“La diversità che vive in noi”. Zafer Şenocak su traduzione e intraducibilità

This article reflects on the translatability and untranslatability of cultures in the light of some core essays (1996-2018) by the Turkish-German writer Zafer Şenocak. In reconstructing Şenocak’s considerations, the article emphasizes that, given the idea that linguistic and cultural plurality is original and linguistic and cultural institutions are incommensurable, the untranslatable attests to the inexistence of an objective and intermediate neutrality that automatically and universally permits transposition. In this regard translation appears as an experience that, however risky, is possible and necessary: the incomplete commensurability of a language and a culture to our own calls for an additional effort of communicative comprehension and implies an incessant work of broadening our hermeneutic categories.