Abstract: The global present remains saturated with various forms of xenophobia, hostility towards cultural and ethnic others, us-versus-them feelings, and ethnocentric arrogance. It is in response to such an exigency, to which one cannot respond, that cosmopolitanism and cultural translation are being globally debated and embraced at various intellectual forums, academic conferences, and in various journal special issues. This paper explores the issue of cosmopolitan cultural translation through the lens of two world-famous novels: Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Ngugi wa Thiong'o's The River Between. It illustrates how the cosmopolitan reader, by way of cultural translation, perceives or recognizes culture-specific articulations of the universal staged in literature. Such encounters between the cosmopolitan reader and the literary text, the paper argues, are an essential part of aesthetic education in the humanities when the world continues to be the theatre of various forms of ethnocentrism and imperialism. The paper concludes that, if cosmopolitanism as a set of values and idea(l)s and cultural translation as a productive method of decolonizing the concept of universality are a central concern of literary and aesthetic studies, then every act of reading and every site of representation will contribute to cultivating intercultural tolerance, respect, and acceptance.

Key words: Cosmopolitanism, cultural translation, universality culture, tolerance