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Ignacio InfanteAs Charles Altieri has argued when describing the two main models that, for him, define modern and postmodern American poetry, "[c]onsidered thematically, a poetic is a logical system in which the desired relationship between mind and nature determines many of the particular recurrent emphases."1 Based on the terms set by Altieri, the notion of poetic form as a system is ultimately determined by the productive tension established "between mind and nature" that articulates both the logical relation between the self and the Other, as well as the aesthetic realm in which this relation takes place. Like Altieri, David Palumbo-Liu also emphasizes the relational dimension of literary form in his essay "Atlantic to Pacific," where he refers to the formal "problematic" at the core of the work of Henry James within the framework of global literary exchange: "The 'problematic' that emerges as the product of a 'poetic' analytic revolves back with great logic, to precisely the issue that James outlines-how is otherness not only given form, but how can Form itself be both the allegorical articulation of the mediation of self and other, and at the same time be that mediating space that accommodates both." 2 As I will briefly argue in this introduction, Altieri's and Palumbo-Liu's relational approaches to literary form open a productive space to define translational literature today in terms connected with Waïl Hassan's recent analysis of the cross-cultural and interlingual dimension of literary works. Hassan specifically conceptualizes translational literature as "texts" that problematize the "act of translation" in the following terms: "In the space between translators and translated, there are texts that straddle two languages, at once foregrounding, performing, and problematizing the act of translation; they participate in the construction of cultural identities from that in-between space and raise many of the questions that preoccupy contemporary translation theory." 3 Thus, Hassan's notion of translational literature depends on understanding translation as an interlingual textual practice able to construct "cultural identities" across languages, as they emerge from the "in-between space" that Hassan locates at the core of translation, both as a practice and theory. In other words, for Hassan, the critical value of translational literature lies in how it provides a way to read "cross-cultural contact" differently, one in which the various linguistic and cultural problems mobilized by interlingual translation are brought to the fore of their own textual and cultural condition as literary works. As Hassan argues, "translational texts point to the limits of translatability. They transfer the rhetoricity of one language into another, reproducing not only sense but also such cultural-linguistic phenomena as etymological derivation; conventional, idiomatic, and proverbial usage; and culturally embedded connotations of cognates and word associations." The connection between literary form in the two approaches resp...

This article examines how Jorge Luis Borges articulates a mechanical form of lyricism in the collection of short stories The Aleph, which are characterized by a complex mechanism of rewriting and reproduction that problematizes the concept of the original. This process of fictional reproduction entails the generation of implicit and explicit forms of lyricism. Using Walter Benjamin’s notion of “aura” and Gilles Deleuze’s concept of “orgiastic representation,” this article analyzes how this fictional mechanism destroys the aura of originality of key narrative elements into a potentially infinite series. At the same time, Borges’s lyrical questioning of the original is intrinsically connected to the sense of immortality evoked in his short stories. Ultimately, this article shows the ways in which Borges alters the traditional conceptualization of the lyric as a poetic form into a new fictional version of itself.

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