Born Translated ─ The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature

As a growing number of contemporary novelists write explicitly for publication in multiple languages, the genre's form and aims are shifting. Born-translated novels include passages that appear to be written in different tongues, narrators who speak to foreign audiences, and other visual and formal techniques that treat translation as a medium rather than an afterthought. These strategies challenge the global dominance of English, complicate "native" readership, and protect creative works against misinterpretation as they circulate. They have also given rise to a new form of writing that confounds traditional models of literary history and political community.

Born Translated builds a much-needed framework for reading translation's effect on fictional works, as well as digital art, avant-garde magazines, literary anthologies, and visual media. Artists and novelists discussed include J. M. Coetzee, Junot Diaz, Jonathan Safran Foer, Mohsin Hamid, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jamaica Kincaid, Ben Lerner, China Mieville, David Mitchell, Walter Mosley, Caryl Phillips, Adam Thirlwell, Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries, and Amy Waldman. The book understands that contemporary literature begins at once in many places, engaging in a new type of social embeddedness and political solidarity. It recasts literary history as a series of convergences and departures and, by elevating the status of "born-translated" works, redefines common conceptions of author, reader, and nation.

Rebecca L. Walkowitz is associate professor and director of graduate studies in English and affiliate faculty in comparative literature at Rutgers University. She is the author ofCosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation and the editor or coeditor of several books, includingImmigrant Fictions and, with Douglas Mao, Bad Modernisms. She is the president of the Modernist Studies Association.