Zrinka Stahuljak, Fixers: Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2024, xii, 345 pp., 13 b/w fig.

Stahuljak, who teaches comparative literature and French at UCLA, presents here a provocative and productive perspective toward how to identify global aspects already in the European Middle Ages. By way of translations, as she rightly assumes, ‘national’ boundaries were crossed and narrative negotiations opened up. She reads this phenomenon, however, mostly from a western perspective and does not consider parallel cases in various parts of Asia or Africa. In particular, she considers mostly European, Christian writers who were pilgrims, missionaries, or merchants and explored many new goals in the Middle and Far East during the Middle Ages. Those individuals she calls “fixers,” using a term coined by journalists in the last few decades primarily for local translators who helped the western military to reach out to the communities on the ground in the various war zones. But such a “fixer” was really a very different person than a travelogue author who reported about his (sometimes also her) experiences in the foreign countries. Those, in turn, commonly relied on local translators because no one can learn all those languages spoken all over the world, or acquire sufficient knowledge immediately to communicate with the people the authors encountered. Stahuljak kindly dedicates this book to her mother because “motherhood may be a fixer’s biggest job,” which clearly signals that the focus here is supposed to rest on the negotiators, helpers, companions, intermediaries and not on the actual translators many of the pilgrimage authors, for example, refer to (Felix Fabri, above all). However, when we turn to the actual discussion, we mostly learn about those authors and their efforts to cope in the foreign worlds. I find this a bit disjointed, if not confusing.