This forum offers a new set of brief studies focusing on Shakespeare reimagined across cultures, languages, and media. The articles below engage with modes of inquiry that in recent years, under the partly overlapping headings of interculturality, translation, appropriation, and adaptation, have generated substantial Shakespeare scholarship and criticism. In their different ways, these eight short essays acknowledge the importance and critical consequence of such precedents, but they commit, above all, to offering a fresh focus on instances of cultural, linguistic and medial transit that either have obtained little (or no) critical attention, or otherwise appear ripe for reassessment in the intellectual environment of the early twenty-first century.

As with any critical venture into Shakespeare's iiber-fertile research range, this forum has to confront the challenges posed by a sense of the deja lu, even the commonplace. And this sense is hardly mitigated by the diversity that characterizes our project: indeed, as shown by any list of recent scholarly and institutional designs, initiatives described as intercultural, intermedial, and "global" have come to enjoy a prominence in Shakespeare criticism that would appear to rival more conventionally monocultural endeavours (even if publication figures may not match such perceived prominence). The emphases that characterized the hyper-commemorative year of 2016 bear this out, with major festivals stressing the "world" dimension of their celebratory impetus, and prominent commentators in the conventional and digital media enthusing about "Shakespeare's infinite adaptability [as] the source of his global popularity," and how he "lives on from Warsaw to Vegas." (1)

The essays below negotiate the forms taken by such an "adaptable" and prolific object with tools afforded by intellectual frameworks that have recently prevailed in the humanities--dominated as such frameworks have been by relational arguments and a pervasive engagement with notions of difference and plurality. In other words, the topic of Shakespeare and cultural translation will here be approached predominantly from an attitude of inquiry that privileges "betweenness" over self-containment, that (explicitly or tacitly) rests on an understanding that alterity "has become the central value of postmodern culture." (2) This general attitude of inquiry will tend to be anchored verbally in keywords prefixed inter- or trans-. (3)

The operative potential of such notions (but also their pitfalls) would seem to be epitomized by the varying fortunes of the phrase that this forum's title balances against "Shakespeare." As any quick search will show, "cultural translation" has been used recurrently, often in discussions that have proved central to disciplinary realignments in the humanities--but not always in the same acceptation, and not always as a descriptive label for identical intellectual stances and critical practices. Significantly, the phrase started to be deployed in its current conceptualized sense by the mid 1980s, in the framework of a critique energized by concerns over difference and relationality--but "cultural translation" was then in fact the label for a research stance that appeared "problematic," and potentially at odds with such values. As used thirty years ago in a few landmark studies in anthropology and ethnography, "cultural translation" was viewed with wariness about the risk of "potential distortion" in the characterization of other cultures. (4) For some scholars, "cultural translation" became the name for an elision of particularity and difference when one rendered the forms that expressed other ways of life into the terms that define our own, in a process "vitiated" by a limited awareness of the asymmetries (in power) between the cultures respectively of the agents and objects of investigation. (5)

The implications that attended the practice of "cultural translation" in those discussions of three decades ago reflected underlying views of translation in its primary, interlingual sense that were then still prevalent. In fact, that wariness about probing into other cultures in ways that entailed reducing the other to the same coincided with key developments towards the "cultural turn" that were to give the discipline of translation studies much of its current shape. However, it predated a broader recognition of that major shift; in other words, that moment's reluctance about "cultural translation" still reflected an understanding of the translational venture as guided by a search for equivalences, and by a resilient confidence in the sufficiency of language systems to provide expressive resources for such mutuality. (6) Such confidence would be impacted in the early 1990s by a critical emphasis that stressed, often in terms that were all the more provocative for being proposed by scholars with a background in language and linguistics, that "attempts to limit discussions of translation to what pertains to constraints of language only (...) fail to do justice to the complexity of the problem," since "translations are made under a number of constraints of which language is arguably the least important." (7) The ambitions underlying the culturalist claims then made on behalf of translation, on course for an enhanced disciplinary relevance in the humanities and indeed the status of a "meta-" or "interdiscipline," can be gauged from remarks made in the mid 1990s by Wolfgang Iser:

   [in translation] a foreign culture is not simply subsumed under
   one's own frame of reference; instead, the very frame is subjected
   to alterations in order to accommodate what does not fit. Such
   changes run counter to the idea of one culture being superior to
   another, and hence translatability emerges as a counter-concept to
   cultural hegemony ... [and] cultural hierarchy. (8)

From such a perspective, the phrase "cultural translation" may appear, if not tautological, at least emphatic: as acknowledged in more recent years by Sherry Simon in a much-cited forum on the topic, "there cannot be a clear-cut distinction between cultural translation and the ordinary kind, because ... even the linguistic categories used to define translation are more than linguistic." (9) And yet the growing currency of "cultural translation" in the new millennium vindicates its critical productivity, arguably fuelled by the most totemic of terms in our age. As noted with a measure of sobering irony by Michel Cronin in the 2009 Translation Studies forum, co-opting "culture" into a concomitance with translation is a form of conceptual empowerment, of boosting translation's credentials on the basis of a broad (albeit precarious) intellectual consensus:

   If, in previous ages, God or Nature was seen as the ground on which
   all else rested for its meaning, in the postmodern age it is
   Culture which is summoned to the basement of epistemic and
   ontological coherence. The sense that culture goes all the way down
   satisfies the essentialists who see culture as a set of immutable
   attributes passed from one generation to the next. Conversely, the
   notion that anything can be understood as a cultural construction
   cheers the relativists[.] ... (10)

Irrespective of the scepticism with which one might view the term's conceptual soundness, and the circumstantial grounds for the favor it has enjoyed, "cultural translation" has nevertheless proved cogent and productive enough to energize a number of causes at (and since) the turn of the millennium, often on the frontier between academic and civic initiatives. "Mobilized in the critique of nationalism, social exclusions and narrow definitions of multiculturalism," it has become both a "rallying point" for various forms of activism and "a centre of inquiry into meaning creation." (11) And this in spite--or because?--of the fact that (as recently acknowledged by Sarah Maitland), "the notion of cultural translation remains as diffuse as it is tantalizing." (12)

These remarks on the recent fortunes of "cultural translation" might associate it with a sense of facile consensus, even a measure of intellectual triviality--but such a dismissive conclusion is belied by its importance in controversies that are firmly imprinted on the critical landscape of the past twenty-five years. Some within translation studies continue to denounce its propensity for totalization, for an indefinite conceptual extension of translation in a variety of "willfully metaphorical" ways, on the basis of a series of "as if" connections. (13) In postcolonial studies the potential of "cultural translation" for exposing critical faultlines was memorably epitomized in Harish Trivedi's response to Homi Bhabha's deployment of it as a keyword, as in his resonant claim that "cultural translation desacralizes the transparent assumptions of cultural supremacy." (14) For Trivedi most uses of "cultural translation" have meant "no more than the representation of migration and diaspora, in just the one global language, English"; the rise of cultural translation is thus seen to facilitate the encroachments of a "growing monolingualism" that works against the "interactive" (rather than just "incidental") homologies made apparent by the quasi-parallel emergence of postcolonial studies and translation studies, and operates in utter aloofness to that most characteristic foregrounding of difference which is the encounter of two languages. (15) Again in Trivedi's view, "the distinctly postmodernist idea of cultural translation in this non-textual non-linguistic sense" proves to be more "a hegemonic Western demand and necessity" than a force for rebalancing cultural influence. His plea, on behalf of "the many indigenous languages of the world," is that "those of us who are still bilingual, and who are still untranslated from our own native ground to an alien shore" argue for the "urgent need ... to protect and preserve some little space ... for some old and old-fashioned literary translation," so that we do not "end up with a wholly translated, monolingual, monocultural, monolithic world." (16)

In its broader terms, this plea resonates with our forum: most contributors have English for their language of academic communication rather than their mother tongue and are based in non-Anglophone academic environments where the interface of languages and cultures is daily apparent. Trivedi's complaint voices an impatience with the manner in which (as summarized with some irony by Sherry Simon) "cultural translation has become a way for cultural studies theorists to appropriate 'translation'--without learning the languages." (17) However, Trivedi's fear that the hijacking of "translation" by advocates of the critical potential of "cultural translation" will also entail an elision of interlingual concerns may be significantly overblown--judging from the forms of interlingual awareness that have explicitly grounded some of the more recent (and substantial) engagements with the topic. Maitland's book-length study, for example, explicitly sets off from her claim that "the interpretive framework behind the process of interlingual translation provides the critical lens through which to examine processes of understanding between different ideologies, different modes of being and different modes of living and acting in the world." (18)

The Trivedi controversy suggests that notions of cultural translation, by combining different strands in the debates that have shaped the humanities in recent decades, have in fact maximized a potential that has often been ascribed to translation, both as concept and practice. This is the ability to bring into relief the defining concerns of a given moment in intellectual history, when translation's effects on the literary canon and on intellectual debate are considered. (19) Further, the very fact that I am arguing for this prominent controversy's heuristic potential also allows my argument to include claims made on behalf of conflict. That is, cultural and discursive conflict, in a variety of forms, can be productive for an enhanced understanding of the world's pluralities; and translation can be the name for an abrasive but enlightening relational play. Indeed, for Michael Cronin, "an agonistic conception of translation, which runs directly counter to the beatific visions of universal understanding underlying many public pronouncements on the subject, takes as a basic premise the incomprehensibility of the other," and it tackles the ensuing challenges through a sense of "conflict as engagement with the multidimensionality of texts, languages and cultures." (20) Additionally, this sense of cultural and linguistic abrasion as a productive force is akin to the perception, integral to recent reflections on translation as well as to other dimensions of relationality, that any process of circulation or transmission alters the nature and content of whatever is being transmitted--that, in other words, "transmissive means are also transfigurative," (21) whether they involve resemanticization, refiguration, or remediation.

This sense that change will always and inevitably characterize the outcome of any of the forms of transits that claim the name of translation, in its primary verbal sense or otherwise, underlies the theorized uncertainty apparent in a recent description of translation (offered by cultural studies scholars) as "the (im)possibility of meaningful commensuration." (22) And this assumption that whatever is carried over can never remain the same, or equivalent even (in a formally calqued way), indeed informs the readings of dislocations, realized in a variety of forms and media, that are offered in the papers below. These mostly foreground the processing of Shakespeare in the cultural frameworks and technological apparatuses that have characterized life and experience in our age, but they also rest on a particular historicized awareness. A perception that has long been integral to Shakespearean scholarship is, indeed, that notions of mobility and relation (rather than autarky or self-containment) gain a specific historical relevance when invoked in connection with the Early Modern period. This was stressed by Karlheinz Stierle (with a latitude that is all the broader for his focus on Italian Renaissance culture) when he claimed that "the experience of the copresence of cultures is perhaps the most important aspect of what we call Renaissance"; he combined this claim for convergence with an insistence on relational and mobile processes by declaring that the "Renaissance" is characteristically "the culture of the communication of cultures." (23)

Anyone who focuses on the lingual and cultural transits early modern texts have undergone in their afterlives will surely derive a sense of empowerment from understanding that such texts themselves emerge from what Borges once described as "the wake of a literature," also glossed as "a rich (prior) process." (24) As abundantly noted by a broad range of commentators, early modern literature and theatre were themselves grounded on appropriations and rewritings: Jonathan Bate has insisted on the "centrality of translation to the flowering of English literature in that period," and Ton Hoenselaars describes translation as "part of the core business of sixteenth-century culture." (25) Above and beyond the prevalence of interlingual renderings, the age's appropriative textuality reflected a productive agon between Classical and vernacular. There was also a tendency to shift genre and mode--as evidenced in the rich, well-charted practice of giving narrative sources a dramatic makeover for the stage, and by altering the comic or tragic design of dramatic sources. Crucially for our purposes, such practices provide all those who discuss the refashioning (in language, genre, medium) of early modern drama for present-day cultures with a tantalizing glimpse of homologies and replications, of pre- and after-histories that intriguingly mirror each other. The inevitable center of such processes, Shakespeare can easily be recognized as an epitome of the canonical author whose work, when refracted through the cultures of the world, (26) lights up the structures and contours of the host cultural bodies. George Steiner coined a memorable (though chilling) trope for this process, in remarking on the fortunes of Homer in English:

   the sequence of English translations of Homer provides a unique
   radioactive tracer. By the luminescence of this sequence, we can
   observe the development of the language ... The radioactive tracer
   ... lights up not only the history of the English languages and
   their interrelations. It tells of the dynamic reciprocities between
   successive translations ... of the climate of sensibility in which
   ... the translations ... were commissioned and produced. (27)

The implication of a pathological process (the wayward growth that justifies such technologies of detection) in Steiner's metaphor of the radioactive isotope may sound sinister, but it expresses a sense of forms that, through mobility and/or copresence, de- or transform, rather than remaining organically stable. This perception is certainly in line with the favor given to troubled transit, to transmissions that transfigure and abrasion that prevails over seamless processes, which debates over cultural translation have fostered. Additionally, Steiner's phrase, "dynamic reciprocities," chimes with a broader scepticism regarding linearity between original and derivative, writing and rewriting; such scepticism extends beyond the nexus of "successive translations" to challenge conventional understandings of precedence--including those of authorship. This attitude of inquiry finds an object that is all the more enticing for being formidable in the arch-canonical figure of Shakespeare, and it resonates with challenges to the author's singularity as those having arisen from studies of collaborative authorship.

An intersection between the designs proper to collaboration and a non-hierarchical understanding of the translation rationale occurs when the latter-day rewriter or remediator collaborates with the early modern author in generating opportunities for meaning that a text, four hundred years after its inception, can enjoy in a distinct time, cultural environment, and expressive medium. And, in the current critical context, few are bound to be shocked when an influential scholar endorses a reversal of historical linearity to suggest that Shakespeare is co-opted into collaborative ventures by those later writers and artists who have actively addressed his work for imaginative footholds and expressive possibilities. (28) When the translational design is extended from language to a broader cultural nexus, suggestions of shared agency and signifying authority endow the host cultural environment with capacities proper to a new source culture--i.e., the culture of the rewritten, remediated (reimagined) Shakespearean artefact.

Some of the challenges brought by a refocused sense of a source and a tendency toward dispersed authorial agency are discussed in Pavel Drabek's essay, which opens this forum by pondering operative concepts that have energized recent critical discussions of Shakespeare's afterlives. Drabek offers a general appraisal of the diverse forms taken by derivation and rewriting--in his words, "from translations, through adaptations, to real-time manifestations of the Shakespeare myth." In surveying some major published treatments of the topic, Drabek problematizes the lineage and uses of such terms as "appropriation" and "adaptation," interrogating their conceptual consistency and, in general, their effectiveness. This critical project deploys notions from the epistemology of art (particularly the performing arts) and theatre semiotics, combined with a discussion, specifically, of the conditions and modes in which Shakespeare manifests him/itself in current cultural frameworks. One of Drabek's focal points concerns an awareness of new inceptions, or rather of new ways, in which the "Shakespeare myth" is often refashioned from particular versions that have punctuated its historical trajectory, rather than from reworking a hallowed original alone. Since some of these transfigurations involve different media, Drabek's study brings into play cases of remediation which tend to have an agonistic component: as pointed out by Jay David Bolter, "remediation describes a particular relationship in which homage and rivalry are combined," and in which "newer and older forms are involved in a struggle for culture recognition." (29) Additionally, the conceptual core of Drabek's paper is enriched by bringing into dialogue participants in different intellectual and artistic traditions (in this case, from central Europe and from the Anglophone world).

Several contributions to this forum balance systemic or conceptual concerns against a sharp historical perspective, and the resulting tension contributes to a perception of the power (as claimed above) that discussions involving translation have proved to have for illuminating the genesis and delineation of our current cultural and intellectual environments. Thus, Sabine Schulting's article begins with a moment in intellectual and cultural history--early nineteenth-century Germany--which largely set the terms both for key discussions of the rapport between translation and identity and for the importance of national bards, with Shakespeare as major exemplar. Her essay reminds us how processes of nation-making (for which Germany offers an enlightening case) often found a focus in discussions about translation: if the language was deemed as coextensive with the nation, it was also the means through which the nation defined how it related to its others. Schulting briefly traces the varying fortunes of a key argumentative structure--the dilemma posed by nativizing and foreignizing strategies--from its proposal by Schleiermacher (in 1813) to the postmodern present. She also reminds us of the role played by the Schlegel-Tieck version in the history of Shakespeare translation (and indeed of literature and theater in general). Her focus, however, is not on "the well-known history of German Shakespeare translations," but rather on recent productions that reset Shakespeare in a present-day world of "multi-layered" cultural identities; for that, they resort to a range of inter- and intralingual strategies, often provocatively deploying "non-standard varieties" of German associated "with migrant or youth subcultures." Her paper confirms how culturally revealing translation practices can be, shedding light, in this case, not so much on the relational play between the nation and what lies outside it, but rather on a range of identities and signifying codes within the community itself-diversities that crucially define today's societies.

The study of comparative cultures has often highlighted how a community's attempted self-definition will hinge on its relation to a defining other. (30) Florence March's contribution to this forum reveals how Jean Vilar's foundational project for the Avignon festival, consciously part of an urge for national reconstruction in France following World War II, co-opted the English bard as a decisive source of imaginative strengths for a civic theatre and (through it) a reinvigorated social experience, to be achieved "through the construction of a collective memory and the critical appropriation of History." Intriguingly, this deployment of Shakespeare for refashioning the conditions under which the stage addresses the perceived imaginative needs of a community and culture, occurring at the watershed moment of the festival's inaugural season (1947), itself operated in a binary (and even abrasive) manner. It drew on opposing but mutually defining strategies, in a production of Richard II in the Honour Court of the Avignon palace vs. a production of a Hamlet offshoot, Maurice Clavel's La Terrasse de Midi, in an Italian-style playhouse. Florence March's analysis thus also highlights the potential of the theatrical space itself, in its material conformation, to establish a certain rapport with the past--in this case, the by then increasingly unpopular proscenium-arch stage--and the envisaged future--the Honour Court as the defining space for what the Avignon festival was to become. Additionally, March emphasizes Shakespeare's role as a gauge of the festival's evolution and success, in and beyond its close rapport with Vilar's original ambition of "a theatre for all people."

Some contributors to this forum enjoy a rapport with both page and stage that allows them to engage in what Eliot once called "the criticism of the practitioner." (31) Such is the case with Alfredo Michel Modenessi, who explicitly grounds his essay both on his practice as a translator of Shakespeare for stage productions, and on his reflective engagement with English and translation studies as objects of his research. Modenessi brings the enhanced (self-) awareness that results from this dual focus to bear on the perplexities raised, for a present-day translator who writes for the modern theatre, when confronting early modern English works that deploy resources which have variously withstood the intervening four centuries. For one of the instances at the center of his discussion, Modenessi focuses on a particular example of Shakespeare's use of lexical resources from other European languages--in this case, from French--and he ponders the degree of lexical assimilation a word would have obtained in English then versus its comprehensibility for non-Anglophone, non-European audiences now, considering the rhetorical gains and losses of retaining or discarding a foreignism in translation. For his second example, he discusses the again particular case of a crux for which the two available variants entail ethical and political challenges that are bound to be variously offensive to audiences, their (un)acceptability depending on the area of the world in which the production is situated--in this case, Mexico. Modenessi resorts to conceptual tools made available by the global academic culture in which he is an active participant, but tests their cogency and limits by applying them to the conditions of a cultural environment aware of its own ambivalence--a space that speaks the language of a former (European) colonizer from which it has emancipated itself, while retaining some of the conditions of a postcolonial culture.

A sense of topicality, especially when responding to a moment of crisis, has long proved a source of provocative insights into the fortunes of Shakespeare in translation, and in cultural translation. Miguel Ramalhete Gomes's forum contribution arises from the hazards of a particular place and time--Portugal at the height of its recent financial crisis and international bailout (2011-14)--but it ponders the options apparent in Portuguese productions of Shakespeare in that period from the broader perspective of the role and feasibility of committed art under present conditions. In particular, he discusses the manner in which modes of political engagement first defined in the mid-twentieth century to provide an imaginative realization of certain specific issues (i.e., stereotypical images such as the reckless and predatory financier) can be adjusted beyond those conditions in order to convincingly respond to the most recent global financial crisis of advanced liberal capitalism. The range of possibilities drawing on Shakespeare with which Portuguese companies have confronted their audiences in recent years has reflected a set of perceived expressive needs, but they also offer a revealing glimpse of the limitations that the performing arts face in their efforts to respond to crisis scenarios under the social and cultural conditions of "western" societies in the early twenty-first century.

If most of the contributions to the forum discuss instances of Shakespeare's recent processing in stage productions--though in some cases with attention to a variety of media--two of the essays focus on film. Maurizio Calbi's study of Shakespeare in French nouvelle vague films finds its starting point in a brief film sequence, involving a Shakespeare allusion, that is characterized by a mismatch between sound and image. This may simply have been a case of "faulty ... post-synchronization" (indeed a feature of the deliberate precariousness sought by some of the art cinema of the 1960s, rebelling against protocols of formal cinematic quality), but Calbi describes it as "allegorical of ... a 'Shakespeare' that is elusive, enigmatic, ex-centric"; and, as a striking form of discontinuity, it can also be construed as a trope for the non-linearity found to characterize the lingual and medial transits that the essay is about. (32) For Calbi, the range of "cultural translation" is adequately expressed in a conflated understanding of the three types of translation--intralingual, interlingual, intersemiotic--that Roman Jakobson memorably expounded in a much-cited 1959 essay. (33) However, the conceptual apparatus with which Calbi looks back on allusions and renderings that Shakespeare obtains in nouvelle vague films (by Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol) is largely that of poststructuralist criticism. Notions such as hybridity, contamination, and liminality allow him to find new opportunities for meaning in a Shakespeare encountered "in the interstices of media, languages and cultures," which are construed "as cultural process rather than product"--"a 'Shakespeare' that cannot be properly translated" and thus "remains in translation."

The other contribution to Shakespeare on film in this forum demonstrates the range of that topic. Varsha Panjwani's discussion of Romeo and Juliet in Bollywood foregrounds aspects of the rich and productive encounter of Shakespeare and one of the entertainment industries that has proved globally most fascinating. Bollywood has generated a visual and musical rhetoric that has both catered to the tastes and expectations of Indian audiences and proven hugely successful in providing representations (even if often stereotypical) of Indian culture for reception, consumption and sometimes emulation elsewhere. Panjwani's broader concern is how Bollywood has produced "empowering readings of Shakespeare's heroines due to its reliance on a unique blend of sources," and she stresses the dimensions of cultural hybridity that this has entailed. In this essay, she considers how the role of Juliet in these appropriations reflects both Indian mythology and expectations as regards gender that arise from local and global cultures (including prior examples of Shakespeare on film). She combines modes of reading that have developed in studies of gender and of postcoloniality, and the insights she provides are enriched by examples of the manner in which her students (in a British academic environment) have responded to some of the representations in question.

Features of a global youth culture are bound to figure prominently in any study of a canonical author's translation into the discourses and formal conditions that prevail in the digital sphere, but Stephen O'Neill offers glimpses of Shakespeare's digital presence and circulation that range across the full spectrum of cultural constituencies. This suggestion of broad human appeal relates teasingly to his delineation of a Shakespeare translated beyond the human in digital flows--human and digital indeed vying for agency, since algorithms are arguably "agential because they do not merely transmit Shakespeare but transfigure it." His reading of current uses of the Bard in and through "digital platforms and technologies" brings out a desire for order--primarily, in his view, aimed at "the unbounded nature of the information age." But ultimately (one might add) such a desire may reflect the expectation that those imaginative designs which seek their realization through art should provide (in the terms, ironically, of the intellectual elites of a century ago) "a way of controlling, ... of giving a shape and a significance" to human experience in challenging historical contexts. (34) The narrativizations, for which O'Neill resorts to "Storify as a platform to construct a narrative about Shakespeare and cultural exchange in a digital context," find an epitome in the "strangers' case" scene from Sir Thomas More. The scene's success with much broader audiences than would otherwise consume Shakespeare via stage and screen highlights the power of "digital participatory cultures" and Shakespeare's appeal in such frameworks; and it does so by refracting, through an otherwise little-remembered piece of early modern drama, the horrors and miseries of recent crises of human mobility--for many, the defining disaster of our age.

The eight short studies that make up this forum thus address instances of the multiple transits--across languages, locations, times and media--through which Shakespeare has repeatedly found his (or its) way into the range of figurations proper to today's cultures. They also draw on widely accepted significances that the notion of cultural translation has obtained in current critical practices--with degrees of conceptual uncertainty that have not prevented its productivity, a productivity enhanced by the perplexities that never fail to attend on discussions of Shakespeare's imaginative wake.

Notes

(1.) Michael Billington, "Still got it--why Shakespeare lives on from Warsaw to Vegas," The Guardian (Friday 22 April 2016) https://www.theguardian.com/ culture/2016/apr/22/william-shakespeare-lives-on-why-plays-still-staged--last accessed 09 08 17.

(2.) Aleida Assmann cited in Sanford Budick, "Crises of Alterity: Cultural Untranslatability and the Experience of Secondary Otherness," in The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between, ed. by Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996) 1-24; 1.

(3.) This paragraph acknowledges the widespread currency of Levinas's understanding of self-other relationships as well as the discursive and conceptual implications of poststructuralist and postmodernist anti-essentialist criticism. For a discussion (and critique), in broader terms, of current uses of "relational," see Brian Weatherson and Dan Marshall, "Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Properties," in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), forthcoming URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/intrin sic-extrinsic/

(4.) Roger M. Keesing, "Conventional Metaphors and Anthropological Metaphysics: The Problematic of Cultural Translation," Journal of Anthropological Research 41, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 201-17; 202, 204.

(5.) Talal Asad, "The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology," in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. by James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 141-64; 163-64.

(6.) As an example of a "scientific" belief in the sufficiency of language(s) as regards expressive needs: "All cognitive experience and its classification is conveyable in any existing language.... No lack of grammatical device in the language translated into makes impossible a literal translation of the entire conceptual information contained in the original" (Roman Jakobson, "On Linguistic Aspects of Translation" (1959), in The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Lawrence Venuti [London: Routledge, 2004], 126-31; 128).

(7.) Andre Lefevere, ed., Translation /History / Culture: A Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 1992), xiv.

(8.) Wolfgang Iser, "On Translatability: Variables of Interpretation," The European English Messenger IV:1 (Spring 1995): 30-38; 30.

(9.) Sherry Simon, "Response," in "Cultural Translation: An introduction to the problem, and Responses," by Boris Buden, Stefan Nowotny, Sherry Simon, Ashok Bery & Michael Cronin, Translation Studies 2, no. 2 (2009): 196-219; 210.

(10.) Michael Cronin, "Response," in "Cultural Translation," by Buden, Nowotny, Simon, Bery & Cronin, Translation Studies, 196-219; 216.

(11.) Simon, "Response," 208-9.

(12.) Sarah Maitland, What Is Cultural Translation? (London; Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 14.

(13.) Cf. Anthony Pym, Exploring Translation Theories, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2014), 139, 144.

(14.) Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 327.

(15.) Harish Trivedi, "Translating culture vs. cultural translation," in In Translation: Reflections, Refractions, Transformations, ed. by Paul St-Pierre and Prafulla C. Kar (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007), 277-87, at 277, 279 and passim.

(16.) Trivedi, "Translating culture vs. cultural translation," 283, 284, 286, 287.

(17.) Simon, "Response," 210.

(18.) Maitland, What Is Cultural Translation?, viii.

(19.) "The trajectory of translation studies, when its arc one day becomes clear, will also be a revealing chapter in the history of ideas" (Simon, "Response," 208).

(20.) Cronin, "Response," 218.

(21.) Simon, "Response," 209, glossing Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar and Elizabeth A. Povinelli, "Technologies of Public Forms: Circulation, Transfiguration, Recognition," Public Culture 15, no. 3 (2003): 385-97, at 392.

(22.) Gaonkar and Povinelli, "Technologies of Public Forms," 392.

(23.) Karlheinz Stierle, "Translatio Studii and Renaissance: From Vertical to Horizontal Translation," in The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between, ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996) 55-67; 64-65.

(24.) Jorge Luis Borges, "The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights," trans. Esther Allen, in The Translation Studies Reader, 3rd ed., ed. Lawrence Venuti (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 92-106; 104.

(25.) Jonathan Bate, "Books of the Year," Times Literary Supplement (December 6, 2002): 7; Ton Hoenselaars, ed., Shakespeare and the Language of Translation, rev. ed. (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2012), 3. For a series of studies of how translation helped shape Early Modern cultures, see Peter Burke and R. Po-Chia Hsia, eds., Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and European Science Foundation, 2007).

(26.) "Refraction" is here used in the broad sense theorised by Andre Lefevere, for whom "refractions are to be found in the obvious form of translation, or in the less obvious forms of criticism ..., commentary, historiography ..., teaching, the collection of works in anthologies, the production of plays"; and he adds: "refractions are what keeps a literary system going" (Andre Lefevere, "Mother Courage's Cucumbers: Text, System and Refraction in a Theory of Literature" in The Translation Studies Reader, 3rd ed., ed. Lawrence Venuti [London: Routledge, 2012], 203-19; 205, 217).

(27.) George Steiner, "From Caxton to Omeros: The Continuing Appeal of Homer to Anglo-Saxon Ideals and Experience," Times Literary Supplement (August 27, 1993): 13-16; 14.

(28.) Besides underlining that "in producing art for a buying public, Shakespeare like any other professional artist chose to become part of a collaborative economy," Diana Henderson sustains an argument for a collaborative semiosis that defies historical linearity: "It does not necessitate the complete displacement of the earlier work or artist by the latter, nor does it presume a positive or negative stance toward either the artwork in question or the relational process: instead, it holds open the possibility of moving either way, both temporally and judgmentally." (Diana E. Henderson, Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and Media [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006] 10,13.)

(29.) Jay David Bolter, "Transference and Transparency: Digital Technology and the Remediation of Cinema," Intermedialites 6 (automne 2005): 13-26, at 14.

(30.) "[M]ost imputed national characteristics will exhibit a binary nature;" "national characterizations take place in a polarity between self and Other" (Joep Leerssen, "The Rhetoric of National Character: A Programmatic Survey," Poetics Today 21, no. 2 [Summer 2000]: 267-92; 267, 271.

(31.) T.S. Eliot, "Milton II" (1947), On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber, 1957), 146-61; 146.

(32.) As regards the formal rebelliousness of the 1960s arts cinema, cf. Richard Neupert, A History of the French New Wave Cinema, 2nd ed. (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 39-41.

(33.) Jakobson, "On Linguistic Aspects of Translation," 127.

(34.) T.S. Eliot, "Ulysses, Order and Myth," The Dial 75, no. 5 (November 1923): 480-83; 483.