A key concern of recent theoretical orientations in the development of “World Literature” as a discipline has been the question of accessibility to literatures in minor languages, which is to say of literal and metaphorical translatability, even transparency. This essay explores the challenge posed by the occlusion of the possible intertextual influence of works in such languages that are evident only as a trace in texts that now seem indisputably part of a canon of World Literature. What happens when the engagement of writers in this canon with cultural production in languages adjacent to those in which they themselves principally operate is not evident to an increasingly global community of scholars, and perhaps not even evidenced in an author’s archive (whether this is understood to be a material collection or indeed a virtual space conceptualized as the literary ecosystem in which an author has developed)? This essay addresses these questions with reference to the work of South African-born Nobel Prize-winning writer J. M. Coetzee, and to the problem posed by some of his work’s (and his archive’s) others, here specifically Afrikaners and the work of Afrikaans-language writers. This consideration has implications not only for the current shape of Coetzee studies, but for that of World Literature more broadly, presenting something of a limit-case for the translation metaphor that directs some of its formulations as disciplinary field.

在将“世界文学”发展为一门学科的过程中，近来理论取向的一个主要关注点是对次要语言的文学的可及性问题，即直译和隐喻的可译性，甚至透明性。本文探讨了在这种语言中隐藏作品可能的互文影响所带来的挑战，这些影响仅体现在文本中，而这些文本现在无疑已成为世界文学经典的一部分。当越来越多的全球化学者群体不了解作家在这一经典中以与其自身所使用的语言相近的语言进行文化生产时所发生的情况，甚至可能没有在作者的档案中得到证明（无论这是被认为是物质收藏，还是实际上被概念化为作者所发展的文学生态系统的虚拟空间）？本文针对南非出生的诺贝尔奖得主作家JM Coetzee的作品，以及他的某些作品（和他的档案馆的作品）所提出的问题，特别是南非荷兰语和南非荷兰语的语言所提出的问题，解决了这些问题。作家。这种考虑不仅对库切研究的当前形式有影响，而且对世界文学的研究形式也有影响，这为翻译隐喻提出了一种极限情况，该隐喻将其某些表述指导为学科领域。