.

Key words: world literature; translation; Mikhail Bakhtin; non-Eurocentrism

Author: Galin Tihanov is the George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London; he was previously Professor of Comparative Literature and Intellectual History and founding co-director of the Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures at the University of Manchester. Tihanov has published widely on German, Russian, and East-European cultural and intellectual history. He is the author of four books and (co)editor of nine volumes of scholarly essays. Some of his books and articles have been translated into Bulgarian, Chinese, Danish, French, German, Hungarian, Macedonian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, and Slovene. His current research is on world literature, cosmopolitanism, and exile. Amongst his recent authored and edited books are Narrativas do Exílio: Cosmopolitismo além da Imagina??o Liberal (2013) and Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism (2011, ed. with David Adams). Tihanov is winner, with Evgeny Dobrenko, of the Efim Etkind Prize for Best Book on Russian Culture (2012), awarded for their co-edited A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism: The Soviet Age and Beyond (2011). He is Honorary President of the ICLA Committee on Literary Theory, member of Academia Europaea, Honorary Scientific Advisor to the Institute of Foreign Literatures at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and member of the Advisory Board of the Institute for World Literature at Harvard University. Tihanov has held visiting appointments at Yale University, St. Gallen University, the University of S?o Paulo, Peking University, Seoul National University, and the Higher School of Economics (Moscow), and research fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust, AHRC, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Open Society Foundation, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and Collegium Budapest. His new book, Regimes of Relevance, will be published by Stanford University Press in 2019. He is currently writing Cosmopolitanism: A Very Short Introduction for Oxford University Press.

标题：跨越时间和语言：巴赫金、翻译、世界文学

内容摘要：本文试图理解思想家巴赫金的作品如何跨越时间和语言，和这两者之间的关联。在这一过程中，巴赫金作品经典化的地位被确立，但这并不是最重要的。本人试图探讨自20世纪60年代以来巴赫金思想传播的重要轨迹，这也促使本人重新思索巴赫金的魅力为何长久不衰，以及其作品在当下的文学争论中是否依然具有吸引力。本人运用一种适用范围更广泛的翻译理论来支撑自己探讨巴赫金思想传统的方法，该翻译理论更多地从全球化视角和历史视角来理解翻译。

关键词：世界文学；翻译；米哈伊爾?巴赫金；非欧洲中心主义

This article is an attempt to understand how the work of a thinker travels across time, and what journeying through languages and cultures has to do with these peregrinations. There is more at stake in this process than the certainty of canonisation would suggest. Building on my previous work, I want to examine the principal trajectories of appropriating Bakhtin in the West since the 1960s; this will allow me to revisit the question of Bakhtins longevity, and the potential of his work to gain traction in current debates on world literature. The agenda of reviving and opening up Modern Languages is inseparable from thinking through their encounters within the practice of translation, and Bakhtins work can serve as a litmus test of appropriation that involves constant meta-reflexion on what constitutes translation in different cultural zones.

My approach to Bakhtins legacy is sustained by a wider theory of translation which comprehends translation both more globally and more historically; at the end of this article, I also discuss the problem of translation vis-à-vis recent debates specifically on world literature, again in the context of Bakhtins work. Let me begin with a historical excursus. Translation, in the modern sense in which we understand the term, is a fairly recent phenomenon. Its emergence is concomitant with the rising sense of intellectual property – and of the significance originality and imagination play in literature and in scholarship – that appears in the late eighteenth century. Before that, translation lives other lives: those of imitation, transposition, rendition, emulation, and recreation of the text. This is true of the West, as much as it is true of the wider cultural region formed by the Middle East, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Indian Subcontinent. In the European context, we are aware of poetic contests that sought to emulate rhetorically examples of Greek and Roman poetry; these competitions were forms of translation; the resulting texts do not insist on originality, nor – importantly – do they insist on complete faithfulness. They present a mode of creativity that is beyond the – at the time still constraining – binary expectations of either originality or loyalty. For centuries on end, helping oneself to someone elses plot or figure of speech, or range of similes, or metaphors, often suitably updated, was a way of ferrying an earlier discourse into a new zone of contemporaneity. This wider meaning of ‘translation which highlights both the passive following and the co-creative departure from the example continues – at least to some extent – to be constitutive of our seemingly more advanced, but perhaps also more one-sided understanding of translation today. As late as the twentieth century, we can still observe this mode of consciously unfaithful translation in what, in the German tradition, is known as Nachdichtung, the making of poetry following another text, a process grounded in a deliberate refusal of copying or rendering that text with precision. Of course, there lurks behind all this the question of the canon, for it is the assumption of the rhetorical force and beauty of the canonical text that often enables these acts of permissible transgression. In Central Asia and Persia, as well as in the Arab-speaking world, for a very long time the practice of translation remains alien to our modern notion of it. When Nizami, in the second half of the 12th century, creates his five epic poems in Persian, all through to the eighteenth century we have nothing but forms of rendition that are based on emulation, adaptation, and conversation with the canonical pieces – but not on the literal reproduction our norms of translation would require. This emulation through conversation with the source text is a genre of its own at the time, known as nazire: a work in its own right that responds to an earlier work by plunging todays reader into uncertainty as to where the line between translation, re-creation, and original writing is to be drawn – if such a line exists at all before the late eighteenth century.① I would thus venture a hypothesis: for as long as the canon – based on the certainty flowing from adherence to a combination of rhythm, plot, composition, and rhetorical figures – remains in place, there is no imperative for literal repetition or exactitude. It is with the shift towards originality, the premium value placed on novelty, and the sense of property that emerges as a by-product of this shift late in the eighteenth and in the first half of the nineteenth century that tradition is put under strain and ceases to be self-evident (in Europe, the practice of translation as identifying ‘ownership begins gradually already in the sixteenth century). We know that it is precisely at that time – late in the eighteenth and early in the nineteenth century – that the European canon of “great literature” is constructed, in which Shakespeare takes his pride of place. But no longer as the borrower of circulating plots, but rather as the originally irregular, chaotic, and disorderly potent genius that the German Romantics saw in him. Similarly, Calderon is unearthed from oblivion. But not the Caledron who was stealing plots, lifting in one of his plays an entire act from Tirso de Molina. Rather, it his Baroque vacillation between dream and reality, the quality of un-folding, to invoke Deleuze,②that underwrite his place in this new canon that reshuffles the previous order and signals the virtues of instability, not least the unmooring of literature from a long-standing pool of recurring plots, meters, compositional patterns, and rhetorical devices.

This is when translation as we know it becomes important, fitting into a new situation in which novelty and originality require to be captured with reliable precision of nuance. What is more, this is a process that – historically speaking – seems to me to be nothing but the culmination and the logical end to the protracted transition from powerful cosmopolitan koines – Greek, Latin, Persian, Sanskrit – to a multitude of vernaculars, each of which insists on its own inimitable vocabulary, sensitivity, and plasticity, in the way advocated by the many supporters of a presumably organic bond between language and thinking, from Humboldt to Georgii Gachev. Although this is true of translation of profane rather than sacred texts (the history of the translation of the Bible would reveal other patterns and trends), what I am contending here is true of the way not just literary texts have been treated until the early nineteenth century. The translation of philosophical and political texts would be marked by the same relaxed interpretation of fidelity, by co-creation and adaptation, sometimes amounting to co-writing. One of my favourite examples is the first German translation of Edmund Burkes “Reflections on the Revolution in France” by that inveterate Conservative, Friedrich Gentz. Gentz published his translation of Burkes important book in 1793, only three years after its appearance. The translation is marred not just by inaccuracies, but by numerous insertions of Gentzs own thoughts and interpretations of Burkes work.③ By our standards today this is not a reliable translation, and yet it is this translation that penetrated German and Austrian conservative debates and participated in them for more than a century and a half until a new German edition was published not long before the eventful 1968 that eventually signalled the less than conventional ways, in which Gentz approached his task as translator.④The moral of the story here is one we may wish to keep in mind: the texture of ideas is discursive, and translations – even before the time our stricter notions of loyalty to the source text were introduced – have always been very much part of this texture. Once a translation begins its circulation, it begins its work through this discursive universe, of which it becomes inseparable. The effects of a translation, once planted in the discursive body of culture, cannot be undone, the clock can never be turned back completely.

This, of course, bears on how we see the task of the translator, to echo the title of Benjamins famous essay, with regard to Mikhail Bakhtins corpus of texts. I should begin, perhaps, by saying that Bakhtins position in this battle within modernity over the limits of dynamic originality, on the one hand, and stability based on recurrence, on the other, a battle which we see enacted in the transition from a looser to a stricter notion of translation, reflects his own wider understanding of literature and culture. In a sense, Bakhtin performs the opposite transition. He begins by sharing a belief in the uniqueness and originality of the writer only to end up endorsing the overbearing power of tradition imprinted in what he calls “the memory of genre”. The entire intellectual evolution of Bakhtin can be described as a struggle against psychologism and an ever more powerful negation of subjectivity (in its classical identitarian version). He admitted to Vadim Kozhinov that Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler played a vital role in his re-education into a thinker who mistrusts psychologism.⑤Beginning with a celebration of Dostoevsky as a unique and inimitable writer of singular achievement, Bakhtin ended up in the 1930s (in his essays on the novel) and in 1963 (in the reworked version of his Dostoevsky book) focusing on the impersonal memory of genre, leaving little room for creativity as such and examining instead the inherent laws of poetics (note the change in the title of the 1963 book, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo). Bakhtins entire work and intellectual agenda, indeed the most important questions he sought to answer, are shaped by his resistance to traditionally conceived, stable subjectivity: from the question of the body (which we gradually cease to possess and be in control of, as the book on Rabelais maintains) to the question of language (which, as the essays on the novel would have it, reaches us through established generic patterns and is never quite our own—as it has always already been in someone elses mouth). The fortunes of the novel embody this rejection of classical subjectivity in full measure: the individual writer is virtually irrelevant, he or she is no more than an instrument through which the genre materializes itself, no more than a mouthpiece that enunciates the calls of generic memory. Bakhtin, in other words, despite his apparent attraction to canonical figures such as Goethe, Dostoevsky, and Rabelais, would ideally have liked to be able to write a history of literature without names. (The formula, “history without names,” was, of course, derived from the work of art historian Heinrich W?lfflin and had drawn approval from the Russian formalist Boris Eikhenbaum and also from Pavel Medvedev, who, together with Matvei Kagan, was the most important transmitter of art-historical and art-theoretical knowledge in the Bakhtin Circle.⑥Bakhtins trajectory is thus the trajectory of a thinker who returns from a more modern notion of individual originality and creativity to the notion of a nameless tradition, in which stable discursive formations recur and suck in, in a manner that is as fascinating as it is unstoppable, the work of individual writers who are deprived of their individualities to become servants of tradition. Of course, Bakhtin remains modern as he performs this move, for tradition to him is not a soothing force; it is disruptive in the way the archaic is both disruptive, but also enduringly constitutive, of the modern.

Bakhtin, then, is a thinker who de-emphasises originality and property, those underlying features attached to our modern understanding of literature and its translation. If a pun be allowed, he retranslates literature away from the endeavour of individuals, and towards the work of anonymous verbal masses that support the typomachia of dialogue and monologue, of the centripetal and the centrifugal. His most important book, in my no doubt biased judgement, the monograph on Rabelais, is a case in point. Admittedly, one of the seven chapters of the book is dedicated to Rabelais language. But even there, Bakhtin does not approach Rabelais from a philological perspective. Most of what he has to say on Rabelais use of language is borrowed – and readily acknowledged - from Leo Spitzer and the work of other contemporaries. Nor are the principles of interpretation exclusively pertinent to, or derived solely from, literature. The reason for all this is that Bakhtin is trying to think in this book as a philosopher of culture in its totality; language as such takes a back seat, it is only one amongst many different manifestations of culture. In fact, language is here drowned by sweeping manifestations of culture produced by the body in simultaneous acts of laughter, eating, copulation, etc. One might even argue that Bakhtins Rabelais book has non-verbal communication and creativity at its heart.

Whether all this endows and licenses an approach towards Bakhtins work that applies a charitable and more flexible understanding of translation away from the – often unproductive – obsession with terminological fixity – is a difficult question. To begin to forumalte an answer to it, we have to be able to survey Bakhtins intellectual career as a whole and discern that which its different stages have in common. Bakhtins work falls, roughly speaking, into three distinct periods. The first one, I think, is the time up until the first version of the Dostoevsky book, when Bakhtin is primarily preoccupied with ethics and aesthetics; the second phase encompasses the 1930s, the time when he thinks as a philosopher of culture, most pre-eminently in the essays on the novel and in the Rabelais book. Again, we should not be misled into considering these texts examples of philology or literary theory. Both Bakhtin and the Formalists came of age by pushing away from preoccupations with aesthetics. Aesthetics was their shared starting point; but from there, the Formalists developed into literary theorists, Bakhtin – into a philosopher of culture who employs literary examples, but often (as in the book on Rabelais) also examples drawn from other domains, always in order to ponder larger issues that have to do with the deeper mechanisms of culture, its inner make-up and typology, and its evolution. The last stage in Bakhtins intellectual career begins already in the early 1940s; this is the time when his attention is gradually claimed by the methodology of the humanities. The late appearance of the Rabelais book and the republication of the reworked Dostoevsky book have skewed our perspective on what is the longest period in Bakhtins work, from the 1940s through to the early 1970s. What genuinely interests him here is a range of new questions that have a meta-dimension: what is an utterance; what is meaning and how is it produced and communicated; what is the role of dialogue in how we understand the world we are immersed in? Yet different as these three periods might arguably be, they have something very important in common: the way in which Bakhtin handles language in his own writing. Whether preoccupied with philosophy of culture, or with the nexus of moral philosophy and aesthetics (which he seeks to resolve in the first version of the Dostoevsky book by putting forward and valorising a non-finalising and non-objectifying polyphonic writing), Bakhtins proper realm as thinker was the in-between territory that is confined to no particular discipline and that he inhabited with such non-negotiable sovereignty. It is in this space between the disciplines that he crafted his own metaphors that enabled him to move freely between different levels of argumentation and address issues located above and beyond particular fields of knowledge. Often elusively, but always extremely stimulatingly, Bakhtin lifts the categories he employs above the conceptual constraints of their home disciplines and instils in them new life by obliterating their previous conceptual identity. One brief example, the way in which he formulates the idea of dialogue, should suffice. We hear in Bakhtins use of dialogue a linguistic substratum, which can probably be attributed to Lev Yakubinsky and a host of other early Soviet linguists, and yet Bakhtins specific interpretation of this category is so much wider, applicable to entire narratives and whole domains of culture, that focusing exclusively on its linguistic origins, even when these are attestable, would not explain the power and fascination of Bakhtins dialogism. By way of illustration we could reference here Jan Muka?ovsk?s important essay “Dialogue and Monologue,” written in 1940.⑦Terminologically, Muka?ovsk?s text is much more disciplined and rigorous, and yet in scope and inventiveness it lags behind Bakhtins version of dialogue. Muka?ovsk? (who knew and was highly appreciative of some of Voloshinovs writings) works within a narrowly linguistic juxtaposition of dialogue and monologue; Bakhtin transcends this limitation, he refreshes our understanding of dialogue by inviting us to hear the dialogue within a single uttered word, or the dialogue embodied in voices that convey conflicting outlooks and perspectives on the world, or indeed dialogue as the foundation stone for a wide-ranging typology of cultural forms. This transformation which subjects the term to inner growth (sometimes at the expense of exactitude), a transformation whereby the term expands its scope of relevance to the point of turning into a broader metaphor, is the most important feature informing Bakhtins prose, the hallmark of his writings, especially those of the 1930s. It is this transformative energy that sets him apart from his likely, or even demonstrable, antecedents hailing from various specializations, be they linguistic, sociological, theological, or art historical for that matter. It is not difficult, for example, to demonstrate how several of Bakhtins concepts—architectonics, space, gothic realism—were derived, at least to a significant degree, from the German art-historical tradition.⑧This, however, would tell us very little about the significant transformation of these concepts when thrown into the melting pot of Bakhtins argumentation. Bakhtins originality as thinker is actually the originality of the great synthesizer who took at liberty from various specialized discourses—linguistics, art history, theology—and then reshaped, extended, and augmented the scope of the respective concepts.

Bakhtin is thus a thinker who handles language in a way that protects him from falling prey to terminological fetishism. His often metaphoric employment of terminology from different domains of knowledge gives volume and breadth to his writing and propels it into a quality that cannot be matched by a translation that shies away from preserving this potential metaphoricity. The failure to accept this hallmark of Bakhtins writing has been responsible, at least in part, for the vicissitudes of his reception in the West since the 1960s. Bakhtins discoveries have been articulated differently at different historical junctures and in different cultural settings; the Bakhtin we see today is a fluctuating image, resulting from superimposed perspectives involving growth, modification, loss, and a complex adjustment of meaning, as his body of writing travels across time, languages, and discursive traditions and meets inherited patterns of reasoning. Bakhtins work is thus not a reliable supply of knowledge or wisdom; it rather derives from the elusive, sometimes blurred, and never quite finished work of mediation and translation. Thus Bakhtins legacy is the function of multiple historical articulations, a patrimony in transit and subject to translation and dialogue.

We have to recall that Baakhtins appropriation in the West commences under the sign of Structuralism and its belief in scientific rigour. While in Russia Bakhtin was thought to be a foe of Formalism and Structuralism – and by extension, in the eyes of his future opponents (such as Mikhail Gasparov), a denier of ‘exact literary science – his career in the West, particularly in the Anglophone world, began and evolved for about two decades under the auspices of Formalism and Structuralism. Ladislav Matejka, an émigré scholar from Prague who had reached the United States via Sweden, published in 1962 a slender anthology titled Readings in Russian Poetics, incorporating texts in Russian by, amongst others, both Voloshinov and Bakhtin. The second edition (1971), which was considerably expanded and published in English, carried the telling subtitle “Formalist and Structuralist Views”; it became the first major collection in the West to include translated work by Bakhtin and Voloshinov. Bakhtin was here introduced with a portion of his 1929 Dostoevsky book which Matejka had first read in a class offered at Harvard by the truly ubiquitous Dmitro Chizhevsky.⑨Matejka was very clear about Bakhtins status as a critic, rather than a proponent, of Formalism, and yet he described both Bakhtin and Voloshinov in his postscript as “followers of the Russian Formal method”.⑩The trend of packaging Bakhtin together with the Formalists continued all through the 1970s, often on the grounds that his Dostoevsky book put the study of the ideas of Dostoevskys novels second to the exploration of categories that originated in aesthetics, such as voice, author, or hero.

This trend persisted for two decades until Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist began translating and editing Bakhtins essays on the novel, whose appearance marked a new stage in his discovery in the West during the 1980s and beyond. But let me also briefly point to the more difficult fortunes of Bakhtins writings in two continental environments with strong domestic philosophical traditions, where Bakhtins lax ways with terminology would not earn him much sympathy. In 2008 and 2011, Bakhtins early texts “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity” and “Towards a Philosophy of the Act” were finally translated into German, thus rounding off the canon of his works available in that language. To be fair, an important text of Bakhtins, “Epos i roman” (“Epic and Novel”) had first appeared in German translation – at the end of 1968, with a publication date of 1969 – in a collective volume in the GDR, before appearing anywhere else in any other language, including Russian.? As Edward Kowalski reveals in his essayistic epilogue to the 2008 German translation of “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity”, the typescript of Bakhtins article “Epic and Novel” was smuggled out of the Soviet Union following encouragement from Kozhinov. The Russian text was published only in 1970, in the journal Voprosy literatury. Bakhtins Dostoevsky and Rabelais books, as well as his other essays on the novel, were also translated into German without much delay. Yet in Germany, his discovery seemed to have been hampered by the resistance of a rich and elaborate domestic philosophical tradition which found it difficult to relate to Bakhtins evocative but – by the standards of that tradition – largely loose and floating style of reasoning. Bakhtins impact in Germany hardly went beyond Slavic Studies, with the exception of some Bakhtinian presence in art and film theory.?

In France, Bakhtins discovery faced similar barriers. In a 1998 interview with Clive Thomson, Julia Kristeva complained that Bakhtins style was alien to the Cartesian spirit of the French humanities.?Bakhtins writing seemed to generate too many ambiguities and too little terminology. As if to placate these concerns, in her own work Kristeva had taken Bakhtins unstable, fluid, yet extremely productive notion of dialogue and had rather controversially ‘upgraded it to intertextuality, a shift which, she believed, not only made Bakhtin her contemporary but also added that indispensable degree of lucidity (arguably also ‘objectivity), which the French public appears to have missed in his works.?Kristeva is acutely aware of Bakhtins precarious status as a thinker: measured by the requirements of the various fields of specialised knowledge, he doesnt quite fit anywhere. The central categories of his mature writings, body and discourse, were perceived as either too vague or too obsolete by the French psychologists, anthropologists and linguists.

We thus see that Bakhtins peregrinations across linguistic and disciplinary borders have had everything to do with his own mode of handling language and terminology. The lifting of the Structuralist curtain that had been obscuring the ultimate impossibility of thinking literature and culture by deploying a disinterested metalanguage has revealed a Bakhtin who gains in acts of translation which do not seek to reify his prose in a string of one-dimensional concepts.

Of course the case for translating – and interpreting – Bakhtin with due sensitivity for his capacious and often unfixed terminology should not be pushed too far. The early Bakhtin, for example, was serious about phenomenology, as Towards a Phenomenology of the Act, Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity, but also “The Problem of Content, Material, and Form in Verbal Art” abundantly demonstrate. As late as the early 1940s, in a fragment titled “Towards the Philosophical Foundations of the Humanities” (“K filosofskim osnovam gumanitarnykh nauk”), in which he takes his leave from phenomenology, Bakhtin confronts his readers with a piece of philosophical prose that poses multiple challenges:

Проблема понимания. Понимание как видение смысла, но не феноменальное, а видение живого смысла переживания и выражения, видение внутренне осмысленного, так сказать, самоосмысленного явления.

Выражение как осмысленная материя или материализованный смысл, элемент свободы, пронизавший необходимость. Внешняя и внутренняя плоть для милования. Различные пласты души в разной мере поддаются овнешнению. Неовнешняемое художественное ядро души (я для себя). Встречная активность познаваемого предмета.?

Clearly Bakhtin here activates a vocabulary that is as recognisably Hegelian (“an element of freedom that had shot through necessity”; “externalisation” = “Ent?u?erung”), as it is Platonic and phenomenological (“видение смысла”), even as he rejects the phenomenological perspective. A translator will have no choice but to heed these fixed layers of terminology. Yet even here the fragment carries an almost untranslatable potentiality inscribed in the noun “миловáние“, to be rendered most certainly as “caressing”, but to a reader of Russian, if read out with a different accentuation (‘mílovanie instead of ‘milovánie), also triggering associations with “forgiveness” and “absolution”. This example is only one illustration of the rewarding, perhaps also daunting, task of translating Bakhtins philosophical prose at the confluence of equivalences shaped by, and indicative of, different philosophical and cultural traditions – a confluence very much at the heart of Modern Languages, both intellectually and pedagogically.

Before I proceed to my conclusion, I feel compelled to dwell on a particular aspect of Bakhtins work in which the significance of translation and Bakhtins renewed relevance for current discussions in literary studies intersect in a most telling manner. We seem to have been facing in recent years the rise (or, historically speaking, I should say, ‘return) of ‘world literature as a prism through which to spectate and study literature. A lot of this hinges, as is well-known, on the question of the legitimacy of working in translation. The main positions are not difficult to adumbrate by now: there are those like David Damrosch who believe this legitimacy to be beyond doubt, and those like Emily Apter who fear that the failure to accept that certain things are untranslatable fuels the practice of harnessing translation for the production of misleading (and ideologically consequential) equivalences. Let me begin by stating that today the legacy of modern literary theory is not available in a pure and concentrated fashion; instead, it is dispersed, dissipated, often fittingly elusive. The reason for this is that this inheritance is now performing its work in a climate already dominated by a different regime of relevance, which it faces directly and which it must negotiate. The patrimony of literary theory is currently active within a regime of relevance that thinks literature through its market and entertainment value, with only residual recall of its previously highly treasured autonomy. It is this regime of relevance that has engendered the interpretative framework of ‘world literature that has recently grown and gained enormous popularity, also in the classroom. I take the words “world literature” in quotation marks, for they refer to a particular liberal Anglo-Saxon discourse grounded in assumptions of mobility, transparency, and re-contextualizing (but also de-contextualizing) circulation that supports free consumption and unrestricted comparison of literary artefacts.?

If we look at Russian literary theory during the interwar decades, we would be struck to see that many of its major trends were, obliquely or more directly, relevant to this new framework of understanding and valorizing literature in the regime of its global production and consumption. Bakhtin begins his book on Rabelais with a reference precisely to world literature: “Of all great writers of world literature, Rabelais is the least popular, the least understood and appreciated”.?Bakhtin, however, pays lip service to the then powerful notion of world literature as a body of canonical writing: he ostensibly compares Rabelais to Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Voltaire. But this understanding of world literature does not really interest him. Instead, he takes a different route, re-conceptualizing the study of world literature as a study of the process that shapes the novel to become a world genre, a global discursive power that, in Bakhtins words, “colonizes all other genres”. Of course, Bakhtin is here indebted to the Russian Formalists: for him, too, the novel is the underdog of world literature, whose discursive energies are at first feeble and scattered, unnamed for a long time, until they begin to coalesce and rise to prominence.

Bakhtins engagement with world literature holds a distinctly non-Eurocentric and, let me repeat this, non-philological charge. He works with the novels he lists mostly in translation, as does Shklovsky before him. Bakhtin appears to be relying on a Western canon to validate his theses. But, in truth, he is more interested in the literature and culture of pre-modernity, the time when Europe is not yet a dominant force, long before the continent begins to see itself as the centre of the world. Bakhtin is thus actually a thinker much more fascinated by the subterranean cultural deposits of folklore, of minor discourses, of ancient genres, of anonymous verbal masses – all of which long predates European culture of the age of modernity (beginning roughly with the Renaissance, but especially since the eighteenth century when the doctrine of cultural Eurocentrism is worked out by the French philosophes, only to witness its first major crisis in the years around World War One), which is the only dominant (Eurocentric) European culture we know. Even Rabelais novel interests him above all for its traditional, pre-modern, folklore-based layers. Bakhtin performs a flight away from Eurocentrism not by writing on non-European cultures, but by writing on pre-European cultures, on cultures that thrive on the shared property of folklore, rites, rituals, and epic narratives, before Europe even begins to emerge as an entity on the cultural and political map of the world: his is an anti-Eurocentric journey not in space, but in time. His contemporaries, the semantic paleontologists Nikolai Marr and Olga Freidenberg, whose writings Bakhtin knew, did something similar in their work on myth and pre-literary discourses.?All of this casts Bakhtins work in a new light and allows us to enlist him as an early predecessor of the non-Eurocentric and translation-friendly drive of todays Anglo-Saxon academic programmes in literature.

In 2000, Caryl Emerson published her article “The Next Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin”,?itself a reference to her well-known book The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin (1997). 82 more years to go until the end of the century. The excitement – and the anxiety – here stem from the fact that we cannot possibly know which long durée this century, in retrospect, will have turned out to be part of, or, to speak in Bakhtinian terms, how this century will have positioned itself vis-à-vis “great time”. We know by now that “great literature” is a historically attestable category that has both a birth and an expiry date. Will there be “great thinkers” by the end of the century, or will this, too, have proved to be a construct that disintegrates once the foil of a universal humanity is withdrawn? Bakhtins work cannot answer these questions, but it can infuse trust in the eventual returns of meaning, celebrated for its ability to cross borders, to exude invigorating and challenging multiplicity, and to resist monopolising appropriation. Ferrying a thinker across time and language, translation is the platform that can transform these returns into departures.

Notes

① On nazire in the context of translations-responses to Nizamis five poems, see, above all, G. Aliev, Temy i siuzhety Nizami v literaturakh narodov Vostoka, Moscow: Nauka, 1985.

② See Cf. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

③For a recent study of this translation, see Jonathan Green, “Friedrich Gentzs translation of Burkes Reflections, ” The Historical Journal 3(2014): 639-659.

④See Edmund Burke, Betrachtungen über die franz?sische Revolution, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967.

⑤See V. Kozhinov, “Bakhtin i ego chitateli: Razmyshleniia i otchasti vospominaniia,” Dialog. Karnaval. Khoronotop 2-3(1993):124–125.

⑥See Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics, trans. Albert J. Wehrle (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978): 50–52 (with a quote from Eikhenbaums earlier endorsement of W?lfflin on p. 52). On the idea of “history without names” in the Bakhtin Circle, see also F. Pereda, “Mijail Bajtín y la historia del arte sin nombres,” in Mijail Bajtín en la encrucijada de la hermenéutica y las ciencias humanas, ed. B. Vauthier and P. M. Cátedra, (Salamanca: SEMYR, 2003): 93–118.

⑦See J. Muka?ovsk?, “Dialogue and Monologue,” The Word and Verbal Art: Selected Essays, trans. J. Burbank and P. Steiner (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1977): 81–112.

⑧For an excellent study of the origins of the term gothic realism in Bakhtin, see N. Pankov, “Smysl i proiskhozhdenie termina ‘goticheskii realizm,” Voprosy literatury 1(2008): 227–248 (pp. 237–39 on Max Dvo?aks impact, and pp. 241–248 on (neo)classical aesthetics in Literaturnyi kritik and Bakhtins implicit polemic with it in the Rabelais book).

⑨ See Cf. Peter Steiner, “Interview s Ladislavem Mat?jkou, ” ?eská literatura 5(2007): 733-738, here p. 735.

⑩ See Ladislav Matejka, “The Formal Method and Linguistics”, in Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed. L. Matejka and K. Pomorska (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971): 281-295, here p. 290; cf. also Pomorskas statement that the anthology wanted to “present theoreticians who ‘rounded up and transformed the work of the Opojaz” (K. Pomorska, “Russian Formalism in Retrospect, ”ibid.(: 273-280, here p. 273). Both Matejkas and Pomorskas texts were reprinted in the 1978 edition as well.

? See Edward Kowalski, “Bachtins langer Weg zum deutschen Leser, ” in Michail M. Bachtin, Autor und Held in der ?sthetischen T?tigkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008): 353-356, here pp. 353-354.

? See For Bakhtins appropriation in Germany, see Anthony Walls articles “On the Look-Out for Bachtin in German”, Le Bulletin Bakhtine/The Bakhtin Newsletter 5(1996):117-141 (Special issue “Bakhtin Around the World”, ed. Scott Lee and Clive Thomson) and “How to Do Things with Bakhtin (in German)?, Recherches sémiotiques/Semiotic inquiry, 1-2(1998):267-294 (special issue “Bakhtine et lavenir des signes/Bakhtin and the future of signs”).

? The interview appeared in Recherches sémiotiques/Semiotic inquiry 1-2(1998):15-29 (special issue “Bakhtine et lavenir des signes/Bakhtin and the future of signs”) See also Kristevas earlier interview about Bakhtin (with Samir El-Muallia): “Beseda s Iuliei Kristevoi,” Dialog. Karnaval. Khronotop 2(1995): 5-17.

? Todorov later followed this move from ‘dialogue to ‘intertextuality, thus continuing the process of domesticating (or rather enfeebling) Bakhtins key concept (cf. Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtine: Le principe dialogique, Paris: Seuil, 1981: 95, where he adopts Kristevas terminological change).

? See Mikhail Bakhtin, “K filosofksim osnovam gumanitarnykh nauk”, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Russkie slovari, 1996): 9.

? More on this see in Galin Tihanov, “The Location of World Literature,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 3(2017): 468-481.

? See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1984): 1.

? For detailes, see Galin Tihanov, “Framing Semantic Paleontology: The 1930s and Beyond,” Russian Literature 3-4(2012): 361-384.

? See Caryl Emerson, “The Next Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin (The View from the Classroom),” Rhetoric Review 1-2(2000): 12-27.