Translation as Craft and Heroic Deed: On the Political Stakes of a Multilingual Sensoriality

Abstract

This chapter examines what is politically at stake in the senses by studying the translation maneuvers displayed in the multilingual work of Nabokov, as their double dimension/nature, both crafted and epic, sheds light on the ongoing process of linking the individual and the collective, strangers and natives. The analysis focuses on the craft of the translator, so as to show how the subject invents himself through deploying always more than one language—if one fully takes into account that a language is never completely pure and unmixed, but is closely bonded with its original environment. This really means thinking about translation in its ecological dimension, both in its role of preserving language biodiversity and opening up to horizons onto distant territories. The investigation goes on to consider the heroic craft of translating, clarifying how Nabokov gives a voice to real and imagined communities “in-translation.”