Postcolonial Translation

Theory and Practice

Susan Bassnett, Susan Bassnett (S Editor), Harish Trivedi, Susan Bassnett, Susan Bassnett (S Editor), Harish Trivedi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781134754984
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This outstanding collection brings together eminent contributors (from Britain, the US, Brazil, India and Canada) to examine crucial interconnections between postcolonial theory and translation studies. Examining the relationships between language and power across cultural boundaries, this collection reveals the vital role of translation in redefining the meanings of culture and ethnic identity. The essay topics include: * links between centre and margins in intellectual transfer * shifts in translation practice from colonial to post-colonial societies. * translation and power relations in Indian languages * Brazilian cannibalistic theories in literary transfer.

Chapter 1

Post-Colonial Writing and Literary Translation

Maria Tymoczko

Analysis of literary texts emerging from peoples who have been colonized or oppressed invites metaphor: the criticism of such texts speaks, for example, of voices silenced, margin and centre, and epistolary exchange.¹ Perhaps this is so because of cognitive processes themselves. In speaking of unfamiliar or new phenomena, humans often adapt the language of similar though disparate objects and action. Figurative language is used: in English, for example, the newly invented vehicle propelled by an internal combustion engine was sometimes known as the horseless carriage.² The penchant for metaphorical speech about post-colonial literature suggests that critics view it as a new literary phenomenon about which we do not as yet know how to speak directly, a type of writing for which we do not as yet have an adequate vocabulary. Because metaphoric speech is cognitively pervasive, a normally harmless and time-honoured linguistic practice, the approach could be extended; metaphors are to hand. Mirrors come to mind as appropriate figures, for example: the writing of post-colonial authors or those from subaltern cultures as a house of mirrors in which the reader and writer alike risk being lost in the tangle, confusion and redundancy of reflections; as the mirror in St Paul’s trope, in which one as yet sees only darkly rather than face to face; or, to adapt Joyce’s aphorism about Irish art, as the cracked looking-glass of a servant. And let us not forget the mirroring in the well-used figure of Caliban’s rage.

Translation might be used as such a metaphor, but this is not what I am about here. Translation as metaphor for post-colonial writing, for example, invokes the sort of activity associated with the etymological meaning of the word: translation as the activity of carrying across, for instance, the transportation and relocation of the bones and other remains of saints. In this sense post-colonial writing might be imaged as a form of translation (attended with much ceremony and pomp, to be sure) in which venerable and holy (historical, mythic and literary) relics are moved from one sanctified spot of worship to another more central and more secure (because more powerful) location, at which the cult is intended to be preserved, to take root and find new life. There is, of course, much in this metaphor that bears reflection (mirroring again) in relation to many works emanating from former colonies, and the metaphor is suggestive of certain perils faced by writers in these circumstances.³

However that might be, in this enquiry I am not using translation as a metaphor of transportation across (physical, cultural or linguistic) space or boundaries: instead, interlingual literary translation provides an analogue for post-colonial writing. The two types of intercultural writing are essentially distinct, but they have enough points of contact that exploration of the two in tandem and comparison of the two – investigation of the commonalities and the differences – results in new insights about both. Moreover, because literary translation is a phenomenon that can be charted for more than two millennia with an almost coeval critical and theoretical literature about it, many of the workings of literary translation are reasonably well understood. Thus, the comparison of literary translation and post-colonial writing is particularly apt to shed light on the latter more recent literary phenomenon, an understanding of which can benefit from the body of knowledge that has been built up in translation studies.

Significant differences between literary translation and post-colonial literature are obvious and should be addressed from the outset. The primary difference is that, unlike translators, post-colonial writers are not transposing a text. As background to their literary works, they are transposing a culture – to be understood as a language, a cognitive system, a literature (comprised of a system of texts, genres, tale types, and so on), a material culture, a social system and legal framework, a history, and so forth. In the case of many former colonies, there may even be more than one culture or one language that stand behind a writer’s work. A translator, by contrast, has seemingly a much more limited domain, only a single text to transpose. As perspectives from general systems theory and semiotics suggest, however, this difference is more apparent than real, for the same cultural complexity facing a post-colonial or minority-culture author is implicit in any single text of the same culture: Ivir (1987: 35) goes so far as to claim that translation means translating cultures not languages.⁴ Thus, a literary translator is de facto concerned with differences not just in language (transposing word for word, mechanically), but with the same range of cultural factors that a writer must address when writing to a receiving audience composed partially or primarily of people from a different culture. The culture or tradition of a post-colonial writer acts as a metatext which is rewritten – explicitly and implicitly, as both background and foreground – in the act of literary creation. The task of the interlingual translator has much in common with the task of the post-colonial writer; where one has a text, however, the other has the metatext of culture itself.

A more significant difference in the two literary activities has to do with the parameters of constraint. A translator is faced with a fixed text (one usually freely chosen, to be sure, but fixed nonetheless); such a fixed text includes cultural and linguistic elements that are givens for the translator and that typically involve factors that are particularly problematic for the receiving audience. Thus the translator is faced with the dilemma of faithfulness: to be ‘faithful’, such problematic factors must be transposed despite the difficulties they might cause to the sensibilities or cognitive framework of translator or audience; in obscuring or muting the cultural disjunctions, the translator ceases to be ‘faithful’ to the source text. This constraint of a text with cultural givens in a fixed ordering is a major factor behind the discourse regarding literalism that has been part of discussions of translation for some centuries.⁵ A post-colonial writer, by contrast, chooses which cultural elements to attempt to transpose to the receiving audience.

An author can choose a fairly aggressive presentation of unfamiliar cultural elements in which differences, even ones likely to cause problems for a receiving audience, are highlighted, or an author can choose an assimilative presentation in which likeness or ‘universality’ is stressed and cultural differences are muted and made peripheral to the central interests of the literary work. Similarly, linguistic features related to the source culture (such as dialect or unfamiliar lexical items) can be highlighted as defamiliarized elements in the text, or be domesticated in some way, or be circumvented altogether. The greater element of choice in the construction of an original literary text means that in the hands of a skilled writer it is easier to keep the text balanced, to manage the information load, and to avoid mystifying or repelling elements of the receiving audience with a different cultural framework. Because a translator begins with a text intended for an audience in the source culture, however, it is not uncommon that elements that are difficult for the receiving audience will cluster; a translated text more than an original piece of literature thus risks losing balance at critical moments, making the information load too great for comfortable assimilation by the receiving audience. These differences are somewhat mitigated in practice by the choice actually exercised by translators in deciding which elements of a text to preserve in translation (Tymoczko 1995); at the same time writers are not necessarily so free as might be imagined, constrained as they are by history, myth, ideology, patronage and affiliation, which set bounds on the presentation of the source culture in the literary work. Thus, the two types of writing converge on the shared limit defined by cultural interface.⁶

It is tempting to identify the greater range of paratextual commentary permitted to the translator as another difference between literary translation and post-colonial writing. In the form of introductions, footnotes, critical essays, glossaries, maps, and the like, the translator can embed the translated text in a shell that explains necessary cultural and literary background for the receiving audience and that acts as a running commentary on the translated’ work. Thus, the translator can manipulate more than one textual level simultaneously, in order to encode and explain the source text. This, too, is a distinction that may be more seeming than real between these two types of intercultural writing. Particularly in contemporary literary works aimed at intercultural audiences, it is not uncommon to find maps, glossaries, appendices with historical information, or introductions describing the cultural context of the work, while experimental formal techniques and multilayered textual strategies may even permit the use of embedded texts, footnotes and other devices constituting more than one textual level. Authors also frequently provide introductions and postscripts, write critical essays commenting on their own texts, or facilitate ‘authorized’ commentaries on their work.⁷ Indeed, we better understand why post-colonial authors embrace such textual types and such literary strategies by considering the functions of similar elements for translators.

Thus, although there are differences between literary translation and post-colonial writing, such differences are more significant prima facie than they are upon close consideration. The two types of textual production converge in many respects; as the metaphor of translation suggests, the transmission of elements from one culture to another across a cultural and/or linguistic gap is a central concern of both these types of intercultural writing and similar constraints on the process of relocation affect both types of texts. To these constraints let us now turn. It is abundantly clear from the theory and practice of translation that no text can ever be fully translated in all its aspects: perfect homology is impossible between translation and source.⁸ Choices must be made by the translator; there are additions and omissions in the process, no matter how skilled the translator. Some of the differences between text and translation have to do with incompatibilities between the substance of any two linguistic systems, and it is for this reason that J.C. Catford defines translation as ‘a process of substituting a text in one language for a text in another’, involving the replacement of source-language meanings with alternate receptor-language meanings (Catford 1965: 1, 20, 35–42). Many of the differences between source text and translation are inescapable, resulting from the shift from the obligatory features of one language to the obligatory features of another. Other shifts have a cultural basis; the translator must decide how to handle features of the source culture (e.g. objects, customs, historical and literary allusions) that are unfamiliar to the receiving audience, adapting and modifying the source text in the process, if only through the process of explanation.⁹ Still other differences have to do with information load: in trying to adapt the multiple layers of information in a text to a new reception environment, a translator will almost inevitably produce a longer text. Even that eventuality does not result in a full capture and transposition of all the coded information.¹⁰

A translator’s refractions of a source text have analogues in the choices a minority-culture writer makes in representing the home culture, for no culture can be represented completely in any literary text, just as no source text can be fully represented in a translation. Selectivity is essential to the construction of any piece of literature, particularly when the intended audience includes readers who are unfamiliar with the cultural subject.¹¹ Not everything in a post-colonial cultural metatext can be transposed in a literary format; just as literary translations are typically simpler than their source texts, so post-colonial authors of necessity simplify the cultural fields they write about. Like translators, they will be criticized accordingly. The greater the distance between an author’s source culture and the receiving culture of the author’s work, the greater will be the impetus to simplify. A minority-culture or post-colonial writer will have to pick aspects of the home culture to convey and to emphasize, particularly if the intended audience includes as a significant component international or dominant-culture readers; similarly, a literary translator chooses an emphasis or privileges an aspect of the text to be transposed in translation (e.g. linguistic fidelity, tone, form, cultural content, or some combination thereof). Another name for the choices, emphases and selectivity of both translators and post-colonial writers is interpretation. Judgement is inescapable in the process; ‘objectivity’ is impossible. And just as there can be no final translation, there can be no final interpretation of a culture through a literary mode. There is no last word.¹²

Such a process of selectivity and interpretation is ideological and will inevitably invite controversy. The political censure that post-colonial writers are subject to from their fellow citizens can be given an intellectual context in the proverbial denigration of translation as a process; the Italian aphorism about translation, ‘traduttore, traditore’, says it succinctly. The ideological valences of post-colonial literature are spectacularly obvious in cases where feelings run so high about the portrait of the source culture that the very life of an author is in jeopardy, but the case of Salman Rushdie is only a limiting example of the way in which post-colonial literature can become the battleground of ideological disputes. Many post-colonial writers choose to live abroad, writing about their culture of origin from the vantage point of another nation, in part because of the ideological pressure and censure – both implicit and explicit political constraint – that they are subject to within their native framework. Joyce is an example of such a writer, and he was outspoken about the impossibility of writing freely about his culture from within Ireland, making explicit the necessity he saw of exile if he was to be an artist.¹³ Translation is generally a less heated affair at present, but the process of translating texts from minority cultures can in fact become fraught for ideological reasons (Simms 1983), while in the past translation has produced its own martyrs to ideology.¹⁴

Various well-known problems of translation can be related to marked features of post-colonial writing. There are, for example, often perturbations in the lexis of a translation. In source texts to be translated t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: of colonies, cannibals and vernaculars
• 1. Post-colonial writing and literary translation
• 2. Writing translation: the strange case of the Indian English novel
• 3. Translating and interlingual creation in the contact zone: border writing in Quebec
• 4. Composing the other
• 5. Liberating Calibans: readings of Antropofagia and Haroldo de Campos’ poetics of transcreation
• 6. A.K. Ramanujan’s theory and practice of translation
• 7. Interpretation as possessive love: Hélène Cixous, Clarice Lispector and the ambivalence of fidelity
• 8. Shifting grounds of exchange: B.M. Srikantaiah and Kannada translation
• 9. Translation and literary history - an Indian view
• Bibliography
• Name Index