19^th-century European translation theory (Schleiermacher, etc.) conceptualized a negotiation between a faraway foreign language and a familiar, present mother tongue: translation as bridge across vast expanses of spatial, temporal, and cultural distance. This model emerges during the European Renaissance and is a core feature of high culture, as evinced by the names engraved on the façades of 19^th & 20^th-century neoclassical library buildings.  Theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Michael Cronin, and Sherry Simon, however, have instead focused on the everyday reality of multilingual contiguous spaces, their polyglossia and dialogism, which Bakhtin viewed as the wellspring of the novel genre.  In his recent Language City, Ross Perlin argues that New York is one of the most multilingual spaces to have existed in human history. Taking NYC as a primary point of comparison with other hugely multilingual urban centers (and what present-day urban space isn’t multilingual?), this course considers forms of local multilingualism and resistance to monolingualism as the basis for new literary modes and new approaches to the theory and practice of literary translation.