“A low murmur of provisional consent” John Berger and translation

The English polymath John Berger is best known for his 1972 television series Ways of Seeing, and Booker Prize-winning novel G., published the same year. A critic, actor, playwright, poet, storyteller and novelist, Berger’s is a singular achievement in English writing after the Second World War. But Berger was also a translator – which, characteristically, he practiced collaboratively, as in his translations of Aimé Césaire and Mahmoud Darwish. Translation can be said, however, to have provided Berger with an ethical and aesthetic model across much of his work. This essay assesses Berger’s practice as a translator, and the role translation plays in his assessment of a neoliberal order from which “words, terms, phrases can be separated from the creature of their language”.