The age of nationalism is the age of national poets: Mickiewicz of the Polish, Mácha of the Czechs, Eminescu of the Romanians. Especially for the smaller nations of Central and Eastern Europe, national language plays such a central role in the creation of national identity that those who develop, control, and exploit that language are rewarded with heroic status. Their agency over the language demonstrates the agency of their nation; their beautiful poetry an assertion of parity with that of larger, major nations: they author the nation with authoritative writing. Yet, for the smaller nations, this demonstration inevitably rests on practices of cross-border reading and literary translation, practices that trouble ideas of national particularity. A smaller nation simply lacks the mass and diversity of authors to sustain literary life in isolation. The smaller the nation that desires major status, the more dependent its poets are on translations for their reading, and, in many cases, their writing: the poets listed above all developed their authorial voices through the practice of translation. Even increased reading directly in foreign languages does not replace but rather tends to increase the production of literary translations. Romantic nationalism depends on, but must occlude, translation. Under what conditions, however, could literary translation move to the center of the national imagination? How much would the idea of the nation have to change, in order to create a national translator?

The idea is almost a contradiction in terms: a national idea based around a secondary literary practice, authorship without authority. The practice of translation highlights just those anxieties of secondary status that the nation is intended to assuage. What results from the ascendency of translation is a nation no longer major, but minor. This minor in translation is radically distinct from “minor” in the usual sense. A “minor” nation designates a lack of political agency and cultural significance, when compared with a major nation. The “minor” nation thus shares the same categories of definition as the major nation and participates in the same fantasies of power and significance; it simply fails where the major succeeds.