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Fixers

Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature

Fixers

Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature

A new history of early global literature that treats translators as active agents mediating cultures.
 

In this book, Zrinka Stahuljak challenges scholars in both medieval and translation studies to rethink how ideas and texts circulated in the medieval world. Whereas many view translators as mere conduits of authorial intention, Stahuljak proposes a new perspective rooted in a term from journalism: the fixer. With this language, Stahuljak captures the diverse, active roles medieval translators and interpreters played as mediators of entire cultures—insider informants, local guides, knowledge brokers, art distributors, and political players. Fixers offers nothing less than a new history of literature, art, translation, and social exchange from the perspective not of the author or state but of the fixer.

358 pages | 13 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2024

Literature and Literary Criticism: Romance Languages

Medieval Studies

Reviews

"Fixers is an erudite, ambitious book that synthesizes concepts from medieval studies and modern translation theory, offering salutary reading for students and scholars of both. It offers an exciting lens for reading the work of fixer-travelers and translators across the medieval world – from Chaucer, who worked by day as a customs official and diplomat, to Arabic-language travel writers such as Ibn Fadlan and Ibn Batutta."

Times Literary Supplement

“Stahuljak, who used to work as an interpreter in war zones, uses the term [“fixer”] by analogy with the local interpreters-guides-brokers who make it possible for modern journalists to function in alien terrain. She emphasizes that the work they do as interpreters . . .  is more creative than we might assume. Medieval writers, readers and travelers understood translation as a dynamic process.”

London Review of Books

“In her paradigm-shifting Fixers, Stahuljak boldly rewrites the terms of literary history as we understand it, decentering its national authors and genres to refocus our gaze on a late medieval literature that comes into being by and through its ‘fixers’—worldly translators and emissaries, diplomats, and merchants—whose activities give shape to an early, precolonial world literature. A study that will do no less than force a rethinking of existing accounts of medieval literary production, Fixers is at the same time essential reading for scholars of world literature, translation, and decolonization.”

Shirin Khanmohamadi, San Francisco State University

“In Fixers, Stahuljak provides readers with a provocative and wide-ranging tour of medieval literary encounters and their mediation through multilingual and multicultural knowledge production. By centering the agency and experiences of fixers, she not only opens up new interpretive possibilities for seemingly familiar texts but develops a powerful analytic lens through which to study the multifaceted meanings and contingencies of translation in a medieval world released from the demands of modern agendas."

Carol Symes, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Table of Contents

List of Figures
On Translations and Terminology
Introduction Fixers: Toward an Alternative History of Translation and Literature

Part I. Historical Realities: Strategy, Loyalty, and Gift
One The Politics of Translation: Foreign Language Acquisition, Conversion, and Colonization (Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Crusade Treatises)
Two The Economy of Translation: Missionaries to the Mongol Empire, Pilgrims to the Holy Land, and the Gift of Languages (Thirteenth to Fifteenth Centuries)

Part II. Disciplinary Realities: Authorship, Genre, and Literary History
Three The Ethics of Translation: Loyalty, Commensuration, and Literary Forms in the Fourteenth Century (Machaut, Froissart, Mézières)
Four Fixer Literature: (Pseudo)Translation and Manuscript Illumination (the Fifteenth-Century Court of Burgundy)
Five The Hermeneutics of Translation: Authorship and Genre (the Fifteenth-Century Court of Burgundy)
Conclusion Fixers: Early World Literature in the Age of the Global
Acknowledgments
Appendixes
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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