post-colonial_translation

92 André Lefevere
mouth of a cannon and he had the cannon fired subsequently – It
is true that nobody hinders the orangcayas from making up their
loss by oppressing their black subjects, but they are too much of
stupid pagans still to want to oppress the people of their own
country and their subjects and to reduce them to hunger and
destitution.
No wonder Haafner looks forward to the end of the rule of the
Maatschappij, which he imagines near: ‘the most recent war with the
British has already given it a terrible blow, and without the French,
even though they have their own special interests at heart, we would
no longer possess as much as one thumb’s breadth of soil in the East
Indies’ (p. 127). That was published in 1820. In 1769, on the other
hand, Agon dies at the end of van Haren’s play, and the audience is
told that his youngest son, Hassan, has also died in battle. Abdul, the
eldest son, does what all rulers had to do eventually: reach some kind
of accommodation with the Maatschappij: ‘In the wary East nobody
is free any more, / And everybody intent on soft rule. / Batavia’s fortress
has made everything give way / And it is no longer a shame to retreat
before Holland’ (p. 239b) – a sad judgement on rulers who are reduced
to this state of affairs because, in the words Agon speaks at his
abdication: ‘The Batavian who seeks to subjugate the whole of the
East, / Free in Holland, will not allow freedom here’ (p. 242a), even
though de Marre writes that the ‘Batavian fleet’ found ‘the means to
deliver the spicy Moluccas / Yes, the whole East from tyranny’ (p.
14). But that was the tyranny of the Portuguese.
I trust the point I wanted to make has been made by now. In
conclusion I would like to add a few observations as well as a few
disclaimers. It is obviously not my intention to claim that it is the epic
that made de Marre into a colonialist, any more than that it is the
story of personal adventure that made Haafner into an anti-colonialist.
They had obviously both taken up those conceptual positions before
they began to write what they wrote. It is my contention, though,
that de Marre’s decision, at a time when genres were viewed in a strictly
hierarchical order, to write an epic about the Maatschappij reflects
his admiration for that Maatschappij. He must have felt that only the
epic could do it justice. And once he casts the Maatschappij as the
heroine of his epic, she can do no wrong; she will go under, if at all,
because of her own failings, as described and warned against in the
epic. In the meantime, though, all her actions are to be praised and
supported. It follows that if the Maatschappij is to be the pure heroine