2016 Summer School for Translation Studies in Africa

2016 Summer School for Translation Studies in Africa

University of Nairobi, Kenya

29 August to 2 September 2016

Reading material: Postcolonial Translation Studies

Reading material provided:

Bandia, P.F. 2003. Postcolonialism and translation: The dialectic between theory and

practice. Linguistica Antverpiensia, 2:129-142.

Bandia, P.F. 2010. Post-colonial literatures and translation. In: L. Van Doorslaer and

Y. Gambier (eds.). Handbook of translation studies. Volume 1. Amsterdam: John

Benjamins: 264-269.

Bassnett, S. and H. Trivedi. 1999. Introduction: Of colonies, cannibals and

vernaculars. In: S. Bassnett and H. Trivedi (eds.). Postcolonial translation: Theory

and practice. New York: Routledge. 1-18.

Cronin, M. 2000. History, translation, postcolonialism. In: S. Simon and P. St-Pierre

(eds.). Changing the terms: Translating in the postcolonial era. Ottawa: University of

Ottawa Press. 33-52. [Available on GoogleBooks:

https://books.google.co.za/books?id=cmJ5O0ZOwqsC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepa

ge&q&f=false]

Further reading:

Bassnett, S. 2013. Postcolonialism and/as translation. In: G. Huggan (ed.). The Oxford

handbook of postcolonial studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 340-358.

https://books.google.co.za/books?id=cmJ5O0ZOwqsC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

https://books.google.co.za/books?id=cmJ5O0ZOwqsC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

Postcolonialism and translation: the dialectic between theoryand practice

Paul F. BandiaConcordia University, Montreal

Postcolonial intercultural writing has been likened to translation both interms of the writing practice and the nature of the postcolonial text, whichoften involves multiple linguistic and cultural systems. To highlight the sig-nificance of this view of translation as a metaphor for postcolonial writingand its impact on current translation theory, this paper attempts to lay thegroundwork for defining the linguistic and cultural status of postcolonialdiscourse and to establish parallels between the translation process andsome strategies for crafting the postcolonial text. The ontological relationbetween translation theory and practice is discussed in the light of post-colonial translation practices which have broadened the scope of researchin translation studies to include issues of ideology, identity, power relations,and other ethnographic and sociologically based modes of investigation.

0. Introduction

This paper seeks to define and describe the linguistic and cultural status ofthe postcolonial text, establish the relation between postcolonial writing andtranslation, and discuss the dialectic between translation theory and practicein the light of contributions from postcolonial translation studies. The em-pirical data is drawn from African European-language literature, which ischaracterized by hybrid formations that blend indigenous and Western me-tropolitan traditions. As a postcolonial text, Euro-African writing is charac-terized by a form of linguistic and cultural hybridity that is achieved, for themost part, through specific translation practices. It has been said that post-colonial texts are themselves translations often based on multiple linguisticand cultural systems. This has led to the characterization of postcolonialtranslations as rewriting, thereby highlighting the specificity of this kind oftranslation practice. It therefore becomes necessary to explore the ideologi-cal and socio-cognitive factors that determine the strategies involved in thewriting and translating of such postcolonial literatures.

Rather than dwelling on notions of equivalence and fluency in trans-lation, postcolonial translation studies is mainly concerned with investigat-ing the impact of translation on a colonized source culture, and the conse-quences for a homogenizing or colonizing language culture. The analysiscarried out here is based on a text-linguistics approach, making use of con-cepts and tools from the sub-fields of discourse analysis and pragmatics.This approach makes it possible to transcend the limitations of a purely lin-

130 Paul F. Bandia

guistic approach to translation studies, and allows us to have a broader viewof language in use as well as to account for linguistic variation within thepostcolonial text. The approach is better suited to studying peripheral or mar-ginalized language cultures and their translations, such as Euro-African literatures.

1. Linguistic and cultural status of the postcolonial text

In order to ascertain the impact of postcolonial translation studies on gene-ral translation theory and practice, it is important to define and characterizethe postcolonial text. How does it differ from mainstream Western metro-politan varieties? What are the discourse or writing strategies that accountfor its difference or specificity? What is the relationship between postcolo-nial Europhone fiction and the indigenous oral narrative? These are some ofthe questions that are fundamental to establishing the status of postcolonialdiscourse.

1.1. Theoretical framework

From a methodological perspective, our attempt at characterizing the Euro-African text draws heavily on approaches that fall within the parameters ofstudies in cross-cultural pragmatics, or intercultural communication. Ourpragmalinguistic approach (Blum-Kulka 1985) is based on the assumptionthat speech communities tend to develop culturally distinct communicationstrategies, which are characterized by culture-specific features of discourse.We contend that such culture-specific features are either consciously orunconsciously transposed from the native languages and cultures of Africanwriters into their European-language works. In order to isolate these culture-specific features our analysis goes beyond the level of sentence grammar(sentence-bound and so context-free) to deal with text-grammar, includingseveral extra-linguistic factors.

According to Hymes’s theory of communicative competence (1972:269), the members of a given linguistic community are aware of the rules oflanguage, the rules of speaking and all aspects of social behaviour that affectspeech in that community. This theory is relevant to the study of postcolo-nial discourse in that it suggests that whenever two linguistic communitiescome together the two languages in question provide the speakers with twosystems of communicative competence. The members of each linguisticcommunity are likely to transfer their native competence onto the secondlanguage adopted by the community. In such a situation the measure of eachmember’s bilingualism is based upon the degree to which his/her competen-cies in both languages merge. In the African postcolonial context, theAfrican writer is often a bilingual and bicultural subject who has a good

Postcolonialism and translation 131

command of his/her native African language and his/her European languageof writing. The apparent non-nativeness of the African writer’s European-language text can only be gauged in terms of the differences between his/hervariety and the presumed ideal communicative competence, namely theEuropean variety of the language as used by those for whom it is a mothertongue. Postcolonial European-language writing is indeed the result of aform of radical bilingualism (Mehrez 1992), evoking two alien, or remote,language cultures simultaneously. This has led to the assumption that AfricanEurophone literatures are themselves translations, an assumption whichhighlights the role of translation in shaping and defining African varieties ofEuropean languages (e.g. English and French). The African writer’s transla-tional position (position traductive (Berman 1995)), which is informedlargely by his/her bilingual and bicultural background, is determined by thedegree to which the writer-translator chooses either to respect the transla-tional norms of the receiving European language culture or to ensure the for-mal as well as ideological representation of the colonized source languageculture.

1.1.1. Ethnography of speaking: traces of African orature

In the postcolonial context, when African and European discourses merge,the difference in perception of socio-cultural interactional norms and valuesand social situations that exists between the traditional African society andits European counterpart makes for a peculiar African discourse-type inEuropean languages. Although it is generally agreed that aspects of folkloreand other residual techniques of oral tradition abound in much modern fic-tion written in Africa (Anozie 1981: 355), the methods used to account forthis phenomenon have been relatively superficial and limited to the obviouscases of direct transfer (transposition) of whole segments of texts of someAfrican narrative genres onto European languages (Obiechina 1975;Chinweizu and Madubuike 1980). Apart from Zabus’s The AfricanPalimpsest (1991), which deals specifically with the indigenization ofEuropean languages in Africa through a process of relexification, hardly anysignificant attempt has been made to account fully for the inherent intertex-tuality of African European language writing from a translation standpoint.Like most postcolonial literatures, Euro-African literature often draws heavi-ly on related oral traditions through a process whereby creative writing takesthe form of rewriting as translating. Generally, there has been a tendency toseek to assert an African identity in Euro-African literature through a processof writing as translating based on a selective exploitation of various aspectsof African oral narratives. As translations, these oral narrative features occurin postcolonial texts in varying degrees of subtlety ranging from bold trans-lations to mere traces that can only suggest the existence of an oral narrativesubtext.

132 Paul F. Bandia

1.1.2. Discourse and social relations

Speech act studies are often based on the assumption that “the minimal unitsof human communication are not linguistic expressions, but rather the per-formance of certain kinds of acts such as making statements, asking ques-tions, giving directions, apologizing, thanking, etc.” (Blum-Kulka et al.1989: 55). While some theorists claim that speech acts operate by universalpragmatic principles (Austin 1962; Searle 1969, 1975), others believe thatspeech acts vary in conceptualization and verbalization across cultures andlanguages (Green 1975; Wierzbicka 1985). It has also been said that themodes of performance of speech acts carry heavy social implications (Ervin-Tripp 1976) and seem to be governed by universal principles of cooperationand politeness (Brown & Levinson 1978; Leech 1983). Yet it has also beenobserved that speech communities have different preferences for modes ofspeech act behaviour. Culturally coloured interactional styles create cultu-rally determined expectations and interpretative strategies, and can lead tobreakdowns in intercultural and inter-ethnic communication (Gumperz1978).

Some markers of social relations and some social-situational factorsthus affect verbal interaction among Africans in a traditional setting, andAfrican writers have sought to retain these culture-specific characteristics oftraditional African discourse in European-language writing. The problemssuch cultural differences pose for cross-cultural communication are many, asclashes between different interactional styles can often lead to interculturalmiscommunication. Translation serves to bridge this intercultural gap, as canbe shown by highlighting the characteristics of Euro-African hybrid dis-course. Postcolonial intercultural writing attempts to rise above these cultu-ral differences by seeking textual middles (Lecercle 1990) that is, meetingpoints where differences are negotiated and reconciled into new hybrid for-mations that are indeed evocative of both alien cultural systems. Thesehybrid formations are truly representative of postcolonial text, which isbased on a multi-layering of different linguistic and cultural discourses.

1.2. Discourse-types and textual hybridity

For purposes of illustration, the following are two main discourse-typesprevalent in Euro-African literature. The examples show clearly that post-colonial texts are hybrid in nature, and highlight some of the strategies atwork in the writing-as-translating process involved in intercultural writing.

1.2.1. Indirectness in discourse

Discoursal indirectness, as practised in traditional Africa, is often emulatedby Euro-African writers resulting in a peculiar discourse-type. By indirect-


ness we mean the strategy of making a point or statement in a roundaboutmanner, through circumvention, calculated delays, pausing, and so on. Byusing indirect language the traditional African speaker can display great skillin oratory, often through the display of knowledge or wisdom, and his/herability to use such devices or discourse strategies as inclusion (or group iden-tity), shared meaning, textual coherence, proverbs, rhetorical questions, etc.(see Enahoro 1966; Obiechina 1975; Kaplan 1980; Chishimba 1984).Sometimes Westerners with a universalistic mind-set find the devices orstrategies of indirectness used by Africans in a conversational situation to beconfusing and even a waste of time. This misunderstanding often leads tomiscommunication and charges from the West of the apparent irrationalityand superficiality of African discourse. According to Kaplan, there are atleast four ways of encoding information logically and these are correlatedwith socio-cultural origin. They are linear logical sequencing, parallelisticlogical sequencing, zig-zag sequencing, and circular sequencing (1980:410). Ways of producing discourse may thus differ from one socio-culturalgroup to another.

1.2.1.1. Discoursal indirectness and hybridity

It is not surprising that some African peoples who do not traditionally use thewritten word for formalized transactions or artistic expression should havedeveloped the oral skill of public speaking to perform these functions. Anaccomplished speaker in a traditional African context is someone blessedwith many qualities, amongst which is the quality of possessing profoundknowledge of, and ability to transmit, notions and ideas which generally por-tray the speaker as being wise and knowledgeable. Wisdom is certainly alsohighly valued in many cultures, and a knowledgeable person is generally onewho shows special skills in recalling events and putting them in a wider con-text as befits the expectations of his/her contemporaries. Knowledgeabilityalso includes the ability to manipulate language: an ability which is cultiva-ted with time, or inherited, as is the case with most traditional praise-singersin Africa. This skill is closely associated with oratorical ability where thespeaker deliberately resorts to the strategy of discoursal indirectness. Today,such knowledge is not exclusive to the praise-singer neither does it manifestitself only in set forms such as elegies and panegyrics. Knowledgeability, orwisdom, occurs in everyday conversations, either in a situation where anolder person advises, cautions or educates a younger person, or when a kingis being addressed by his/her subjects in a circular language, full of symbol-ism and imagery.

African writers often attempt to reproduce these rhetorical skills intheir European language texts particularly in direct speech events such as indialogue or in monologue. As can be seen in the following example, theresult is often a form of bicultural, and sometimes bilingual, hybrid text char-acteristic of postcolonial writing.

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(a) I salute you all… When an adult is in the house the she-goat is not left tosuffer the pains of parturition on its tether. That is what our ancestorshave said. But what have we seen here today? We have seen people speakbecause they are afraid to be called cowards. Others have spoken the waythey spoke because they are hungry for war. Let us leave all that aside. Ifin truth the farmland is ours, Ulu will fight on our side. But if it is not weshall know soon enough. I would not have spoken again today if I had notseen adults in the house neglecting their duty. Ogbuefi Egonwanne, asone of the three oldest men in Umuaro should have reminded us that ourfathers did not fight a war of blame. But instead of that he wants to teachour emissary how to carry fire and water in the same mouth. Have we notheard that a boy sent by his father to steal does not go stealthily but breaksthe door with his feet? Why does Egonwanne trouble himself about smallthings when big ones are overlooked? We want war. How Akukaliaspeaks to his mother’s people is a small thing. He can spit into their faceif he likes. When we hear a house has fallen do we ask if the ceiling fellwith it? I salute you all. (Achebe, Arrow of God: 162)

(b) is our paraphrase of the above speech for the purpose of illustration:

Our ancestors believed that it is the responsibility of the adult to share hiswisdom with the young so as to prevent the young from following thewrong course in life. Instead, today what we see here is adults neglectingtheir duties, because they are afraid to be called cowards. Others havesaid things that only betray their resolve to go to war. But all that is besidethe point. The fact is, if the farmland is really ours we can count on ourgod Ulu to be on our side. But remember Ulu shall not take part in anunjust war. I would not have spoken again today if I had not seen adultsin the house neglecting their duty. Ogbuefi Egonwanne, as one of thethree oldest men in Umuaro, should have reminded us that our fathersnever fought an unjust war; but rather he encourages the young emis-saries to go and deliver a message of war and yet he expects them to doso peacefully. If you send an emissary to declare war on your enemy itdoesn’t really matter how he does it. Egonwanne therefore does not seemto have his priorities straight. The fact is we want war and it does not real-ly matter how we declare it. Thank you.

Passages (a) and (b) are obviously different from a rhetorical point of view.Passage (b), which is our paraphrase of passage (a), is far from what Achebewould have his village elders say. As Achebe puts it, passage (b) is not “incharacter” with the “ways of speaking” (Hymes 1972: 279) of the Ibgo peo-ple. It may be closer to the standard metropolitan variety of English; how-ever, it does not have the same ethnolinguistic, or culture-specific, charac-teristic of Igbo speech as illustrated in (a). Thus, (b) is a de-Africanized ver-sion of (a) for the following reasons:

• In passage (a) the speaker begins with a proverb and concludes with anoth-er proverb, which gives the text a distinct local flavour and also a dose of authority since proverbs are indicative of wisdom and knowledgeabi-lity.


• In passage (b) the proverbs, as well as the rhetorical questions, have beentranslated into straightforward declarative and assertive statements, withthe result that the tone of the text is flat and the local colour is lost. Thespeaker’s comments appear blunt and direct.

Although the speaker is highly critical of another village elder for his irre-sponsible behaviour, the message in (a) is laced with wisdom and couched invery subtle and carefully crafted language, designed to make a point withoutengaging in any obvious personal and direct attack. The latter is made pos-sible through the rhetorical practice of discoursal indirectness.

From a discourse analysis standpoint, the target reader (or listener) isexpected to grasp the nuances of the speech through a process of interpreta-tion based on grasping the inference, implication and implicature (Grice1975) embedded in the proverbs and rhetorical questions. Indeed, the cul-ture-specific strategies found in traditional African discourse give Africanliterature in European languages a peculiar flavour. A main characteristic oftraditional African discourse is the fact that logical linearity is not a neces-sary strategy of discourse production. Sometimes the reader can only makesense of a text by putting together an underlying logicality linking the state-ments, based on non-textual clues and some knowledge of African discourseproduction strategies.

As indicated earlier, traditional African discourse tends to value dis-coursal indirectness, and in this context, textual coherence is usually notbased on propositional or illocutionary unity as is often the case in Westerndiscourse analysis. Regarding traditional African discourse, textual coher-ence can refer to such logical relations as connectedness, verbal marking ofsentence unity, topic-comment relation, etc. Therefore, studying the textualcoherence of traditional African discourse would imply investigating itemssuch as linearity, circularity, parallelism, implication, implicature, assertion,inference, etc.

1.2.2. Linguistic experimentation and hybridity

Euro-African literature can also be characterized in terms of the basic lin-guistic influences of traditional African discourse on European-languagewriting. These influences can be observed at the lexical, syntactic and sen-tential levels, and they account for the lexico-grammatical processesinvolved in the Africanization of colonial languages. The indigenized (Zabus1991) texts are hybrid in nature in that they are the result of a contextualiza-tion (Kachru 1983) process whereby certain context-specific features areassigned to a second language in order to make it a part of the meaning andbehaviour potential of the postcolonial subject. The assigning can occurthrough linguistic processes such as transfer, interference, lexical innova-tion, collocational shifts or semantic shifts.

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The following is an example of a hybrid Euro-African text producedthrough a form of radical bilingualism:

You asked me why I am giving you my hands in this happening-thing, whenyou have become the enemy of everything in the town? Well, I am giving youmy hands and my inside and even my shadow to let them see in their insidesthat if even the people do not know, we, you and I, know and have preparedour bodies to stand in front of them and tell them so. They now feel that Ireally am a witch, so I put fear into their insides. That sweetened my insidebecause I had wanted to remain a witch in their eyes so that I could do some-thing against them. Then you returned, and when I started to hear the hap-pening-things in your name, my hopes rose to the eye of the sky. And thenyesterday you came running, being pursued by the people. So I called you in. These are my answering words to your questioning words. (Okara, TheVoice: 56)

This text, though an extreme case of transliteration, shows how the Englishlanguage has been othered into a hybrid linguistic form with the underlyingpresence of an African idiom. The author, Gabriel Okara, claims to havetranslated oral narrative forms literally from his native Ijaw language intoEnglish, in an attempt to stay as close as possible to the intended meaning.This verbatim translation produces a curious mix of English words in a syn-tax that is alien to the English language but reflective of the lexico-gram-matical structure of the Ijaw language. Expressions such as “my inside”, “my shadow”, “this happening-thing”, “my answering words to your ques-tioning words”, “the eye of the sky” – examples of collocational and seman-tic shifts – are a unique expression of African idiom in English. They areindeed hybrid in nature as they simultaneously evoke two distinct linguisticsystems (i.e. African and European). As a creative writing technique, thistype of linguistic experimentation can only lead to a dead end as it seemssomewhat unrealistic to attempt to create a fully-fledged language based ona literal translation from one distant, alien or disparate language to another.

There are other strategies of representation through innovative for-malisms used by African writers to highlight the cultural specificity of theirwork. For instance, some authors use indigenous language words andexpressions, or pidgins and creoles, and either translate or explain themwithin the European language text. This is understood as a form of ideolog-ical representation of the work’s Africanness through a conscious disruptionof the fluency of the European language text and a deliberate violation of thelinguistic and aesthetic norms of the receptor colonial language.

Only with a clear understanding of these discourse strategies can onebegin to grasp the full meaning potential of a postcolonial Euro-African text,even before embarking on any form of cross-cultural (and cross-linguistic)transfer.

The two examples (discoursal indirectness and linguistic experimentation)discussed so far are an attempt to characterize African postcolonial dis-


course, and to establish the relationship between strategies for creating thishybrid discourse and the translation process. Tymoczko (1999) has arguedconvincingly that postcolonial intercultural writing is similar in many waysto interlingual translation. Using interlingual literary translation as an ana-logue for postcolonial writing, she explores the concept of translation asmetaphor for postcolonial writing. This concept, which views postcolonialwriting as a form of translation, understands the activity of translation as thecarrying across, the transportation and relocation of cultures from a mar-ginalized or peripheral position to a more central and more powerful one.After discussing some of the similarities and differences between postcolo-nial writing and interlingual translation, Tymoczko arrives at the followingconclusion:

Thus, although there are differences between literary translation and post-colonial writing, such differences are more significant prima facie than theyare upon close consideration. The two types of textual production convergein many respects; as the metaphor of translation suggests, the transmissionof elements from one culture to another across a cultural and/or linguisticgap is a central concern of both these types of intercultural writing and sim-ilar constraints on the process of relocation affect both types of texts. (1999: 22-23)

There are indeed parallels between a translator’s choices in transmitting asource text and the choices made by a minority-culture writer in represent-ing his/her indigenous culture in an alien dominant language.

2. Postcoloniality and translation studies

Postcolonial approaches to translation studies have had a significant impacton the assessment of the relationship, or the dialectic, between theory andpractice. For one thing, mainstream notions of equivalence and fluency havebeen put to the test, and traditional models often based on binary oppositionssuch as source/target, primary/secondary, faithful/unfaithful have beenshown to be rather limited. Questions have been raised regarding the conceptof the original and the rapport between the original and the translated text.For instance, the view of translation as a metaphor for postcolonial intercul-tural writing raises the question of the original from which such texts arecrafted. The definition of such an original is necessarily different from theclassic understanding of the term, since the relationship is partial and notwhole as only traces of the original can be found in the written text. Also, farfrom being a concrete or palpable entity, the original is often abstract or elusive, embedded in the oral tradition of the writer-translator’s native culture. Furthermore, once it is written down the ‘translated’ postcolonialtext appears to be no longer bound by the exigencies of the original as it seeks to project its autonomy assuming different functions and a life of its own.

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2.1. Universal pragmatics and translation

Some basic concepts of universal pragmatics and intercultural communica-tion can help elucidate the impact that postcolonial writing as translation hashad on the discourse of translation theory and practice. The ethical stance oflanguage philosophers such as Habermas and Gadamer regarding some fun-damental universal principles of communication can shed light on the con-cept of intercultural writing as translation, its significance for translation theory and practice, as well as on the ideological underpinnings of such awriting practice.

In Habermas’s (1979, 1984) discussion of universal pragmatics andcommunicative action one point stands out which seems quite significant forthe discussion of the accessibility of postcolonial hybrid texts to non-Africanreaders. He argues forcefully that success or failure of communication is notmerely a question of comprehensibility (in the linguistic sense) but ofacceptability. Basically, if the comprehensibility of one’s utterances is ques-tioned, communication can continue only if the misunderstanding is clearedup (through explication, elucidation, paraphrase, translation, semantic stipu-lations, etc.). The main thrust of Habermas’s theory is the preeminence ofuniversal conditions of possible understanding (1979: 24). Questions havebeen raised by some critics who generally perceive postcolonial intercul-tural writing as a deliberate practice of obscure and opaque writing. Thismainstream homogenizing view is less receptive to the kind of radical bilin-gualism (or radical translation, to borrow Quine’s (1960) words) practisedby African writers, which appears to do violence to the norms of the Westernvariety of European languages. Habermas’s theory (as well as Gadamer’s(1976) hermeneutic reflections) emphasizes the unity of reason in the plu-rality of natural languages. As stated by Habermas, “We are never lockedwithin a single grammar. Rather, the first grammar that we learn to masteralready puts us in a position to step out of it and to interpret what is foreign,to make comprehensible what is incomprehensible, to assimilate in ourwords what at first escapes them” (1984: 255).

In Gadamer’s view, understanding and interpretation are closelylinked. Difficulties in understanding and the need for interpretation con-stantly arise even in one’s own language. Regarding translation, he observesthat although understanding cannot be achieved that is free of the inter-preter’s own life-world, only by further penetrating the material of an alienlanguage with an openness for cultural differences can the interpreter’s pre-conceptions derived from his or her own cultural background show them-selves to be arbitrary. All interpretive understanding is necessarily bound topreconceptions and prejudgments. However, it is by being open to other cul-tures that interpreters become aware of their prejudices in the course of theirinterpretive activity. Gadamer states the following:

The interpreter, like the translator, must capture the sense of his material inand through articulating it in a symbolic framework different from that in


which it was originally constituted as meaningful. And as the translator mustfind a common language that preserves the rights of his mother tongue and atthe same time respects the foreignness of his text, so too must the interpreterconceptualize his material in such a way that while its foreignness is pre-served, it is nevertheless brought into intelligible relation with his own life-world. (qtd. in McCarthy 1978: 173)

Gadamer believes that language and tradition are inseparable, and the inter-preter is only a concrete historical subject of his/her own tradition whoseunderstanding is shaped by the values of that tradition. Yet, as Gadamerpoints out, any conception of hermeneutic understanding should necessarilytranscend such limitations.

In Habermas’s view, the interpreter willing to use his/her power ofscientific reflection is likely to overcome the influence of dogmatism of lifepractice. With this line of argument Habermas relates hermeneutic interpre-tation to the critique of ideology. He says:

Language is also a medium of domination and social power. It serves to legi-timate relations of organized force. In so far as the legitimations do not arti-culate the relations of force that they make possible, in so far as these rela-tions are merely expressed in the legitimations, language is also ideology[…]. (1984: 287)

Habermas’s critique of ideology can shed some light on the language prac-tice of postcolonial writers in Africa. Though ‘victims’ of their own concretehermeneutic situation and tradition, African writers seek to deny language itsrole as a medium of domination and social power, by subverting the coloniallanguage. The European language is othered in an attempt to retain the for-eignness of the African culture in a process of translation as representation.Contextualizing, or indigenizing, colonial languages is a well-known stra-tegy in the quest for identity vis-à-vis a universalizing (or homogenizing)metropolitan culture. The culturo-linguistic constitution of this hybrid writ-ing is also a reflection of the historical reality of the postcolonial experience.This hybrid discourse – the result of a practice of radical bilingualism ortransculturality, evoking two alien, or remote, language cultures simultane-ously – enhances our understanding of the role of translation as representa-tion grounded in ideology, and the role of translation as subversion in vio-lating the norms of the receiving colonial European languages.

African European-language writers have elected to “preserve the ori-ginal function of the source text in its culture” (Snell-Hornby 1988: 44) thuspreserving the “situation of the source text” (ibid.), a judicious choiceviewed from the vantage position of a postcolonial bilingual and biculturalsubject. Postcolonial writing as translation is, to a degree, about conveyingone’s sociocultural life-world through the medium of an alien languageweighed down by its historical and ideological load as a language of colonyand postcolony.

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3. Conclusion

According to Jakobson: “All cognitive experience and its classification isconveyable in any existing language. Whenever there is deficiency, termi-nology may be qualified and amplified by loanwords, or loan translations,neologisms or semantic shifts, and finally by circumlocutions” (1959: 234).Indeed, representations of Africanness in European-language writing havebeen made possible through such translingual and transcultural processes asloan translations, semantic shifts, shifts in norms and cultural circumlocu-tions. Regarding the apparent limitations of the hybrid postcolonial text, wecan only echo Gadamer’s and Habermas’s view that if one genuinely seeksto understand the beliefs or values of an alien culture, one is likely to findthem worthy of consideration from a common point of view of humanity.The following statement by Nida sums up the essence of our study:

Because translation always involves communication within the context ofinterpersonal relations, the model for such activity must be a communicationmodel, and the principles must be primarily sociolinguistic in the broad senseof the term. As such, translating becomes a part of the even broader field ofanthropological semiotics. (1976: 78)

The concept of translation as a metaphor for postcolonial writing broadensthe horizon of the study of translation theory and practice to include otherfields of inquiry such as history, sociology, ethnography, and anthropologi-cal semiotics. Postcolonial theory has had a significant impact on translationstudies and has forced a rethinking of some commonly held views in trans-lation theory by pointing out, for instance, that translation does not alwaystake place between two stable, concrete and well-defined entities, thus ques-tioning the relevance of a relentless search for equivalence and fluencywhich has characterized mainstream translation theory for so long.

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Achebe, Chinua (1964). Arrow of God. London: HeinemannOkara, Gabriel (1964). The Voice. London: Heinemann.

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Chinweizu, Jemi Onwuchekwa & Madubuike Ihechukwu. (1980). Toward theDecolonization of African Literature: African Fiction and Poetry and theirCritics. London: Routledge.

Chishimba, Maurice (1984). African Varieties of English: Text in Context. Ph.D.Dissertation. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Cole, Peter & Jerry L. Morgan (eds) (1975). Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts.New York: Academic Press,

Croft, Kenneth (ed.) (1980). Readings on English as a Second Language: forTeachers and Teacher Trainees. 2nd edition. Cambridge, MA: Winthrop, 399-418.

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(1975). Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press,41-59.

Gumperz, John (1978). “The conversational analysis of inter-ethnic communica-tion.” E. Lamar-Ross (ed.) (1978). Interethnic Communication. Athens, GA:University of Georgia Press, 13-31.

Habermas, Jürgen (1979). Communication and the Evolution of Society. (tr. T.McCarthy). Boston: Beacon Press.

Habermas, Jürgen (1984). The Theory of Communicative Action. (tr. T. McCarthy).Boston: Beacon Press.

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Kachru, Braj (1983). The Indianness of English: The English Language in India.London: Oxford University Press.

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Lamar Ross, E. (ed.) (1978). Interethnic Communication. Athens, GA: University ofGeorgia Press.

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Lecercle, Jean-Jacques (1990). The Violence of Language. London/New York:Routledge.

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Zabus, Chantal (1991). The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of language in theWest African Europhone novel. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Post-colonial literatures and translation

Paul F. BandiaConcordia University

It is now generally acknowledged that the “cultural turn” in the social sciences and the humanities that occurred in the 1990s changed Translation Studies (TS) forever. Culture had come to take center stage in translation analyses and discourses, rather than language viewed mainly in term of a system of linguistic exchange and communication. Language became subordinate to culture, both intertwined and often fused together in any serious discussion or analysis of translation. The ramifications were numerous for Translation Studies, as age-old notions and concepts such as equivalency, pure or standard language, distinctive binarisms and their implied hierarchy (original/translation; source-text/target text; word-for-word/sense-for-sense, etc.) were thrown into disarray. The study of post-colonial literatures is one of the fundamental areas through which the “cultural turn” made inroads into Translation Studies. By the very nature of this literature, written in colonial languages by post-colonial subjects, a host of issues often overlooked in the past, namely gender, ethnicity, sociology, linguistic alterity, identity, politics and ideology became prom-inent in translation research.

The intersection between postcolonial studies and Translation Studies has rested primarily on literature, which has had the double effect of expanding the purview of literary criticism and translation criticism. Although postcolonial studies often includes the colo-nial era, postcolonial Translation Studies has dealt mainly with pre- and post- independence literatures, i.e., literature dealing with the period immediately before and after indepen-dence. It is worth pointing out that, as a research paradigm, postcolonial theory is also being applied to contexts without an obvious (post)colonial relationship, such as between Quebec and Canada (Shamma 2009). Post-colonial literatures are now understood to include lit-eratures dealing specifically with neocolonialism and metropolitan, migrant and diaspora literatures, which can be grouped under the label post-postcolonial literature. These liter-atures have opened up translation research to include non-western cultures from Africa, India, Latin America, and the Caribbean, as well as non-hegemonic cultures such as the Irish and those from settler colonies like Australia, Canada and South Africa.

1. Writing as translation

The inter-play of translation and post-colonial literatures is two-pronged. It occurs when postcolonial writing in its materiality overlaps with the act of translating (see Bandia

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Post-colonial literatures and translation 265

2008; Tymoczko 2000), and also in the interlingual translation of post-colonial literature (Bandia 2008; Tymoczko 1999a). The first instance, also known as “writing as translation,” is related to the fact that although postcolonial writing is different from translation, they both employ similar strategies for linguistic and cultural representations. Based on this assumption, postcolonial literature is understood metaphorically as a form of translation, whereby the language of colonization is bent, twisted or plied to capture and convey the sociocultural reality or worldview of an alien dominated language culture. The very fact of writing about the experiences of formerly colonized societies by postcolonial subjects in the language of the colonizer is thus likened to translation as a metaphor for the rep-resentation of Otherness. It is in this vein that Salman Rushdie has been known to refer to postcolonial writing as translated literature and to the colonized subject or migrant as “translated men” (Rushdie 1991: 17).

The metaphorical equation of post-colonial literature with translation has been enhanced by empirical studies that have described postcolonial fictionalization in terms of translation processes and strategies (Bandia 2008; Tymoczko 1999b; Zabus 1991). The rationale for these studies and the claim to translation are grounded in what Bandia (2008) has referred to as the orality/writing interface. In other words, the representation of cul-tures of orality in colonial language writing is viewed as a double transposition process involving translating oral narrative cultures into written form and translating between distant or alien language cultures. This in itself does not imply wholesale translating as fictionalizing, but rather explains the traces of indigenous languages and oral artistry in colonial language fiction in terms of translation. Without making specific reference to translation, the seminal book The Empire Writes Back (Ashcroft et al. 1989) had established colonial language use and practices as a defining attribute of postcolonial literatures. The attempt by post colonial writers to mould and shape the colonial language into a medium for expressing non-western thought and literature resulted in non-western varieties of the colonial language, challenging its hegemony and imperialist-universalist pretentions, and disrupting the classic notion of a standard language. Linguistic experimentation and inno-vation within the matrix of the colonial language became a writing device resulting in the hybridization and vernacularization of colonial languages.

Besides lexical innovations and syntactic (de-) formation, the colonial language was infused with alien dialectal formations and in many instances forced to share space with related but locally-derived hybrid languages such as pidgins, creoles and other lingua franca through the mechanism of code-switching and mixing. This contributed to the perception of postcolonial fictionalizing as inherently involving the practice of polylingualism and literary heteroglossia. The linguistic transformation of colonial languages, as well as the hybridization and multilayering of languages (Mehrez 1992) within the postcolonial text, are conceptualized in terms of translation either pragmatically with respect to processes of linguistic transfer or metaphorically in regard to the implicit role of translation in the read-ing of multilingual discourse. Although generally understood as strategies of linguistic and




266 Paul F. Bandia

cultural representation, postcolonial fictionalizing also raises some ontological issues that have become research paradigms in Translation Studies. For instance, the issues of identity, ideology and power relations are inherent to the writing of subaltern discourse in dominant or hegemonic languages, and these issues have become paramount in the relation between post-colonial literature and translation. Postcoloniality has raised serious questions regard-ing some long-held views in Translation Studies, particularly with respect to the nature of an “original” and its relation to the translated text, the notion of equivalency or transfer between stable monolithic linguistic entities, and ultimately the purely linguistic and non-ideological conceptualization of translation practice. Postcolonial research, as a subfield, has stripped Translation Studies of its innocence, as it were, by establishing parallels between postcolonial writing as resistance to hegemony and the translation of subaltern cultures as resistance to imperialism or subversion of dominant linguistic and cultural practices.

2. Translating post-colonial literatures

Postcolonial literature enters the world through translation either as the product of inven-tive fictionalizing as discussed above or the actual translating of postcolonial fiction from one global language into another. Translation as a praxis is therefore pivotal in the writing and dissemination of postcolonial literatures. It plays a central role in the struggle of mar-ginalized cultures for acceptance and recognition in the global literary space. This in effect casts translation in a role fraught with political and ideological concerns due to the central-ity of power relations in the rapport between postcolonial theory and Translation Studies.

In “The Politics of Translation” (1993) Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak discusses the ide-ological ramifications of translating Third World literature into colonizing or hegemonic languages. She points out that the asymmetrical power relationships in a postcolonial con-text often lead to colonizing translation practices that seek to minimize the difference of minority cultures for the benefit of the target majority culture. In this regard, translation continues to play an active role in the colonialist and ideologically motivated construction of colonized peoples as mimetic and inferior clones of their ex-colonizers. To counter this perspective, Spivak proposes a translation strategy based on a kind of “positive or strategic essentialism” (1993) calling on the translator, much like the field anthropologist, to seek an intimate knowledge of the language, culture and history of the colonized.

Given the centrality of power differential in postcolonial theory, Tejaswini Niranjana (1992) also views translation with great suspicion owing to the way colonialist historio-graphy has used translation to further its agenda of colonial domination. Niranjana therefore calls on Translation Studies to cast aside its flawed and naïve image of a disci-pline concerned mainly with issues of linguistic representation, and confront the political and ideological underpinnings of an intercultural exchange essentially based on unequal power relations. To redress the power imbalance, the postcolonial translator must be





interventionist and, through the practice of re-translation, deconstruct colonizing trans-lation strategies and resist colonialist ideological impositions. It is generally in the light of such theoretical musings that the intersection of postcolonial literatures and translation can be understood.

In reference to the African context, Bandia (2008) has posited that the translation of post-colonial literature is a tripartite process involving the writing of orality from a mainly analphabetic culture into an alien and dominant written culture and subsequently the trans-fer or conversion of a discourse of interculturality and intermediality from one national language into another. There are of course many literate minority cultures for whom transla-tion into languages with global literary capital provides the sole means to recognition. This unfortunate fact enhances the perception of postcolonial fiction as a translated literature, and its subsequent translation into other languages as translating a translated original. Hence, as “translated men” (Rushdie 1991), postcolonial writers must translate themselves into global languages in order to afford some literary capital in the global marketplace. Therefore, the translation of post-colonial literature has been described variously as “re-translation” (Niranjana 1992), re-creation, rewriting, or reparation (Bandia 2008), as it involves the rep-resentation of marginalized cultures in dominant languages, with an underlying intent to set the historical record straight, as it were. It is translation as reparation insofar as its overriding purpose is one of restitution or restoration, of redress of the inanities of the past, and resis-tance to linguistic, social and cultural misrepresentation. Far from being a mere linguistic transfer, postcoloniality imposes a praxis of translation as negotiation between cultures in an unequal power relationship.

Translating post-colonial literature involves a rejection of the mainstream representa-tional theory of language in Translation Studies, which elides politics and ideology, and the subversion of dominant linguistic and aesthetic practices. Given its status as a ‘translated text’, as well as its characteristic hybridity and polylingualism, postcolonial fiction disrupts the relation between the original and translation often conceived in terms of a uniform and monolithic entity easily defined or circumscribed and transferable from one language into another. The postcolonial text is linguistically multilayered and culturally multifaceted, and calls for translation strategies that can account for its innate plurality.

3. Conclusion

Postcolonial fiction is therefore disseminated through a poetics of translation as relation, as it is transposed and re-created in global languages of power and universal appeal that were once instruments of oppression of the very postcolonial reality. It is a problematic relation in which the postcolonial subject translates himself into the language of the colo-nizer. The intersection of postcolonial literature and translation has reset the button of an ethics of translation, raising questions about the relation between writer-translator and




268 Paul F. Bandia

language, about who translates postcolonial literature and for whom, about publishers and editorial policies regarding minority literatures written in major languages, about the loca-tion of power and the relation between centre and periphery, and ultimately about the teaching of post-colonial literatures in translation. With respect to translation practice, other ethical issues arise regarding the degree of fluency or transparency of the target text, the vexed question of the assimilation of minority language cultures, the manipulation or subversion of language, an ethics of sameness or difference, reception and readability of translation, and the role of translation as an agent of decolonization. Central to the inter-section of post-colonial literatures and translation is the issue of literature and identity in our contemporary world characterized by hybrid and translational cultures in a context of unequal power differential that had ensued in the aftermath of colonization.

References

Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth & Tiffin, Helen. 1989. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures. London & New York: Routledge.

Bandia, Paul F. 2008. Translation as Reparation: Writing and Translation in Postcolonial Africa. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.

Mehrez, Samia. 1992. “Translation and the Postcolonial Experience: The Francophone North African Text.” In Rethinking Translation, Lawrence Venuti (ed.), 120–138. London & New York: Routledge.

Niranjana, Tejaswini. 1992. Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Rushdie, Salman. 1991. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticisms, 1981–1991. London: Granta.Shamma, Tarek. 2009. “Postcolonial Studies and Translation Theory.” MonTI 1: 183–196.Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1993. “The Politics of Translation.” In Outside in the Teaching Machine,

179–200. London & New York: Routledge.Tymoczko, Maria. 1999a. “Post-Colonial Writing and Literary Translation.” In Post-Colonial Transla-

tion: Theory and Practice, Susan Bassnett & Harish Trivedi (eds), 19–40. London & New York: Routledge.

Tymoczko, Maria. 1999b. Translation in a Post-Colonial Context: Early Irish Literature in English Translation. Manchester, UK: St. Jerome Publishing.

Tymoczko, Maria. 2000. “Translations of Themselves: the Contours of Postcolonial Fiction.” In Chang-ing the Terms: Translating in the Postcolonial Era. Sherry Simon & Paul St-Pierre (eds), 147–163. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press.

Zabus, Chantal. 1991. The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel. Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi.

Further reading

Bassnett, Susan & Harish Trivedi (eds). 1999. Post-colonial Translation. Theory and practice. London & New York: Routledge.





Cheyfitz, Eric. 1991. The Poetics of Imperialism. Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rafael, Vicente L. [1988] 1993. Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule. Rev. ed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Simon, Sherry & Paul St-Pierre (eds). 2000. Changing the Terms: Translating in the Postcolonial Era. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press.




Introduction

Of colonies, cannibals andvernaculars

Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi

I

Once upon a time, in the sixteenth century, in what is now Brazil,members of the Tupinambà tribe devoured a Catholic priest. This actsent shudders of horror through Portugal and Spain, representing as itdid the ultimate taboo for a European Christian. The very term‘cannibal’ was associated with the Americas; originally referring to agroup of Caribs in the Antilles, it entered the English languagedefinitively in the OED of 1796 meaning ‘an eater of human flesh’ andsubsequently passed into other European languages. The name of atribe and the name given to savage peoples who ate human flesh fusedinto a single term.

The eating of the priest was not an illogical act on the part of theTupinambà, and may even be said to have been an act of homage.After all, one does not eat people one does not respect, and in somesocieties the devouring of the strongest enemies or most worthy eldershas been seen as a means of acquiring the powers they had wieldedin life. Nor was it unknown in Europe; we need only think of Portia,the noble Roman widow who drank her husband’s ashes in a glassof wine, declaring her body to be his fittest resting place. And, ofcourse, no doubt confusingly for the Tupinambà tribe that the priestwas seeking to convert, Christianity rests on the symbolism ofdevouring the body and blood of Christ, the Saviour. In vain toprotest that the symbolic eating of the Eucharist needed to bedistinguished from the actual eating of Father Sardinha’s flesh – the

2 Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi

Tupinambà concept of eating and taboo came from very differentsources.

Now what, we may ask, does this narrative have to do with A great deal, in fact, but before considering the questionmore fully, it is important to establish certain premises. First, and veryobviously: translation does not happen in a vacuum, but in a continuum;it is not an isolated act, it is part of an ongoing process of interculturaltransfer. Moreover, translation is a highly manipulative activity thatinvolves all kinds of stages in that process of transfer across linguisticand cultural boundaries. Translation is not an innocent, transparentactivity but is highly charged with significance at every stage; it rarely,if ever, involves a relationship of equality between texts, authors orsystems.

Recent work in translation studies had challenged the long-standingnotion of the translation as inferior to the original. In this respect,translation studies research has followed a similar path to other radicalmovements within literary and cultural studies, calling into questionthe politics of canonization and moving resolutely away from ideas ofuniversal literary greatness. This is not to deny that some texts are valuedmore highly than others, but simply to affirm that systems of evaluationvary from time to time and from culture to culture and are not consistent.

One problem that anyone working in the field of translation studieshas to confront is the relationship between the text termed the ‘original’,or the source, and the translation of that original. There was a timewhen the original was perceived as being de facto superior to thetranslation, which was relegated to the position of being merely a copy,albeit in another language. But research into the history of translationhas shown that the concept of the high-status original is a relativelyrecent phenomenon. Medieval writers and / or translators were nottroubled by this phantasm. It arose as a result of the invention of printingand the spread of literacy, linked to the emergence of the idea of anauthor as ‘owner’ of his or her text. For if a printer or author owned atext, what rights did the translator have? This discrepancy has beenencoded into our thinking about the relationship between translationand so-called originals. It is also significant that the invention of theidea of the original coincides with the period of early colonial expansion,when Europe began to reach outside its own boundaries for territoryto appropriate. Today, increasingly, assumptions about the powerfuloriginal are being questioned, and a major source of that challenge comesfrom the domains of the fearsome cannibals, from outside the safety ofthe hedges and neat brick walls of Europe.

Introduction 3

Octavio Paz claims that translation is the principal means we haveof understanding the world we live in. The world, he says, is presentedto us as a growing heap of texts,

each slightly different from the one that came before it: translationsof translations of translations. Each text is unique, yet at the sametime it is the translation of another text. No text can be completelyoriginal because language itself, in its very essence, is already atranslation – first from the nonverbal world, and then, becauseeach sign and each phrase is a translation of another sign, anotherphrase.

(Paz 1992: 154) This is a radical view of translation, which sees it not as a marginalactivity but as a primary one, and it fits in with similar comments madeby writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luís Borges and CarlosFuentes. Indeed, Fuentes has gone so far as to say that ‘originality is asickness’, the sickness of a modernity that is always aspiring to see itselfas something new (Fuentes 1990: 70). It is fair to say that a great manyLatin American writers today have strong views about translation, andequally strong views about the relationship between writer/reader andtranslator. To understand something of this change of emphasis, weneed to think again about the history of translation, and about how itwas used in the early period of colonization.

Vicente Rafael describes the different significance translation hadfor the Spanish colonizers and the Tagalog people of the Philippines:

For the Spaniards, translation was always a matter of reducingthe native language and culture to accessible objects for andsubjects of divine and imperial intervention. For the Tagalogs,translation was a process less of internalizing colonial-Christianconventions than of evading their totalizing grip by repeatedlymarking the differences between their language and interests andthose of the Spaniards.

(Rafael 1988: 213) He pinpoints the profoundly different meaning that translation heldfor different groups in the colonization process. For it is, of course, nowrecognized that colonialism and translation went hand in hand. EricCheyfitz has argued that translation was ‘the central act of Europeancolonization and imperialism in America’ (Cheyfitz 1991: 104 ).


Tejaswini Niranjana goes even further, and suggests that translationboth shapes and takes shape ‘within the asymmetrical relations of powerthat operate under colonialism’ (Niranjana 1992: 2). The figure of LaMalinche, the native American woman taken as mistress of theconquistador Hernán Cortés who was also the interpreter between theSpaniards and the Aztec peoples, serves as an icon to remind us that adominant metaphor of colonialism was that of rape, of husbanding‘virgin lands’, tilling them and fertilizing them and hence ‘civilizing’them (Hulme 1986). So in this post-colonial period, when, as SalmanRushdie puts it, the Empire has begun to write back, it is unsurprisingto find radical concepts of translation emerging from India, from LatinAmerica, from Canada, from Ireland – in short, from former coloniesaround the world that challenge established European norms aboutwhat translation is and what it signifies.

Let us return at this juncture to cannibalism. The Tupinambà atetheir priest; and in the 1920s a group of Brazilian writers returned tothat story in an attempt to rethink the relationship which they, as LatinAmericans, had with Europe. For Europe was regarded as the greatOriginal, the starting point, and the colonies were therefore copies, or‘translations’ of Europe, which they were supposed to duplicate.Moreover, being copies, translations were evaluated as less thanoriginals, and the myth of the translation as something that diminishedthe greater original established itself. It is important also to rememberthat the language of ‘loss’ has featured so strongly in many commentson translation. Robert Frost, for example, claimed that ‘poetry is whatgets lost in translation’. Students of translation almost all start out withthe assumption that something will be lost in translation, that the textwill be diminished and rendered inferior. They rarely consider that theremight also be a process of gain. The notion of the colony as a copy ortranslation of the great European Original inevitably involves a valuejudgement that ranks the translation in a lesser position in the literaryhierarchy. The colony, by this definition, is therefore less than itscolonizer, its original.

So how were the colonies, emerging from colonialism, to deal withthat dilemma? How might they find a way to assert themselves andtheir own culture, to reject the appellative of ‘copy’ or ‘translation’without at the same time rejecting everything that might be of valuethat came from Europe? Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto Antropófago,which appeared in 1928, was dated 374 years after the death of FatherSardinha, the cannibalized priest, and proposed the metaphor ofcannibalism as a way forward for Brazilian culture. Only by devouring

Introduction 5

Europe could the colonized break away from what was imposed uponthem. And at the same time, the devouring could be perceived as both aviolation of European codes and an act of homage.

The cannibalistic metaphor has come to be used to demonstrate totranslators what they can do with a text. Translation, says the greatBrazilian translator Haraldo de Campos, whose work is discussed indetail by Else Vieira in her chapter in this book, may be likened to ablood transfusion, where the emphasis is on the health and nourishmentof the translator. This is a far cry from the notion of faithfulness to anoriginal, of the translator as servant of the source text. Translation,according to de Campos, is a dialogue, the translator is an all-powerfulreader and a free agent as a writer. This is a vastly different view oftranslation from that described by George Steiner as involving the‘penetration’ of the source text (Steiner 1975).

At this point in time, post-colonial theorists are increasingly turningto translation and both reappropriating and reassessing the term itself.The close relationship between colonization and translation has comeunder scrutiny; we can now perceive the extent to which translationwas for centuries a one-way process, with texts being translated intoEuropean languages for European consumption, rather than as part ofa reciprocal process of exchange. European norms have dominatedliterary production, and those norms have ensured that only certainkinds of text, those that will not prove alien to the receiving culture,come to be translated. As Anuradha Dingwaney and Carol Maier pointout, translation is often a form of violence (Dingwaney and Maier 1995).Moreover, the role played by translation in facilitating colonization isalso now in evidence. And the metaphor of the colony as a translation,a copy of an original located elsewhere on the map, has been recognized.

This shameful history of translation that is now being exposed hasled to some extreme reactions. There are those who maintain thattranslation into European languages should be restricted, even curtailed,that texts should not be translated into dominant linguistic and culturalsystems because this perpetuates the colonizing process. They have apoint, of course. But to restrict translation is to tread perilously close toother forms of censorship. A ban on translation can lead one down thesame pathway that ends with the burning of books judged unacceptableby a tyrannous regime. Much more productive is the approach proposedby such writers as Homi Bhabha, and many of the Canadian womentranslators discussed by Sherry Simon in her chapter, who arguepersuasively for a new politics of in-betweenness, for a reassessment ofthe creative potentialities of liminal space. As Homi Bhabha puts it:


we should remember that it is the ‘inter’ – the cutting edge oftranslation and renegotiation, the in-between space – that carriesthe burden of the meaning of culture. It makes it possible to beginenvisaging national anti-nationalist histories of the ‘people’. Andby exploring this Third Space, we may elude the politics of polarityand emerge as the others of our selves.

(Bhabha 1994: 38–9)

The editors of this volume of papers by translation specialists, writersand translators share the desire to eschew a politics of polarity. Thebasic premise upon which all the chapters are based is that the act oftranslation always involves much more than language. Translationsare always embedded in cultural and political systems, and in history.For too long translation was seen as purely an aesthetic act, andideological problems were disregarded. Yet the strategies employed bytranslators reflect the context in which texts are produced. In thenineteenth century, an English translation tradition developed, in whichtexts from Arabic or Indian languages were cut, edited and publishedwith extensive anthropological footnotes. In this way, the subordinateposition of the individual text and the culture that had led to itsproduction in the first place was established through specific textualpractices. The Arabs, Edward Lane informed readers in notes to hispopular translation of The Thousand and One Nights, were far moregullible than educated European readers and did not make the sameclear distinction between the rational and the fictitious (Lane 1859). Insimilar vein, Edward Fitzgerald, author of one of the most successfultranslations of the nineteenth century, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,could accuse the Persians of artistic incompetence and suggest that theirpoetry became art only when translated into English (Bassnett 1991).Both these translators were spectacularly successful, but when we startto examine the premises upon which their translation practice wasbased, what emerges is that they clearly saw themselves as belongingto a superior cultural system. Translation was a means both of containingthe artistic achievements of writers in other languages and of assertingthe supremacy of the dominant, European culture.

II

When Sir William Jones (1746–96) translated the Sanskrit romanticplay Abhijnanashakuntalam into English as Sacontala, or the FatalRing: An Indian Drama (1789), a major departure he made from the

Introduction 7

original was to stop the tender lovelorn heroine from breaking intosweat every now and then. Having lived in Calcutta as a judge of theSupreme Court there since 1783 he could not but have noticed thatthe climate was appreciably warmer, but he still felt obliged to mitigatethis essential bodily function in the interests of his Western notion ofthe aesthetic. He would not have known, with the Kama Sutra yet tobe ‘discovered’ and translated, that to sweat was traditionally knownand appreciated in India also as a visible symptom of sexual interestand arousal (in contrast with England, where one sweats when one is‘hot, ill, afraid or working very hard’; Collins 1987: 1477), nor could hehave taken recourse to the English euphemism, which probably wasinvented somewhat later, that while horses sweat and men perspire,women glow. Anyhow, his act of prim and proleptically Victoriancensorship neatly points up the common translatorial temptation toerase much that is culturally specific, to sanitize much that iscomparatively odorous.

Sir William Jones was, of course, universally acclaimed till the otherday as ‘Oriental Jones’ (Cannon 1964), in pre-Saidian innocence andeven reverence. He pioneered translations into English of Indian(specifically Sanskrit) as well as Arabic and Persian texts, and helpedbring about a new awareness of oriental literature which initially causedsuch tremendous excitement among some of the best and mostcreative European minds of that age as to have precipitated nothingless than an ‘Oriental Renaissance’ – or so it then seemed (Schwab1984: 4–8). What is notable here is that now, as for some decadesafterwards, the traffic in translation between the East and the Westremained decidedly one-sided, from the East to the West. However,through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, even whena regular flow of translations from English into the Indian languageshad been inaugurated, nearly as many works from Sanskrit continuedto be translated into the modern Indian languages as from English,and often by the same multilingual Janus-faced Indian translators.

Throughout this period, the Indian literary space was a vigorouslycontested terrain, with the impulse for an eager reception of the newWestern modes of literature being counterpointed by a tendency toresist such influence, often through reasserting the older indigenousforms of Indian writing. Eventually, however, the resurgence of nativetraditions gave way to a hegemony of Western literary culture even asthe British colonial dominance grew more entrenched all round. Astriking instance of the new literary climate was a flurry of about a dozentranslations into Hindi in the 1920s and 1930s of the Rubaiyat of Omar


Khayyam. These were, of course, translations of a translation, aninstance indeed of orientalism translated, and perhaps even aforeshadow, so to say, of the Empire translating back. For several ofthese translations were strongly modified Indian adaptations, while acouple had been done straight from Persian, which had been the elitecourt-language of India for several centuries before Englishsupplanted it under the Macaulay-Bentinck diktat from 1835 onwards,and in which many cultured Indians were still well versed a centurylater. Thus, while multiple translations into Hindi of Edward Fitzgerald’sOmar Khayyam may have underlined the condition of colonialdependence in which Indians now gained access to Persian literaturethrough English, the translations undertaken at the same time directfrom Persian can be seen as a resolute act of resistance to the Englishintervention. In any case, the most successful of all these translations(or new and inspired versions), Madhushala (i.e. The House of Wine;1935), by the most popular romantic poet in Hindi this century,Harivansha Rai Bachchan (1907– ), was a wholesale appropriationof the Rubaiyat to the local cultural and even topical nationalist context(Trivedi 1995: 29–52). Thus, if the Persian poets such as Khayyamand Attar needed to be supplied with ‘a little Art’ by Fitzgerald beforethey could become acceptable in English, Fitzgerald in turn neededto be fairly comprehensively modified and even subverted before hecould be metamorphosed into successful Hindi poetry.

If Bachchan’s Madhushala is at all translation, it is translation asrewriting, as André Lefevere has called it, or translation as ‘new writing’,as Sujit Mukherjee has named it in the Indian literary context(Mukherjee 1994: 77–85). In India, with its long history of oralcomposition and transmission, and the dominant early phase of bhaktior devotional poetry in all its modern languages in which the poetsurrendered to and sought to merge his individual identity with his divinesubject, the distinction between different composers of poetry withinthe same tradition or between an original writer and a translator wasnever half as wide as it has been in the West. Indeed, GayatriChakravorty Spivak’s uncharacteristically tender plea that a translatorshould adopt a procedure of ‘love’ and ‘surrender’ towards the original,as she herself claims to have done when translating from the Bengalisome devotional poetry as well as the contemporary fiction writerMahasweta Devi, may be seen as a vestigial persistence of thesetraditional Indian practices (Spivak 1993: 180–1). It is relevant in thisregard that the printing of books started in India on any significant scaleonly towards the end of the eighteenth century. Charles Wilkins, an

Introduction 9

early orientalist and translator from Sanskrit, also designed and castthe first font of Bengali characters and founded in 1778 in Calcutta aprinting press which was generously patronised by the East IndiaCompany (Brockington 1989: 96); the Indian incunabulum thus maybe said virtually to comprise books published before 1801. The rise ofprint capitalism in India was thus a modern-colonial phenomenon, aswas the birth of the individual copyright-holding ‘author’, whose ‘death’and ‘function’ have lately been debated in the West by Roland Barthesand Michel Foucault. Such an author could no longer be simply andsilently rewritten; he needed to be scrupulously, even faithfully,translated.

The word for translation in Sanskrit, which persists unchanged inmost of the modern Indian languages, is anuvad, which etymologicallyand primarily means ‘saying after or again, repeating by way ofexplanation, explanatory repetition or reiteration with corroborationor illustration, explanatory reference to anything already said’ (Monier-Williams 1997: 38). (One of the early Sanskrit uses of the word in thissense occurs in the Brihadaranyaka Upnishad in a passage whichT.S. Eliot picked up for use in the last section of The Waste Land; Eliot’s‘What the Thunder Said’ is, in the Sanskrit source, strictly speakingWhat the Thunder Translated/ Repeated – for the syllable DA hadalready been first uttered by the god Prajapati.) The underlyingmetaphor in the word anuvad is temporal – to say after, to repeat –rather than spatial as in the English/Latin word translation – to carryacross. Thus, ‘imitation’ in the neo-classical sense was in India a formof translation as being a repetition of something already written, andformed the staple of the pre-colonial literary tradition with those twogreat source-books of Indian culture, the Ramayana and theMahabharata, being worked and reworked by countless writers inSanskrit itself as well as in all the modern Indian languages, with variousshifts of emphasis and ideology through which gaps in the originalwere inventively filled in, silences were rendered poignantly articulate,and even some of the great heroes turned into villains and villains intoheroes.

The most outstanding examples of literature as an accumulativeendeavour constantly to make it new are the standard versions of thesetwo great epics in nearly every one of the modern Indian languages.Each of these versions, which were done on the whole sometimebetween the tenth and the sixteenth centuries AD, is clearly andsubstantially based on the Sanskrit original it repeats or retells, butwith sufficient indisputable originality for it to be regarded by everyone


as an autonomous free-standing creative work of the first order. Forexample, Tulsi Das (1532–1623) is still regarded as the greatest poetever in Hindi for having (re-)written the Ramayana. Such was his ownpoetic genius that he enjoys the status in Hindi, incredible as it maysound, of both Shakespeare and the Authorised Version of the Bibleput together in English.

Tulsi Das was by birth a brahman. Even as he brought this scripturalepic to the ‘vernacular’ masses by releasing it from the monopolistcustody of Sanskrit pundits, by whom he was predictably derided andharassed, he remained, as decreed by religious tradition and caste,entirely non-violent and a vegetarian. His reformational act of theappropriation of the Ramayana could thus hardly be called an instanceof Brazilian cannibalism; it marked, rather, a natural process of organic,ramifying, vegetative growth and renewal, comparable perhaps withthe process by which an ancient banyan tree sends down brancheswhich then in turn take root all around it and comprise an intertwinedfamily of trees: quot rami tot arbores. Such symbiotic intermingling ofthe original with the translation, of the tradition with the individualgenius, still persists, and is seen as sanctioning the practice, fairlywidely prevalent in contemporary India, of ‘transcreation’ (Lal 1996).Indeed, this word is listed in a new supplement of ‘Indian English’ wordsin the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Contemporary English(5th edn, 1996), along with such exotically incomprehensible termsas tota and trishul – unmindful of the fact that transcreation is a termwhich has independently been used also on the other side of the globe,by Haroldo de Campos in Brazil (as shown in Else Vieira’s chapter inthis volume).

A crucial disjuncture between the older pre-colonial translationalpractice in India (of which different aspects are highlighted in thisvolume in the chapters by G.N. Devy and by Vanamala Viswanathaand Sherry Simon) and the present post-colonial phase is that now,translations from the various Indian languages into English, whetherdone by foreigners or by Indians themselves, have attained ahegemonic ascendancy. The widely shared post-colonial wisdom onthe subject is that the Empire can translate back only into English, orinto that lower or at least lower-case variety of it, english, according tosome pioneering and influential theorists of the subject (Ashcroft etal. 1989: 8). To any counter-claims that literature especially with a post-colonial thrust is being written equally or even more abundantly inlanguages other than English, especially in countries such as Indiawhere only a small elite (variously estimated to constitute between 2

Introduction 11

and 10 per cent of the population) knows any English, the usualsceptical Western retort is: But show us – in English translation! (Trivediand Mukherjee (eds) 1996: 239). Yet, in inveterately multilingualcountries such as India, not only is most literature being written now inthe indigenous languages but the majority of translations being doneare from one Indian language into the others. In 1996, whenMahasweta Devi, translated, introduced and theorized in English byno less a post-colonial authority than Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,received India’s highest literary award, the Jnanpeeth (at a ceremonyat which a special guest was Nelson Mandela) and acknowledged inher acceptance speech the role played by translation in gaining her awider audience beyond Bengali in which she writes, she mentionedwith gratitude the role played not by Spivak or any others of hertranslators into English but rather by Arvind Kumar, the then directorof the National Book Trust of India, and earlier a Hindi publisher himself,who had for many years facilitated the translation and disseminationof her works into Hindi and other Indian languages. There are thustwo Mahasweta Devis, the one addressing the political and culturalrealities on her native ground in her native language as these haveevolved over a long stretch of both colonial and post-colonial times(right from her first novel, which had for its heroine Rani Lakshmi Bai,one of the most valiant fighters against the British during the ‘Mutiny’of 1857, to her more recent works describing the present-day strugglesof the tribals and Marxist revolutionaries against the independent Indiannation-state), and the other the author of a few selected short storieswhich through English translation have been borne across and co-opted within the post-colonial agenda set by the Western academy.And there are many Mahasweta Devis in each of the Indian languageswhose writings engage with a whole range of post-colonial issues butwho are yet untranslated into English and therefore unknown to post-colonial discourse.

The question to be asked here is: can one be thought to be a post-colonial even before or without being translated into English? Does s/he even exist before so translated? It is an understandable urge forsimple self-assertion which in a large measure accounts for the greattranslation boom currently on in India in which any number of Indianshave taken it upon themselves to translate works of Indian literature,both ancient and modern, into English, to show the world (includinganglophone Indians) that such works do exist. A.K. Ramanujan,probably the most outstanding Indian translator in the half-centurysince Independence, set an example in this regard through his own


informed and conscientious practice, as Vinay Dharwadker’s chapteron him in this volume demonstrates.

Symptomatically, Salman Rushdie, probably the most eminent ofall post-colonial writers, writes in English in the first place and thereforedoes not need to be translated. And yet, this is because (as G.J.V.Prasad shows in his chapter with reference to Rushdie and severalother older Indian novelists in English) he has already translatedhimself into becoming an English-language writer, through atransformation of which signs are deliberately and transparently (orfor most Western readers opaquely?) strewn all over his work in theform of Hindi/Urdu words and phrases. This is the magic bilingualismwhich paradoxically authenticates him as a post-colonial writer. Thereis another sense, of course, in which Rushdie himself has claimed tobe a ‘translated’ man, for the reason as he explains it that he hasphysically been ‘borne across the world’ from India/ Pakistan toEngland (Rushdie 1991: 17). In his formation as a post-colonial writer,the fact of his having abandoned both his native language and hisnative location has played a crucial constitutive role. With him as withnumerous other Third World writers, such translingual, translocationaltranslation has been the necessary first step to becoming a post-colonial writer.

Indeed, if one is to go by a characteristically homophonousformulation by Homi Bhabha, offered specifically in connection withRushdie’s fiction, there is now a conceptual near-synonymity betweenthe ‘transnational’ and the ‘translational’, and the translated hybridityof the ‘unhomed’ migrant now inhabits a Third Space’ (Bhabha 1994:5, 224) – which presumably becomes accessible only after one hasleft the Third World. But even when one is firmly located on colonialground, one is no less ‘in a state of translation’, as Tejaswini Niranjanaargues in her complex conflation of colonial history with post-structuralist theory; for her, translation is an overarching metaphorfor the unequal power relationship which defines the condition of thecolonized (Niranjana 1992). The colonial subject fixed to his nativesite as well as the unsited migrant post-colonial are thus equallytranslated persons.

In current theoretical discourse, then, to speak of post-colonialtranslation is little short of a tautology. In our age of (the valorizationof) migrancy, exile and diaspora, the word translation seems to havecome full circle and reverted from its figurative literary meaning of aninterlingual transaction to its etymological physical meaning oflocational disrupture; translation itself seems to have been translated

Introduction 13

back to its origins. As André Lefevere suggested, ‘the time may havecome to move beyond the word as such, to promote it to the realm ofmetaphor, so to speak, and leave it there’ (Lefevere 1994: vii).

Meanwhile, however, the old business of translation as trafficbetween languages still goes on in the once-and-still colonized world,reflecting more acutely than ever before the asymmetrical powerrelationship between the various local ‘vernaculars’ (i.e. the languagesof the slaves, etymologically speaking) and the one master-languageof our post-colonial world, English. When the very first translation fromSanskrit into English was published in 1785 (the only one to precedeJones’ Sacontala), of the Bhagavad-gita by Charles Wilkins, the thenGovernor-General Warren Hastings remarked that ‘works such asthis one will survive when the British dominion in India shall have longceased to exist’ (quoted in Brockington 1989: 97). He could not haveforeseen the post-colonial turn in world history, through which theBhagavad-gita now augurs to circulate and survive rather better inEnglish translation than in the original language – perhaps even withinIndia in the decades to come.

III

The contributors to this volume are concerned in many differentways with both the theory and practice of translation in a post-colonialcontext. In her chapter, ‘Post-colonial writing and literary translation’,Maria Tymoczko suggests that there are strong similarities betweenthese two types of textual production. Both are concerned with thetransmission of elements from one culture to another, both are affectedby the process of relocation, hence it is hardly surprising that so manypost-colonial writers have chosen to use the term ‘translation’metaphorically. Tymoczko focuses on the way in which African writerssuch as Ngãugãi wa Thiong’o have consciously chosen to import Africanwords into their writing, which creates variations in the standardlanguage and highlights the hybridity of the text. She points out that intranslation studies a distinction is always made between whether totake an audience to a text, or to take a text to an audience, and arguesthat the same distinction applies also to post-colonial writing. Bydefamiliarizing the language, post-colonial writers can bring readersface to face with the reality of difference, and call into question thesupremacy of the standard language.

G.J.V. Prasad, in similar vein, considers the case of the Indian Englishnovel, starting with the views of the novelist Raja Rao, who sees the act


of writing as a struggle for a space created by the transformation of theIndian text, the context and the English language. He points out thatIndian English writers do not so much translate Indian language textsinto English, but rather use different strategies to make their workssound like translations. This conscious ‘thickening’ or defamiliarizationof English makes the act of reading more difficult, but proclaims theright of Indian writers to translate the language for their own purposes.A complex web of translations results, and a new space is opened up inwhich bilingualism becomes the norm.

In ‘Translating and interlingual creation in the contact zone: borderwriting in Quebec’, Sherry Simon argues that bilingualism leads to thedissolution of the binary opposition between original and translation.Following Mary Louise Pratt, she uses the notion of the ‘contact zone’,the place where previously separated cultures come together.Traditionally a place where cultures met on unequal terms, the contactzone is now a space that is redefining itself, a space of multiplicity,exchange, renegotiation and discontinuities. Simon looks at the workof three Quebec writers, Jacques Brault, Nicole Brossard and DanielGagnon, showing how these writers play on language relationships inradically innovative ways. Their work, she claims, is deliberately, self-consciously provocative, blurring boundaries of cultural identity andwriting against a cultural tradition that has, as she puts it, ‘been deeplysuspicious of the work of translation’. Simon also points out that moreand more writers, from James Joyce and Samuel Beckett through toSalman Rushdie and Derek Walcott, claim that they are never ‘at home’in any language. Neither culture, nor language in today’s world offerthemselves as unifying forces, sharing a universe of references.Contemporary understanding of translation both as reality and as ideal,Simon suggests, has more to do with discontinuity, friction andmultiplicity.

André Lefevere takes up similar lines of argument in his chapter, inwhich he proposes the notion of a ‘conceptual grid’ and a ‘textual grid’that underpin all forms of writing. These grids, which he sees asinextricably intertwined, derive from the cultural and literaryconventions of a given time. So, for example, the epic, once the greatliterary form of European cultures, has virtually ceased to exist, andhas become strange and distant for contemporary readers. Anytranslator wishing to translate an epic has therefore to deal with thefact that this form is alien to readers, even though they may be aware ofits historical significance. In contrast, with a form like the Arabicquasida, which has no precedent in Western literatures, the reader’s

Introduction 15

resistance may effectively block its translation altogether. Lefevereargues that translators need to keep in mind a double set of conceptualand textual grids, in both source and target systems, but points out alsothat Western cultures ‘translate’ non-Western cultures into Westerncategories, imposing their own grids regardless. To illustrate hisargument, he considers three Dutch texts, written between 1740 and1820, that construct an idea of Dutch India (now known as Indonesia)specifically for Dutch readers. These are texts produced in a colonialcontext, for consumption at home, and Lefevere shows how the threewriters, in different ways, used forms that reinforce their attitude tothe Dutch colonizing venture.

Else Vieira moves us from epics of colonialism to the cannibalisticundertaking of the twentieth century in her chapter on the Braziliantranslator Haroldo de Campos. She draws attention to the wealth ofmetaphors he has used to define what he perceives as a new kind ofpost-colonial translation: ‘transcreation’, ‘transluciferation’,‘translumination’, ‘transtextualization’, even ‘poetic reorchestration’and the profoundly significant ‘reimagination’. De Campos’ translationpractice, which is as radical as is his theory, derives from the deliberateintention to define a post-colonial poetics of translation. Translation,says de Campos, is a form of patricide, a deliberate refusal to repeatthat which has already been presented as the original. Vieira looks atthe importance of the metaphor of cannibalism in twentieth-centuryBrazil, and shows how de Campos presents cannibalism as both a breakwith monological (colonial) truth and a form of nourishment.Translation, she claims, disturbs linear flows and power hierarchies,and unsettles the logocentrism of the original.

The unsettling power of translation is also the subject of VinayDharwadker’s chapter on A.K. Ramanujan’s translation theory andpractice. He examines the work of the great Indian translator, showinghow Ramanujan voiced the idea that the task of the translator was to‘translate’ the foreign reader into a native one, and argues thatRamanujan’s work effectively demonstrates the eurocentrism of WalterBenjamin’s and Derrida’s theories of translation, by offering analternative Indian translation poetics. In the second part of his chapterhe defends Ramanujan against his critics, seeking to show that he wasnot, as has been suggested, a colonialist translator.

The case against dominant European models is also the theme ofRosemary Arrojo’s chapter on Hélène Cixous’ versions of the work ofClarice Lispector. Although recognizing that Cixous has an authenticpassion for Lispector’s writing, Arrojo argues that Cixous uses this as a


device for appropriating Lispector’s work to serve her own ends. Cixous’discovery of Lispector has, as she points out, been perceived as a reversalof traditional colonial, patriarchal encounters, with a European writerworshipping the work of a woman from a colonized continent. ButArrojo suggests that the outcome of this relationship is merely areinforcement of the colonial model, with Cixous in the dominantposition, deliberately ignoring, disregarding or even destroyingLispector’s own ideas. Ultimately, Arrojo believes, Cixous does nothingmore than repeat the model of oppressive, masculine patriarchy thatshe claims to oppose.

Vanamala Viswanatha and Sherry Simon, who also started out fromvery different places, collaborate in a chapter significantly entitled‘Shifting grounds of exchange’. They point out that in both India andCanada, their homelands, translation is a particularly sensitive indicatorof cultural tensions. Translation practice, they suggest, is alwaysgrounded in a set of assumptions about ways in which linguistic formscarry cultural meanings – in short, in an implicit theory of culture. Apost-colonial perspective foregrounds the asymmetrical relationshipsbetween cultures that are also evidenced in the translation of literarytexts.

Understanding the complexities of textual transfer throughtranslation is of especial importance at the present time, formultilingualism, and the cultural interactions that it entails, is the normfor millions throughout the world. European languages, once perceivedas superior because they were the languages of the colonial masters,now interact with hundreds of languages previously marginalized orignored outright. Translation has been at the heart of the colonialencounter, and has been used in all kinds of ways to establish andperpetuate the superiority of some cultures over others. But now, withincreasing awareness of the unequal power relations involved in thetransfer of texts across cultures, we are in a position to rethink both thehistory of translation and its contemporary practice. Cannibalism, oncethe ultimate taboo of European Christians, can now be put intoperspective, and the point of view of the practitioners of cannibalismcan be put through the medium of translation.

References

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Introduction 17

Bassnett, S. (1991) Translation Studies (London: Routledge), citingEdward Fitzgerald, Letter to Cowell, 20 March 1851.

Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture (London and New York:Routledge).

Brockington, J.L. (1989) ‘Warren Hastings and Orientalism’, in TheImpeachment of Warren Hastings: Papers from a BicentenaryCommemoration, eds G. Carnall and C. Nicholson (Edinburgh:Edinburgh University Press).

de Campos, H. (1981) Deus e o diablo no Fausto de Goethe (San Paolo:Perspectiva).

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Fuentes, C. (1990) Aura (London: André Deutsch).Hulme, P. (1986) Colonial Encounters (London and New York:

Routledge).Lal, P. (1996) Transcreations: Seven Essays on the Art of Transcreation

(Calcutta: Writers’ Workshop).Lane, E. (1859) The Thousand and One Nights (London).Lefevere, A. (1994) ‘Introductory comments II’, in Cross Cultural

Transfers: Warwick Working Papers in Translation (University ofWarwick: Centre for British and Comparative Cultural Studies).

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Niranjana, T. (1992) Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism andthe Colonial Context (Los Angeles: University of California Press).

Paz, O. trans. Irene del Corral (1992) ‘Translations of literature andletters’, in R. Schulte and J. Biguenet (eds) Theories of Translationfrom Dryden to Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press),pp. 152–63


Rafael, V. (1988) Contracting Colonialism: Translation and ChristianConversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Ithaca,NY: Cornell University Press), p. 213.

Rushdie, S. (1991) Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta Books).

Schwab, R. (1984) The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscoveryof India and the East 1680–1880 (New York: Columbia UniversityPress; orig. pub. in French, 1950).

Spivak, G.C. (1993) ‘The politics of translation’, in her Outside in theTeaching Machine (New York: Routledge).

Steiner, G. (1975) After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation(Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Trivedi, H. (1995 [1993]) Colonial Transactions: English Literatureand India (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

Trivedi, H. and Mukherjee, M. (eds) (1996) Interrogating Post-colonialism: Theory, Text and Context (Shimla: Indian Institute ofAdvanced Study).

Documents

2016 Summer School for Translation Studies in Africa