Abstract

The truth of a myth, your Honor, is not its words but its patterns.Why would a novel want to undermine its own words? Surely, literature is made of words, and any ambitious novel would want to wear its words proudly, declaiming their truth as well as their beauty. Yet we know that novels produced in smaller languages, which possess fewer publishers and fewer readers, have needed to make their words accessible, both to distant audiences and to translators in dominant languages. And some works in dominant languages, when they are produced in spaces far from the centers of publishing, have likewise had to retract idiomatic phrases, alter references to regional languages, and provide glossaries. But why would a..