Translation as History-Writing: Disrupting Linearity Come Hell and High Water.

In my thesis, I combine Walter Benjamin's theories on translation and history-writing to see how shifting language across time, cultures, and genres can disrupt singular national narratives. I discuss Mary Jo Bang's 2011 translation of Dante's Inferno, which incorporates anachronism after anachronism , jolting us out of our naturalized expectations about what belongs when and what translation should do. I examine Herman Melville's 1855 novella Benito Cereno as a cross-genre translation from American captain Amasa Delano's first-person historical account, and the way in which Melville's literary interventions call history" into question. I synthesize the two texts through Achille Mbembe's concept of necropolitics to implicate the U.S. in affinity with systems of death."