post-colonial_translation

146 Rosemary Arrojo
Kafka’s story who spends his whole life waiting before the law,
dominated by the fear of castration. Therefore, as Cixous’s logic goes,
giving is easier for women (or for anyone or anything that can be called
‘feminine’) while men are more prone to retaining: ‘a limited, or
masculine, economy is characterized by retention and accumulation.
Its dialectical nature implies the negation – or death – of one of the
terms, for the enhancement of the other’ (Conley 1992, pp. 39–40).
These opposite ways of relating to the law produce different styles,
different strategies of reading and writing as well as different modes of
research. A feminine style is, for example, ‘the style of live water’ –
echoing the title of Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva (1973) – in which
‘thirst is itself that which quenches, since to be thirsty is already to give
oneself drink’. Such a style ‘gives rise to works which are like streams
of blood or water, which are full of tears, full of drops of blood or tears
transformed into stars. Made up of phrases which spill forth dripping,
in luminous parataxis’. On the other side of the dichotomy, Cixous
identifies a style ‘marked by the pain of reduction, a “man’s style” which
is at the mercy of scenes of castration’ and that ‘gives rise to forms which
are dry, stripped bare, marked by the negative, forms of which the most
striking examples are those of Kafka and Blanchot’ (Cixous 1988, p.
25). The pursuit of a feminine style is also the pursuit of meaning without
mediation, free from the constraints of translation, and which could
be different from the ‘masculine’ language we have been taught, a
language ‘that translates everything in itself, – understands nothing
except in translation, [ . . . ] listens only to its grammar, and we separated
from the things under its orders’ (Cixous 1980, p. 137; quoted in Conley
1992, p. 79). Cixous, by the way, explicitly associates translation with
laziness, violence and reduction: ‘in these violent and lazy times, in which
we no longer live what we live [ . . . ] we no longer listen to what things
still want to tell us, we simply translate and translate, everything is
translation and reduction [ . . . ]’ (Cixous 1979a, pp. 412–13).
A ‘feminine’ mode of writing involves strategies which strive to treat
the other ‘delicately, with the tips of the words, trying not to crush it, in
order to un-lie’ (Cixous 1991b, p. 134). Obviously, such a mode of
research, which ‘presents radical alternatives to the appropriation and
destruction of difference necessitated by phallic law’, has implications
for the ways in which texts are approached. Since it necessarily involves
a certain blurring of the limits between author and interpreter, and
between the two languages and cultures involved, translation is first of
all adamantly avoided. Appropriately, reading is viewed as an act of
listening to the text’s otherness. As a consequence, if the text as other is