A World of Translation

Abstract

World literature is not a specific branch of literature, writes Philippe Ratte. Literature is what conveys the idea of a world, as such. While globalization gives a soaring experience of our belonging to an overwhelming common whole, the smallest page of literature opens up a path into the Greatest Else, namely that which is not what we all “boil down to,” but what remains out of reach. That “other” part of our relation to the world is indeed where our human nature lies and lives, since our humanity begins where our self ends. This is why literature, as diverse as it can be, is a vital requirement to rescue humanity from getting smoothly drowned in all sorts of commodities in the whirl of a globalized market.