post-colonial_translation

Ramanujan’s theory and practice 139
of Miami Press, 1971), pp. 29–40; and J. Culler, Structuralist Poetics:
Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1975), pp. 8–10. On parole, langue and langage, see M.
Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1972); esp. pp. 21–117.
11 Walter Benjamin, ‘The task of the translator: an introduction to the
translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens’, in his Illuminations: Essays
and Reflections, ed. H. Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken
Books, 1969), pp. 69–82; see p. 79. Hereafter cited in the text as ‘TT’.
12 On the hermeneutic circle, see E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967), pp. 76–7.
13 T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the individual talent’, in Selected Prose of T.S.
Eliot, ed. F. Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 1988), pp. 37–44; see p. 38.
14 T. Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the
Colonial Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992);
hereafter cited in the text as ST.
15 The Times of India, 25 July 1993.
16 The various texts and editions as cited by Niranjana and Ramanujan are:
S.C. Nandimath, L.M.A. Menezes and R.C. Hirenath, eds and trans.,
Sunyasampadane, vol. 1 (Dharwar: Karnataka University Press, 1965); S.S.
Bhoosnurmath and L.M.A. Menezes, eds and trans., Sunyasampadane,
vols 2 and 3 (Dharwar: Karnataka University Press, 1968–9); Basavaraju,
ed., Allamana Vacana Candrike (Mysore, 1960).
17 J. Derrida, ‘From “Des Tours de Babel”’ trans. F. Graham, in Theories of
Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, eds. R.
Schulte and J. Biguenet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp.
218–27; hereafter cited in the text as ‘DT’.
18 The quotation within the second quotation here is from Benjamin, ‘Task’, p.
71.
19 The epigraph to A.K. Ramanujan, ‘Is there an Indian way of thinking An
informal essay’, Contributions to Indian Sociology n.s. 23 (1) (1989), pp.
41–58, reads: ‘Walter Benjamin once dreamed of hiding behind a phalanx
of quotations which, like highwaymen, would ambush the passing reader
and rob him of his convictions’.
20 See, for example, A.K. Ramanujan, ‘Three hundred Ramayaas: five
examples and three thoughts on translation’, in Many Ramayaas: The
Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia, ed. P. Richman (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1991), pp. 22–49.
21 See A.K. Ramanujan, ‘On translating a Tamil poem’, included as ch. 11 in
his forthcoming Collected Essays.
22 Jakobson, ‘Linguistics and poetics’, p. 71.
23 See J.P. Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-
Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).
24 See H.K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994).
25 Cited in n. 6 above.
26 Another, more recent, example of ‘the limits and failures of
philosophical reasoning’ is the debate about ‘consciousness’ among
analytical philosophers in the 1990s; see J.R. Searle, ‘Consciousness