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This book is divided into three parts: one part devoted to ‘theory’ and two parts devoted to respective versions of ‘application’: the first in the area of literary interpretations, the second in the area of teaching methodologies. In fact, as will become evident as the reader progresses through the book, none of these parts really fulfils this idealized hypostatization of ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ respectively; and even ‘practice’ falls into very different forms of ‘doing’ literary or cultural studies. All three parts are in fact hybrid undertakings, intertwined with each other. Each section thus constitutes a ‘trading zone’ between theory and experimentation (Galison 1999) that in many ways is structurally analogous to the ‘contact zones’ that are everywhere explored—and performatively opened up and populated—in the book. Thus the theoretical sections of the book make no claim to exhaustive documentation or neutral scholarship. They are in reality a polemical and essayistic exploration of the intuition that apparently separate activities such as ‘translation’ and the ‘material reality of the world’ are in fact very close to one another in their underlying dynamic. They therefore seek to translate ‘translation’ into the foreign semantic field of quantum theory. In these chapters, translation becomes ‘quantized’. This section of the book is iconoclastic rather than soberly scholarly in its tenor, seeking to infringe consecrated boundaries both in form and content. Likewise, the second part of the book, which proceeds to case studies of individual translations, aims to ask about the ways in which the German language, as a source or target language of literary translation, can be seen to become ‘quantized’ or to ‘quantize’ itself within the translation process. Thus the translation of language, no less than the language of translation, also finds itself ‘translated’ into the bizarre world of quantum gravity processes. The third part of this book re-translates this translation of translation into the world of the classroom, a place of interactions and exchanges that microcosmically maps the larger social world and perhaps, as I will suggest, the natural world as well.

Thus, to summarize again, in the chapters that make up part 1 of this book I lay down the lineaments of a theory of quantum translation according to which a quantized German would function as a ‘contact zone’ at the interface with other languages and cultures. In part 2 of the book I explore what this notion of quantum translation might look like once translated into a translative practice in which German is the source language (Sebald, Hölderlin) or the target language (Mujila)—or in one case, both at once (Eich/Vladislavić). In part 3, I turn to a further ‘translation’ of ‘translation’, that of the transposition of translation into the classroom.

Part 1 opens with a chapter devoted to the exemplary moment of the ‘translative turn’ in cultural studies and suggests that this moment may be scaled up to prise open the closed box of interlingual translation ‘proper’. The cultural turn in translation studies, which had hitherto been a largely technical and instrumentalist discipline, was followed by a translative turn in cultural studies. These incremental shifts away from a narrow notion of translation as an exclusively linguistic notion of semantic transfer between natural or even national languages were registered with increasing disapproval by the guardians of disciplinary purity. Chapter 1 exploits that moment of resistance as a heuristic device to interrogate the very notion of a translational border and point to possible ways of overcoming it in an even more radical manner.

Following this inaugural gesture, chapters 2 and 3 orchestrate a contractive movement that suggest that human language is actually only a very minor part of the larger cosmic business of the exchange of information. Here, I examine anthropological theories by Kohn, Viveiros de Castro and Ingold. Chapter 2 addresses Kohn’s anthropological notion of ‘provincializing language’ and demonstrates the limitations, but also the necessity of a fundamental paradigm shift within the anthropological sciences. There, the anthropologist is a translator who can only with great difficulty abandon his position as the adjudicator of language as the marker of humanity. In chapter 3 I turn to the work of Viveiros de Castro and Ingold for more generous versions of the anthropological translator. Here, the translator as shaman is better equipped to open language up to a broad and inclusive community of nonhuman actants. The translator-shaman does not translate between cultures as the translator-anthropologist does, but rather, translates the multiplicity of the heart of all things, whether human or non-human, cultural or natural. The shaman presides over local nodes of a universal process of translation. Indeed, language itself registers this universal transformation, in Tim Ingold’s notion of the verbs that describe beings in the circumpolar world, by becoming a ‘languaging’—language permanently in a state of translation because it is part of a world-in-translation.

Following these preparatory moves, in chapter 4 I rehearse a contrary expansive movement that elevates translation from a restricted linguistic operation to a universal operator of information exchange. I call upon the work of Michel Serres and Juri Lotman to explore these ideas. Serres treats a wide range of intellectual practices across the natural and human sciences as practices of translation. What they all have in common is that they identify and formalize exchanges of information. Translation as the exchange of information is the underlying operation that can be found everywhere in the cosmos, and the production of invariability via variation is its leitmotif. Serres’ approach to translation is an all-embracing one that includes Lotman’s notion of translation as a basic cognitive operation. Because Serres reads all exchanges in the natural world as exchanges of information, cognition spills across the border from the human world of culture into the nonhuman world.

Building upon the double, countervailing movements of chapters 2, 3 and 4, a third moment in the argument (chapter 5) uses the same double scaling of great and small to introduce a quantum theory of translation. The chapter suggests that such a theory would stress that the linguistic process of translation is part and parcel of all the processes that quantum-gravity theory deals with, from the very precisely identifiable mega-nano-dimension of the basic building blocks of gravitational quanta upwards. Proceeding from the generative nature of all cosmic processes constructed out of quantum-gravity attractive pulls, a quantum theory of translation would also emphasize the non-linear, ‘probabilistic’ character of translation. Radicalizing Quine’s ‘indeterminacy thesis’ and the work of Berman on the creativity of translation, the chapter harnesses the quantum theory of translation to show how translation produces new versions of reality in the multilingual borderlands between specific local semiospheres.

Finally, in chapter 6, I turn back to German as a national language to ask what a quantum theory of translative linguistics might do to our conception of civic subjecthood informed and infused by a particular natural language. Drawing above all on Bakhtin’s writing on heteroglossia, Peirce’s on semiosis, and Adorno’s postwar work on foreign loan words in German, I interrogate the manner in which German may become ‘quantized’ by mobilizing the translative procedures always already at work in a living language.

Part 2 exemplifies these ideas of by offering four concrete case studies of quantum translation at work.

Chapter 7 reads W. G. Sebald’s Ringe des Saturn by laying bare the ambivalence of the trope of fragmentation that dominates the text both in its content and its form. At the level of content, fragmentation indexes the destruction of the natural world in the wake of the separative paradigm of the Enlightenment. At the level of form, however, Sebald’s fragmentary and associative compositional method employs collage to suggest secret connections between apparently disparate regions and epochs of a global history of catastrophe. Sebald’s project thus embraces the translative connectivity articulated in part 1 of the book. In order to imbricate these concepts with the specific work of interlingual translation, I focus upon Michael Hulse’s translation of Sebald’s translation of Joseph Conrad and a proto-Global South context to exemplify this ambivalent translation of generativity. The three levels of translation display a complex interplay of fidelity and infidelity, with Hulse often translating the original Conrad back into his English translation of Sebald. In this way, the work of translation restores—and sometimes invents—connections under historical conditions in which the distending and disruptive force of history appears to pull elements of the natural and human world further and further apart. The non-linear routes of faithful and apparently non-faithful rendition or transformation of texts thus make up a ‘quantum’ translation history that displays resilience in the face of historical destruction.

Chapter 8 examines the South African author Ivan Vladislavić’s novel Double Negative in its German translation of the same name by Leipzig-based translator Thomas Brückner. The chapter focuses upon a famous catchphrase from the postwar radio-play writer Günter Eich—‘Seid Sand, nicht Öl, im Getriebe der Welt’—in German in Vladislavić’s text, and the ways it shifts its valencies as it transits from English original to German translation, where it no longer figures as an ostentatious foreign body in the text. The chapter correlates this fluctuating form of translation with the valencies of political resistance and complicity that accrue to the literary work in two transitional (translational?) polities (pre- and post-1994 South Africa and pre- and post-reunification Germany respectively). At the same time, however, the ‘sand’ image that resides at the centre of the translative negotiations between resistance and complicity also figures the ‘enabling constraints’ that characterize both the transactions of quantum generativity and the compromises of interlingual translation.

Chapter 9 interrogates Australian poet John Kinsella’s ‘transversioning’ of Hölderlin, a German Romantic poet who often worked with translations from Greek Antiquity as his basal material, and was embarked upon the ceaseless ‘translation’ of his own work in an ongoing process of self-transformation. Kinsella, an Anglo-Australian poet of Irish provenance, writes from Noongar country in South-Western Australia, but is also an itinerant academic, having spent much time in Tübingen, the university city where Hölderlin spent the later part of his life. These stays inform Kinsella’s palimsestic ‘reversionings’ of Hölderlin filtered across Michael Hamburger’s English translations and infused with ecological issues from the Noongar country that is today’s severely degraded Western Australian wheat belt. Kinsella’s ‘reversionings’ stand in close dialogue with Hölderlin’s own poems-in-process and in particular with their subsequent translations and retranslations across a fifty-year period by Michael Hamburger. These poetic interventions are engaged in a close dialogue with their respective landscape contexts, all of them endangered by ecological destruction and the threat of ongoing wars, from the Napoleonic Wars to the current conflict in Syria and the European ‘war’ on refugees. Together, however, the constantly retranslated poems constitute a long process of incessant transformation that resonates with the environment’s deep-seated resilience and regenerativity.

Chapter 10 embarks upon a close reading of the temporal models proposed by the Congolese author Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s frenetic novel Tram 83 (2014). The reading suggests that Mujila provides a template for a temporal regime apposite for Global South polities in semi-institutional collapse, typical of the post-Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) and post-civil-war polities of some parts of Africa (Mujila is de facto describing post-2000 Democratic Republic of Congo [DRC] whence he hails). Mujila’s project mobilizes a form of temporal translation that is highly relevant not only for the post-apocalyptic polities of the Global South, but also for the pre-apocalyptic societies of the Global North, for whom, according to some readings, the South provides a grim future roadmap. The temporal template Mujila’s prose embodies is effectively and affectively very close to that described by quantum translation. In the light of this temporal template and its translative resonances, the chapter critiques the German translation of Tram 83 for the way it systematically undercuts Mujila’s project of temporal translation.

Part 3 of the book translates these concrete case studies into the even more concrete context of the translation classroom.

Chapter 11 opens the third part by turning to the practical business of literary translation under a double rubric: that of translation proper, and that of teaching (including the teaching of translation). It operates a transition between literary translation and the classroom by reading Klaus Martens’ German translation of Nobel Prize Winner Derek Walcott’s ‘The Morning Moon’, asking whether the German version succeeds in maintaining the English version’s insistence upon its participation in the Caribbean landscape it describes. The chapter shifts the focus of postcolonial poetics away from the contestatory ‘writing back’ of anti-imperial critique towards a Global South-based mode of immanent formal resonance between poetic devices and structures and the vibrant, self-generative continuum of the cosmos itself. Within the framework of a landscape ethos posited by numerous Caribbean theorists, the reading of Martens’ translation sketches a translative/pedagogical ethics that sees the role of creative, interpretative translation as the continuation the dynamics of natural creativity in which the poem ideally participates. The chapter opens part 3 with the coupling of translation and teaching, both of which can be understood as subgenres of the larger span of cosmic creativity discussed in part 1.

Chapter 12 returns to the classroom with a more narrowly linguistic perspective, focusing on language-teaching and -learning in the multilingual society that is today’s Germany. The chapter begins by analysing a recent provocation in the teaching of German, the pedagogical handbook Ausländisch für Deutsche, which turns the customary relationships between German and DaF (Deutsch als Fremdsprache, i.e. German as a Foreign Language), and German and other Modern Languages inside-out, making German the peripheral rather than the core language of German school curricula; by the same token, it places German on the margins of the education system, automatically rendering it a linguistic-pedagogical ‘contact zone’ where translation is always already happening under the guise of ‘language awareness’. The chapter then turns to recent work by Anthony Pym to show that, at the micro-level of classroom interactions, translation has always been and continues be a vital part of pupils’ or students’ learning strategies—in particular in Germany. In this way, as in chapter 7, translation and teaching are placed alongside each other and shown to be not merely isomorphic to one another, as chapter 7 suggested, but in actual fact intimately entangled. In order to integrate this micro-analysis into the larger argument of the book, which posits that interlingual translation is a subset of cosmic transformation, the chapter finally looks as Rosa’s Resonanz (2016), a ‘sociology of worldly relationships’, for a model, albeit one that is only partly developed by Rosa himself, of the larger networks of translative encounters in which the classroom might be inserted.

Chapter 13 views the translation classroom from another point of view, asking about its integration into the field of contemporary German political debates in a rapidly changing world. It opens with the notion of the blackboard as a fourth wall that often separates the classroom from the world outside. It begins by interrogating contemporary racism as it spikes in response to the global multi-crises of the present time (Brand and Wissen 2017: 21-42), and enquiring how racism can be combated in the classroom. Racism is analysed as a local epiphenomenon of other segregative, separative dynamics in the world. Against this broader background of rampant, almost-universal separatism, the chapter proposes a translative methodology for the classroom, one that seeks to create connections between disparate domains of knowledge so as to map the contemporary global landscape. Translation, as a universal creative and connective process, can be put to work in the classroom in a way that unleashes larger dynamics of epistemological and political creativity via what Pratt calls ‘the pedagogical arts of the contact zone’. (An appendix to the volume explores cognate issues in the German EFL classroom.)

The conclusion takes up chapter 13’s notion of the blackboard as the ‘fourth wall’ of the translation, looking at a very real, if ephemeral blackboard-wall that could be found as a street-art intervention for a short period in inner-city Johannesburg. That blackboard addresses its audiences in a number of languages—English, Zulu, Afrikaans, and ‘textese’—to ask what they dream of doing in the time ‘before they die’. Each addressee is invited, in the language of her or his choice, to fill in the blank line (‘Before I die_______’) just as they must, willy-nilly, fill the interval of the remaining days of their life. The blank or empty space invites readerly participation in the form of writing. The space between the wall and the street, between the words and the world, becomes a spatio-temporal and linguistic-existential ‘contact zone’. Participation generates transformation between the poles of concretely embodied language and language-borne humans. Writing the blank space of an ongoing and future life happens within the tensile fabric of a life-being-lived between various actants. The street in Johannesburg thus becomes a South-South translation—doubtless a very circuitous one—of the Chinese cosmologies expounded by François Jullien in his work on seventeenth-century neoconfucianism (1989, 2016). Those cosmologies posit that between paired opposites—night and day, light and dark, mountain and water, emptiness and fullness—a constant flow of energy, a translative exchange of information, takes place in such a way as to disqualify these pairs as polarized binaries because their relationship is one of dynamic transformation. The difference that pertains between them is the difference between the phases of a ceaseless process of transformation (Jullien 1989)—the pulse of life itself, its undulating expanse. Life ‘adheres’ to itself in its persistence by ‘disadhering’ to itself in its energetic push through the stages of a restless self-transformation (Jullien 2016: 17-39). Even the description, the writing that package this presentation—indeed, the translative (and transliterative!) work, both cultural and linguistic, that precedes it, within a genealogy running from Wang Fuzhi to Tan Sitong to Mao Zedong to François Jullien (Jullien 1989: 14)—are instances of the immense, vibrant ‘contact zone’ that is life as cosmic translation. Join in by reading on, never forgetting that you will be translating all the way.