This essay is an ethnographic analysis of the violent world of translation in Kabul, Afghanistan, and the provinces referred to in the general idiom of “the countryside” by Afghan translators who encounter rural subjects as part of an international military campaign. It begins with the tragedy of translation as an elegiac matter of the heart closing, and it attempts to understand the metaphor of closure alongside that of strangeness and (un)translatability in a series of encounters that take us into the heart of death-dealing and wartime representation as the encounter between foreign languages.
Copyright 2019 by Duke University Press
2019
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