Scales of Translation: ALTA48 Keynote Address by Karen Emmerich
I. Nation-state // city // neighborhood // body
One evening a few weeks ago, I walked from the neighborhood in Athens where I am currently living—a working-class neighborhood where roughly a third of residents are first- or second generation immigrants—to see a play titled “Το δράμα της δημοκρατίας,” which etymology invites me to translate with a pair of potentially false friends as “The Drama of Democracy.” A friend’s son was in the pay, and while the performances were good, the play itself was (to the two of us) a bit of a flop, but in a way interesting enough to warrant me telling you about it today: it was a mashup of (unattributed) modern Greek translations of quotations from fifth-century Athenian texts—by Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, and so on—pronouncing on the ideals of the Athenian polis and the benefits and challenges of democracy as a political system, mashed up yet again with depictions of various mechanisms of contemporary nation-state self-perpetuation: high school classroom close readings of those ancient texts, polling stations on election day, live streamed protests, etc. In the midst of this frenetic jumble of quotes and micro-vignettes was one singularly moving scene, which presented the entire Melian dialogue from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, a stylized diplomatic negotiation between delegations from the powerful Athenian empire and the island of Melos, in which the Athenians try to bully the Melians into submitting to occupation, and the Melians call on justice, divine intervention, and the help of their allies to allow them to maintain independence, only to be invaded and utterly annihilated by the Athenian army. As the scene progressed, the room grew heavy with the awareness of the past two years of the mass destruction of Palestinian lives and the unequal terms not only of the violence itself but of any eventual end to the violence. We had suddenly shifted out from the closed loop of a supposedly continuous but compromised Hellenism to a broader world context in which ruthless imperialism is shown to nestle at democracy’s very heart. To use a phrase often attributed to Aristotle, the scales in that moment had turned—through what we might call a shifting of methodological scales, a panning out to get a broader or differently contextualized view.
And then the loop closed once again, and the play zoomed in again to the toggling between the Athens of Pericles and 2025. And while the show ended with another opening of sorts, inviting audience members to voice their thoughts on how to make Athens specifically a more just and democratic place, the conversation remained caught in that localized loop, in a way that peculiarly seemed not to recognize or address any of the ways in which the global has thoroughly permeated that cityscape. People chimed in with grievances, ideas, quibbling with the question itself—until we arrived at the speaker who would become the last speaker, and therefore would get the last word, whose comments felt in hindsight, to me, almost inevitable. And now, like Thucydides in the Melian dialogue, I’m stylizing, paraphrasing the content of those comments: μπράβο, παιδιά, congrats to you all, actors, playwright, theater, this whole noble effort to remind us of the deep roots of democracy in our country, to return us to the words of the Greeks of the past, of our ancestors. “Η Ελλάδα μας,” he said, our Greece, “έχει βαθιές ρίζες, και πρέπει να τις ποτίσουμε,” our Greece has deep roots, and we need to water them, with our words and our actions. Our Greece, this speaker said, to a room full of people who could, for all he knew, have been from anywhere— for instance an American skulking in the middle of the front row, whose alarm bells went off at the sound of that μας, that our, that possessive pronoun that both includes and excludes, that stakes a claim and confers belonging in a group to some at the same time as it imposes non-belonging on others. The assumption of that our, spoken in Greek to an audience who had shown up to see a play in Greek, in a business district in the cultural and political capital of Athens, was one of like addressing like. What possibilities might there have been to make space in that room for the voices and thoughts and experiences of individuals and groups beyond that we? For instance, of the Melians, all kinds of Melians, beyond that one allegorical cameo? What possibilities might there be to try to create a literary culture in Greece that is open to the voices and thoughts and experiences of the currently dispossessed? What would it be like to be a translator of that literature?
After twenty-five years as a translator and scholar of Greek-language literature, I am no longer surprised by the omnipresence of the “we” and the “our”: our language, our country, our past, the glorious works of our ancestors, and so on and so forth. In fact, this utterly mundane experience at the theater has been repeated in countless variations and venues during my years of navigating the cultural space of Greece and of Greek-language writing. I’m also no longer surprised by the way this “our” doesn’t land oddly on the ears of my unproblematically Greek friends, even though they would surely counter it if asked. But it still jabs me uncomfortably, even makes me angry, as I walk back up through streets that stand witness every day to the disproportionate suffering of certain classes of non-we: not the me non-we, the professional class transnationals who seem to be popping up everywhere, shaping certain parts of the city and casting the dirty runoff of our wealth on other residents of Athens, but people like the ones who attend the neighborhood school my child currently attends, or their parents—the non-citizen natives of Greece, or the recently arrived, the displaced from elsewhere, the otherized, the frequently racialized as belonging only, if at all, by virtue of the generosity of “actual” Greeks who can convincingly (to other such Greeks) lay claim to a certain imagined lineage.
Why open a keynote addressed to a room of translators with a story about the persistence and exclusive force within the Greek cultural sphere of racialized understandings of Greekness? The truth is that I had planned, researched, and outlined an entirely different talk, but what you just heard is more or less what came out when I sat down to write, and I chose to follow the hunch that it mattered. I’m currently writing an academic book about literary citizenship and rhetorics of belonging in the modern Greek sphere, and while the book doesn’t address translation specifically, it does reflect concerns that grow out of my life as a translator. After all, those rhetorics of belonging are intimately related not only to the creation of literary fields as such but also to some of the ways in which we talk about or conceptualize the work of literary translation. For instance, in the Greek press I have more than once been referred to as an “ambassador for Greek literature,” a term that may resonate with some of you who also translate from so-called “less common” or “lesser spoken” languages. This phrase, “ambassador for Greek literature,” invokes the existence of some thing identified as “Greek,” generally understood to be bounded by geography, genealogy, and/or language, as well as a broader outside that my activities as a translator open up to particular works, authors, even the conceptual field of “Greek literature” as a whole. My translations become a speaking-for, without my being-of. Among literary folk in Greece, I am often praised and thanked for this speaking-for; I am also often granted my own rhetorical form of belonging—είσαι δικιά μας, you’re one of us—that is simultaneously an act of bordering and exclusion: to have to declare me as part of the “μας” clearly indicates that I in fact am not.
Not belonging in the way that I don’t belong brings a host of privileges, especially when combined with a linguistic belonging to the Anglosphere and a political and cultural belonging to the U.S. But it also opens up the possibility of charges of misunderstanding, mistreatment, misrepresentation, defiling, looting, complicity or collusion in the organized crime of extraction and domination that the world literary market is sometimes understood to be. These are not charges that have been leveled at me yet, as far as I’m aware. But the possibility is always there, and it’s one I take seriously. In a sense, the role “ambassador of X literature,” even if unwillingly assumed, comes with a political responsibility to scale out from the focused work we perform on and with specific literary texts, to consider—at every turn, really—the other scales on which our work as translators operates and has force. Yet I also want to invite us to scale in and view from up close the entities we call “Greece” or “Greek literature,” by way of example, to see the oppressive force of that presumed unity, as well as the continual ideological labor it takes to keep the presumption up.
In considering the issue of scale, I’m thinking with Nirvana Tanoukhi, who draws on terminology from the field of human geography to consider the various contexts in which literary works and literature as a category can be considered. Where is literature located? Where are particular literary works located? What are the consequences of treating a work as belonging to or existing on a particular local or national or regional or transnational scale? How do processes on different scales intersect, interact, come into tension? How, as translators, are our lives and work bound up in multiple scales at once, and how do those scales come together or collide? And does the work of translation prime us for reflecting on issues of scale in ways other kinds of work might not?
I think what I’m proposing is that it does. During my evening at the theater, I brought my translating self, this translator’s body with its years of experience negotiating the often conflicting terms of engagement set by the overlapping scales of neighborhood, city, nation-state, and globe, to a space that held all those scales in itself at once, and made them visible certainly to me, if perhaps not to others. We might think, then, of translation—or, better, of the various kinds of effort or awareness or acuity involved in being a person who translates—as a habit of continual scale switching.
II. Versions of “translation”
The thing about scale, though, is that you can always go bigger or smaller, and when you’re caught up in one, it’s easy to forget about others. Ten years ago, I was just starting to sketch out a plan for a scholarly book on translation. The book is called Literary Translation and the Making of Originals, and looking back at it now, I see it as invested in bringing together at least two scales of thinking about translation: an individual or personal scale arising out of repeated experiences of being asked to translate literary works whose “originals” kept popping up in different textual or bibliographic versions or variations; and a broader scale of Anglophone discourse about translation that spoke—and still speaks—about “originals” and “sources” as if they were unproblematic terms. The very first translation I ever published was of a novel that had appeared in multiple Greek language editions ranging over decades and differing in length by hundreds of pages; I was tasked by the U.S. publisher with cutting the author’s preferred version, which clocked in at about 800 pages, down to create a 350-page English translation. Another early project was a collection of short stories that didn’t exist as such in Greek, but that the author and I put together for the purpose of the English edition. A few years later, I chose to base my translations of Eleni Vakalo’s poetry on the first editions, which look quite different in terms of the layout of the work on the pages and spreads than the later collected edition that most readers in Greece would have access to. After a series of experiences like this, I started to shift the scale of my thinking outward in two ways: first, to consider the literary work as something that could accommodate all these versions, in and between languages; and second, to consider this not just as a series of isolated cases I had happened to bump up against, but rather as a fundamental part of what we do as translators. I came to think of this as a question of the one and the many: any given literary work is generally taken to be a single, unified thing, yet will be represented in the world by many discrete objects and texts, from abridged versions to revised editions to pirated editions to editions with notes and introductions to translations (also with or without notes and introductions, revised, abridged, pirated, and so on) to audiobook or staged performances, and the list goes on. But we could also think of this as a shifting of scales, a scaling in or out, to particular texts or to the broader work those texts are taken to represent. This same scaling in and out is something we could do for other presumed unities, as well: the unity of something called “Greece” or “Greek literature,” or even the unity of something called “Greek”—and I recall here Naoki Sakai’s description of the unity of a language as a “regulative idea” rather than a reality in the world, i.e. as something that organizes knowledge but is not empirically verifiable.
But I want to linger for a bit on the relationship between work and text and the continuity between translation and the many other forms of textual (and non-textual) mediation that works of literature regularly endure. In a fabulous 2019 article, Brian Baer amplified Doug Robinson’s call to “de-sacralize” the notion of the “original”—which, Brian added, has been entirely “undertheorized, making it perhaps the greatest unknown of Translation Studies” (227). In a piece tracking the different sources for five separate Finnish translations of a novel by Jules Verne, Laura Ivaska and Suri Huuhtanen echo Brian’s point when they ask, “How does translation studies define source text? Rather vaguely, if at all, it seems.” There is, they note, no article on “source text” or even “text” in any editions of any of the several available handbooks of translation studies, and point out that in many cases (almost all cases?) “the translator may be the only one with access to and/or knowledge of what the ST(s) of a particular translation were” (315). And of course there is the brilliant work of Matthew Reynolds, who has directed a series of collaborative research projects on what he calls “prismatic translation,” focusing not on the textual instability of so-called originals but on the way translation proliferates sometimes radically different texts that are all taken to represent a single work. In the 900-page collected volume Prismatic Jane Eyre that resulted from a project in which researchers tried to track down every text circulating in the world that was taken by readers to be a translation of Charlotte Brontë’s novel, Reynolds and his team put forward an understanding of a given literary work as the sum total—an ever-growing total—of the various versions taken to represent it. Jane Eyre, then, isn’t just an English novel, but “a world work, co existing in at least 618 translations, by at least as many translators, and spreading over an ever extending period of years—currently 176—into at least 68 languages” (11), each with its own history of critical and readerly reception. The source, meanwhile, isn’t “a fixed point of origin to which translations orient themselves and from which they diverge,” but rather “a multiplicitous and shifting entity, which the translational imagination enters and re-makes” (5).
Prismatic Jane Eyre is a project that works on multiple scales at once: individual researchers take on particular linguistic or geographic contexts, examining versions of Jane Eyre that might be much shorter than Brontë’s English version(s), or have different plot twists or characters, while the project as a whole scales out, accepting these differences as a part of how works of literature grow and change in different contexts. But as a reader (and fan) of Prismatic Jane Eyre who is also a translator, I have trouble knowing what to do with the potential global scale of any given work when I’m sitting down to translate, or when I’m thinking about the ethics of a particular act or product of translation. Translation always introduces differences, sometimes quite radical ones; potential sources for a translation can also differ greatly from one another. But how does acknowledging this on a large scale as an accurate description of how translation functions in the world intersect with the cultivation of daily micro-practices of translation?
The last chapter of Literary Translation and the Making of Originals, my academic book about translation, is about Jack Spicer’s 1957 After Lorca, which contains translations and pseudo translations of Federico García Lorca, as well as letter-style meditations about poetry and translation, signed “Love, Jack” and addressed to “Dear Lorca,” and an introduction supposedly written by Lorca himself, who at that point was over three decades in the grave. Spicer engages in translations that seem to many critics like mis-translations (for instance, using “thumbs” rather than something like “gesture” to translate “ademán”)—but he also articulates a rationale for doing so that questions the terms upon which such judgements are often made. I quote here a passage from one of the letters to Lorca:
Things do not connect; they correspond. That is what makes it possible for a poet to translate real objects, to bring them across language as easily as he can bring them across time. That tree you saw in Spain is a tree I could never have seen in California, that lemon has a different smell and a different taste, BUT the answer is this—every place and every time has a real object to correspond with your real object—that lemon may become this lemon, or it may even become this piece of seaweed, or this particular color of gray in this ocean. One does not need to imagine that lemon; one needs to discover it.
Even these letters. They correspond with something (I don’t know what) that you have written (perhaps as unapparently as that lemon corresponds to this piece of seaweed) and, in turn, some future poet will write something which corresponds to them. That is how we dead men write to each other. (133-134)
Spicer, who opposed the ideological grounds of copyright and claimed, tongue in cheek, that his own poems were written by Martians, perceived of this correspondence with Lorca and his work as one that other translators, poets, or poet-translators could then pick up and carry forward: “When I’m through,” he wrote to his friend Robin Blaser while at work on the project, “I’d like someone as good as I am to translate these translations into French (or Pushtu) adding more” (Spicer 1987: 47).
This passage from After Lorca will likely never cease to be one of my favorite statements on translation. I love its critique of equivalence. I love its questioning of what counts as a mistake or a mistranslation. But I’m nervous about how I ended this chapter and therefore my book as a whole: by suggesting that more translators (and specifically ones who don’t also self-identify as poets) might want to take Spicer as a model to emulate, to start to loosen the bonds of an internalized expectation of equivalence. To some extent, or in some ways, yes, sure, of course. Then again, what do we do when power enters the equation? And, of course, power always enters the equation, in dispersed rather than centered ways. As Kavita Bhanot and Jeremy Tiang write in their introduction to Violent Phenomena, “every aspect of translation is political” (12)—and it’s political in different ways, I would suggest, depending on the scale or scales we’re considering. Certainly the apparent stability of “originals” I critiqued in my book has a lot to do with the power dynamics associated with the official discourse of nation-states. But how, for instance, do we read my call, or Spicer’s translatorial correspondence with the dead Lorca, in light of Mona Kareem’s piece in Bhanot and Tiang’s volume, titled “Western Poets Kidnap Your Poems and Call Them Translations: On the Colonial Phenomenon of Rendition as Translation”? I don’t mean to suggest that Mona is anti-Spicer. She says outright that she “hold[s] no objections against adaptation as a form of translation,” nor is she interested in “guarding definitions of translation.” Her piece focuses specifically on the phenomenon of Anglophone poets with little to no knowledge of a given language or literature teaming up with so-called native speakers in a form of “collaboration distinct for its uneven power relations.” She argues that this constitutes a “co-opting of literary translation [that] speaks of a larger attitude toward non-Western literatures” (144). The resulting translations, Mona writes, present “a form of textual violence” (145). As I understand it, the violence is operating on multiple scales at once: any individual instance is overlaid by a whole history of extractive translation, directionally from the non-West to the West. Implicit in Mona’s piece, as I read it, is an insistence that thinking on a world historical scale should be—and is so often not—part of any conceptualization of the work of translation, including the ones that fuel the mundane daily activities that make up our lives as translators.
In other words, it’s one thing to describe the exponential growth of a literary work when the movement—as with Jane Eyre—is from an imperial center outwards, and another to describe the growth of literary works from colonies or former colonies or post-colonies or crypto-colonies into the languages of the west, and still another to describe the growth of literary works from one colony or crypto-colony to another, and so on and so forth. It’s also one thing to trace the movement of a work through languages, places, and times and another altogether to consider what to do when facing a text (or texts) that you are responsible for helping to grow into a different text (or texts). How much does it help or hinder me, as I sit down to translate a collection of poetry or short fiction or a play by a contemporary Greek author, to place what I am doing as on a conceptual par with Spicer’s pseudotranslative translations? Or with some of the practices of abridgement, expansion, or freewheeling alteration that gave rise to the world Jane Eyre? Are there better and worse scales on which to be thinking in that moment? How many scales come into play in the process of translating—each day as we sit down at our desk, or during the entire production of a particular book from first read to published version, or over the course of a lifetime as a person who translates? How can we best cultivate habits of reflection about the scales we’re operating on at any given moment? Because, I’d like to suggest, reflecting on scale, or keeping the notion in mind that translation operates on all these different scales, can also encourage us to scale even further out, or in, or both, with any project we come across. This is not to say that we can’t ever settle—on the contrary, settling on and defending a particular scale or scales for a project seems like a necessary part of the process. I’m just saying we should make sure we know that’s what we’re doing.
III. “Do we say that in English?”
Since the formulation of my first anecdote about “The Drama of Democracy,” I’ve been to the theater again, to see another play that wormed its way into my thinking about this talk. This one, by Vaggelis Hatziyannidis, was titled Κέικ, which I translate for you with what is again a potentially false friend, Cake. The play takes place in a single apartment in a building in the heart of Athens, where four residents meet to address a complaint about one of them (but which one?) habitually throwing trash bags off their balcony and habitually missing the dumpster below. One of the characters is not Greek, and his non-Greekness makes him an object of suspicion for certain other residents of the building.
The play is not a comedy; in fact, it’s quite dark. But there was a lot of laughter in the audience, mostly arising from hyperbolic performances, including what felt to me a deeply unfortunate caricature of the non-Greek character. When the play was over, I went home and immediately read the published script for the play, or at least the parts involving the non-Greek character. The text was published in 2014. In it, the character’s name is Agrón, which other characters continually mispronounce as Árgon; we are given to understand that Agrón is a first-generation immigrant from Albania, living as a single parent with his adolescent son. In the production I saw, the character’s name is changed to Akbar: his foreignness is displaced—made, in a sense, more foreign, or simply updated to maintain its relevance, since the last wave of mass migration from Albania to Greece is now quite some time in the past. The other characters’ names, meanwhile, don’t change: Petros is Petros, Babis is Babis, Sasa is Sasa, but Agrón is exchanged for Akbar. In the printed text, Agrón speaks Greek extremely well, in language marked by some of the typical grammatical characteristics of Greek as spoken specifically by individuals who learned Albanian first and came to Greek both informally and as adults. In the production I saw, Akbar—played, I should note, by an actor I would characterize as unproblematically Greek—also speaks Greek quite well, but far less well than Agrón; he is given a kind of indeterminate accent, and the text is changed to accommodate a greater degree of otherizing, including a brief moment in which he steps out onto the balcony to call his child, speaking to him barely audibly in a language that may or may not be language. He is also made histrionic, laughable, with pratfalls and gaffes that turn his foreignness into an object of amusement.
To put it very bluntly, the play I saw in the theater seemed like a casually racist play, and seemed to be enjoyed by at least some of my fellow theatergoers for that reason among others. The play I read later that night seemed to me far closer to anti-racist, in ways that had everything to do with the care its author took to articulate a particular form of fluent but nonstandard Greek that avoids caricature: Agrón’s version of Greek exists in the script on a plane with other characters’ class- or social-group-coded uses of their own versions of perhaps more “fluent” but similarly nonstandard Greek. In fact, seen in that light, you could even say that Κέικ, in its published form, disrupts the very idea of standard language as such.
As it happens, Greek is a language with a robust history of vigorous debate about what constitutes a proper literary language. I won’t give you the whole long story, but around the time of the revolution against the Ottoman Empire and the creation of a new Greek state in the early 19th century, a debate arose between proponents of creating an archaizing version of Greek that would draw on the grammar and vocabulary of the classical Greek that was so crucial to Western European thinkers from the Renaissance on, or consolidating and standardizing a form of the many different contemporary versions of Greek that were spoken (among other languages) in the lands of the new state. The debate went on for over a century, and while a standardized form of modern Greek eventually won out, the archaizing form of katharevousa was used in places like schools and parliament and the TV news as late as 1974. This de facto diglossia and the enormous amount of energy spent defending the demotic language might not have left much room for nonstandard forms of Greek to enter the literary field until quite late, but in the past 10 or 15 years, regional and class usages have come spilling in. There have been high-profile, award-winning books that use versions of Greek spoken on Chios, in Epirus, on Cyprus, books involving Arvanitika and other marginalized languages. But these usages have also met with resistance, as for instance in a now infamous online piece by the critic Lina Pantaleon that attempts to cast nonstandard uses of Greek in literary texts—and particularly the use of Cypriot Greek—as, in essence, substandard. Greek is also, not unrelatedly, a language with very few first- or second-generation immigrant authors, a fact I take as indicative of larger mechanisms of bordering and social exclusion.
In an essay published on the Poetry Foundation website last spring, Mia You describes an individual who, like herself, was born in South Korea and moved to the U.S. at the age of three. In an advanced-level workshop on translation, after sharing a poem she is translating from Korean, she is asked by a fellow workshop member: “Birds don’t actually sit perched in a tree, do they? They can perch on a branch of a tree.” “If,” You writes, “you have sat in (through?) a literary translation workshop—or, for that matter, a creative writing workshop more generally—you might recognize this kind of feedback. It seems like a minor point, a little pedantic, not too difficult to fix, but therein lies how easily it gets under your skin.” For, in some sense, you have been told, “gently but decisively, that you were mistaken in your choice of preposition in English. As if, having reached age 27 and enrolled in a PhD program in English literature, you had nevertheless not yet learned the language to proficiency.” “Who belongs to a language?” You ultimately asks in this piece. “To whom does a language belong?”
Do we say that in English? Is that how we say that in English? I’m pretty sure we don’t say that in English. These are phrases I have heard many times in the context of translation workshops. I have surely said them myself, or versions of them, many times, in the context of translation workshops, and I know for a fact that I do quite frequently when translating with someone else in the room: I’m always looking up from my Greek text and my translation-in-progress and asking whatever friend or family member happens to be close at hand, You know that thing x, or when we do y, how do we say that in English? When I ask this, I’m certainly not intending to include or exclude—I’m just trying to get my brain unstuck from Greek and into English. The person I’m asking may or may not have English as their first or second or even third language. In fact, I sometimes ask the question in Greek: Πως το λέμε αυτό στα αγγλικά; But regardless of who’s in the room, regardless of the intent of the question, isn’t there a sense in which the habit of this “we” is operating on the same scale as the habit of the “we” in “our Greece,” in “η Ελλάδα μας”? On the scale of a self-fashioned hypothetical group that projects itself as being larger than it is, taking up all the space, adjudicating on behalf of invisibilized others? In its worst versions, the “we” in the question Do we say that in English? is normativizing, corrective, and above all selectively inclusive, i.e. exclusive, pitching itself at a tiny speck of speakers in a sea of other speakers of English, whose uses of that language (if we want to consider it one and one only) are often different from those of what Mia You calls the “Imaginary (white U.S./U.K.) Anglophone Grammar Patriarch,” who “turns out to represent only a fraction of anglophones around the world.” The sway that patriarch holds over usage in countless contexts, print and otherwise, is therefore entirely and oppressively disproportionate.
At the back of my mind has been the idea of scale in a different sense: scales to weigh with, to measure, to determine the value of. The translation workshop as an institution is one of the sites where that adjudication frequently takes place, on the level of the word or sentence on up. If, to return to Sakai, the unity of language is a regulative idea, and if translation is not a bridging of the gap between pre-existing, discrete languages but rather “an act with which to produce difference, inscribe borders” (including between languages) “and therefore identify the unity of language” as such (71), then the translation workshop is one site where this bordering is enacted. So too are prize committee deliberations, or the editorial markup of a text, or an editorial meeting to pitch projects, or book reviews taking issue with certain non-standard usages of language, and so on. When we scale out from a singular workshop or prize committee meeting or a singular round of edits emailed from a publishing house to a translator, we can see the very real consequences for the kinds of translations and texts in general that are allowed to continue their outward journey into the world.
The scale as valuative is deeply related to the other methodological scales I’ve been talking about thus far. The question of who has the right to adjudicate between proper and improper, felicitous and infelicitous usages, between good and bad translations, is related to the larger-scale question of who belongs in or to a language, and to whom a language belongs. And both are also related, certainly in the era of nation-states and beyond, to the “we” and the “our” of an ethnonational, political understanding of belonging. In a sense, every aspect of translation is political precisely because of translation’s capacity to negotiate, solidify, prop up, challenge, and/or resist those wes and ours, on all the intersecting scales on which they operate. How, then, to translate, how to teach translation, to read and respond to translations, to think and talk about the past, present, and future of translation, with an awareness of the multiple scales on which this vast and complex thing called “translation” operates? How to keep the scales of translation in flux? How to use translation—if this is a goal, which for me it is—not only to make our allegorical city, Athens or otherwise, more just, but also to question the terms of its justice?