post-colonial_translation

142 Rosemary Arrojo
upon the expedient of cutting up an old Quarterly Review,
and distributing the articles among them.
(Niranjana 1992, p.1)
In this poignant scene, in which what is at stake is not simply physical
force or asymmetrical military powers, but the power of seduction which
dominant cultures and languages exercise over the subaltern, we find a
radical denial of translation as the boys, fascinated by English originals,
demand an unmediated contact with the object of their desire. Ideally,
the alluring foreignness of the dominant English has to be experienced
without the mediation of the boys’ own language and culture and, of
course, at the cost of their own historical identity. In this sense, this
brief but revealing snapshot of colonial India can also be seen as an
illustration of the delusive ethics that seems to underlie most acts of
reading and translating – and particularly those undertaken in
asymmetrical contexts – in which it is the interpreter’s labour of faithful
love that is supposed to guarantee the protection of the other even if it
means the denial of the interpreter’s own identity and interests.
If asymmetrical relations of power have established that authorship,
patriarchy and colonialism do have a lot in common, by the same token,
the devoted interpreter’s or translator’s plight may be comparable not
only to the woman’s (Chamberlain 1992), but also to that of the subject
of colonization. One can recall, for instance, the exemplary story of la
Malinche, the daughter of an influential Aztec chief, whose main task
as Cortés’s translator was not merely to serve as his faithful envoy and
concubine, but to persuade her own people not to resist the Spanish
invaders (Delisle and Woodworth (eds) 1995, p. 148). To this day, her
name is a sad reminder of the Spaniards’ brutal violation of the land
and the women of Mexico, ‘passively open’ to the invader’s power and
cruelly abandoned to their own fate after being used and exploited.
And it is to this inaugural narrative – which is also the birth scene of
Mexico as a nation literally conceived in rape and in violence – that
Octavio Paz attributes, for instance, some of the most important traits
of Mexican culture, largely determined by the reliance on a clear-cut
opposition between the vulnerable (associated with the feminine, the
open, the weak, the violated, the exploited, the passive, the insulted),
and the invulnerable (associated, of course, with the masculine, the
closed, the aggressive, the powerful, capable of hurting and humiliating)
(Paz 1959, pp. 59–80).
Some insight into the mechanisms of these asymmetrical
relationships which mingle power and fascination might be gained if