Document Type
Introduction
Abstract
[First paragraph]
The idea of this issue is to consider the possibility of Babelian performances in the context of scholarly mediations on multilingual realities in translation. The idea came to me as I was reading John le Carré’s 2007 novel A Most Wanted Man. While generic conventions have long prescribed at least one polyglot character per spy novel—often the spy himself—le Carré goes out of his way to represent in his post-cold-war fiction the traffic in languages that the locale demands. Set in Hamburg amid the war on terrorism and the global traffic in capital in the first decade of the 21st century, the author’s obsessive signaling at every turn which language is spoken by and among the multilingual cast of characters who inhabit the metropolis—German, Turkish, English, Arabic, Russian, and Chechen—got me to imagine what a film adaptation of this English language novel would do with these incessant shifts in language, indicative of linguistic inadequacies as much as instrumental to the plotting. For a film, hypothetically, might be better equipped to represent the dialogue in various languages by resorting to subbing, the use of subtitles. This way of reading the novel as—at least as far as the dialogue is concerned—a series of subtitles would suggest that le Carré’s text is something like a simulated translation, evoking the specter of an original where there is none.
Repository Citation
Flury, Angela, and Hervé Regnauld. "Introduction." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 11, no. 1, 2011, pp. 1–4. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol11/iss1/1