Untranslatability and the Cold War: Theory in Context

So, rather than dwell on what untranslatability “is”, which risks presenting it not only as “transhistorical” (Fani 2020, 5) but as an exercise of the Western epistemic privilege (Mignolo 2012, ix) of presenting “the habits of Eurocentric thought” as universal, I will focus on how the term was operationalized, and in certain cases weaponized, in the context of the Cold War, which John J. Curley (2018, 8) describes as “the central story of the second half of the twentieth century—essential for explaining what happened around the world and why.” Indeed, the influence of the Cold War was felt everywhere. As Curley (2018, 8) goes on to note, “Even disputes that, at their start, had little or nothing to do with the Cold War, morphed into important battlegrounds for the conflict.” Or, as U.S. poet Robert Frost put it, “I was sometimes like that as a boy with another boy I lived in antipathy with. It clouded my days” (Frost 2007, 231).