ABSTRACT
This entry addresses the ways in which the practice of literary translation has constituted a force in the development of transnational poetics, as a critical category within literary and translation studies. While it is obvious that literary translation, as a linguistic practice across languages, has traditionally played a role in the circulation of different poetic forms and aesthetic movements across national or regional cultures – such as the sonnet, or realism, to offer two specific examples – it constitutes an aspect of translation that has received relatively scarce scholarly analysis. One of the main questions in this particular context is the extent to which literary translation, beyond its capacity to transmit elements belonging to different linguistic and literary traditions to each other (i.e. an instrumental conception of literary translation as it relates to the transnational circulation of literary works), has the power to formally and conceptually shape these traditions as it connects them with each other (i.e. literary translation as constitutive to the articulation of a transnational poetics as such). The potential answers to this key question ultimately depend on the particularities of the approach taken to literary translation in specific geopolitical and historical instances as articulated by different translators, as well as on the context of the reception of a particular literary translation within local or global literary markets. In the rest of this chapter, we aim to highlight a limited number of these instances and contexts in order to further explore the deep interrelation between literary translation and transnational poetics.
