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Vanamala Viswanatha and Sherry Simon
reflection of the changing power relations which shape and
maintain national/cultural boundaries.
Though they are often initiated through violence, translations, as
forms of contact, also put into play systems of interaction whose
outcomes introduce new terms of exchange. What recent postcolonial
theory alerts us to is the need to restore complexity to our
understanding of relations of alterity, of oppositional identities
created through struggle. The heritage of imperialism, according
to Edward Said, is paradoxical. Although it led people to believe
that they were ‘exclusively Western, or Oriental’, in fact
‘[i]mperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities
on a global scale’ (Said 1993: 336). 23 Stuart Hall reminds us that
the movements of military and cultural conquest which established
colonialism were interwoven with ‘transverse linkages’,
disruptions and dislocations which affect both the dominated and
dominating cultures. Hall argues that post-colonialism ‘obliges
us to re-read [these] binaries as forms of transculturation, of
cultural translation’, to rediscover the ‘transverse movements
which were always inscribed in the history of “colonisation” but
carefully overwritten by more binary forms of narrativisation’
(Hall 1996: p. 247, 251).
These, then, are the paradoxical logics of exchange in which
translations participate. Though important vectors of colonial influence,
translations, as in the case of BMS’s work, made possible the creation of
new kinds of literary identities. The post-colonial frame allows us to better
understand the outcomes of translation by taking into account the
asymmetry of languages and cultures within the evolving global context
and by insisting on historically informed criticism.
Authors’ Note
Vanamala Viswanatha and Sherry Simon would like to thank Vidya
Vikram for permission to quote from English Geetragalu, 1985
(B.M. Shri Smaraka Prathishtana, Bangalore) and Shrisahitya, 1983
(Kannada Adhyayana Samsthe, Mysore) both by B.M. Srikantaiah.
Notes
1 See, for instance, S. Simon (ed.), Culture in Transit: Translating the
Literature of Quebec (Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1995).