Abstract
Fixers: Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature takes us on a fascinating journey through the myriad ways in which interpreters—or what the author prefers to call ‘fixers’—negotiated and actively shaped a wide range of encounters in the medieval world. Stahuljak (1999, 2001, 2010a, 2010b) is exceptionally well qualified to address this topic, being both a distinguished scholar of medieval studies and a seasoned wartime interpreter who has written a number of key articles on her frontline experience in the former Yugoslavia. Her multilayered story focuses on the period 1250–1500 and stretches geographically from the European Northwest across the Mediterranean and Adriatic Seas to the Near East and North Africa. This period is deeply shaped by the Crusaders’ loss of Acre to the Mamluks in 1259 and the resulting reliance of Christians on Muslims to access the Holy Land. Christians and Muslims spoke different languages that did not neatly map onto nation states as we understand them today, and they relied on intermediaries to negotiate their dealings. These intermediaries, Stahuljak argues and demonstrates through numerous historical examples, had considerable agency and autonomy. They occupied a “third space” between the parties for which they provided different types of assistance, including interpreting, and could therefore be “doubly paid for loyal services to both sides,” without this double payment compromising their loyalty (p. 125). This is a rather different scenario from the one we are used to entertaining in the context of modern interpreting in conflict zones. Indeed, if anything, studies of interpreters/fixers in the context of modern war and conflict demonstrate that loyalty to one side and one side alone is a key issue on which the fate of interpreters/fixers—and even their families—often depends (Baker, 2010; Todorova & Ruiz Rosendo, 2021).
The range of texts Stahuljak analyses in meticulous detail to present the reader with a panorama of encounters in which such intermediaries played a central role is referred to as “fixer literature” and defined as “literature of the fixers, by the fixers, for the fixers” (p. 35). This is a “literature of the world, in which we learn to read not the genealogy of the man and the work, but the action of the works in the world” (p. 235). It includes various histories and chronicles, travel reports, crusading treatises, romance literature and illuminated works. These works are mined for extended examples of the complex role played by fixers in a wide range of encounters in the medieval world, particularly encounters marked by tension and hostility, with a heightened possibility of physical danger and armed confrontation.
In focusing her theoretical lens on examples of such historical encounters, scattered as they are across numerous texts and sources, Stahuljak sets out to propose a paradigm shift in two areas of study that are rarely addressed together: medieval literary history and the history of translation and interpreting, both of which she sees as grounded in the idea of authorship as origin and translators and interpreters as neutral conduits (p. 1). There is a great deal of historical detail and painstaking analysis of manuscripts that I cannot possibly do justice to, nor am I qualified to undertake an assessment of such analysis given that I am not a specialist in medieval studies nor of literature. I will therefore focus in the rest of this review on Stahuljak’s concept of interpreters as fixers and her argument that contemporary translation and interpreting studies operates “in a singularly ahistorical, asocial, apolitical, and acultural discourse” and treats the interpreter as “a mere conduit, neutral,” a professional operating in the sanitised environment of the conference hall and governed by an “extrasituational professional code” (p. 3). Someone who never features in the encounter as a third party in their own right, never exercises agency or enjoys autonomy.
Following a 36-page introduction, the book is divided into two parts: “Historical Realities: Strategy, Loyalty, and Gift” (two chapters) and “Disciplinary Realities: Authorship, Genre, and Literary History” (three chapters). It ends with a concluding section titled, “Early World Literature in the Age of the Global” that sums up and further elaborates the core argument of the book, namely that “[a] different history of translation, to which interpreting in its dimensions of communication and commensuration is intrinsic, creates the conditions for an alternative history of literature” (p. 237). This alternative history would not feature author names and genres as structuring dimensions, nor would it separate form from genre to distinguish between history and prose as truthful and allegory and verse as fiction. A rereading of the medieval world and medieval literature through the lens of fixers reveals that allegory and verse were frequently used “to convey historical events, especially events reported by eyewitnesses” (p. 137) and, further, that the idea of a national literature in which author, language and territory can be neatly mapped onto each other has been artificially superimposed on a highly fluid and complex terrain. This terrain is negotiated by the slippery figure of the fixer, the cornerstone of networks of exchange and linguistic affinity that crossed institutional and ethnic boundaries and could not be neatly mapped onto national categories in the medieval world. It is the fixer, a familiar figure in much of the literature analysed by Stahuljak, who made it possible for the many traders, missionaries, pilgrims, travellers, king’s emissaries and others who populate medieval texts not only to converse but to barter, make deals with Bedouins to guarantee their safety and mobility across hostile spaces, secure provisions, and gain access to holy sites. A new literary history written from the perspective of fixers “has the potential to be decolonized” (p. 245), to break away from categories and roles imposed on the precolonial world by modernity.
The fixer may be an interpreter who makes a living out of providing translation as commonly understood, among much else, but he (it is always he) is above all a multifunctional intermediary, a facilitator with multiple “linguistic, logistic, cultural, religious, military, commercial” skills that he uses in the interest of various networks of exchange—and his own interests (p. 1). The fixer apparatus is built on three principles. First, it is defined by linguistic difference and multilingualism: “fixers always operate between at least two languages, and more precisely, between people speaking two mutually unintelligible languages” (p. 10). Second, fixers operate in conflict zones, in hostile environments. These zones are hostile not necessarily because they are marked by armed confrontation to begin with but because of “various, often simultaneous, forms of nonintelligibility” that enhance the potential for “misunderstanding, escalation, and outright armed confrontation” (p. 10). And third, the fixer’s role is characterised by a multifunctional positionality and a high degree of agency not typically associated with professional interpreting. Being a fixer is thus “not a profession; rather, it is a job that requires multiple skills for which there is no received training” (p. 10). These are principles that map quite straightforwardly onto accounts of interpreters working in conflict zones today, as discussed in detail by scholars such as Footitt and Kelly (2012) and Tesseur (2019), among others.
A fixer is “an interpreter in the world, . . . in full possession of agency precisely because he or she is in the world” (p. 34; emphasis added). This definition attempts to distinguish the medieval fixer at the heart of this study from what Stahuljak takes to be the image of the interpreter as theorised by modern translation studies: a professional bound by strict codes of conduct, unable or unwilling to exercise any agency, and unresponsive to the specificities of context. As early as page 3 of the introduction she makes the rather bold claim that “[f]ocus on meaning given in language (rather than in an utterance), on linguistic work alone (rather than on multifunctionality in a context), and translator neutrality (rather than agency) are encoded in the deontology of the profession.” Before proceeding further, it must be pointed out that much of the interpreting that takes place today falls outside what might be called a profession, just as it did in the medieval world described by Stahuljak. Scholars of translation and interpreting examine and theorise the work of these “unregulated” interpreters as a core concern of the discipline, and rarely reduce it to a performance bound by strict codes of conduct and lacking in agency and autonomy. There is now extensive literature on issues such as interpreter agency in both mainstream interpreting studies and other areas of the humanities, and pertaining to both professional and non-professional interpreting, going back at least 20 years. This literature does not support the rather reductive image of the discipline one gets from reading this otherwise fascinating book. To mention only a few highly pertinent and widely quoted references that have failed to make their way to Stahuljak’s bibliography, we might list Barsky (1996), Davidson (2000), Diriker (2004) and Angelelli (2004), among many others.
More directly relevant to Stahuljak’s core argument and types of settings she focuses on are relatively more recent references such as Baker (2010) and Tobia (2010), both curiously in the same special issue of The Translator in which Stahuljak’s (2010a) own article appeared, as well as the special issue of Linguistica Antverpiensa on Interpreting in Conflict Situations edited by Ruiz Rosendo and Persaud (2016). In choosing to make her case by ignoring relevant work done in translation and interpreting studies Stahuljak missed a valuable opportunity. Her lack of engagement with core references in the discipline that do not support her claim, especially references that deal specifically with interpreting in hostile environments and explicitly use the term “fixer,” detracts from an otherwise highly illuminating and well argued study. To give just one example, her discussion of Jacques de Heilly, a mercenary in the army of Murad I who could speak a little Turkish and was recruited to help establish the identities of potentially important captives, brings to mind Jacquemet’s (2005) study on the role played by interpreters in registration interviews run by the United Nations High Commission on Refugees in Albania. At a point when many Albanians were trying to pass for Kosovars in search of a relatively easier life in Kosovo, the interpreter acted as an institutional gatekeeper, one tasked—among other things—with establishing asylum seekers’ identity by observing their accents, clothes and communicative behaviour and reporting to the case worker even before the interview proper had started.
It would have been more productive in my view for the author to have framed her contribution as an attempt to flesh out in more detail and provide further historical evidence of what has already been argued and demonstrated in translation and interpreting studies for a number of years, namely that interpreters often perform multiple tasks that exceed direct linguistic mediation and are embedded in complex social and political networks with which they form different alliances, whether consciously or unconsciously, willingly or otherwise. That would have given her study more depth without detracting from its importance, and would have allowed readers who are not specialists in medieval studies to engage more readily with the fascinating world to which she so capably introduces us.
