A tradition ‘closed in on itself and defensive’ is a good description of the way authors and their writings tended to be straitjacketed from the Renaissance until the twentieth century into concepts of national literatures. For Johann Gottfried von Herder, who first theorised this idea, the national character of a literature was considered to be fixed in terms of a series of traits, and literary histories were composed and taught in such a way that they tended to be closed in upon themselves, and limited in their openness to foreign influences. Even the various periods of national traditions rendered them difficult to compare, as the confusion surrounding the use of the term modernism in different European contexts testifies.

Yet it was modernism, as we intend this term in English, that began the process of eroding national borders in favour of considering authors and texts as part of fluid, complex, and international literary spaces, as Pascale Casanova describes them in her book La république mondiale des lettres (1999), translated as The World Republic of Letters (2004). Valery Larbaud, back in 1927, declared that all which is national ‘is silly, archaic and disreputably patriotic’ and imagined instead an ‘intellectual International’. Sounds great, but how feasible is it? Australian writers, like writers from other post-colonial countries, are long used to thinking about themselves in relation to multiple literary spaces: from the local, the national, the imperial and the variously international. One of the most tyrannical literary spaces, however, has always been, and remains, that of language. National boundaries may have become more permeable, but can the same be said for linguistic ones? Translators hope not, and this issue of Southerly considers that question from multiple points of view.

I am not convinced that special issues on translation are particularly useful. They run the risk of appearing a hotchpotch. Why should the fact that they have been translated by Australians be enough to give two otherwise disparate texts any cohesion? There is something to be said for publishing some translated material on a regular basis, but the tendency has been to segregate translation into one-off issues or specialist journals such as Modern Poetry in Translation. What we do take out of reading this Southerly is a sense of how many varied voices there are in the world republic of letters. But how much more strongly would we feel this if the original texts had been published alongside the translations (at the very least in the case of the poetry)? David Brooks writes in his editorial that there must inevitably be in Australia the common playing field of the English language, even though we are a multiculture.

Sure, but while it’s one thing to have a common ground of English, it’s another to have an awareness that English is not the only linguistic medium. There is the question of making the other language visible. Even the most foreignising approach to translation cannot rival printing the source text alongside the English for bringing this home. And it needs to be brought home, because, while we may be a multicultural and multilingual society at large, the dominant spaces of Australian literature, to our detriment, remain monolingual.

As to the material itself in this issue, titled Golden Tongues: The arts of translation, it is rich and varied. I particularly enjoyed John Tranter’s modern adaptations of Baudelaire, and the chance to read a new (in English) Thomas Bernhard story twice. The two poems by Lionel Fogarty remind us that translation can indeed be conceived as a multiple art. Rather than versions of a particular source text, these poems seem to be written out of the interaction between the multiple languages and identities of the poet. Similarly, Ouyang Yu’s personal musings about the differences between particular expressions in Chinese and English sees translation as an everyday activity investigating the way languages construct selves. He writes at a certain point, ‘Afterwards, I remember hearing someone on TV referring to someone else as duo xin (much heart). This defies translation, which is good, because in translation one always looks for the translatable while avoiding the untranslatable.’

From a similar linguistic geography, Simon Patton writes thoughtfully of his experiences of translating Chinese poetry; while back in Europe, Vrasidas Karalis introduces us to the Greek poet Andreas Aggelakis. As with previous issues, this Southerly contains extra material online, where I was pleased to discover the Uruguayan poet Jorge Palma, translated here by Peter Boyle.