You can purchase our Fall issue here. An original version of this essay was given as the Saif Al-Ghobash Lecture in Translation, an annual lecture held by the Banipal Trust of London, and was delivered on February 8, While translation has always been about trying to communicate with or understand the other who speaks a different language, interest in translation has ebbed and flowed over the centuries.
Both enlightenments are characterized by claims for the equality of mankind which led to greater interest in translation as a mechanism for intercultural knowledge exchange and created a space for interlinguistic erotics and cultural kinship.
But both of these currents of enlightenment and the states and institutions that represented their values have been unable to resist the power differential between the cultures and societies engaged in this exchange, whereby Europe and North America have constantly made exceptions to their stated values to justify oppression and genocidal violence.
The fact that Enlightenment values have been betrayed does not mean that translation is not a powerful source of connection and innovation. Translation is a facility we acquired so that we may be engaged in an eternal process of knowing each other as we change and evolve.
Life depends on newer versions of things emerging that bear our sameness and the traces of other lives in it, hence the analogy of linguistic exchange and reproduction, translation and eros. Eros, we may recall, is a Greek god, who is a child of Aphrodite, goddess of sexual love and beauty, who was fathered by Zeus, or Ares, or possibly Hermes.
