This text describes the minor as a particular image of the smaller nation, one born of a hyperengagement with translation; one modeled on, developed within, and expressed through translation. While a more intense practice of translation is characteristic of cultures like Romania—languages with fewer speakers and correspondingly smaller literary production, and states that host a variety of languages and nations, positioned at the crossroads of cultural exchange—the minor described here represents something unusual. The translator moves toward the center of national imagination, becomes a model for a subject distanced from national agency, juxtaposed with the foreign, and engaged in critique while maintaining an ironic distance. Thus, the minor is not simply an effect of a culture's size. Not all small cultures are minor, nor are all “minor” cultures minor in this sense. While small-culture provenance may be an enabling characteristic of the minor, the history of small-nation dreams of greatness indicates that small size is not determinative. Rather than a passive effect, the development of the minor by the figures in this study represents an active transvaluation of a lack of national agency, on the one hand, and of translation, on the other. The minor is a remarkable work of national imagination. If an idea of the nation still seems inevitable, then the minor is valuable, in its pragmatic detachment and interactivity. My goal has been to bring this rare model to light.

Current political readings in translation studies seem challenged to handle the minor. This fact reveals a stubbornly national contour to contemporary translation theory. The national specter that reads the re-creation of a text in a new language as a question of national culture (be it the representation of the foreign culture or the challenge to the xenophobia of the receiving culture) betrays a surprisingly strong association of language and nation. The same progressive academic who may resist the claim that English is the official language of the United States may also imagine a translation into English as a transformation of the American national character.