Description

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A new history of early global literature that treats translators as active agents mediating cultures.
 
In this book, Zrinka Stahuljak challenges scholars in both medieval and translation studies to rethink how ideas and texts circulated in the medieval world. Whereas many view translators as mere conduits of authorial intention, Stahuljak proposes a new perspective rooted in a term from journalism: the fixer. With this language, Stahuljak captures the diverse, active roles medieval translators and interpreters played as mediators of entire cultures—insider informants, local guides, knowledge brokers, art distributors, and political players. Fixers offers nothing less than a new history of literature, art, translation, and social exchange from the perspective not of the author or state but of the fixer.

About the Author

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Zrinka Stahuljak is professor of comparative literature and French at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of seven books, including, most recently, The Adventures of Gillion de Trazegnies: Chivalry and Romance in the Medieval East.

Praise For…

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"Fixers is an erudite, ambitious book that synthesizes concepts from medieval studies and modern translation theory, offering salutary reading for students and scholars of both. It offers an exciting lens for reading the work of fixer-travelers and translators across the medieval world – from Chaucer, who worked by day as a customs official and diplomat, to Arabic-language travel writers such as Ibn Fadlan and Ibn Batutta."
— Times Literary Supplement

“In her paradigm-shifting Fixers, Stahuljak boldly rewrites the terms of literary history as we understand it, decentering its national authors and genres to refocus our gaze on a late medieval literature that comes into being by and through its ‘fixers’—worldly translators and emissaries, diplomats, and merchants—whose activities give shape to an early, precolonial world literature. A study that will do no less than force a rethinking of existing accounts of medieval literary production, Fixers is at the same time essential reading for scholars of world literature, translation, and decolonization.”
— Shirin Khanmohamadi, San Francisco State University

“In Fixers, Stahuljak provides readers with a provocative and wide-ranging tour of medieval literary encounters and their mediation through multilingual and multicultural knowledge production. By centering the agency and experiences of fixers, she not only opens up new interpretive possibilities for seemingly familiar texts but develops a powerful analytic lens through which to study the multifaceted meanings and contingencies of translation in a medieval world released from the demands of modern agendas."
— Carol Symes, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign