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K. Sripad Bhat is the Head of the Dept. of English, Goa University. His area of specialisation is Literary Theory & Cultural Studies. He has published more than two dozen articles in various national & international Journals.His postal address is Head, Dept. of English, Goa University, Goa - 403206.

Abstract

The paper deals with the issues related to the landscape of translation particularly in the post-colonial world. The paper argues that translation does not take place in an ideologically neutral ground. On the contrary, it is mediated through the dominant ideologies of the time. Translation during the post-colonial period has been subject to Euro centric norms. Concepts like 'hybridity' and 'post-nationalism' tend to legitimize only those translations/writers who adhere to Eurocentric norms. Finally, the paper argues for the historical necessity of coming back to nationalist discourse to redefine the discourse of translation as well as literature.

"I too am a translated man".

Salman Rushdie

"The vernacular literature of India will be gradually enriched by the translation of European books whose minds have been imbued with the spirit of European advancement, so that European knowledge may gradually be placed in the manner within the reach of all classes of the people".

From the dispatch on educational matters by the East India Company in 1894

Translation has never remained a noble or innocent literary engagement in the colonial or post-colonial context. "Translation during the colonial period", as Sherry Simon observes, "was an expression of the cultural power of the colonizer. Missionaries, anthropologists and learned Orientalists chose to translate the texts which corresponded to the image of the subjugated world that they wished to construct" (Simon 2000: 10). Translation referred not only to the transfer of specific texts into European languages, but to all the practices whose aim was to compact and reduce an alien reality to the terms imposed by a triumphant western culture.

Tejaswini Niranjana (Niranjana1992) argues that the meaning of historicity in translation involves examining effective history, questions such as who did the translation, how, and why and more importantly, the translation's impact need to be addressed. By examining the history of translation of classical Indian works into English from this point of view, it became apparent to Niranjana that the translators were always European missionaries or colonial administrators since Indians themselves were not considered worthy. Niranjana goes on to observe, rightly, that translators'prefaces reflected a desire to present Indian culture in a purified state so as to make it seem more English (Tervonen 2002: 1).

Perhaps, this desire to experience the familiar has emerged as the dominant equation behind translation in the post-colonial world, particularly from the Third World languages to the master language, which in today's globalized world happens to be English.

Of course, the unfamiliar or the exotic in the Orient has always been the object of curiosity and wonder in the western imagination. Such a perspective generated a lot of stereotypes about the East in the West. India being projected as a land of elephants and snake-charmers is a case in point. The popularity of Panchatantra stories is indeed reflective of the imaginative tour de force of the West because it kindled their imagination. Nevertheless, despite its popularity Panchatantra has not become a part of Western canonical establishment. The reasons are not far to seek. The main reason is the wholesale application of Eurocentric norms while studying and translating literatures belonging to the colonial and the post-colonial world. The term Eurocentrism stands for the conscious or the unconscious process by which Europe and European cultural assumptions are constructed as or assumed to be normal - the natural or the universal (Ashcroft 2004: 90-91). Eurocentrism is masked in literary study by literary universality and the universal human subject. Such a Eurocentric perspective was responsible for scrutinizing, analyzing, labeling and finally canonizing literatures of the colonial world. It was Chinua Achebe, a prominent writer from Africa, who for the first time pointed out way back in 1974 that the universal qualities expected of literature from Western criticism were not so much universal as European in a Universal disguise. Even today there is little change in the ground reality. Narratives or translations originating in the Third World become a part of the canonical establishment only if their authors pick up and deal with typical western/modernist motifs in their narratives. Perhaps for this reason, a writer like Salman Rushdie has become part of the canon in the West. The same norms are applicable to translations too.

Certain varieties of post-colonial theories have succeeded in rationalizing such perspectives. The notion of hybridity for instance belongs to this realm. Of late, hybridity is used to legitimize and authenticate the ambivalent post-colonial reality saturated by Western ideas. It is one of the most widely employed terms in post-colonial theory. It refers to the creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zone produced by colonization.

The term 'hybridity' is associated with the work of Homi. J. Bhabha (Bhabha 1994). His analysis of colonizer/colonized relationship stresses their inter-dependence and the mutual construction of their subjectivities. Bhabha contends that all cultural statements and systems are constructed in a space that he calls the Third Space of Enunciation. Cultural identity always emerges in the contradictory and ambivalent space, which, for Bhabha, makes the claim to a hierarchical purity of cultures untenable. According to him, the recognition of this ambivalent space of cultural identity may help us to overcome the exoticism of cultural diversity in favour of the recognition of an empowering hybridity within which cultural difference may operate.Let me quote Bhabha in full:

It is significant that the productive capacities of this Third Space have a colonial or post-colonial provenance. For, a willingness to descend into that alien territory…may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture's hybridity.

(Bhabha 1994: 98)

Bhabha is categorical in his rejection of old liberal humanist notions of multiculturalism and cultural diversity. According to him, it is the in-between or third space that carries the burden and meaning of culture and this is what makes the notion of hybrid important (Ashcroft 2004: 119).

Bhabha's notion of hybridity or celebration of in-between or third space quickly became a part of the vocabuary of modern translation theory, and there have been many attempts to look at the whole discourse of translation from this angle. Samia Mehrer (Mehrer: 2000) for example argues that post-colonial texts understood as hybrids have created their own language. Michaela Wolf's essay entitled The Third Space in Postcolonial Representation (Wolf 2000: 127-145) is a plea for the application of the notion of hybridity in the field of translation.

What does this mean for the conception of translation? All attempts at cultural and textual translation must work on the assumption of the multi-tracked, non-synchronous nature of cultural hybridities, not of a one-way road leading from the source text to the target text. Thus, one discovers not only a sphere of new internationalism in the sense of the complex practice and poetics of world-wide migration and the cultural symbolism into which the historical processes of the transformation of the post-colonial societies themselves are translated, but also the powerhouses where global or international culture is retranslated into specific cultural or historical locality. Post-colonial translations postulate the decentralization and location of hybrid cultures across the traditional axis of translation between separate cultures and literatures (Medick 1996: 11).

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