For New Forms of Thinking about/in Translation and Migration

Review of Simona Bertacco and Nicoletta Vallorani's The Relocation of Culture: Translations, Migrations, Borders, foreword by Homi K. Bhabha (New York, Dublin, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021). Bertacco and Vallorani's dual gaze focuses on the metaphorical quality and the material reality of the phenomena of translation and migration, in the places and time that most concern them, not treating them as exceptions to a residential or monolingual norm but rather as facts shaping the substance of a global humanistic culture: we cannot truly comprehend translation if we do not also consider its physical and material effects on the lives of those who most urgently needed it, the migrants, nor can we fully comprehend migration, multicultural encounter and intercultural coexistence, and the creative works that take shape in and express them, without facing the various translation processes that accompany their occurrence, including intersemiotic translation.