This blog is on Thinking activity given by Dr. Dilip Barad sir on Comparative Literature and Translation studies.
In this paper our teacher gave a task to present a partner presentation on every article it is divided by the teacher.
Unit 4 we have two article
SITING TRANSLATION
History,Post-structuralism, and The Colonial Context
-Tejaswini Niranjana
In a post-colOnial context the problematic of translation becomes a significant site for raising questions of representation, 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. the discourses of philosophy, history, anthropology philology, linguistics, and literary interpretation, the colonial "subject constructed through technologies or practices of power/knowledge is brought into being within multiple discourses and on multiple sites.
Western philosophical notions of reality, representation, and knowledge. Really is seen as something unproblematic, "out there"; knowledge involves a representation of this reality; and representation provides direct, unmediated access to a transparent reality.
Her concern here is to explore the place of translation in contemporary Euro-American literary theory (using the name of this "discipline" in a broad sense) through a set of interre- lated readings. I argue that the deployment of "translation" in the colonial and post-colonial contexts shows us a way of questioning some of the theoretical emphases of poststructuralism.
Chapter 1 outlines the problematic of translation and its relevance to the post-colonial situation. Reading the texts of different kinds of colonial translators.
In chapter 2, she examines how "translation" works in the traditional discourse of translation studies and in ethnographic writing. Caught in an idiom of fidelity and be- trayal that assumes an unproblematic notion of representa- fion, 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 representation and the longstanding 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 associated with a major preoccupation in each: allegory or literature in de Man, the problematics of representation and intentionality in Derrida, and the question of materialist historiography in Benjamin. Pointing out the configurations of translation and history in Benjamin's work, she describes the kind of reading provided by de Man and Derrida of Benjamin's important essay "The Task of the Translator." Her argument is that Walter Benjamin's early writings on translation are trapped in significant ways into his later essays on the writing of history, a trope that goes unrecognized by both de Man and Derrida.
The word translation not 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).
Her 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. Her concern is to probe the absence, lack, or repression of an awareness of asymmetry and historicity.
The post-colonial distrust of the liberal-humanist rhetoric of progress and of universalizing master narratives has obvious affinities with post-structuralism.
That translation became part of the colonial discourse of Orientalism is obvious from British efforts to obtain information about the people ruled by the merchants of the East India Company.
As translator and scholar, Jones was responsible for the most influential introduction of a textualized India to Europe, Within three months of his arrival, the Asiatic Society held its first meeting with Jones as president and Warren Hastings. the governor-general, as patron. It was primarily through the efforts of the members of the Asiatic Society, themselves ad- ministrators and officials of the East India Company's Indian Government, that translation would help "gather in" and "rope off" the Orient.
Grand Jury at Calcutta, his letters, and his "Oriental" poems to show how he contributes to a historicist, teleological model of civilization that, coupled with a notion of translation presupposing transparency of representation.
The most significant nodes of Jones's work are (a) the need for translation by the European, since the natives are unreliable Interpreters of their own laws and culture; (b) the desire to be a lawgiver, to give the Indians their "own" laws; and (c) the desire to "purify" Indian culture and speak on its behalf. The interconnections between these obsessions are extremely complicated.
In Jones's construction of the "Hindus," they appear as a submissive, indolent nation unable to appreciate the fruits of freedom, desirous of being ruled by an absolute power, and sunk deeply in the mythology of an ancient religion. In a let- ter, he points out that the Hindus are "incapable of civil liberty," for "few of them have an idea of it, and those, who have, do not wish it"
The idea of the "submissive" Indians, their inability to be free, and the native laws that do not permit the question of liberty to be raised are thus brought together in the concept of Asian despotism.
Indians thought of liberty as a curse rather than a blessing, since they certainly could not rule themselves or administer their own laws, these laws had first to be taken away from them and "translated" before they could benefit from them.
William Ward's preface to his three-volume A View of the History, Literature, and Mythology of the Hindoos is instructive for the virulence with which it attacks the depravity and im- morality of the natives.
Ward does not see the present state of the Hindus as a falling away from a former Golden Age. Instead, like James Mill, who quotes him approvingly and often, Ward sees the Hindus as corrupt by nature, lacking the means of education and improvement.
Macaulay did not think it necessary for the entire Indian populace to learn English: the function of anglicized education was "to form a class who may be interpreters between us (the British) and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian.in.blood.and.colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect."
A Gauri Viswanathan has pointed out, the introduction of English education can be seen as "an embattled response to historical and political pressures: to tensions between the English Parliament and the East India Company, between Parliament and the missionaries, between the East India Company and the native elite classes. Extending her ar- gument, I would like to suggest that the specific resolution of these tensions through the introduction of English education was enabled discursively by the colonial practice of transla- tion. European translations of Indian texts prepared for a Western audience provided the "educated" Indian with a whole range of Orientalist image) Even when the anglicized Indian spoke a language other than English, "he" would have preferred, because of the symbolic power conveyed by En- glish, to gain access to his own past through the translations and histories circulating through colonial discourse. English education also familiarized the Indian with ways of seeing, techniques of translation, or modes of representation that came to be accepted as "natural"
The construction of the colonial subject presupposes what Pierre Bourdieu has called "symbolic domination." Symbolic domination, and its violence, effectively reproduce the social order through a combination of recognition and misrecogni tion (reconnaissance and méconnaissance)-recognition that the dominant language is legitimate (one thinks again of the use of English in India) and "a misrecognition of the fact that this language.
The notion of auto colonization implicit in the story about the "native boys" begging for English books could be ex- plored in greater depth through Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony.
My central concern here is not to elaborate on the battle for "history" now being staged in Euro-American theory but to ask a series of questions from a strategically "partial" per- spective that of an emergent postcolonial practice willing to profit from the insights of post-structuralism, while at the same time demanding ways of writing history in order to make sense of how subjectification operates.
History in the text of Post-structuralism is a repressive force that obliterates difference and belongs in a chain that includes meaning, truth, presence, and logos.
If representation stands for the reappropriation of presence, translation emerges as the sign for what Derrida would call "dissemination"
The point is not just to criticize these characterizations as "inadequate" or "untrue"; one should attempt to show the complicity of the representations with colonial rule and their part in maintaining the asymmetries of imperialism.
Clearly, the notion of hybridity, which is of great importance for a Subaltern critique of historiography as well as for a critique of traditional notions of translation, is both "ambiguous and historically complex."" To restrict "hybridity," or what I call "living in translation," to a post-colonial elite is to deny the pervasiveness, however heterogeneous, of the transformations wrought across class boundaries by colonial and neocolonial domination. This is not to present a meta- narrative of global homogenization, but to emphasize the need to reinvent oppositional cultures in non essentializing ways. Hybridity can be seen, therefore, as the sign of a post-colonial theory that subverts essentialist models of reading while it points toward a new practice of translation.
-E. V. Ramkrishnan click here
No comments:
Post a Comment