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Translation is the essential premise of post-coloniality. Translation, understood as a secondary activity, a derivative discourse dependent on an original text, resonates with the dilemmas of post-coloniality. We are all 'translated' men or women irrespective of our disciplinary locations as we translate ideas, institutions, and ideologies originating in settings alien to our own, which doom us to unoriginality. As we discourse in borrowed languages, we are compelled to answer the question:
Is there anything
outside colonialism?
Definitely, there is. But the self that is outside
colonialism lies hidden from the outsider's gaze
in our languages to which we must return if we are
to recover this self. Unfortunately, these
indigenous languages of self-recovery are
untranslatable into familiar euro-american
categories. This brings us to the
incommensurability thesis in Translation. Some of
the essays shift the incommensurability thesis
from intralingual to interlingual or
multisemiotic
translation.
The incommensurability premise is further
compounded in the cultural terrain where cultural
incommensurability is arranged in a hierarchical
relation. T S Satyanath's definition of
translation as "an act of transfer of knowledge,
information and ideas from one language to
another" as a colonial enterprise which implies
"certain relationships of power among the
languages and cultures involved in the process"
fits all the essays in this issue including his
own. Jharna Sanyal's Vernacular Dressings and
English Redressings, Purabi Panwar's
Post-colonial Translation:
Globalizing Literature and Swati
Ganguly's Translation and DissemiNation
implicate translation in relationships of power. Testifying to
the "the importance of translation in the project of the British Empire", Sanyal points out that "the politics of this metaphorical recasting" in the Preface to Neel Darpan lies in "elevating the local cultural markers to universal moral properties". While Sanyal and Panwar trace back the issue of power invested in the translator to the orientalist enterprise, Ganguly exposes the politics of translation in the disciplinary formation of post-colonial studies. Its privileged location in the euroamerican academy enables the monitoring and control of what gets translated, disseminated or read, forcing one to repeat that "postcolonial nations like India also produce significant and powerful Indian regional languages or bhasha literatures". K Srilata, sharing her experience of her translation of women's writing from the Self-Respect movement, unveils another form of the politics of translation,
viz. of gender
and location.
Reading post-colonialism as ‘resistance’, Meena T Pillai says, "part of the project of postcolonial theory would be to push literary
texts into this shifting arena of discursiveness, thus enabling new strands of counter narratives and counter contexts to shape themselves and complicate binarist histories". Reading translation as representation, she proceeds to analyze two subaltern narratives, one displaying "the need to implement discursive strategies to resist translations" and the other "indicating the translatability of the subaltern identity into the master language of the nation". Satyanath reveals “the processes of constructing dominations and counter constructions" by tracing the history of the Kannada translations of Shakespeare in which Shakespeare is reinscribed as Sekh Pir. Anjali Gera Roy, borrowing Rushdie's extension of the idea of translation or 'carrying across' to migrancy, cites another instance of post-colonial resistance, of a dislocated community's refusal to be translated into the national language by preserving pre-colonial dialectal difference through its
deconstruction of the
national language.
The essays by M K Raghavendra and B Hariharan move into the unexplored realm of intersemiotic translation. B Hariharan seeks to extend the meaning of translation beyond the linguistic to embrace the semiotic and the inchoate. “A dream, or an orthodox tradition handed down from generation to generation”, says he, “is a text that may also be translated as well as the city”. Hariharan gives examples of translation as a personal enterprise, as cultural enterprise and public enterprise. Raghavendra makes an attempt to defend the much-maligned Hindi film against the plagiarism charge by presenting it as ‘post-colonial appropriation’. Som Dutta Mandal’s paper elucidates the work of Tagore as a translator which to quote her is ‘essentially colonial discourse’. Tutun’s paper, the only one not on postcolonialism, is
on cultural interference
in translation.
Anjali
Gera Roy
Guest Editor
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