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the very idea of a nation, may well belong to an elite minority (178). Venuti adds
that translations must be acepted by a mass audience to be effective in
constructing national languages, cultures, identities (178).
This begs several important questions. For instance, to what extent can
translation be posited as a kind of ltierature? Is it even worthwhile to ask this
question in this broad way? Venuti highlights the disparate reasons motivating why
a certain translation might be called for or needed, and while these are framed
through the nationalist implications he is exploring in his argument, some of these
imply aesthetic and other less situated reasons as well. For instance, these reasons
for choosing a foreign text for translation can include a percieved similarity of social
situation between the original and the contemporary society, or because a foreign
theme or formal style is seen as analogous to that of the translating culture (180).
At the same time, Venuti offers that the irreducible foreignness of these materials
may actually result in an intensification of national desire (180). Surely, his
situating of these seemingly disparate forces desire, aesthetics, and, perhaps, the
commercialization of culture are importantly interwoven with his examination of
nationalism as both essential yet unconscious. At the same time, one wonders if
these categories are always inevitably mobilized towards nationalism. In other
words, if we remember that an interpretation of anyones statements or actions is
always a limited kind of access to an ultimately impermeable interiority, to what
expression that translation helps highlight (86).Yet surely in these moments one
could accuse Borges of as much apolitical as much as , for it is in and through his
awareness of German literaruture that his expectation for the German translation is
based.