Renowned Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s From Language to Language: The Hospitality of Translation (Other Press Hardcover; On Sale 9/23/25) offers an engaging humanist text, informed by his own multicultural background—African, French, and American. Interrogating the practice of translation in this bridgebuilding exploration, From Language to Language echoes Jhumpa Lahiri’s Translating Myself and Others and Elena Ferrante’s In the Margins. Here, Diagne explores the power of translation to connect across cultural divides.
Although translation often produces a relationship of profound inequality between dominant and dominated languages, it can also be a source of dialogue and exchange, including in situations of asymmetry, particularly regarding colonialism, where the interpreter becomes a true cultural mediator.
To praise translation, “the language of languages,” is to celebrate its plurality and equality, because to translate is to give hospitality in one language to what has been thought in another. It is to create reciprocity, a shared sense of humanity, and to imagine a positive version of the Tower of Babel.
My daughter and I are very interested in languages and cultures, and found this book intriguing. It was academic, but still accessible, and is a good read for anyone who studies languages and linguistics.
About the Author: Souleymane Bachir Diagne is Professor of Philosophy and Francophone Studies and Director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University. His books include The Ink of the Scholars: Reflections on Philosophy in Africa, Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with the Western Tradition, Postcolonial Bergson, and African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, and the Idea of Negritude (Other Press, 2023).
About the Translator: Dylan Temel is a translator and English instructor at the University of Nanterre. He currently lives in Paris.
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