post-colonial_translation

90 André Lefevere
The Northern European, who leaves the Amstel’s shore,
Keeps his cool soul in this scorched climate;
His soul, not captured, as ours is, by hot passion,
Seeks slowly and serenely its essential interests:
Its cruelty, avarice, its anger itself is cold
and laments that his oldest son, Abdul, has ‘gone European’, blaming
the fact on one of the Maatschappij’s officials who ‘Has taught this
young man Europe’s customs, / Maybe filled his heart with its
dissipations’ (p. 243a).
It is also van Haren’s Agon who, in the dialogue of the neoclassical
tragedy that makes it possible to speak of such lofty
subjects as history (which also belong in the epic, but less so, at
least at the time, in the autobiographical tale of adventure),
provides the counterpoint to Book III of de Marre’s epic, in which
Jan Pieterszoon Koen, it will be remembered, recounts the glorious
history of the Maatschappij. Agon tells one of the Maatschappij’s
ambassadors, who has just given a heavily condensed version of
de Marre’s third book: ‘One could also, Sir, name on your list /
With all your boasting, Formosa, Moçambique, Macau, / And show
how there, in more fights than one / No victory was affixed to your
flag’ (p. 249b).
Both Van Haren and Haafner, not surprisingly, state the real cause
of the Maatschappij’s superiority in the East. In Agon Ibrahim, the
priest, states: ‘Europe’s knowledge in war is far superior to ours’ (p.
251b); whereas Haafner says in his own voice, or at least in that of his
autobiographical persona: ‘It is only to their irresistible superior fire
power that the Europeans owe their settlements in this and most Indian
countries; in courage, power and skill they rank far below the natives’
(p. 110).
Van Haren’s Agon also reveals the real bottom line of the
Maatschappij’s operations: ‘Expenditures have been made, they also
have to be paid. / Their mercantile spirit already counts the gains /
Of our slavery, or at least of our money’ (p. 243b). Since the
mercantile spirit is the mainstay of the Maatschappij, its other main
enemy, next to the ‘dissolute natives’, is corruption or, to put it
differently, that its officials begin to increase their own wealth at
the expense of the Maatschappij. As long as they increase their
personal wealth otherwise than at the Maatschappij’s expense, it is
content to leave them alone. But the fear of corruption is so great
that it is expressed at least five times in Batavia, on pp. 152 (by none