The World Republic of Letters, Translation and Colonialism

The rise of the discussions of World Literature in the past two decades is a response to the limits of Comparative Literature as well as attempts to re-visit the principles of literary criticism in the form of World Literature. One aim of World Literature is the development of methods that are sufficient to the study of non-Western literatures and, hence, to the writing of the history of World Literature. These discussions have recently been introduced into Persian by the translation of Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters. In this paper, after briefly introducing the theoretical frames of World Literature, I engage three major axes of Casanova's model (the republic, the centrality of Paris, and the nation-state ideology). Questioning the presuppositions of this book, I discuss why such definitions fail to define Persian literary tradition and why accepting this model necessitates epistemological transformations which logically lead to the removal of a great part of Persian literary history from world literary history. In this connection, then, I discuss translation in terms of colonialism and the inherent power relations in the act.