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Article published In:
Translation Spaces
Vol. 12:1 (2023) ► pp.124–143

Transnational wisdom literature goes pop in translation

ORCID logo | Kent State University

The genre of self-help often is nurtured – or hijacked – from highbrow literary traditions such as conduct literature and sacred texts. Translation is the mechanism whereby an ‘esotouristic’ or new-ageified text travels in ready consumability, a commercializing process that asserts forms that themselves are ideological, and dramatically shifts ‘mirrors for princes’ and works considered ‘high literature’ to works of mass marketability. The branding of yogic and Kabbalistic texts, and of authors Kahlil Gibran, Baltasar Gracián, Rumi, and Sun Tzu, is analyzed in this light. I object to the ‘timeless classic’ positioning of texts that deterritorializes, dehistoricizes, and deculturizes, and map these publications as forms of manipulation, especially exoticizing, genre shifting, radical recontextualizing, and allegorizing. The resulting hyper-acceptability of the distorted products for a self-helpified readership calls into question the translator’s complicity in appropriative, otherized cultural production.

Keywords: wisdom literature, self-help, new-age-ification, popularizations, esotourism
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Wisdom literature
  • The relationship of literature to self-help
  • New age-ification: Detraditionalization
  • Wisdom literature and sacred texts: Consuming enlightenment
  • Pocket wisdom
  • The reading subject: From ‘self-help for princes’ to magic mirror for strivers
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 8 November 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ts.21047.was
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