post-colonial_translation

Ramanujan’s theory and practice 129
Ramanujan’s technical training in linguistics almost certainly
would have led him to argue that such a position is necessarily
skewed and contestable. He knew that each of the ten or twelve Indo-
European and Dravidian languages he had studied formally is
historically and structurally a mongrel tongue; that any claim about
its ‘purity’ is contrafactual and, therefore, merely an ideological or
political construct; that each language and its body of historically
articulated discourses is a vast palimpsestic network of rewritten
signs, which interacts constantly with other similarly constituted
proximate or distant networks in its cultural environment; that the
mongrelization of languages occurs because their ‘interiors’ and
‘exteriors’ are separated by porous, elastic membranes and not by
rigid walls; and that, despite such a permeability of boundaries, each
language heuristically retains its ‘identity’ in relation to other
languages, a unique ‘inner form’ that resists intrusions, outsiders and
colonial conquests. Unlike Homi Bhabha, for instance, who is
concerned with demonstrating that all identities are ineluctably
ambivalent and hybrid in the end, Ramanujan accepted the hybridity
of languages and cultures as a starting point and tried to show,
instead, how different degrees and kinds of hybridization shape
particular languages, and how, despite the universal fact of
mongrelization, no two mongrels are actually alike. 24
Again, the divergence between Ramanujan’s conception of
translation and Derrida’s argument in ‘Des Tours de Babel’ becomes
evident when we notice that what Derrida claims Jakobson
‘presupposes’ is not a presupposition at all, but is worked out
explicitly and fully in a large number of essays, such as those
collected post-humously in Jakobson’s Language in Literature. 25
Moreover, I would argue, Derrida’s terms ‘obviously’ and ‘in the
final analysis’ in the sentence quoted above are highly questionable
from a structuralist standpoint, because what Jakobson presupposes
is not obviously what Derrida wants to make him seem to
presuppose in order to turn him into a straw man for easy target
practice on this occasion. Besides, what Derrida considers an
adequately rigorous demonstration of ‘the unity and identity of a
language, the decidable form of its limits’ would not be rigorous
enough for Jakobson, Ramanujan and most professional historical,
comparative and descriptive linguists. It is precisely the
deconstructionists’ undeconstructed (or unreconstructed) notion of
‘rigorous’ procedures that is a problem, not a source of solutions. If,
for a few moments, we look at the practice of translation through