Ferrying a Thinker Across Time and Language: Bakhtin, Translation, World Literature

This article is an attempt to understand how the work of a thinker travels across time, and what journeying through languages and cultures has to do with these peregrinations. There is more at stake in this process than the certainty of canonization would suggest. Building on my previous work, I want to examine the principal trajectories of appropriating Bakhtin in the West since the 1960s; this will allow me to revisit the question of Bakhtin’s longevity, and the potential of his work to gain traction in current debates on world literature. The agenda of reviving and opening up modern languages is inseparable from thinking through its encounters within the practice of translation, and Bakhtin’s work can serve as a litmus test of appropriation that involves constant meta-reflexion on what constitutes translation in different cultural zones.