This blog is about Thinking Activity on. articles presentations about comparative literature and Translation studies. This task is assigned by Prof. Dr. Dilip Barad sir, Head of the English Department of Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University (MKBU). As a part of the syllabus, students of English department are learning the paper called Comparative literature and translation studies.
Article : 8 SITING TRANSLATION
HISTORY, POST - STRUCTURAL, AND THE COLONIAL CONTEXT
TEJSWINI NIRNJANA
Abstract
Introduction:
History in Translation
The passion for English knowledge has penetrated the most obscure, and extended to the most remote parts of India. The steam boats, passing up and down the Ganges, are boarded by native boys, begging, not for money, but for books.... Some gentlemen coming to Calcutta were as tonished at the eagerness with which they were pressed for books by a troop of boys, who boarded the steamer from an obscure place, called Comercolly. A Plato was lying on the table, and one of the party asked a boy whether that would serve his purpose. "Oh yes," he exclaimed, "give me any book; all I want is a book." The gentleman at last hit upon the expedient of cutting up an old Quarterly Re- view, and distributing the articles among them.
Charles Trevelyan, (1807-1886) On the Education of the People of India
SITUATING TRANSLATION
In a post-colonial context the problematic of translation be- comes a significant site for raising questions of representa tion, power, and historicity. The context is one of contesting and contested stories attempting to account for, to recount the asymmetry and inequality of relations between peoples races, languages. Since the practices of subjection/subjectif cation implicit in the colonial enterprise operate not merel through the coercive machinery of the imperial state but als through the discourses of philosophy, history, anthropolog philology, linguistics, and literary interpretation, the colon "subject constructed through technologies or practices power/knowledge is brought into being within multipdiscourses and on multiple sites. One such site is translation. Translation as a practice shapes, and takes shape within, the asymmetrical relations of power that operate under colonialism.
Conventionally, translation depends on the Western philosophical notions of reality, representation, and knowledge. Realty is seen as something unproblematic, "out there"; knowledge involves a representation of this real- ity; and representation provides direct, unmediated access to a transparent reality.
Jacques Derrida suggests, the concepts of metaphysics are not bound by or produced solely within the "field" of philoso- phy. Rather, they come out of and circulate through various discourses in several registers, providing a "conceptual net- work in which philosophy itself has been constituted.
By employing certain modes of representing the other-which it thereby also brings into being-translation reinforces hege- monic versions of the colonized, helping them acquire the status of what Edward Said calls representations, or objects without history.
Thomas Babington Macaulay's 183 dismissal of indigenous Indian learning as outdated and in relevant, which prepared the way for the introduction of E glish education.
Niranjana concern here is to explore the place of translat contemporary Euro-American literary theory (using the of this "discipline" in a broad sense) through a set of i lated readings. I argue that the deployment of "trans in the colonial and post-colonial contexts shows us a questioning some of the theoretical emphases of pos turalism.
into being hegemonic versions of the non-Western other. Be- cause they are underpinned by the powerful metaphysics of translation, these versions are seen even in the post-colonial context as faithful pictures of the decadence or depravity of "us natives." Through English education, which still legiti- mizes ruling-class power in formerly colonized countries, the dominant representations put into circulation by translation come to be seen as "natural" and "real." In order to challenge these representations, one must also examine the historicist tenets that endorse them. I will, therefore, discuss the perti- nence of the critique of historicism to a world undergoing de- colonization, Given the enduring nature of Hegelian presen- tations of the non-West and the model of teleological history that authorizes them, a questioning of the model could un- derwrite a new practice of translation.
In chapter 2, examine how "translation" works in the tra- ditional discourse of translation studies and in ethnographic writing. Discussing the last two, which are somewhat mar- ginal to literary theory, may nevertheless help us sharpen our critique of translation. Caught in an idiom of fidelity and be- trayal that assumes an unproblematic notion of representa- tion, translation studies fail to ask questions about the histor- icity of translation; ethnography, on the other hand, has recently begun to question both the innocence of representa- tion and the long-standing asymmetries of translation.
In chapters 3, 4, and 5, my main focus is the work of Paul de Man Jacques Derrida, and Walter Benjamin (an earlier critic who is becoming increasingly important to post-structuralist thinkers). My analysis shows how translation functions as a "figure" in all three thinkers, becoming synonymous or as- sociated with a major preoccupation in each: allegory or lit- erature in de Man, the problematics of representation and in- entionality in Derrida, and the question of materialist istoriography in Benjamin. Pointing out the configurations of translation and history in Benjamin's work, I describe the ind of reading provided by de Man and Derrida of Benja- nin's important essay "The Task of the Translator." My ar- ument is that Walter Benjamin's early writings on translation.
tion are troped in significant ways into his later essays on the writing of history, a troping that goes unrecognized by both de Man and Derrida. (I use trope to indicate a metaphorizing that includes a displacement as well as a re-figuring.) The re- fusal of these major proponents of deconstruction to address the question of history in Benjamin suggests a critical draw- back in their theory and perhaps indicates why deconstruc tion has never addressed the problem of colonialism
In the final chapter, with the help of a translation from Kannada, a South Indian language, into English, I discuss the "uses" of post-structuralism in post-colonial space. Through- out the book, my discussion functions in all the registers philosophical, linguistic, and political-in which translation "works" under colonialism. If at any point I seem to dwell on only one of these, it is for a purely strategic purpose.
This work belongs to the larger context of the "crisis" in "English" and post-structuralism on literary studies in a rapidly decol- orizing world. The liberal humanist ideology that endorsed and was perpetuated by the civilizing mission of colonialism is still propagated by discourses of "literature" and "criti- cism" in the tradition of Arnold, Leavis, and Eliot. These dis- ciplines repress what Derrida, in the words of Heidegger, calls the logocentric or ontotheological metaphysics by which they are constituted, which involves all the traditional conceptions of representation, translation, reality, unity, and knowledge."
There have been few systematic attempts to question "En- glish," or literature, or criticism from a post-colonial perspective, let alone such a perspective that also incorporates in- sights from contemporary theory. In order to help challengethe complicity of these discourses with colonial and neo- colonial domination, I propose to make a modest beginning by examining the "uses" of translation. The rethinking of translation becomes an important task in a context where it has been used since the European Enlightenment to under- write practices of subjectification, especially for colonized peoples. Such a rethinking-a task of great urgency for a post- colonial theory attempting to make sense of "subjects" al- ready living "in translation," imaged and re-imaged by colonial ways of seeing-seeks to reclaim the notion of translation by deconstructing it and reinscribing its potential as a strat- egy of resistance.
Michel Foucault's no- tion; as the rest of this chapter will show, however, my use of the term is not exclusively dependent on the Foucauldian framework. Colonial relations of power have often been re- produced in conditions that can only be called neocolonial, and ex-colonials sometimes hunger for the "English book" as avidly as their ancestors.
By now it should be apparent that I use the word translation just to indicate an interlingual process but to name an entire problematic. It is a set of questions, perhaps a "field." charged with the force of all the terms used, even by the traditional discourse on translation, to name the problem, to translate_translation. Translatio (Latin) and metapherein (Greek) at once suggest movement, disruption, displacement. So does Übersetzung (German). The French traducteur exists between interprète and truchement, an indication that we might fashion a translative practice between interpretation and reading, carrying a disruptive force much greater than the other two. The thrust of displacement is seen also in other Latin terms such as transponere, transferre, reddere, vertere. In my writing, trans- lation refers to
(a) the problematic of translation that author- izes and is authorized by certain classical notions of represen- tation and reality;
(b) the problematic opened up by the post-structuralist critique of the earlier one, and that makes translation always the "more," or the supplement, in Derrida's sense.
My study of translation does not make any claim to solve the dilemmas of translators. It does not propose yet another way of theorizing translation to enable a more foolproof "method" of "narrowing the gap" between cultures; it seeks rather to think through this gap, this difference, to explore the positioning of the obsessions and desires of translation, and thus to describe the economies within which the sign of translation circulates. My concern is to probe the absence, lack, or repression of an awareness of asymmetry and historicity in several kinds of writing on translation. Although Euro- American literary modernists such as Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Samuel Beckett persistently foregrounded the question of translation, I have not discussed their work, since it has, in any case, been extensively dealt with by mainstream literary critics, and since the focus of my interrogation is not poetics but the discourses of what is today called "theory."
The post-colonial distrust of the liberal-humanist rhetoric of progress and of universalizing master narratives has ob- vious affinities with post-structuralism." Derrida's critique of representation, for example, allows us to question the notion of re-presentation and therefore the very notion of an origin or an original that needs to be re-presented. Derrida would argue that the "origin" is itself dispersed, its "identity" un- decidable. A representation thus does not re-present an "original"; rather, it re-presents that which is always already represented. The notion can be employed to undo hegemonic " representation" of "the Hindu", like , for example, those put forward by G.W.F. Hegel and James Mill.
I am sharing 'I am sharing 'Introduction _ History in Translation ' with you' with you.pptx from HinabaSarvaiya
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