Fixers

Reviews / Votes

"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 * "Stahuljak, who used to work as an interpreter in war zones, uses the term ["fixer"] by analogy with the local interpreters-guides-brokers who make it possible for modern journalists to function in alien terrain. She emphasizes that the work they do as interpreters . . . is more creative than we might assume. Medieval writers, readers and travelers understood translation as a dynamic process." * London Review of Books * "The culmination of a lifetime of experience and research in medieval studies, codicology, and translation theory, Fixers is exhaustive and pointedly argued, challenging along the way such constructed boundaries as those that split the premodern from the modern, the West from the East, victory from defeat, and epic from romance." * French Studies * "[Stahuljak] asks us to rethink medieval translators and all the social and political roles they served beyond simply rendering meaning from one language into another." * History Today, Book of the Year * "Medieval European pilgrims, merchants, and missionaries relied on fixers in foreign lands not only for linguistic services, but also for extensive assistance in facilitating communication, mediating situations, wayfinding, and even protection along the way. By exploring the role and meaning of fixers in medieval society, Stahuljak's goal is nothing less than a paradigm shift through which the study of early global literature can free itself from national and colonial modes of thinking, an ambitious goal that this book goes a long way toward achieving. . . In Fixers, Stahuljak not only elevates a rarely studied aspect of medieval studies to the level of more traditional avenues of inquiry, but also convinces the reader of how investigating this story can at once challenge the basic tenets underlying medieval studies and reveal the relevance of such an approach to understanding the modern phenomenon of globalization." * Speculum * "While translation and translations have been critical subjects in this field, the present book shows that the role of translators can still be understood in new ways and that familiar stories can be reframed in interesting ways through the lens of multilingualism and translation. Specialists in European medieval history will enjoy the wide range of sources and extensive quotations in original languages and English translation." * Sixteenth Century Journal * "A provocative and productive perspective toward how to identify global aspects already in the European Middle Ages." * Mediaevistik * "A manifesto for the literary historian as fixer." * The Medieval Review * "The book's central and most brilliant idea is to conceive translation not in the narrow modern sense of the faithful and accurate expression of the original in another language but in the dynamic and historical sense of moving across boundaries, communicating and engaging with difference, and effecting transformation in the world at large." * The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture * "This groundbreaking study by Stahuljak seeks nothing less than to reorient literary transmission and cross-cultural exchange in the Middle Ages via fixers, 'multifunctional intermediaries with multiple linguistic, social, cultural, and topographical skills and knowledge.'" * Choice * "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