Against Translation

Against Translation is a text by American poet Kenneth Goldsmith (born 1961) published in eight volumes--English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Japanese, Russian and Arabic. The author discusses the impasses and shortcomings of translation and the virtues of an unapologetic linguistic “displacement. ” “Translation is the ultimate humanist gesture,” he states. “Polite and reasonable, it is an overly cautious bridge builder . in the end, it always fails, for the discourse it sets forth is inevitably off-register. ” Displacement, by contrast, never explains itself.