The fire alarm went off during Oscar Jansson’s opening address for the Komplitt symposium TRANSLATION/TRANSMISSION/TRANSGRESSION, so all participants had to leave the auditorium and make their way out into the sunny September morning. Those gathered for the symposium crowded with lundensean students at the designated assembly spot, drank coffee and waited. Once the fire-drill was finished the participants moved as one, delayed but in good spirits, and returned to the symposium’s schedule and opening address. Logistically the fire-drill occurred at a poorly chosen moment, but in the capacity of it being a break, infringement, unexpected movement or reversal it nevertheless fit well into the symposium’s theme.

The prefix trans, meaning different types of movement across boundaries, featured at the symposium in several respects. In terms of content it delineates the papers presented, but in a wider sense it also captures the symposium’s cross- and interdisciplinary character. On the 22–23 September 2022 researchers from a number of disciplines and areas of study convened: translation studies, comparative literature, as well as Chinese, English, French, German, Spanish and Scandinavian literature. The contributions presented ranged across a similarly wide scope of subjects and theoretical fields. World literary and postcolonial perspectives met translation theories and queer methodologies, depictions of the bodies and sexualities of plants, animals and humans were juxtaposed, and presentations moved between sociological and formalist modes of analysis; between considerations of the theoretical, the textual, and the materialities of archives.

Using the movability of the prefix trans to connect different subjects and fields of study was also an explicit ambition of the symposium. To shed light on and discuss the “trans-functions” of the world’s literatures invited the types of questions traditionally addressed in research on translation and World Literature – e.g. concerning languages and circulation – but also to concerns of race, gender and sexuality, that has often been overlooked within those fields. In that regard the symposium was a continuation and extension, as well as a widening and a development of the research and collaborations previously initiated and lead by the Komplitt group in Lund.

The three keynote lectures pertinently capture the width that characterized the two days of the symposium. Under the rubric “Translation, Sexuality and the World Literary System,” Paul Tenngart of Lund University used three examples to discuss what happens with sexually explicit prose and poetry when it is translated and moves from one national context to another. The dissimilar examples – Charles Baudelaire, Ivar Lo-Johansson and Yasunari Kawabata – showed how a range of factors affect translations and transpositions of sexual depictions. Genre, questions of censorship, national stereotypes, whether a work migrates from (hyper)central positions to the (semi)periphery or the other way around, and whether the author is niched or canonized; all was presented as important in the complex processes at hand.

The first day of the symposium turned to a close with Kanika Batra, who joined via link from Texas Tech University and spoke on “Trans Worldlings and Postcolonial Sexual Activism.” Batra primarily focused on archives – more specifically the theoretical and methodological opportunities and challenges actualized in any attempt to trace postcolonial, feminist and queer histories in fragmented and dispersed materials, or in activist and oral literature. With reference to activist publications from Jamaica, South Africa and India, Batra underscored the significance of seeking interactions in the Global South, of directing attention to the specific vocabularies of activism, and of finding connections between knowledge production and activism. She also discussed the tension in how new materials afford opportunities of hearing new voices, while intersections between different activist settings continue to leave certain voices unheard: the risk that the queer is subsumed in the postcolonial, or that lesbian, bisexual or trans experiences are displaced in favor of male homosexuality.

In the final keynote of the symposium Emily Apter, New York Univerity, talked on the theme “No Good Paradigms. Untranslatability as Critical Method.” The presentation started out on the allure and risks of paradigms, with particular focus on the role of translation in comparative literature and studies on World Literature. The connection between language and power was a guiding principle throughout the talk. The pragmatic need of translation was pitted against how translations always bring forth a power imbalance: a potential for linguistic, structural violence through which the “source” or “originary” language is simplified and subordinated – and where the idea of source and origin is made into an object, fetishized as virginial and untouched. As an antidote Apter called for an affirmation of untranslatabilities, not as a paradigm but as a critical method or practice. During the talk she returned to the metaphor of getting lost on purpose as a means of moving forward; of sometimes choosing to not understand rather than to simplify, of preferring silence to forced dialogue.

The tension between ideals and pragmatism was one of the points repeatedly brought up during the symposium, not least in the panel “Teaching with/in/on translation,” where Shuangyi Li, Alexander Bareis and Oscar Jansson discussed the possibilities of accommodating theoretical ideals with the concrete needs and demands of teaching. Another red thread through the symposium as a whole was the need of continued and comprehensive efforts to bridge the gaps between postcolonial perspectives, research on World Literature and translation studies. Politics was a recurring term in papers and discussions, both in relation to World Literature as a (possibly) apolitical framework, and in arguments on the connections between literatur, translation and activism. A third point that recurred in presentations and dialogues, as in the structure of the symposium as a whole, was the need for scholars to move between the systemic and the specific. An observation, however, is that the questions on sex and sexuality tended to end up on the sidelines, and that transgression to a certain extent appeared as an addendum to the more intertwined translation and transmission. But this observation must be weighed against the novel ambition of the symposium to more clearly integrate these questions in studies on World Literature and translation. Seen as a pioneering effort in that direction the symposium was an excellent start, that hopefully will be continued by further dialogues, meetings and collaborations.

Translation by Oscar Jansson