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The Hospitality of Translation
by Souleymane Bachir Diagne
In this engaging humanist text, a renowned Senegalese philosopher explores the power of translation to bridge cultural divides.
Informed by his own multicultural background—African, French, and American—Souleymane Bachir Diagne interrogates the practice of translation in this thoughtful text. Although translation often produces a relationship of profound inequality between dominant and dominated languages, it can also be a source of dialogue and exchange, including in situations of asymmetry, particularly regarding colonialism, where the interpreter becomes a true cultural mediator.
To praise translation, "the language of languages," is to celebrate its plurality and equality, because to translate is to give hospitality in one language to what has been thought in another. It is to create reciprocity, a shared sense of humanity, and to imagine a positive version of the Tower of Babel.
"A broad and vital philosophy of translation as a decolonizing force that serves to build a common humanity...Alongside George Steiner's After Babel, a seminal work that furthers translation scholarship." —Kirkus Reviews
This information about From Language to Language was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Souleymane Bachir Diagne is Professor of Philosophy and Francophone Studies, and Director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University. His books include The Ink of the Scholars: Reflections on Philosophy in Africa, Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with the Western Tradition, Postcolonial Bergson, and African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, and the Idea of Negritude (Other Press, 2023).
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