Another thought-provoking section of the introduction to How Literatures Begin (see this post):

If we focus on the cases where a new literature comes into view in response to new senses of group identity of one kind or another, we need to acknowledge that the petri dish in which this new set of reactions is cultivated almost invariably turns out to be an already multilingual and multicultural environment—cases such as premodern Japan, where virtually no one except immigrants spoke Chinese, are very rare, and even there a crucial factor in the development of the new literature was the arrival of a wave of refugees from the destruction of the Paekche state in Korea (chapter 2). To give just a selection of examples: later medieval Britain had a trilingual textual culture; mid-Republican Rome was home to speakers of Greek, Etruscan, and Oscan; the Swahili classic Al-Inkishafi came from a hybridized culture involving Arabic rulers and three competing Swahili dialects.

As a consequence, very strikingly, the beginnings of literatures are regularly venues for the transformative impact of interstitial figures, bilingual or trilingual intercultural actors, who become the catalysts for new forms of cultural expression. These individuals are often able to import into the target culture their expertise in an outside literary tradition (regularly from a cosmopolitan literature). Such entrepreneurial experts shuttling in between cultures are key figures in the beginning of literatures in Rome (Livius Andronicus, Naevius, and Ennius); Russia (Antiokh Kantemir [1709–44]); Japan (the refugees from Korea in the seventh century CE, especially Yamanoue no Okura [660–ca. 733], from a Paekche immigrant family); and India (Maulana Daud, the Muslim who in the 1370s composed the first Hindi work, the Candāyan). The bi- or trilingual individuals who must have been crucial in mediating the epics and songs of the Near East into the Greek-speaking sphere in the period before Homer and Hesiod are now lost to history. As with any feature of culture, all literary traditions interact and appropriate to one degree or another: in their initial phases, the splitting off of vernacular literatures from their parental cosmopolitan literatures will provide ready opportunity for such middle men and culture brokers.

Translation is often a key mediating and galvanizing element at these moments, and the culture brokers are regularly the people responsible for such work. Translation—often to be understood in the broadest sense of adaptation and transformation—flourishes at moments of origin in many traditions, often being carried out by individuals who are also composing “original” works in the new literary language: Chaucer and Ennius are obvious examples. Yet translation of literary texts, however common it may be in the modern world, is not something we should take for granted. In the ancient Mediterranean the Romans are outliers and innovators in translating literary texts, and the later European attitude that it is normal to translate literature is one due ultimately to the Romans’ peculiar decision to translate large quantities of Greek literature, especially drama (chapter 6). By contrast, the astounding Greek-Arabic translation movement of the ninth and tenth centuries (chapter 9) concentrated on philosophical, medical, and technical writing and barely touched on literary texts at all; similarly, the extensive Syriac translation movement that was so important as a mediator for the later Arabic one did not include classical Greek literature either (chapter 8)— literature in the sense of fiction, poetry, or drama.

Such differences in selection prompt us to reflect on the criteria of categorization. Essentially all the cultures discussed over the following chapters operate with a set of assumptions about the differences between kinds of texts within the larger family of “literature.” If “literature” may include any texts that are codified, transmitted, and curated, then capacious definitions will include writings on agriculture or medicine along with love poetry or novels, and this is a state of affairs that obtained in Europe, for example, up until the eighteenth century. Yet subdivisions within that larger family definition always have the potential to become important for whatever reason, and translation is certainly one of the key vectors that we can identify as encouraging or enforcing generic subcategorization, regularly homing in on “imaginative” literature as a category for inclusion or exclusion.

Outside Europe we see important cases where translation is not in play at all. India and Japan provide key examples of new literatures being formed out of intense cultural interaction without translation. Here, once again, script can be crucial. As Wiebke Denecke shows (chapter 2), the nature of the Chinese logographic script meant that translation was unnecessary for the elites of premodern East Asia, who could read Literary Sinitic even though they could not speak Chinese. If, then, heightened interaction between cultures appears to be indispensable for the creation of a new literature, this interaction may take many forms, and translation is by no means a necessary condition.

We discussed the fact that “the later European attitude that it is normal to translate literature is one due ultimately to the Romans’ peculiar decision to translate large quantities of Greek literature” somewhere, but I can’t find the post.