Translating Home in the Global South

Isabel C. Gómez is an Associate Professor of Latin American and Iberian Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her book Cannibal Translation: Literary Reciprocity in Contemporary Latin America (2023) received a 2022 Helen Tarter First Book Subvention Prize from the ACLA. She served as the President of the ICLA Committee on Translation Studies 2020–2023. Currently, her research focuses on the intersection of climate activism and translingual poetics; she has been recipient of a National Humanities Center Residential Fellowship award for her next monograph Divest from English: Eco-Translation and Translingual Repair. Marlene Hansen Esplin is an Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities in the Department of Comparative Arts and Letters at Brigham Young University. Her main research interests are translation studies and US and Latin American literatures. Recent projects include “Approaching Literary Self-Translation in the United States and Latin America” for The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Literary Translation, a review essay on “The ‘Outward Turn’ in Translation Studies” for Recherche littéraire / Literary Research, and an article examining intersections between translation and ethnography in English translations of Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación for Translation Review. She is the Vice President of the ICLA Committee on Translation Studies.

• Introduction: Home as a Translingual PracticeISABEL C. GÓMEZ AND MARLENE HANSEN ESPLINPART I: Self-Translation, Collaboration, and Co-Creation in Migrant Writing1 A Pandemic View of Translation: Novels of Catastrophe and Our Hemispheric HomeMARLENE HANSEN ESPLIN2 Post-National Refugee Writing on Social Media: Translation as a Strategy of SurvivalTATJANA SOLDAT-JAFFE3 An Almost Invisible Scene: Collaboration and Co-Creation in the Task of Translating Ricardo PigliaSERGIO WAISMANPART II: Detention, Denial of Home, and Border Policing4 Dwelling in Indeterminacy: Interpreting the Migrant Poet in DetentionALEXANDRA MARIA LOSSADA5 Interpreting for Asylum-Seekers by a Former Refugee: Professionalism and Mental Health in Bekim Sejranović’s TransfictionVIŠNJA JOVANOVIĆ AND FILIP JOVANOVIĆ6 “A Big, Beautiful Wall”: Experimental Translation and Decolonial Practice in Mónica de la Torre’s Repetition NineteenJANET HENDRICKSONPART III: Stateless Translation and Planetary Ecologies7 Fluid Voices: Translating Language and Place in Novels of MigrationYAN WU8 Specters of Home in Agha Shahid Ali’s Translations of Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Mahmoud DarwishWAFA HAMID9 A Puerto Rican Poetics of Disaster Relief and Cuir Eco-TranslationISABEL C. GÓMEZ

"This is a book that raises important issues for translation theory and practice . The various essays highlight ways in which texts have become destabilised through migration, cultural displacement and statelessness, which challenges the more usual translation relationship of source and target texts. The notion of belonging and unbelonging is threaded through the book, which invites us to think about whether what is needed is a new set of interlingual practices for our rapidly changing contemporary world."Dr. Susan Bassnett, FRSL, FIL, Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature, Special Advisor in Translation Studies, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of WarwickProfessor of Comparative Literature, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Glasgow- Author of Translation Studies (Routledge, 4th edition 2014) and editor of Translation and World Literature (Routledge, 2019)."Focused on the Global South, this innovative and thought-provoking volume on translation involves migrant writers, interpreters, and translators, connecting home to movement and transition. Each chapter in this welcome collection contributes compellingly to new understandings of how translation is a turning point in the making, unmaking, and remaking of home for people in transition among languages, spaces, and existences."Siri Nergaard, author of Translation and Transmigration (Routledge 2021)This book was awarded an Honorable Mention in the Rene Wellek Prize for 2025 from the American Comparative Literature Association:https://www.acla.org/sites/default/files/Wellek%202025%20Edited%20Collection%20Honorable%20Mention.pdf