Vicente Rafael's most recent book is an ambitious theorizing of translation that posits translation as a site for struggles for power and legitimacy, thus making translation not accidental to, but constitutive of empire in particular and of political struggle more generally. Rafael argues that empire not only engages in wars of translation but also on translation, with the aim of making all things reducible to a single universal (imperial) language. With this reduction would come, finally, a cessation of translation as all things could be spoken through this universal language: thus the war on translation. As language and translation are often embedded in power struggles, these wars of and on translation need not only occur in imperial settings, as Rafael demonstrates. In fact, he charts these wars of and on translation not only through political events, but also through personal lives and familial relationships.
What Rafael celebrates, however, is what...
