post-colonial_translation

4 Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi
Tejaswini Niranjana goes even further, and suggests that translation
both shapes and takes shape ‘within the asymmetrical relations of power
that operate under colonialism’ (Niranjana 1992: 2). The figure of La
Malinche, the native American woman taken as mistress of the
conquistador Hernán Cortés who was also the interpreter between the
Spaniards and the Aztec peoples, serves as an icon to remind us that a
dominant metaphor of colonialism was that of rape, of husbanding
‘virgin lands’, tilling them and fertilizing them and hence ‘civilizing’
them (Hulme 1986). So in this post-colonial period, when, as Salman
Rushdie puts it, the Empire has begun to write back, it is unsurprising
to find radical concepts of translation emerging from India, from Latin
America, from Canada, from Ireland – in short, from former colonies
around the world that challenge established European norms about
what translation is and what it signifies.
Let us return at this juncture to cannibalism. The Tupinambà ate
their priest; and in the 1920s a group of Brazilian writers returned to
that story in an attempt to rethink the relationship which they, as Latin
Americans, had with Europe. For Europe was regarded as the great
Original, the starting point, and the colonies were therefore copies, or
‘translations’ of Europe, which they were supposed to duplicate.
Moreover, being copies, translations were evaluated as less than
originals, and the myth of the translation as something that diminished
the greater original established itself. It is important also to remember
that the language of ‘loss’ has featured so strongly in many comments
on translation. Robert Frost, for example, claimed that ‘poetry is what
gets lost in translation’. Students of translation almost all start out with
the assumption that something will be lost in translation, that the text
will be diminished and rendered inferior. They rarely consider that there
might also be a process of gain. The notion of the colony as a copy or
translation of the great European Original inevitably involves a value
judgement that ranks the translation in a lesser position in the literary
hierarchy. The colony, by this definition, is therefore less than its
colonizer, its original.
So how were the colonies, emerging from colonialism, to deal with
that dilemma How might they find a way to assert themselves and
their own culture, to reject the appellative of ‘copy’ or ‘translation’
without at the same time rejecting everything that might be of value
that came from Europe Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto Antropófago,
which appeared in 1928, was dated 374 years after the death of Father
Sardinha, the cannibalized priest, and proposed the metaphor of
cannibalism as a way forward for Brazilian culture. Only by devouring