What do thinkers as disparate as Hobbes, Cervantes, Marx, Wittgenstein, Irigaray, Derrida, Cassin and Laclau have to say to each other about translation? If your answer was going to be “not much,” pause, and read this book. Translation and sovereignty, the oneness and not-oneness of untranslatability, universalism’s dependence on non-universal standards of commensuration, comparison and market equivalence, “widgets,” animal translation, the problem of unshared natural language, the articulation of plural modes of “being” in languages - all these topics and more are considered in response to a disturbing thought: “Globalization has taken our tongues from us.” To the growing list of signal works in “non-translation” studies we must add Jacques Lezra’s astute and witty Untranslatating Machines.

Emily Apter, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, New York University, author of Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability

Jacques Lezra’s exciting, lucid intervention into untranslatability explores the theories and – most of all – the ethics of translation under globalisation. Deep, dense close readings are rooted in the early modern – Cervantes holds centre stage – and range energetically through Asterix, Borges, Wittgenstein, Wagner, Shakespeare, Grandin and Derrida in a dense but also immediate and wonderfully conversational book. Reading Untranslating Machines is a provoking experience and a spur to thought, like sitting in on the ideal seminar on translation and untranslatability from someone in absolute control of their subject.

Clare McManus, Professor of Early Modern Literature and Theatre, University of Roehampton