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TL;DR: The text explores the relationship between translation and archipelagic thought, highlighting the multilingualism of books and the dynamic nature of archipelagos.

Abstract: REBECCA L. WALKOWITZ is dean of humanities and distinguished professor of English in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the author or editor of ten books, including Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (Columbia UP), which appeared in English in 2015 and in Japanese, translated by Motonori Sato, Kyoko Yoshida, and others, with two original chapters, in 2022. Her new book, The New Multilingualism: Knowing and Not Knowing Languages in Literature, Culture, and the Classroom, will be published by Columbia University Press. Thinking about translation as the engine rather than the caboose of literary history has led me to thinking about literary works as collective objects, made up of past, present, and future editions of the work in multiple languages and formats (Born Translated). I have come to think of a work’s first edition as comprising not only the first imprint of the work in one language but also the aggregate of imprints across media, languages, and versions of languages. The first edition is one and many. It exists in multiple formats as well as in multiple languages—and, indeed, format alters, greatly determines, and diffuses language. For the novel, digital and audiobooks alter through sight, sound, and touch our experience of the page and the words on the page. Format alters the use of idiom because the meaning of words depends on variations to orthography, font, and illustration. As we consider translation across media as well as across lexicons, we see that the multilingualism of the book precedes, compounds, and extends the multilingualism of the text. My vision of translation intersects with the aqueous borders, dynamicmultilingualism, and proleptic groupings that contemporary scholars of the archipelago have associated with archipelagic thought. A paradigm for understanding island clusters such as the Philippines and the Antilles, archipelagic thought draws its concepts from objects at once individual and collective, one and many, whose boundaries and substance such as shorelines, land mass, and estuaries are unfixed and changeable (Roberts; Roberts and Stephens). The archipelago serves as both metaphor and agent of translation. Because inhabitants of archipelagos move frequently across overlapping spaces, archipelagos create new, blended languages while hindering efforts to count and distinguish languages. The archipelago, like the practice of translation, establishes spatial, cultural, and linguistic networks that converge and diverge over time. Throughout history, islands have been