Reconfiguring the sensible through translation

The article investigates the ambivalent role of translation as a means of radical social and cultural change in a totalitarian situation such as the earlier Sovietization of Estonia after WWII. Translation becomes, on the one hand, an empowered and dominant activity in the establishment of the new ideological and cultural values; but it functions, at the same time, as a disempowering and marginalizing kind of writing to which writers suspicious to the new regime and silenced as authors are now confined. An original combination of Jacques Rancière’s notion of “distribution of the sensible” [partage du sensible] and Michel Foucault’s understanding of the “author-function,” is adopted in the article to describe all this as a process of deauthorization, thus unraveling the relation between authorial agency and political authority, the rationale behind hegemonic discursive attitudes toward different literary activities within a given social order, and political interventions in literature and culture under totalitarian rule.