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A comparative study of the politics and theory of language in the writings of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpιnar and Walter Benjamin, this article suggests that a rethinking of the discursive commensurability and incommensurability of modern Turkish language and literature with western European representational practices has crucial implications for critical comparative methodology today. I leave behind conventional accounts based on models of European literary influence, emphasizing instead changes in writing practices that accompanied the development of modern literature and comparatism. Of particular significance for my analysis are the intensification of print culture and language reforms. I examine Tanpιnar's writings as a special archive registering the problematic of representational writing, while exploring their continuities and discontinuities with Benjamin's work. I configure an alternative critical comparative framework, troubling the uneven epistemological categories of modernity through which “East” and “West” continue to structure even the transnationalist critical discourse that interrogates them.

In introducing this special issue of boundary 2, this essay seeks to challenge the derivative conception of Marxist-communist translation that posits a hierarchical distinction between universal and particular forms of Marxism and communism. Reconceptualizing translation (via Walter Benjamin) as a necessary structural possibility inherent in the original texts, the essay argues that translation is a constitutive feature of all Marxisms and communisms (including Marx's and Lenin's) across time and space. The essay traces the importance of translation as both an actual practice and an important concept-metaphor in Marx's and Lenin's writings. If their writings may all too conveniently be construed as prophecies that lost their historical force in mistranslation (among other misfortunes), we might say that our obligation today is to translate Marx and Lenin more extensively and more vigorously—not despite but precisely because of their inexhaustible translatability. Insofar as an ostensibly original Marx, or Marxism-communism, has always exceeded its historical realization, we ought to affirm its difference as a universalizable in the so-called postcommunist historical present.

This essay traces the legacy of the 1926 Baku Turcological Congress for postcolonial studies and comparative literary criticism. An assembly of 131 delegates, including such prominent figures as the Crimean Tatar Turcologist Bekir Sıdkı Çobanzade, the Kazak revolutionary, linguist, and reformer Ahmed Baytursun, the German Turcologist Theodor Menzel, and Vasilii Bartol’d, a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the congress was convened in Baku, Azerbaijan, for the discussion of writing systems and orthographic and lexical questions, as well as the classificatory question of the kinship of Turkic languages. It is perhaps best remembered for the resolution to adopt the Latin alphabet, defended ardently by the congress’s Azerbaijani organizer and president, Samedağa Ağamalıoğlu, who followed Lenin in his belief that Latinization promised “revolution in the East.” A reading of the addresses delivered by Ağamalıoğlu suggests that the Turcological Congress has left us a unique archive of the contradictions inherent in Leninist communist philology and the anticolonial language politics of the early twentieth century.

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