Starting with the observation that the word translation has its etymological roots, as does metaphor, in notions of space, this chapter attempts to revivify the relevance of the notion of space in translation, by relating it to the space that typically is occupied by textual editors. It takes the example principally of Samuel Beckett: looking at examples from his own translation practice as well as his attitudes towards that practice; looking at the work of scholarly editing that went into the four-volume edition of his letters; and questioning the role of the editor who has traditionally been seen as ideally invisible and authoritative. The various stages that go into the making of such an edition – transcription, translation, selection, annotation – are revealed to be reluctant to conform to the notional ideal of the editor’s transparency.

Though modernism has traditionally been associated with aesthetic autonomy and thus has often been considered in isolation from any political, social, or cultural context, much of what is now thought of as the new modernist studies was anticipated by developments in earlier years. Marxist political criticism, feminist scholarship, restorative work on writers of color, even the sort of textual study that went into new editions, all helped to connect modernist literature to the larger world of which it was a part. Still, modernist cultural studies was a late variant of cultural studies in general, its development retarded by the prestige of postmodernism, which had established itself against a modernism defined as disengaged and elitist. Thus, it was the decline of postmodernism as an influential category that opened the way for a new modernist cultural studies.