Abstract
Some novels do not belong to any one national, ethnic, or linguistic tradition. They are instead comparative novels, or works of what this essay calls "comparison literature." Works of comparison literature are "born-translated": they were published almost simultaneously in multiple languages, and they engage formally, thematically, and sometimes typographically with the theory and practice of translation. Comparison literature fits uneasily within methodologies, comparative and national, that assign unique locations or unique substance to literary artifacts. It urges us to imagine new geographies of literary production and requires methodologies that understand the history of the book to include its many editions and translations. Treating Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities and J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year as examples of comparison literature, this essay asks how the multilingualism of the book tests the national singularity of the work and how the translation of literary texts, into more languages and faster than ever before, establishes networks of affiliation that are less exclusive and less bounded than the nation's "community of fate."
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