Fixers : Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature

In this book, Zrinka Stahuljak issues a challenge to scholars working in medieval studies to account for the history of translation, and to experts in translation studies to read the work of medievalists. Focusing on the term fixer," she unpacks modern uses of the words "interpreter" and "translator" and restores them to their premodern origins: as an active agent who performed a wide range of tasks, as insider informant, local guide, broker of knowledge, and transmitter of art. For Stahuljak, the fixer was a multifunctional intermediary, not a mere translator or interpreter (in the restricted modern sense), but an enabler, facilitator, and mediator, the engine driving the exchange of multiple linguistic, social, cultural, and topographic forms of knowledge. She proposes a paradigmatic shift for both medieval literary history and for the history of translation to confront and interrogate each other in their core disciplinary practices, which promote national, political, and colonial agendas masked as neutrality. Surveying a variety of texts from 1250 to 1500, including crusade treatises and travel writings, accounts of pilgrims and spies, chronicles and romances in both prose and verse, and traversing an impressive range of languages, including Latin, Middle French, German, Italian, and Spanish, Stahuljak asks both medievalists and translation studies scholars to reconsider their assumptions and methods as a way to reconstruct a premodern, precolonial, inclusive world literature"--

• | Author: Zrinka Stahuljak
• | Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• | Publication Date: Jan 26, 2024
• | Number of Pages: 358 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 0226830403
• | ISBN-13: 9780226830407