The translator for this work offers a brief account of the spirit in which the translation was done. The overriding concern in translation was to make a volume that was accessible, thereby trying to make the details of the work relatable to a contemporary audience. The one exception to this is the Life of Lycurgus, where the pervasive strangeness of Spartan society is conveyed through the continued use of Spartan terms (though with an added lexicon). The translator also notes that they have given distances in contemporary terms, while keeping foreign terms for currency, and these choices are justified. Place names and proper names have been Romanised as has become traditional in the translation of Greek texts for a broader audience. The notes also contain a brief discussion on currency and coinage in the ancient world.

‘The Irish Novel in Translation’ identifies the centrality of the Irish language to the nationalist ideology that underpinned the new Irish state as one of the main forces shaping the work of literary translation in Ireland in the twentieth century. A key moment here was the establishment of An Gúm in 1926, a state-funded body tasked with translating works both into and out of the Irish language. Many of the key Irish-language novelists of the period were supported by the work of An Gúm, and this placing of translation at the heart of a literary ecosystem is common for minoritised languages. Simultaneously, for Samuel Beckett, writing in French, and translating his own work, opened a way of escaping what he felt were the constraints of English. More recently, outward translation of Irish fiction into multiple world languages is understood as part of the exercise of soft power.

‘Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy and the Limits of Fiction’ concentrates on Beckett’s post-war trilogy of novels, Molloy (1951; trans. 1955), Malone Dies (1951; trans. 1958), and The Unnamable (1953; trans. 1960). The novels are characterised by an extreme interiority, so that the speaking voice eventually dissolves into the physical world. While these novels have recognisably Irish linguistic turns and references to the symbols and iconography of the Irish Free State, they very much sit outside Irish fiction of the period, even though the fictional forms they pioneered will make possible much later Irish fiction, as is evident when the critical reception of his work in Ireland during the 1950s is traced. Equally, it is possible to discern in the trilogy Beckett’s experience of involvement with the Resistance in France during the Second World War; and these two points of reference, Ireland and France, make it possible to question universalising readings of his work.

‘The Novels and Novellas of Máirtín Ó Cadhain’ traces the development of the major Irish-language modernist novelist Máirtín Ó Cadhain. Ó Cadhain began by translating for the state-run agency An Gúm, before publishing his first collection of short stories, Idir Shúgradh is Dáiríre (1939). However, his major achievement is Cré na Cille, first published serially in the Irish Press in 1949. This is one of the major Irish modernist novels. Set in a cemetery in the West of Ireland, the characters are the deceased lying in their graves, talking endlessly about the world they have left behind them; it is, at one level, a book made of talk. As such, it both gestures towards Irish-language orature and to modernist experiments with literary form. Ó Cadhain’s later works, such as the novella An Eochair (1953), confirm his status as an important and innovative Irish modernist whose critical reputation continues to grow and evolve.

‘Inventing the Novel in Irish, 1894–1970’ begins by noting the challenges that faced the prospect of a ‘modern Irish-language literature’ at the turn of the twentieth century. While there had been earlier long prose narratives in Irish, the first novel in Irish is Peadar Ó Laoghaire’s Séadna (1894), which established an expectation that novels in Irish would either deal with rural life, drawing on oral tradition, or else, like Ó Laoghaire’s next novel, Niamh (1907), would deal with Irish history or mythology. These expectations would come to feel like restrictions for later generations of Irish-language novelists; however, even from the outset, there were indications of a modern literature, such as Pádraic Ó Conaire’s Deoraidheacht (1910), set in London. The establishment of An Gúm in 1926 provided added impetus to the development of the range of the novel in Irish, leading eventually to Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s modernist masterpiece, Cré na Cille (1949).

Chapter 3 focuses on doing privacy by design for Clever Urban Computing systems, that is, interconnected physical sensors and AI-based data analytics embedded into buildings, streets, and wider-city infrastructures. Personal data is central to such systems, so accounting for privacy and data protection laws is critical. This chapter charts the emergence of Clever Urban Computing, from ‘smart cities’ towards AI urbanism. Examples show the problematic assumptions and problems underpinning many initiatives. ‘Smart buildings’ are analysed to foreground the longitudinal and infrastructural aspects of designing for privacy. Privacy by design and ‘data protection by design and default’ are analysed at length. Legal analysis concentrates on privacy as a value, alongside the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the EU Data Act 2023. New HCI-led approaches are proposed as examples of Accountable Design. This includes designing for consent through ‘consent trajectories’, developing a ‘privacy by participatory design’ approach, and user-centred data management. Empirical data from an expert interview presents why privacy is hard to design for.

American Cold War modernism served state interests during the cultural Cold War. The United States government used modernism in art, literature, music, and print to highlight American advancements and respect for individual expressions in a free society. Literary modernism was thus employed to undermine a communist campaign seen as totalitarian, outdated, and void of any room for individual expression. The main targets of American modernism were Western intellectuals who generally looked down on American culture. Haddadian-Moghaddam compares and contrasts early American Cold War cultural diplomacy initiatives in Iran and Afghanistan, including both book programs and motion pictures. These two neighboring countries have been historically related to each other in terms of religion (Shi‘i Islam for the majority of the population in Iran and Sunni Islam in Afghanistan) and languages (Persian, as one of the major languages spoken in Iran, and Dari, or Afghani Persian, and Pashto in Afghanistan). The chapter takes up scholarship on Cold War modernism and the United States Information Agency Book Translation Program’s operations in Afghanistan and Iran.

The Franklin Book Programs (FBP), an American translation and publishing initiative that operated from 1952 to 1978, opened an office in Baghdad in 1957. Based on an analysis of the entirety of the correspondence between the New York headquarters of FBP and its satellite office in Baghdad, a total of 3,771 documents – over 5,000 pages of material in all – held at the Harry Ransom Center, this chapter addresses the inner workings of Franklin’s Iraq office, with special attention to the FBP’s connections to Iraqi poet Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb and the Palestinian intellectual Jabrā Ibrāhīm Jabrā, who lived in Baghdad, as part of its translation activities. Overall, it follows the rise and demise of FBP Baghdad to offer further evidence of Franklin’s changing priorities during the 1960s, which track the realignment of global politics during the cultural Cold War.

All The Seas Were Ink tells its story from the perspective of Abu Bakar of Johor at sea. Johor provides a sweeping view of Asia, from Asia: comparative political thought in practice, and in motion. We observe the evolving international order as it was made sense of, and renegotiated: in ships, ports, court rooms, world exhibitions, marriages. We revisit the history of Islamic constitutionalism, the modern Muslim state, and its entanglements in the international, through encounters, from Johor to Constantinople, Tokyo, Hawaii, London, Chicago. We do this in order to: draw the Malay world into conversation with scholarship on global Islam, its interconnections and exchanges, its expansion and limits; place the making of Islamic law in the entanglements of an evolving international sphere, and the international into its imperial hierarchies; and to approach law’s mobility as a puzzle, rather than an assumption. An early example of a modern Muslim constitution, the Johor Constitution was experimental and many-voiced, elaborating tensions among ideas of rule as dynastic, monarchical, Islamic, and representative. Islamic constitutionalism thus emerges as a global genre of law in motion.

Chapter 5 focuses on responsibility as an ethical category in a newly articulated political community. Drawing from the intellectual and political work of Bengali writer Syed Waliullah, this chapter offers an analysis of his existential call to freedom in the service of a new postcolonial subjectivity. Canonized on both sides of post-partitioned Bengal, Waliullah’s oeuvre – fiction, drama, short stories, essays and paintings – though composed almost entirely abroad, draws on the land and landscapes of rural Bengal, as it does on certain paradigms of existential philosophy; his protagonists, for example, are wracked by a singular and terrible sense of responsibility. How might we understand this complex negotiation beyond the most basic ascriptions of belatedness and mimicry? Because he was based in Paris for most of his life after government posts in England, Germany, Indonesia, and Australia, I suggest self-translation, as a larger philosophical venture and as a way to understand a metaphysical or existential line of questioning in this work. In the process, we see that both “situation” and “responsibility” become newly imbued with meaning in the context of a rural, postcolonial Bengal.

Here at the end of Part II (Chapters 4-5), we discuss the ubiquity of translation across the broad theatre of Muslim constitutional and legal thought as a provocation for Islamic legal studies, comparative law, and comparative political theory. Translation provides a point of engagement for two broad avenues of engagement among these fields: firstly, in reading Islamic constitutionalism as a global genre of law in motion; and secondly, in critical rereadings of how histories of empire and the international matter for circulating legal imaginaries of Islam.

Chapter Five explores modern Islamic constitutions as texts in translation, and Islamic constitutionalism itself as a global genre of law in motion. For the first time in Southeast Asia, the Ottoman civil code was adopted as law, and the idea of Islam as the religion of the state emerged as a constitutional formulation. The translative processes that occurred once these legal instruments arrived provide insight into how law travels, in space and through time: through translations into local language, institutional orders and hierarchies, and through strategic non-translation and delayed translations into the vernacular. The meaning of Islam as the religion of the state, too, underwent translation, constituting a frame within which the Majalah would be understood. Chapter Five concludes with the travels of Islam as the religion of the state, a constitutional formulation which has had its longest continual existence in Johor. We consider the theoretical significance of this largely forgotten history: for rethinking the global history of modern Islamic constitutionalism and its entanglements with empire, the princely international, race, and the making of the modern Muslim state.

The past fifty years comprise a significant period of translation and curation. In addition to the kinds of translation and dual-language publication practices that were shaping the reception of contemporary Irish-language poetry, this era has been characterized by a great many anthologies of Irish poetry. While this chapter will not catalogue or summarize the many dozen anthologies of Irish poetry that have appeared in the past half century, it will shine a spotlight on several of the key anthologies of the period and investigate the conditions of their production and reception.

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill is perhaps the only modern poet in Irish to have gained a global readership. Part of the Innti generation that emerged from University College Cork, Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry immerses itself in Irish folklore while simultaneously torquing those stories, motifs, and patterns so that they might provide a means to represent and critique contemporary social, political, and linguistic conditions. Ní Dhomhnaill has supported translations of her work into English and the dual-language editions that have gained her such a wide audience, but one effect of the success of the dual-language volumes is that they have overshadowed Ní Dhomhnaill’s original Irish-only books, which are architecturally intricate and contain poems that do not make it into the dual-language volumes but also harder to find. This chapter will center Ní Dhomhnaill’s four major Irish-language collections and read them on their own terms, with a secondary focus on the appearance of her poetry in dual-language editions.

Charlotte Brooke’s Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789) had a significant effect on the course of Irish poetry – in both Irish and English – for more than a century after its publication. Part of an Isles-wide antiquarian project, Brooks’ book also stands at the beginning of a line of Irish anthologies that, in addition to constructing canons of Irish poetry, played significant roles in the political and cultural debates of the day. This chapter will examine the formation of a body of poetry, as well as an accompanying set of ideas about what Irish poetry is and was, through the line of important anthologies that appear in the period. It will also consider how these anthologies mediated between Irish-language poetry and English via translation and modes of presentation.

James Clarence Mangan crystallizes many of the key patterns and tendencies in nineteenth-century poetry in English, but he also sits athwart them. He was friends with Thomas Davis and published work in The Nation, but he also kept at a distance from the core of the Young Ireland group and also published a great deal in the Dublin University Magazine. He can be understood as a Romantic poet in a number of ways, although such a tag has perhaps as much to do with the course of his life as with the particularities of his verse. And he is perhaps best known for poems that are, on the one hand, framed as translations – from Irish, Persian, and Arabic – but that veer toward versions or free adaptations, and, on the other hand, poems that were presented as original compositions but that are closer to instances of translation. Despite not having published a volume of poetry in his lifetime, he may be the prototypical nineteenth- century Irish poet, and scholarly interest in his life and work remains high. This chapter considers Mangan’s writings and career within the context of the tumultuous historical period during which he lived.

Opening with Salih’s Season of Migration, the chapter uses an imaginary library devoid of Arabic books to question Arabic’s place in world literature. It rejects two temptations – adding Arabic as a simple supplement or isolating it as exceptional – and proposes modern Arabic literature as a field that reshapes questions of time, language, geography, and media. Surveying scholarship and canon formation, the editors trace and critique Nahda-origin periodizations, fuṣḥā/ʿāmmiyya binaries, nationalist gatekeeping, and regional frames such as Mashriq, Maghrib, Gulf, and exile. The volume’s four sections examine shifting temporalities, contested linguistic registers and translation, transnational geographies, and media histories from print to poetry and the novel. A final provocation reads Ahmed Naji’s prison library to ask why Arabic literature matters now, foregrounding contemporary reading, translation, and experimentation against state-sanctioned canons. Across case studies, the Companion offers methods and close readings that unsettle inherited categories while opening future paths for studying modern Arabic literature.