In January 1827, the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe told his young assistant Johann Peter Eckermann that he had been reading a Chinese novel and was struck by how much its characters thought and felt like his own countrymen. Then he made a prediction, recorded in John Oxenford's 1850 translation of their conversations: "National literature is now rather an unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand." Goethe did not invent the phrase, but Goethe popularized the idea that the age of world literature was beginning. He was reading that novel in translation, as most of us read most of world literature. This last level asks two questions: what happens when a work crosses languages, and who decides which works are worth crossing.
The art of translation
Every translator faces trade-offs. Words rarely match exactly, and a poem's meaning lives in its sound, rhythm and wordplay as well as its sense. An old Italian pun says it: traduttore, traditore, "translator, traitor." The saying suggests that every translation betrays its original to some degree. The question is which betrayals are worth making.
In 1813 the German thinker Friedrich Schleiermacher described two directions a translator can move. One approach is domestication, making a translation read as if written in the reader's own language, with familiar idioms and smooth sentences. The other is foreignization, keeping traces of the original's strangeness, so the reader feels the distance of another culture. Domestication is easier to enjoy; foreignization can be more honest.
History is full of examples. Alexander Pope's Iliad (1715 to 1720) turned Homer into elegant English rhyming couplets. Edward FitzGerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859) is a very free version of Omar Khayyam's quatrains, so loose that critics call it partly FitzGerald's own poem, yet it made the Persian poet famous in English. Constance Garnett translated about seventy volumes of Russian literature, giving English readers their Tolstoy and Dostoevsky for generations, and was later faulted for smoothing their styles into one voice. Translators have often been invisible, and a translator's choices can quietly reshape how a whole culture is seen abroad.
What is a canon?
A canon is the set of works a culture treats as most worth reading and teaching. The word canon comes from a Greek word for a measuring rod, and it first referred to the books accepted as scripture. Literary canons form through schools, anthologies, publishers, critics, prizes and translation. They also form through plain survival. Of the many tragedies staged in Athens, the ones that survive are mostly those chosen for school reading in later centuries. The works that survive are often those chosen for teaching and copying, which means earlier choices about what to teach shape what we can read at all.
Canons have been fiercely argued over. In the 1980s and 1990s, American universities fought over required courses built around Western classics. Defenders argued that a shared canon gives citizens common references, and that works which have lasted centuries usually earned it by rewarding readers again and again. Critics argued that the traditional canon left out many women and non-Western writers, and that "timeless" often meant "chosen by people like the choosers." A middle view, common today, keeps the classics while widening the shelf, treating the canon as a conversation that new voices can join rather than a closed list.
A world literature course is itself a canon, with its own blind spots. This one leaned on works that have been widely translated into English, which favors some languages and traditions over others. Knowing that is part of reading well.
Worked example: one opening line, two translations
The Iliad's first Greek word is menin, "rage" or "wrath." Pope's version of 1715 begins: "Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring / Of woes unnumber'd, heavenly Goddess, sing!" Samuel Butler's prose version of 1898 begins: "Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans." Read closely. Pope keeps "wrath" first, as Homer does, but adds rhyme and a grand eighteenth century diction that Homer's Greek lacks. Butler gives up meter entirely and turns "wrath" into the plainer "anger," gaining clarity and losing music.
Neither is the Iliad itself. Pope domesticates Homer into the style of an English gentleman's library; Butler aims at plain accuracy for ordinary readers. Reading two translations side by side is one of the best ways to sense what lies behind both. It also returns us to the habit this course began with: slow attention to words, a respect for what a work was trying to do, and an awareness that every reader, translator and teacher stands somewhere. Literature from anywhere can then become what Goethe hoped for, a shared inheritance of the whole human family.