Sherry Simon. Cities in Translation: Intersections of Language and Memory. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. $43.50. Cities in Translation neatly inverts Sherry Simon's previous book, Translating Montreal, in which Calcutta, Barcelona, Trieste, and Prague complemented an analysis of the linguistic contact zones of her hometown. Here, Montreal is ranked among those institutionally bilingual zones where translation may serve as a governing trope for civic interaction. In these exemplary modern cities, friction between languages constructs a culture of mediation which takes place against the changing landscape of history. The book has an exhilarating scope encompassing the Victorian Bengali Renaissance, Irredentist Trieste, modern Montreal, and post-Franco Barcelona. These are examined with perspicuity and panache and are fruitfully compared to fifteenth century Antwerp, Ottoman Istanbul, Kafka's Prague, and UN-monitored Nicosia. All are dual cities, which historically legitimated language communities uneasily share. Simon describes the promotional activities of James Long in Raj Calcutta, the modernist channels opened into Italian culture by Italo Svevo, bilingual and Yiddish artistic interstices in wartime Montreal, and the political valences of the double in contemporary Catalan fiction. Simon is after a more pervasive practice than simply verbal and written translation; what fascinates her, and recommends her book, is the translation of literary genres, intellectual categories, and sensibilities, as when the novel and the sonnet are introduced into Bengalese literature or psychoanalysis into Italy through Habsburg Trieste. Such acts dissolve dogmatic cultural distinctions. A militant Hindu nationalist like Bankimchandra Chaterjee could without contradiction act faithfully as a Raj civil servant and affirm the supremacy of British rule, while the Protestant missionary Long, a jailed defender of oppressed Bengal peasants and tireless promoter of literacy in Bengali, could at the same time evangelize the Hindus. In Simon's terms, such mediations as Long's translation of biblical themes into Bengali function by furthering, which integrates within common conversations, rather than distancing, which situates memories within their literary and historical contexts These heighten awareness of multiplicity. Thus she proposes that, in the wake of the fascist interdiction of minority languages, the Catalan and Spanish literatures of contemporary Barcelona generate doppelganger fictions of language confusion, identity loss, and conflictual translation. In turn-of-the-century Habsburg Trieste a thriving mongrel dialect jostled with its literary kin Tuscan Italian, with the German of officialdom, the Slovenian of its largest minority, and the languages of many diasporic groups. The major writers of this Adriatic port, Simon shows, translated the city's political instability, inner division, and peripheral cultural status into an ambivalent idiom that furthered European modernism. Joyce began Ulysses here, promoted the fiction of his friend Ettore Schmitz (whose pseudonym Italo Svevo disguised his Jewish heredity), and from the city's polyglot loquacity wrested the verbal chaosmos of Finnegans Wake. After the wide scope of Translating Montreal, only a restricted analysis of the city can appear in Cities in Translation. Beyond welcome attention to Michel Garneau's translations of Leonard Cohen's poetry and to Andre Carpentier's laneway excursus Ruelles, jours ouvrables, as well as notes on Regine Robin's Le Quebecoite and Gail Scott, the focus rests on the embryonic interaction between linguistic groups before la revolution tranquille eroded coexistence in favour of the brittle categories of national forms of identity. She traces the origins of the current proliferation of third spaces in Montreal to the modernist coteries of the 1940s, the period of Mavis Gallant's maturation. …