Fixers - by Zrinka Stahuljak (Hardcover)

About the Book

"In this book, Zrinka Stahuljak issues a challenge to scholars working in medieval studies to account for the history of translation, and to experts in translation studies to read the work of medievalists. Focusing on the term "fixer," she unpacks modern uses of the words "interpreter" and "translator" and restores them to their premodern origins: as an active agent who performed a wide range of tasks, as insider informant, local guide, broker of knowledge, and transmitter of art. For Stahuljak, the fixer was a multifunctional intermediary, not a mere translator or interpreter (in the restricted modern sense), but an enabler, facilitator, and mediator, the engine driving the exchange of multiple linguistic, social, cultural, and topographic forms of knowledge. She proposes a paradigmatic shift for both medieval literary history and for the history of translation to confront and interrogate each other in their core disciplinary practices, which promote national, political, and colonial agendas masked as neutrality. Surveying a variety of texts from 1250 to 1500, including crusade treatises and travel writings, accounts of pilgrims and spies, chronicles and romances in both prose and verse, and traversing an impressive range of languages, including Latin, Middle French, German, Italian, and Spanish, Stahuljak asks both medievalists and translation studies scholars to reconsider their assumptions and methods as a way to reconstruct a premodern, precolonial, inclusive world literature"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"[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"

"A provocative and productive perspective toward how to identify global aspects already in the European Middle Ages."-- "Mediaevistik"

"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"

"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 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

"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

About the Author

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.