From Language to Language
The Hospitality of Translation
Published on 30. September 2025
128 pages
978-1-63542-394-5 (ISBN)
Description
In this engaging humanist text, a renowned Senegalese philosopher explores the power of translation to bridge cultural divides.
Informed by his own multicultural background-African, French, and American-Souleymane Bachir Diagne interrogates the practice of translation in this thoughtful text. Although translation often produces a relationship of profound inequality between dominant and dominated languages, it can also be a source of dialogue and exchange, including in situations of asymmetry, particularly regarding colonialism, where the interpreter becomes a true cultural mediator.
To praise translation, "the language of languages," is to celebrate its plurality and equality, because to translate is to give hospitality in one language to what has been thought in another. It is to create reciprocity, a shared sense of humanity, and to imagine a positive version of the Tower of Babel.
Informed by his own multicultural background-African, French, and American-Souleymane Bachir Diagne interrogates the practice of translation in this thoughtful text. Although translation often produces a relationship of profound inequality between dominant and dominated languages, it can also be a source of dialogue and exchange, including in situations of asymmetry, particularly regarding colonialism, where the interpreter becomes a true cultural mediator.
To praise translation, "the language of languages," is to celebrate its plurality and equality, because to translate is to give hospitality in one language to what has been thought in another. It is to create reciprocity, a shared sense of humanity, and to imagine a positive version of the Tower of Babel.
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09/2025
Other Press LLC
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Persons
Souleymane Bachir Diagne is Professor of Philosophy and Francophone Studies at Columbia University. His books include The Ink of the Scholars: Reflections on Philosophy in Africa, Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with the Western Tradition, Postcolonial Bergson, In Search of Africa(s): Universalism and Decolonial Thought (coauthored with Jean-Loup Amselle), and African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, and the Idea of Negritude (Other Press, 2023).
Dylan Temel is a translator and English instructor at the University of Nanterre. He currently lives in Paris.
Dylan Temel is a translator and English instructor at the University of Nanterre. He currently lives in Paris.
