A collection that brings together Spivak's wide-ranging writings on translation for the first time. Living Translation offers a powerful perspective on the work of distinguished thinker and writer Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, revealing how, throughout her long career, she has made translation a central concern of the comparative humanities. Starting with her landmark "Translator's Preface" to Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology in 1976, and continuing with her foreword to Mahasweta Devi's Draupadi and afterword to Devi's Chotti MundaandHis Arrow, Spivak has tackled questions of translatability. She has been interested in interrogating the act of translation from the ground up and at the political limit. She sees at play at border checkpoints, at sites of colonial pedagogy, in acts of resistance to monolingual regimes of national language, at the borders of minor literature and schizo-analysis, in the deficits of cultural debt and linguistic expropriation, and, more generally, at theory's edge, which is to say, where practical criticism yields to theorizing in untranslatables. This volume also addresses how Spivak's institution-building as director of comparative literature at the University of Iowa-and in her subsequent places of employment-began at the same time. From this perspective, Spivak takes her place within a distinguished line-up of translator-theorists who have been particularly attuned to the processes of cognizing in languages, all of them alive to the coproductivity of thinking, translating, writing.

The canyons and deserts of the vast natural landscapes of the American West (Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, Death Valley, Canyonlands, Canyon de Chelly, etc.) and the coal-mining ghost towns of California and Wyoming. A town in Montana whose brick architecture is reminiscent of Edward Hopper's paintings. Liquor stores, Idaho's large auto cemeteries, the Bronx and the other industrial fringes of New York City. The sense of distance and the solitude of the wild frontier and the urban periphery alternate between dazzling daytime lights and mysterious nocturnes. This lush book presents 70 colour photographs imbued with clarity and nostalgia, accompanied by short poetic notes as travel counterpoints. A journey on the thread of personal memories which in turn echo literary and cinematographic works. An evocation in images and words of some American topoi, above all the timeless myth of "on the road" travelling. The afterword by Mauro Pala, professor of comparative literature, explores the ancient relationship that binds American literature to great landscape photography. Text in English and Italian.