The leading French philosopher Alain Badiou renders explicit his lack of faith in what's called "comparative literature" in the West, but he rigorously examines the significance of both comparison and translation. There's a great chapter called "A Poetic Dialectic" in his book _Handbook of Inaesthetics_ (mark the word "inaesthetics"), a chapter in which Badiou compares a poem in Arabic to a poem in French--the pre-Islamic Arab poet Labid ben Rabi'a to the French poet Mallarme, that is--to illustrate how "comparison" itself, to use Badiou's own words, "can serve as a sort of experimental verification of its [the poem's] universality."
And as for translation, Badiou puts it this way: "I believe in the universality of great poems, even when they are presented in the almost invariably disastrous approximation that translation represents." Badiou's _Handbook of Inaesthetics_ first appeared in French in 1998 while its English translation first appeared in 2005.
Years later, in 2012, in his conversation with the German philosopher Peter Engelmann (now included in the book called _Philosophy and the Idea of Communism_ which came out relatively recently), Badiou again significantly takes up the question of translation as a sort of verification of a particular poem's universality. Badiou maintains:
How is that a great poem, written in German, can be perceived by a French person as a poem with a universal power even though it has been TRANSLATED, transformed, and so on? I don't know German and yet I know that Holderlin is a great poet, and I know this because I've read Holderlin's poems in French. Hence, I haven't read Holderlin's poems as such, I've read something that comes from Holderlin's poem but has been transformed. And so there is indeed something in that poem that's not reducible to the German language in which it was written.
Following Badiou's words above, one might say that it's that "irreducible" something in the poem that matters, something to which translation seems to be testifying--something that Badiou has already ardently accentuated in his _Handbook of Inaesthetics_, his groundbreaking work on aesthetics and poetics, a work (which is not only about comparison and translation, though) I recommend to anyone interested in translation studies and comparative literature:
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New York Times
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The DW-WORLD Article
http://newsletter.dw-world.de/
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in・sol・vent
━━ a., n. 支払不能の（人）; 破産した（人）; （土地が）借金返済に不十分な; 〔戯言〕 文無しの.
in・sol・ven・cy ━━ n.Goes Under
1. Suffer defeat or destruction; fail. For example, We feared the business would go under after the founder died. [Mid-1800s]
2. Lose consciousness. For example, Ether was the first anesthetic to make patients go under quickly and completely. This usage dates from the 1930s.
3. Submerge, sink, as in This leaky boat is about to go under.
Some Free Democrats want to scupper Angela Merkel’s euro policy
scupper
━━ vt. 〔英〕 （自分の船を）わざと沈める; 滅ぼす; 〔英話〕 （計画などを）ぶち壊す.
Pronunciation: /ˈskʌpə/
VERB
Origin
late 19th century (as military slang in the sense 'kill, especially in an ambush'): of unknown origin. The sense 'sink' dates from the 1970s.
noun [C]
a particular stage of a journey, competition or activity:
He has tickets for the first leg of the UEFA Cup tie.
The last leg of the race was Paris to London.
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