Guest Editorial

In January 2001, I went to hear the writer and translator Ammiel Alcalay speak about his work during a book launch that was hosted by the Vancouver-based Kootenay school of writing. Although this special section on French-language books was far from my mind when I attended the event, I found myself taking copious notes about the process of translation and the issue of what Alcalay called `̀ response and responsibility'' from which it is inseparable. Alcalay had recently cotranslated and edited the first survivor's account to appear in English of a victim held in a Serb concentration camp (Dizdarevic, 1994) and was questioning what effect a translated text can have in a world that is largely indifferent to it and, as in that instance, is the primary cause of the tragedies the original narrative issues from. From that standpoint, he went on to ask more broadly what processes determine which texts become authoritative or remain obscure. How do we identify what knowledges are suppressed because of the academic, which are also linguistic, cultures whereby we acquire knowledge? Even more crucial: how do we create a space for `foreign' literatureöor criticism, theory, geographical studiesöwhere it is the dominant context that is altered to take in these new meanings and not the other way around? As he spoke, I thought about the experience of watching foreign films where reading subtitles is complicated by the sounds and expressions of the original language. That meaning in translation is only approximate is a convention we accept when viewing subtitled moviesöor rather, a fact we cannot forget when lips are still moving even though the words have long run out. In comparison, written translations can be extremely impoverished as they often strive to eliminate every trace of a native context. As a student of translation I was told that a `good' translation is transparent, the text reading as though it could not have been produced in any other language. This assumption suggests to me that translation cannot but be at the forefront of a critical geography, and of a critical geography movement trying not to homogenize but to build on the differences that are expressed in diverse geographical traditions. In their attempt to open dialogue around the dominance of so-called AngloAmerican geography, the special book reviews that have so far appeared in this journal have reflected on many of the questions listed above and reminded us of the extent to which the movement from one language to anotheröwhether in formal translation or when people express themselves in a second languageötends to cover over its own traces. It is precisely to raise these questions that the books selected had to be unavailable in English and that the reviewers were encouraged to highlight for their readers how these works challenge and expand dominant Anglophone geographical traditions. In his introduction to the review of Italian books, John Agnew alerted us to the fact that ``When concepts and research findings are `borrowed' from other linguistic worlds there is also the danger that they are plucked without attention to the contexts in which they developed'' (2000, page 290). This is an issue that pertains to written texts but also to the ways in which non-Anglo geographers often face the challenge of translating themselves and their thoughts `on the spot', whether speaking publicly in conferences or during more informal exchanges with English-speaking colleagues. Claudio Minca referred to this as `̀ the condition of living in incessant and permanent translation between two or more cultural universes'' (2000, page 287). Guest editorial Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2002, volume 20, pages 1 ^ 25