546235

research-article2014

CUS0010.1177/1749975514546235Cultural SociologyBielsa

Article

Cosmopolitanism as
Translation

Cultural Sociology
2014, Vol. 8(4) 392406
The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/1749975514546235
cus.sagepub.com

Esperana Bielsa

Universitat Autnoma de Barcelona, Spain

Abstract
Whereas globalization theory was predominantly silent about the role of translation in making
possible the flow of information worldwide, assuming instant communicability and transparency,
translation has gained central importance in recent accounts of cosmopolitanism that emphasize
global interdependence and the negotiation of difference. In this context, a specification of
translation processes provides a way of analysing the form in which interactions between different
modernities take place and of specifying a notion of cosmopolitanism as internalization of the
other. This article approaches translation as much more than the linguistic transfer of information
from one language to another. Widely defined as the experience or the test of the foreign, a
process which mobilizes our whole relationship to the other, translation appears as a material,
concrete practice through which cosmopolitanism, conceived as openness to the world and to
others, can be empirically examined. After having thus identified the central role of translation in
a cosmopolitan context, the article examines how it can be used to approach current notions of
aesthetic or artistic cosmopolitanism with reference to the key notion of world literature. Finally,
it outlines the most important implications that a conception of cosmopolitanism as translation
has for cosmopolitan social theory.

Keywords
cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitan, aesthetic cosmopolitanism, artistic cosmopolitanism,
foreignness, translation, literature, world literature

Introduction
Globalization - the economic, social and cultural processes that contribute to increased
connectivity worldwide - has led to an exponential increase in translation and, at the
same time, has placed translation in a unique position as a key mediator of intercultural
communication. Translation part of the shared languages and linguistic competencies
that are a key infrastructure of global communication (Held et al., 1999: 345) allows
Corresponding author:
Esperana Bielsa, Department of Sociology, Universitat Autnoma de Barcelona, Edifici B Campus de la
UAB, 08193 Bellaterra (Barcelona), Spain.
Email: Esperanza.Bielsa@uab.cat

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the global circulation of meaning and shapes the nature of the discourses that are disseminated in different localities. Contemporary globalization has witnessed the appearance of English as a global lingua franca, but this phenomenon has not led to a decline in
the significance of translation. On the one hand, people whose native language is not
English are constantly translating themselves into the dominant global language in order
to communicate beyond their own locales (Cronin, 2003: 60). On the other, consumers
prefer to use their own language for access to informational goods, which has led to a
considerable growth of internet content in languages other than English in recent years,
while the localization industry has similarly experienced an unprecedented expansion.1
Moreover, current geopolitical inequalities are directly mirrored in translation, and a
more attentive look at global linguistic flows reveals the basic asymmetries and inequalities that are an important feature of globalization. Thus, some accounts of globalization
have pointed to the number of book translations from English and into English as an
indication of the power distribution in global information flows, where those at the core
do the transmission and those at the periphery merely receive it (Janelle, 1991: 568;
Lash and Urry 1994: 289; Held et al., 1999: 3456). The global dominance of English
is expressed in the fact that books originally written in English currently account for 55
to 60 per cent of translations worldwide, while translations from German and from
French, the only other languages that hold a central position in the global translation
market, are about 10 per cent each (Heilbron, 2010: 2). At the same time, British and
American book production is characterized by a very low number of translations. Since
the 1950s the number of translations has remained roughly between 2 and 4 per cent of
total book production, declining even further over the past decade. Thus, translations
accounted for just 1.4 per cent of books published in 2001 in Britain and 2.07 per cent of
books published in 2004 in the United States (as compared, for example, with 22.9% in
2002 in Italy or 7.3% in 2004 in Germany) (Venuti, 2008: 11).
Given its key mediating role, it is surprising how little attention has been devoted in
the social sciences to specifying and analysing the nature of translation in globalization
processes. One reason for this might be the widespread assumption that translation is a
transparent process, which merely facilitates linguistic and cultural transfer without leaving any traces of its intervention. In the context of globalization, and the ever increasing
quantities of information flows on a global scale, the assumption of transparency becomes
linked to one of instantaneity, which brings, according to Michael Cronin, Anglophone
messages and images from all over the globe in minutes and seconds, leading to a reticular cosmopolitanism of near-instantaneity, devaluing the effort, the difficulty and the
time required to establish and maintain cultural connections (2003: 49).
More generally, globalization theorists have devoted more attention to the increased
circulation of information, ideas, goods and people than to the productive conditions that
make it possible. This has led to assuming that global texts can automatically be received
by audiences and to obscuring the crucial intervention of translation in the production of
a multiplicity of local versions (for theoretical perspectives dealing with translation and
globalization see Bielsa, 2005, 2009: ch. 2). Moreover, the assumption of transparency
has led social scientists to ignore the fact that different translating strategies generate
radically different texts, and to underplay the degree to which translation questions the
whole relationship between different languages and cultures.

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The New Cosmopolitanism and Translation

What has been called the new cosmopolitanism is characterized by a renewed attention
to our global destinies brought about by modernity and globalization. In this sense, the
new cosmopolitanism makes explicit what Roland Robertson identified as the significant
subjective dimension of globalization: the heightening of global consciousness (1992:
8). However, as Chris Rumford has argued (2008: 1), social theories of cosmopolitanism
question the strong vision of the singularity of the world, which is very marked in some
globalization theory, its pretended unicity (Robertsons term), emphasizing a multiplicity of perspectives and the interaction between different traditions. In this context, processes of cultural hybridization and localization are highlighted as important ways
through which the local and the national are redefined through their interaction with the
global. Thus, Ulrich Beck stresses cultural mixture (the principle that local, national,
ethnic, religious and cosmopolitan cultures and traditions interpenetrate, interconnect
and intermingle), and emphasizes the recognition of cosmopolitan differences and the
resulting conflicts as well as cosmopolitan empathy and perspective-taking as constitutive principles of the cosmopolitan outlook (2006: 7).
For Beck, the cosmopolitan outlook breaks with the insularity of national consciousness by opening itself to others and internalizing their vision, imagining alternative ways
within and between different cultures and modernities (2006: 789). Gerard Delanty, on
his part, refers to the cosmopolitan imagination as a condition of self-problematization
and incompleteness which is integral to modernity and stresses the principle of world
openness, created out of the encounter of the local with the global, as constitutive of
cosmopolitanism. This post-universalistic cosmopolitanism (Delanty, 2006: 27, 3435)
emphasizes tensions and conflict (between the global and the local, between the universal and the particular) rather than simply plurality.
In a cosmopolitan outlook where openness and interaction with others (and not universalism) assume a primary role, in which relationships between different cultures and
modernities are underlined, translation can provide a means of conceptualizing and of
empirically analysing this type of interaction. In this context, there is an increasing
awareness of the significance of multilingualism and translation in key aspects of the
cosmopolitan project such as global democracy (Archibugi, 2008), human rights (Santos,
2010), social movements (Santos, 2005) and borders (Balibar, 2010). Both Beck and
Delanty have also explicitly referred to the importance of translation. Thus, Beck at one
point states that:
Cosmopolitan competence, as a fact of everyday and of scientific experience, forces us to
develop the art of translation and bridge-building. This involves two things: on the one hand,
situating and relativizing ones own form of life within other horizons of possibility; on the
other, the capacity to see oneself from the perspective of cultural others and to give this practical
effect in ones own experience through the exercise of boundary-transcending imagination.
(2006: 89)

The obligation to translate emerges not only from the fact that the global other is in
our midst (Beck and Grande, 2010: 417), but also from the necessity to develop truly
cosmopolitan, collective responses to the most tangible problems of a world at risk.

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Delanty also notes that translation plays a central role in the cosmopolitan imagination and that critical cosmopolitanism opens up spaces of discourse and identifies possibilities for translation. He argues that cosmopolitan processes take the form of
translations between things that are different (2006: 43) and uses the notion of cultural
translation to focus on how one culture interprets itself in light of the encounter with the
other and constantly undergoes change as a result (Delanty, 2009: 19398). More
recently, Delanty has defended the possibility of successfully translating the concept of
cosmopolitanism itself in order to relate it to non-Western traditions of inquiry and to
critique its underlying Eurocentrism, calling attention to forms of critical cosmopolitanism through strategies that involve to varying degrees not just conceptual translation,
but also cultural translation and in a direction that captures the normative and critical
moment of self-transformation and learning in light of the encounter with the other
(forthcoming). According to the author, these strategies revolve around the de-centring
of Europe through the discovery of the non-European within Europe, revealing the
hybridizing outcomes of the appropriation of Western culture by non-Western cultures,2
or exploring the significance of non-European concepts.
Two common aspects in Becks and Delantys views on translation and its role in
contemporary cosmopolitanism can readily be identified. First, both Beck and Delanty
work with a notion of translation as gain. Delanty explicitly appeals in this context to a
concept of translation as the transformation of meaning and the creation of something
new, which he borrows from Homi Bhabha (Delanty, 2009: 1956). This contrasts with
more extended views on translation as an inevitable loss which impoverishes and finally
betrays the original, in a context in which transformation without loss is impossible
because no full equivalence between different languages exists. Second, both Beck and
Delanty assume the possibility of transcending ethnocentrism through translation. For
Beck, as I have already indicated, translation is the capacity to see oneself from the
perspective of cultural others, while for Delanty translation provides the possibility of
incorporating the perspective of the Other into ones own culture (2009: 13). Even
though Delanty points out that cultural translation can have a destructive moment producing reifications, racism and misunderstandings (2009: 197), he does not devote any
attention to specify what he primarily sees in terms of a failure of translation.
From a perspective that puts translation at the centre, it is necessary to state the importance of the first point, stressing that the interest of translation lies not in what is lost, but
in what is gained, in the fact that texts and traditions are transformed in order to satisfy
new needs in different cultural contexts. This has been amply recognized in the discipline
of Translation Studies, which has increasingly focused, since the early 1990s, on how
translated texts work in their receiving cultures, rather than on textual comparisons
between originals and translations. Becks and Delantys conceptions of the role of translation in relation to cosmopolitanism are compelling because they are the product of a
view of translation that implies much more than the linguistic transfer of information from
one language to the other, appealing rather to an experience that mobilizes our relationship to the other as well as our conception of ourselves. Cosmopolitanism, understood in
these terms, comes very close to a conception of translation that challenges a view of
translation as transfer and puts in the centre a view of translation as the experience of the

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foreign, such as Antoine Bermans (1992) and more generally the German tradition from
Goethe and the Romantics to Benjamin.
However, we must question and problematize the assumption of the possibility of
transcending ethnocentrism through translation and point out instead that ethnocentrism
is a central tendency or resistance in any act of translation. Lawrence Venuti has characterized translation as a fundamentally ethnocentric act (Venuti, 1998: 10), emphasizing
the violence that is implied in any act of translation and defining translation as: the
forcible replacement of the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text with a
text that is intelligible to the translating-language reader (Venuti, 2008: 14). What is
interesting about translation is not the possibility of transcending ethnocentrism, but the
struggle that is established with cultural ethnocentrism in any translating act, a struggle
which confronts ethnocentric demands for intelligibility with respect for the irreducible
foreignness of the other, in what Berman aptly describes as the ethical objective of translation, which is by necessity openness and dialogue to open up in writing a certain
relation with the Other, to fertilize what is ones Own through the mediation of what is
Foreign, in Bermans own words (1992: 4).
Translation can both help to enlarge the horizons of a language and a culture through
the introduction of the new, and help to falsify an image of the foreign for domestic readers. This ambiguous role translation has in mediating between the foreign culture and the
mother tongue has been approached throughout the history of translation in different
ways. In Friedrich Schleiermachers conception, it is a matter of leading the author to the
reader or leading the reader to the author (1992: 42). And in the most widely known
contemporary formulation, it is the difference between what Venuti has called domesticating translation and foreignizing translation. Indeed, according to Venuti, the global
dominance of English is expressed not only in the low number of books that are translated into English, but also in the way they are translated, following a strategy that denies
the foreignness of the text and hides translations very intervention. Domesticating translation is based on making a translated text read fluently, as if it was an original, thus
rendering translation invisible, transparent. Its effects are to conceal the conditions under
which it is made, starting with the translators crucial intervention in the foreign text, and
to create a recognizable, even familiar, cultural other. To this Venuti opposes what he
calls foreignizing translation, which disrupts the cultural codes of the translating language in order to do justice to the difference of the foreign text, and deviates from native
norms to stage an alien reading experience (2008: 1516).
Domesticating translation, by rendering the foreign falsely familiar and translation
transparent, in fact denies any true openness to the other as other and thus any genuine
cosmopolitan commitment. Its predominance over foreignizing translation, which is a
marginal practice not only in literary translation but also in the translation of commercial
information and of news, reveals the underlying idealism of views that simply assume
the possibility of overcoming ethnocentrism through translation. However, the theorization and practice of alternative forms of translation that attempt to do justice to the difference of a foreign text and lead the reader to the author, thus challenging the sacrality
of the mother tongue and opening it up to the difference of the foreign, also point to its
significance in the current debate on artistic cosmopolitanism, to which I now turn.

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Artistic Cosmopolitanism, World Literature and

Translation
Any cursory glance at the existing literature on what has been referred to as aesthetic
cosmopolitanism, which is relatively scarce when compared with the enormous proliferation of works on other aspects of contemporary cosmopolitanism, reveals that, as
Nikos Papastergiadis points out, Since the Stoics the spiritual and aesthetic dimensions
of cosmopolitanism have been slowly disregarded (2012: 82). In addition, one can soon
perceive significant misunderstandings or confusions in current notions of aesthetic cosmopolitanism. Three of the most salient of these problems in conceptualizing notions of
aesthetic cosmopolitanism in the current context are identified below.
First, I would like to refer to the ambiguity of the term itself and defend the use, for
my purposes, of a narrower concept of artistic cosmopolitanism. The notion of aesthetic
cosmopolitanism is useful to call attention to the predominantly moral and political
emphasis of current notions of cosmopolitanism, as Papastergiadis suggests. But aesthetic cosmopolitanism is not just limited to art. It includes a whole range of experiences, from the awe-inspiring admiration provoked by a sublime landscape in the Alps,
to the ugliness associated with certain urban or industrial landscapes. The problem lies,
according to Theodor Adorno (1997), in reducing this much wider notion of the aesthetic to the artistic. This is why he defends the fundamental difference between natural
beauty and the artificiality of art, even if they have increasingly become confused in the
philosophical tradition since Hegel. In this respect, artistic cosmopolitanism appears as
a more accurate term to refer to the world-opening projects and experiences that are
specifically the product of an artistic or literary endeavour. Moreover, the notion of
artistic cosmopolitanism also allows us to distinguish between the forms of high and
low culture, a distinction that is abolished in more general conceptions of cultural cosmopolitanism. This distinction is highly relevant because whereas mass culture can
easily lead to banal cosmopolitanism, in Becks terms, a trivial, unconscious and
deformed cosmopolitanism based on what is (2006: 19), artistic cosmopolitanism can
teach us what radical openness to and engagement with the other means and open up
imaginary spaces for living with difference. This is the reason why the latter is significant not only as an expression of relevant developments in the cultural sphere, but
should also be recovered for and referred to more general notions of critical cosmopolitanism (Delanty, 2009, forthcoming).
Second, there are issues in periodizing artistic cosmopolitanism, for instance in
Motti Regevs problematic distinction between the aesthetic cosmopolitanism of early
to high modernity, dominated by an essentialist image of ethno-national uniqueness,
and that of late modernity, when more rigid forms of national culture are replaced by
fluid conceptions that are open to foreign influences (2007: 125). This distinction
between the cosmopolitanism of high and late modernity would seem to mirror Delantys
statement that from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth
century the national imagination for the greater part prevailed over the cosmopolitan
imagination (2009: 51). This may be true for a cosmopolitanism that is conceived primarily in political terms, but actually the opposite is the case with respect to artistic
cosmopolitanism. In fact, high modernity can be characterized as the heyday of artistic

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cosmopolitanism, as an expression of the autonomy of art that was the product of a

rebellion against both bourgeois and national culture, enacted by exiles and migrs
gathered in the great Western metropolises whose art reflects a fundamentally cosmopolitan experience of restless mobility, homelessness and estrangement. Thus Raymond
Williams refers to Paris, Vienna, Berlin, London and New York as transnational capitals
of an art without frontiers, precisely at a time when frontiers were starting to become
much more strictly policed (2007: 34), whereas Pascale Casanova defines Paris as the
capital of those who proclaim themselves nationless: the artists (2004: 29). In this
respect, contemporary artistic cosmopolitanism fundamentally continues rather than
breaks with an earlier tradition of international Modernism, a continuity which is well
captured by Rebecca Walkowitzs concept of cosmopolitan style (2006). What has
changed today is that the experience of rootlessness and estrangement that was once
typically associated with the living conditions of artists and marked their distance
from a more settled bourgeois society has become generalized to the rest of the
population.
Third, it is necessary to consider artistic cosmopolitanism from the point of view of
both production and circulation/reception. Thus views of artistic cosmopolitanism as an
open conversation between the local and the global and as an imaginative engagement
with the other (Papastergiadis, 2012: 9) need to be complemented with an examination
of the transnational patterns of circulation of contemporary art and literature. From here
onwards I will be referring more narrowly to literature, rather than the arts, through the
introduction of the notion of world literature, which David Damrosch has defined as follows: I take world literature to encompass all literary works that circulate beyond their
culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language (2003: 4).
The concept of world literature was first used by Goethe in 1827. It appears in the
Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann just after a reflection on a Chinese novel,
which is readily compared to Goethes own Hermann and Dorothea and to the English
novels of Richardson, but distinguished, in its thorough morality, from Brangers songs.
In this context, Goethe remarks:
poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere, and at all times, in
hundreds and hundreds of men I therefore like to look about me in foreign nations, and
advise every one to do the same. National literature is now rather an unmeaning term; the epoch
of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach. (Eckermann,
1850: 35051)

The term also famously appears in Marx and Engels The Communist Manifesto (1848)
as an illustration of the cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in
every country that originates in the exploitation of the world market by the bourgeoisie (1967: 83):
In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in
every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual
production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National
one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the
numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature. (1967: 84)

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This formulation preserves the original sense that Goethe attributes to world literature as
the expression of a new historical epoch in which a market for international literary
exchanges becomes generalized. The emphasis lies in the notions of intercourse in every
direction, universal inter-dependence of nations, of which Goethes Conversations contain abundant examples. Interrelations and exchanges between literatures are at the centre of his conception of world literature, which is thus less a set of works than a network
(Damrosch, 2003: 3). They are expressed in the intense literary practice of polyglots like
Goethe himself, who not only profusely read and reflect on a multitude of foreign works,
but also avidly borrow, incorporate and transform elements taken from them to their own
benefit:
Walter Scott used a scene from my Egmont, and he had a right to do so; and because he did it
well, he deserves praise. He has also copied the character of Mignon in one of his romances;
but whether with equal judgment, is another question. Lord Byrons transformed Devil is a
continuation of Mephistophiles [sic], and quite right too. If, from the whim of originality, he
had departed from the model, he would certainly have fared worse. Thus, my Mephistophiles
[sic] sings a song from Shakspeare [sic], and why should he not? Why should I give myself the
trouble of inventing one of my own, when this said just what was wanted. If, too, the prologue
to my Faust is something like the beginning of Job, that is again quite right, and I am rather to
be praised than censured. (Eckermann, 1850: 1989)

Literary traditions are shaped by this intensified process of appropriation and transformation of foreign elements in a highly interconnected literary space, while world literature refers to the active co-existence of all contemporary literatures (Berman, 1992: 56).
Moreover, Goethe is especially interested not only in reading and borrowing from other
literatures, but also in finding through the international reception of German works a
mirror image of his tradition that is far more revealing because it reflects a vision of
oneself through the eyes of the other. This type of cosmopolitan reflexivity that world
literature makes possible is explicitly highlighted by him:
It is pleasant to see that intercourse is now so close between the French, English and Germans,
that we shall be able to correct one another. This is the greatest use of a world-literature, which
will show itself more and more.
Carlyle has written a life of Schiller, and judged him as it would be difficult for a German to
judge him. On the other hand, we are clear about Shakspeare [sic] and Byron, and can, perhaps,
appreciate their merits better than the English themselves. (Eckermann, 1850: 432)

Pheng Cheah has rightly pointed to Goethes conception of the world in the higher sense
of spiritual intercourse, transaction and exchange as crucially distinct from a concept of
the world as a geographical entity (2012: 141). What matters in this vision is the activity
of imagining and of creating the world, which is both the product of, but is also essentially autonomous from, the processes that configure todays globalized market, and
therein lies its world-making potential.
With Goethes concept of world literature we come back, centrally, to a notion of
cosmopolitanism as translation, because translation both allows and incarnates the

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international literary exchanges that, for Goethe, come to define the new modern era. As
Berman points out, Weltliteratur is the age of generalized intertranslation, in which
all languages learn, in their own way, to be languages-of-translation and to live the experience of translation (1992: 578). Goethe not only spoke several languages and translated many works3 but also particularly welcomed the translations of his own works into
other languages, finding his words mirrored and regenerated in the strangeness of foreign
tongues. Thus he states about his Hermann and Dorothea: I love it best in the Latin
translation; there it seems to me nobler, as if it had returned to its original form
(Eckermann, 1850: 200).
Translated works can recover an original novelty which the originals themselves may
have lost, pointing to a view of translation that emphasizes its effects for the translated
culture in terms of regeneration and revival, and not just the significance of translation in mediating foreign works to readers who do not know the language and in introducing newness to the translating culture and language (for an elaboration of Goethes
formulation of the active reciprocal relation between literatures through translation centred around the concepts of participation, mirroring, rejuvenation and regeneration, see
Berman, 1992: 647).
And in the age of generalized intertranslation, the German cultural tradition has something to offer that can be of benefit to all contemporaries: a conception that aims to make
the translation identical with the original, overcoming the greatest resistance and shaping the taste of the multitude towards it (Goethe, quoted in Berman, 1992: 59). This is
a form of foreignizing translation according to Berman the most advanced expression
of classical German thought on translation that is explicitly conceived as opposed to
the then-dominant French mode of translation based on appropriating the foreign. And
Goethe refers as follows to its potential value to nationals of all countries and speakers
of all languages, and not just of German:
young men do well to come to us and learn our language; for no one can deny that he
who knows German well can dispense with many other languages. Of the French I do not
speak; it is the language of conversation, and is indispensable in travelling, because everybody
understands it, and in all countries we can get on with it instead of a good interpreter. But as
for Greek, Latin, Italian, and Spanish, we can read the best works of those nations in such
excellent German translations, that we need not spend much time upon the toilsome study
of those languages. It is in the German nature duly to honour after its kind, everything produced
by other nations, and to accommodate itself to foreign peculiarities. This, with the great
flexibility of our language, makes German translations thoroughly faithful and complete.
(Eckermann, 1850: 1901)

This constitutes the most persuasive argument about the cosmopolitan potential of
foreignizing translation: to serve as a vehicle for an experience of the foreign potentially
to all contemporaries, as opposed to a narcissistic experience of recognition of dominant cultural values of one linguistic group. German thus becomes, through a form of
translation that is particularly open to the foreign, a privileged language for the acquisition of a cosmopolitan culture, whereas French (English today) merely represents a
more pragmatic choice for ordinary travel and exchange. In this context, we must not
forget that Goethes cosmopolitan views are a product not only of his explicitly

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universalistic political and moral stance, conceived in opposition to the new forces of
nationalist mystique and militant chauvinism that were emerging in Europe and especially in Germany (Steiner, 2013: 11920), but also of the latters rather peripheral role
in Western culture at the time, in contrast with the Anglo-American ethnocentrism and
closure to foreignness that Venuti denounces in the contemporary context.
Through his understanding of world literature, Goethe is to artistic cosmopolitanism
what Kant is to moral and political cosmopolitanism. Moreover, Goethes view of world
literature as a cosmopolitan space where national literatures are not abolished but exist
and grow through intensified contact and interaction with each other is closer than Kants
to contemporary notions of a critical cosmopolitanism that highlights the interrelation
between localities and between the local and the global, pointing towards social relationships that are primarily conceived in post-universalistic terms (Delanty, 2009). This is
why it is highly relevant and should be incorporated into a conception of cosmopolitanism beyond the cultural sphere.
The crucial role of translation in the international literary field has also been theorized
by Pascale Casanova in The World Republic of Letters (2004), where she approaches
translation as an important element of valorization and consecration of texts from the
peripheries, and of diffusion of literary modernity from the centre to the margins. For
Casanova it is especially this first, quantitatively smaller, often neglected function of
translation in consecrating peripheral texts, that is of key importance, because it is in this
form that the great literary revolutions that help to radically change the whole of the literary space take place. This conception of translation as consecration, which gives writers
in dominated languages literary recognition and international existence, points once
more to a notion of translation as gain. As in Goethes views, or in Damroschs characterization of world literature as writing that gains in translation (2003: 281), such
notions of translation as gain are central to a conception of cosmopolitanism as translation that is examined in this article.

Implications for Social Theory of a Notion of

Cosmopolitanism as Translation
In this final section, three important implications of placing translation at the centre of a
cosmopolitan vision defined as openness to the world and to others are specified. First,
through translation a genuinely post-universal cosmopolitanism can start to be glimpsed;
second, translation highlights the global transmission of content from a perspective that
places the materiality of writing at the centre; third, translation can offer a means of
approaching and empirically analysing intercultural relations between different traditions and modernities.
1. Translation introduces a conception that points towards a genuinely postuniversalist cosmopolitanism. This perspective contrasts with those centred on human
rights, through which it is difficult to abandon certain problematic universalistic assumptions.4 Thus against what is increasingly perceived as an indefensible essentialist universalism associated with a stronger cosmopolitan project, Seyla Benhabib feels obliged to
defend a justificatory universalism that seems to offer a more adequate vision of human
rights in an ethically pluralistic world. The latter is associated with authors like Karl

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Otto-Apel, Jrgen Habermas and John Rawls who, according to Benhabib, maintain very
few beliefs about human nature, but share and defend strong beliefs in the normative
content of human reason, expressed in the validity of procedures of inquiry and evidence
that have been the cognitive legacy of Western philosophy (Benhabib, 2011: 1011).
Unlike law, translation cannot appeal to a universal language or procedure. This lack of
a third language through which originals and translations could be judged forces the
abandonment of any universalist assumptions in a project in which one can only appeal
to an open and (self)critical exchange between different languages and traditions. Nor
can translation allow itself to fall into the opposite of universalism, in a relativistic abandonment that hides behind the principle of incommensurability, as Becks cosmopolitan
realism denounces (2006: 54). The mere fact that translation exists points to the implausibility of the relativist position or of an assumed untranslatability.5 However, translation
does not offer any definitive solutions it leaves everything unresolved. As Walter
Benjamin remarked, all translation is only a somewhat provisional way of coming to
terms with the foreignness of languages (1992: 75), and its temporary condition is
revealed in the way those singular interpretations of the foreign rapidly age and need to
be undertaken anew only a few decades after they have been accomplished in the context
of a changing reception of works.
2. Translation offers a perspective centred on the materiality of writing that does not
succumb to the dominant emphasis on the global transmission of contents. Globalization
theory has underlined the importance of circulation, the movement of people, objects
and information around the globe, evidenced in the proliferation of metaphors such as
that of flows or of the information superhighway. This emphasis often involves a nave
belief in the pure transmissibility and intelligibility of information. Even when the
important role of translation in making possible the transfer of information is acknowledged, its intervention tends to be relegated to a mere technical question. However, this
reduction hides the most crucial aspect of the translating act. Translation focuses our
attention on the materiality of words as signifiers, which do not just transmit a preexisting message or signified. Meaning does not precede writing or, as Derrida pointed
out, To write is to know that what has not yet been produced within literality has no
other dwelling place (2001: 11). I insist on the materiality of writing to make visible the
idealism of those who assume the global transmissibility of pre-established meanings
(information), which seem to precede writing itself. A perspective centred on translation
focuses on the production of global transmissibility and not on circulation, and empirically approaches forms of cultural interaction that have a central importance in processes of cosmopolitanization of reality. It particularly identifies how works are
incorporated into local contexts through translation and changed as a result, thus offering an empirical measure of how they travel across linguistic and cultural boundaries,
and relying on a conception of cosmopolitanism that can only be specified in its multiple manifestations at the local level.
3. Translation can offer an approach to interculturality and to the interaction between
different modernities beyond notions of multiculturalism, which have been heavily criticized from a cosmopolitan perspective. Both Beck and Delanty insist on the interrelationship between different cultural traditions, identifying deficiencies and limitations of
a multiculturalism that is still based on a notion of cultural plurality that presupposes the

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existence of different groups rather than a relationship between them. More generally, as
we have seen, contemporary cosmopolitanism underlines existing tensions and conflicts
between the local and the global, the universal and the particular, as well as the processes
of cultural hybridization that result from them. Translation provides a model for
approaching cultural interaction beyond cultural pluralism and the dialogue between
cultures. In this sense, Rada Ivekovic opposes the idea of translation between cultures,
as an open gesture of reciprocal freedom, to the arrogant and limiting idea of a dialogue
between cultures, which is often proposed from a well-intentioned multiculturalist
approach. For her, while the notion of dialogue (implying closed communities with
defined borders) forces an apparent symmetry which really hides a hierarchy, translation,
as an exchange between different forms of being or existing, appears as a vital form of
resistance to the hegemonic lines of imposition of meaning (Ivekovic, 2005: 12).
It is necessary to insist again that translation makes visible the violence inherent in
any interpretation of a culture by another. This is the meaning of Venutis characterization of translation as an act of ethnocentric violence (the forcible replacement of the
linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text; 2008: 14; emphasis added). But
we should perhaps also point out that this violence works in both directions, as cosmopolitan openness to the other leaves the receiving culture exposed to the penetration of
foreign elements that subvert it. There is a direct relationship between violence and intelligibility: the more the difference of the foreign text is reduced, the more intelligible the
translation becomes to the receiving culture, while a rendition that is more respectful
with the foreign borders on intelligibility, forcing the codes and expectations of members
of the receiving culture. As I have indicated above, all translations are transitory and
provisional. Translation is, as Ivekovic maintains, correspondence, approximation or
resemblance, but no identity; difference is maintained in translation, perhaps as the price
of its imperfect success (2005: 2). The perspective that translation offers on cultural relations can therefore be taken as the basis of a cosmopolitan approach that does not minimize existing differences and conflicts, does not postulate a synthesis, but allows one to
empirically investigate how texts, ideas and traditions are communicated across linguistic and cultural borders in a highly interconnected world. This model is also relevant for
those theories that identify different types of cosmopolitanisms and modernities,
European and non-European, and can contribute to the sociological analysis of multiple
modernities (Eisenstadt, 2000; Wagner, 2011, 2012) or of different varieties of cosmopolitanism in the world (Delanty, 2009, forthcoming; Mota, 2012). This is because, in the
last instance, the sociological interpretation of different modernities in a cosmopolitan
context cannot but itself be a translation.

Conclusion
This article has highlighted the significant role of translation in contemporary notions of
cosmopolitanism that emphasize interaction and conflict between the local and the
global. One of the accomplishments of Becks and Delantys theories of cosmopolitanism has been to call attention to this central role, appealing to a notion of translation as
gain that, even though extended in the discipline of translation studies, is still predominantly ignored in social theory. However, both authors have assumed the possibility of

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transcending ethnocentrism through translation, downplaying the serious difficulties that

genuine openness to the other, capable of leading to a radical form of self-questioning
and, as a consequence, to self-transformation, supposes. To minimize the inherent violence involved in any translating act, to approach translation as the overcoming of ethnocentrism and not as a radical confrontation with it of uncertain results, entails the risk of
repeating the mistake of those theories that have assumed the transparent role of translation in processes of global connectivity.
Notions of artistic cosmopolitanism and world literature provide not only a corrective
to a concept of cosmopolitanism that is predominantly conceived in moral and political
terms, but also illustrate the nature of interaction and exchange in the context of intensified cultural contact between different traditions. No one has described these relationships better than Goethe, for whom the experience of the foreign, the active reciprocal
relation between literatures through translation, penetrates and revitalizes national traditions in a cosmopolitan context. Goethes cosmopolitanism, which puts translation at the
centre and identifies the major cosmopolitan potential of foreignizing translation, is
immensely valuable to forms of critical cosmopolitanism today.
Approaching cosmopolitanism as translation reveals the idealism of those that stress
the global transmissibility of information. It provides a model for thinking cultural interaction and exchange that is not blind to the degree of violence involved in the interpretation of one tradition by another, and a notion of cosmopolitanism that must constantly be
specified in its particular manifestations in different localities. The provisionality of
translation, its permanently imperfect success, also points to a form of cosmopolitanism
that is conceived in genuinely post-universalistic terms.
Funding
This research was supported by a fellowship and a grant from the Spanish Ministry for Economy
and Competitiveness [grant numbers RYC-2010-06105, CSO2011-23097]. A first version of this
paper was presented at the European Sociological Associations 11th Conference in Turin in
August 2013.

Notes
1. According to Internet World Stats, in 2011, 26.8 per cent of internet users in the world were
English speakers, closely followed by the Chinese (24.2%). However, the relative weight
of English-speaking internet users has dramatically fallen over the last decade, due to the
rapid growth of internet usage of speakers of other languages (especially of Arabic, Russian
and Chinese). Thus as recently as 2007 there were twice as many English speakers using the
internet as Chinese speakers (31.2% and 15.7% respectively; source: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm). The globalization of the web leads to greater diversity in internet
content, as companies compete to reach users in their own languages (Sorid, 2008). Estimates
indicate that over half of all internet content is in English (Funredes study at www.funredes.
org). On the localization industry see Pym (2004).
2. Good explorations of these can be found in Bhabhas discussion (1994) of mimicry as erosion
of the masters language in colonial discourse, Nstor Garca Canclinis study (1995) of the
changing meaning of crafts in Mexico, and James Cliffords approach (1997) to anthropological museums as contact zones.

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3. According to George Steiner, Goethe translated from a vast and diverse range of materials
in 18 languages, and his activity as translator covers an astonishing 73 years of his long life
(2013: 115).
4. I am grateful to Antonio Aguilera for pointing out this comparison.
5. In this article I defend the centrality of a politics of translation for an account of contemporary
cosmopolitanism. For an opposed, relativistic critique of the concept of world literature based
on the politics of untranslatability, see Apter (2013).

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Author biography
Esperana Bielsa is Senior Researcher at the Department of Sociology of the Universitat Autnoma
de Barcelona. She is the author of The Latin American Urban Crnica: Between Literature and
Mass Culture (Lexington Books, 2006), co-author, with Susan Bassnett, of Translation in Global
News (Routledge, 2009), and co-editor, with Christopher Hughes, of Globalization, Political
Violence and Translation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). She is currently working on a forthcoming
book entitled Translating Strangers, which investigates the relevance of translation for an understanding of contemporary cosmopolitanism, to be published by Routledge.

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