The Time-Traveling Translator; or, World Literature Turns to Time

Abstract This article indexes a growing exhaustion of and with spatiality as the primary critical axis in recent world literature studies. It captures, instead, the critical pendulum poised in a swing back toward temporality as the new “epistemological dominant.” If comparative literature’s desire for spatial extension in the early 2000s functioned to spatialize time, to make time graspable in spatial terms, what might the reverse critical gesture—of temporalizing space—entail? And rather than simply celebrating a text’s ability to herald open futures, how might a conceptual foregrounding of time reckon instead with foreclosure and ruination? The article probes these questions alongside two texts that treat the crossing of spatial borders as an act firstly of time travel. The modernist writers Shi Zhecun 施蛰存 (1905–2003) and Bhisham Sahni (1915–2003) both depict time-traveling translators in, respectively, the Chinese short story “Kumarajiva” (“Jiumoluoshi” 鸠摩罗什, 1929) and the Hindi “Wang Chu” (“Vāṅ cū,” 1978). The two stories allow for a contemplation of translation—a central problematic conventionally taken as spatialized in world literature studies—as that of meaning’s fate in its passage across temporal registers. A turn to time in world literature studies beckons renewed attention to modernist experiments with temporality, particularly, as Shi and Sahni’s texts suggest, with the temporal form of the fragment as the locus of potentiality and survival.