‘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.

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.

As it re-evaluates the foundational role of translation in shaping modern Arabic literature, this chapter challenges reductive narratives that portray translation as a mere one-way importation of European forms, instead revealing a rich legacy of literary exchange where Arabic literature has both absorbed and influenced global traditions. Through case studies spanning from the Nahda to post-9/11 publishing trends and prize circuits, the chapter demonstrates how translation mediates aesthetics, ethics, and cultural capital. It further analyzes the politics of domestication and foreignization in English translations of Arabic texts at several points in recent history. The chapter posits that Arabic literature has always been world literature, not solely through its export into English, but through its deep embeddedness in transhistorical and translingual circuits of exchange. Ultimately, translation is presented not as a secondary act, but as a constitutive force in Arabic literary modernity and its global reception.

This chapter traces an English Romantic poetics of heteromasculinist expression, a key example where heterosexual love dictates which works are worth reading globally as serious literature, to late eighteenth-century translators who “straightened” the famous Persian poet Shamsoddin Mohammad Hafiz Shirazi (ca. 1325–89) into a model of world literature. From Sir William Jones’s A Grammar of the Persian Language (1771) to Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát (1859), English translations that equate classical Persian poets with Anacreon (570–488 BC) – the Greek lyricist renowned for his bawdy drinking songs dedicated to beautiful male youths – transmitted to Romantic lyricism queer practices of imitative poetry-writing. Such contrasting social-literary relations counteract the heteronormativity universalized by colonial (mis)translators in homophilic collaboration with their Indo-Persian instructors. A salient example is the Lucknow-born Muslim nobleman Mirza Abu Talib Khan (1752–1806), whose Hafiz-style “Ode to London” shows how contentious were the (homo)erotic Romantic poetics of untranslatable genders for reading world literature straightly.

This chapter focuses on Thomas Percy’s multiple roles as antiquarian, archivist, translator, and literary historian in order to analyze the relationship between romantic periodization and world literature in translation. By placing Percy’s famous Reliques in the wider context of his published and unpublished “translations” from the Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Icelandic, Portuguese, and Spanish languages, this chapter argues that Percy’s protoromantic poetics is critically informed by his discovery of ancient world poetry. Percy’s romantic theory of primitive poetry as the most universal and therefore most translatable literature arguably grew out of his translation work; correlatively, his ambition to collect and popularize world literature conditioned and made possible his national poetics. Percy thus serves as a particularly rich case study of the complexities involved in using periodization in global contexts, and in defining national literary traditions in relation to a larger, imaginary archive of world literature.

A participant in the ongoing ontological turn in the humanities, this chapter argues for a new approach to World Literature. It contends that in the wake of the Anthropocene, World Literature must reinvent itself in order to remain – or perhaps become – relevant in and to the very world whose literature it professes to attend to. This claim is premised on the ever-more conspicuous disjunction or gap between the highly complex world unveiled by the historical processes and body of knowledge of the Anthropocene and the human-centered world paradigm with which comparative literature has been operating ever since its post-Cold War resurgence as World Literature under the auspices of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Weltliteratur and, subsidiarily, Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory. The gap, the chapter maintains, is epistemologically disabling: to be sure, we know and understand less than we should because of it. But, it also notes, World Literature scholars can close it by drawing on world models built by recent trends in philosophy and critical theory such as New Materialism, Object-Oriented Ontology, and speculative realism, which all take into account the role of more-than-human actors and objects generally in worldmaking and world-writing alike.

The historically overlapping discourses of romanticism and aesthetics frequently draw criticism for being mere ideology. “Ideology” here refers to a restricted worldview that misrecognizes itself as universal and suggests why romanticism is crucial to debates about world literature. Insisting on aesthetics as universal, romanticism helps to initiate a Eurocentric conception of world literature. But this criticism ignores the often-conflicted character of romantic writing in which an aesthetic machinery exposes universalism as built on exploitation. To fully grasp the stakes of such breakdowns one must further consider romantic-era texts that are not European. An exemplary instance is Hérard Dumesle’s 1824 political travel narrative Voyage dans le Nord D’Hayti. Drawing on European models, it proves paradoxically revealing in its account of Eurocentric aesthetics. Endorsing and ironizing universalism, it opens onto alternative conceptions of world literature by marking the limits of translatability and refusing to belong to any one world.

This chapter enacts a practice of “critical commonplacing” to assemble a new global archive of Romanticism, taking as its examples twentieth- and twenty-first-century remediations from Buenos Aires, New York, and Tokyo. Commonplacing a new Romantic archive finds a model in the world of collecting, which valorizes marginalia, marks, scratches, cut-and-pastes – capturing flashes of ephemera over static texts and images. From Japanese depictions of Mary Shelley’s creature as bakemono, to Julio Cortázar’s biography on John Keats during the Latin American Boom, to Audre Lorde and Diane Di Prima’s schooldays clique “The Branded,” this chapter expands the archive of Romanticism beyond 1780–1830, across different languages and media. Turning away from the anthology and canon, this approach replaces static texts with the dynamic media of seemingly fleeting forms, often ephemeral and ghostly dispersed. Each example showcases the experimental quality of commonplacing, aligned with progressive youth culture, learning, and play.

This chapter yokes sartorial fashion and the literary trends that cultural colossus Rabindranath Tagore shapes and critiques in the early twentieth century. Bringing the figure of the dandy to a global stage in his late novel Shesher Kobita or Farewell Song (also translated as The Last Poem, 1928), Tagore lightly cloaks a manifesto on self-fashioning, modernist literary form, and the power of style. Farewell Song not only draws upon the history of textiles in Bengal, but also occasions a contest of fashions between British and Bengali forms of dress. The ensuing debate between Fashion and Style speaks across aesthetic fields and serves to highlight India’s rightful place on the modernist literary stage.

This introductory chapter examines the life, oeuvre, and contested legacy of Pablo Neruda against the backdrop of contemporary debates about cultural memory, ethics, and artistic value. Beginning with recent episodes of public denunciation in Chile, it situates Neruda within a broader dilemma: how to read and evaluate the work of canonical authors whose biographies reveal profound moral failures. The introduction traces Neruda’s evolution as a poet, diplomat, and political actor, highlighting the breadth of his literary production, from love poetry and avant-garde experimentation to epic, politically engaged verse and elemental odes. Rather than offering hagiography or cancellation, it argues for a contextualized reading that recognizes both the gravity of Neruda’s transgressions and the enduring influence of his work on world literature, politics, and cultural imagination. It frames the volume as a collective effort to read Neruda critically, historically, and globally.

This chapter addresses Pablo Neruda’s poetry as world literature. It discusses the prominence that models such as Franco Moretti’s assign to the novel and to Paris or other Western capitals as centers of canonization. It examines the circulation of Neruda’s poetry in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc in the late 1940s and early 1950s to conclude that it is inaccurate to claim that Latin American literature did not enter the international market until the 1960s when the novel received attention in the West. The conclusions argue that a study of the international circulation of literature that is not politically biased or Eurocentric requires an analysis of the translation and publication itineraries of poetry and beyond Europe and the Anglophone market.

Scholarship rarely, if ever, reads Mashreq transregionalism with Algerian literature in French, treating these corpuses as non-conversant at best – and silent enemies at worst. By identifying systems of interacting with texts as interpretive sensibilities, I move away from proper languages as the grounds for a historically troubled comparison. Instead, I investigate differing understandings of polysemy in these two literary systems. Poststructuralist reading methods, which emerged in tandem with Maghrebi literatures after decolonization and remain predominant in academic literary studies, valorize polysemy as a sign of emancipatory reading. In contrast, Mashreq transregionalists associated ambiguities of reading with coercive, state-supported hermeneutics that deprive readers of interpretive autonomy. Drawing on critical essays, calls for print reform, and an interview with Youssef, this chapter outlines a new comparative method for literatures across Maghreb and Mashreq, French and Arabic, founded in plural interpretive sensibilities, or systems of interacting with texts.

This chapter introduces the anti-colonial ideology of Arab nationalism, which in its popular form established a transregional culture of resistance to oppression and injustice. Progressive writers of the decolonization generation, the author shows, mapped their new literary system’s imaginative and circulational scale according to the experience that they believed it must represent and amplify: a shared political experience they called “Arab.” The chapter then discusses the key concepts of Arab scale and transregionalism. It outlines their nuanced entanglements between national and world literatures, and notes the significance of embedded, internal scales that texture and differentiate the system under study. Overall, the chapter argues that a major expression of twentieth-century Arabic literature produced itself as a set of print culture practices, literary themes, and interpretive norms in response to evolving ideas of Arab experience and emancipation.

The introduction sets out the central question and critical framework of this book. It presents the debates around the book’s three keywords: risk, play and Franco–East Asian literatures. It proposes a new comparative reading of world literature that is not based on canonicity, the global circulation of literature via English translations or identity categories.

This is the conclusion of the book. It reiterates my argument that in literature, risk is a necessary and creative force, an aesthetic category before anything else. It ends by proposing Franco–East Asian literatures as one form of world literature, one that is based on the aesthetic experience offered by particular texts, the potential for critical interactions between them and the imaginative comparison of literary traditions and areas that have traditionally been seen as separate.

The poet who seems to have had the largest role in determining Cohen’s decision to practice that art was the Spanish writer Federico García Lorca, whom Cohen first read as teenager. Cohen’s song “Take This Waltz” is a translation of one of Lorca’s poems, and Cohen named his daughter Lorca. Another influence was the thirteenth-century Persian poet, Rumi, whom Cohen called “probably the greatest ascetic religious poet – in the same league as King David.” When Cohen studied briefly at Columbia University, he encountered the Beat movement, which influenced him in a number of ways, though it had little impact on the form of his poems. His writing always had a broad range of reference, from the Bible and ancient mythologies to modernism and postmodernism. His novel Beautiful Losers is reckoned a manifestation of international postmodernism, and, if Cohen’s first literary contexts were Montreal and Canada, his songs and records have had a large international audience. This chapter moves Cohen from a Canadian to a more global context, exploring the cosmopolitan origins of his work.

This chapter begins with outlining the repeated appeal from non-Indigenous Australians to share in the heritage of First Nations people without recognition of the ongoing impact of colonialism. It argues that one devastating consequence was the loss or endangering of many first languages of Australia. The chapter considers the relationship between poetry, language and Country, described by Alexis Wright as ‘library land’. Foregrounding the immeasurable significance of these archives of land and lived cultural practice, the chapter details the differences between Aboriginal oral traditions and the translation of Indigenous song poetry into a written context. Aboriginal women’s poetry of mourning and lament, milkarri, is discussed, the chapter pointing out that the power of such songs remains with those to whom the songs belong and the Country that has created the songs. It turns attention to attempted translations of Aboriginal song into English by Eliza Dunlop and then more contemporary translations of Indigenous oral traditions, such as John Bradley’s bilingual book co-authored by Yanuwa families, Stuart Cooke’s translation of Kimberley song cycles, and the Queensland University Press bilingual anthologies of Aboriginal song cycles. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the translation history of the Moon Bone cycle.