SOURCE: Apter, Emily. “Balkan Babel: Translation Zones, Military Zones.” Public Culture 13, no. 1 (winter 2001): 65-80.

In the following essay, Apter discusses the recurring themes of language politics in Balkan literature, citing how Kadare's works—particularly The Three-Arched Bridge and The Palace of Dreams—portray the challenges of multilingualism in the Balkan region.

As the field of translation studies begins to respond to new directions in transnational literary studies, there has been a foregrounding of topics such as the “dependency” of minoritarian languages on dominant, vehicular ones; the links among linguistic standardization, nation-building, and the colonial export of European languages; the ways in which a global economy reinforces the imperium of English; the emergence of an international canon of books that are translation-friendly (in a market sense); and the definition of a “translational transnationalism” in terms of diversal relations among minoritarian languages.¹ This last conceptual area is clearly indebted to...