Translating Against World Literature
Nicholas Glastonbury wonders whether translators can afford to wage insurgency against World Literature.
Nicholas Glastonbury is a translator of Turkish and Kurdish literature. His translation of Sema Kaygusuz’s Every Fire You Tend won the 2020 TA First Translation Prize from the Society of Authors. He is a co-editor of the e-zine Jadaliyya and a doctoral candidate in cultural anthropology at CUNY Graduate Center, where he is writing his dissertation on Soviet Kurdish radio, the Cold War, and the politics of sound.
Nicholas Glastonbury wonders whether translators can afford to wage insurgency against World Literature.