Translation as historical praxis. On the political conception of translatability in Gramsci

The aim of this article is to examine Antonio Gramsci’s reflections on translation and translatability in view of his insufficiently acknowledged contribution to the philosophy of translation. The first part of the paper focuses on Notebook 29 from the Prison Notebooks, in which Gramsci puts forward his theory of grammar – analysed here as a potential critique of homolinguality. In the second part, the key textual passages dedicated to the notion of translatability are revisited to demonstrate the variety and complexity of the notion’s context and to extrapolate the common thread running through its various usages: the problem of hegemony and its intrinsic relation to language.