post-colonial_translation

12 Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi
informed and conscientious practice, as Vinay Dharwadker’s chapter
on him in this volume demonstrates.
Symptomatically, Salman Rushdie, probably the most eminent of
all post-colonial writers, writes in English in the first place and therefore
does not need to be translated. And yet, this is because (as G.J.V.
Prasad shows in his chapter with reference to Rushdie and several
other older Indian novelists in English) he has already translated
himself into becoming an English-language writer, through a
transformation of which signs are deliberately and transparently (or
for most Western readers opaquely) strewn all over his work in the
form of Hindi/Urdu words and phrases. This is the magic bilingualism
which paradoxically authenticates him as a post-colonial writer. There
is another sense, of course, in which Rushdie himself has claimed to
be a ‘translated’ man, for the reason as he explains it that he has
physically been ‘borne across the world’ from India/ Pakistan to
England (Rushdie 1991: 17). In his formation as a post-colonial writer,
the fact of his having abandoned both his native language and his
native location has played a crucial constitutive role. With him as with
numerous other Third World writers, such translingual, translocational
translation has been the necessary first step to becoming a postcolonial
writer.
Indeed, if one is to go by a characteristically homophonous
formulation by Homi Bhabha, offered specifically in connection with
Rushdie’s fiction, there is now a conceptual near-synonymity between
the ‘transnational’ and the ‘translational’, and the translated hybridity
of the ‘unhomed’ migrant now inhabits a Third Space’ (Bhabha 1994:
5, 224) – which presumably becomes accessible only after one has
left the Third World. But even when one is firmly located on colonial
ground, one is no less ‘in a state of translation’, as Tejaswini Niranjana
argues in her complex conflation of colonial history with poststructuralist
theory; for her, translation is an overarching metaphor
for the unequal power relationship which defines the condition of the
colonized (Niranjana 1992). The colonial subject fixed to his native
site as well as the unsited migrant post-colonial are thus equally
translated persons.
In current theoretical discourse, then, to speak of post-colonial
translation is little short of a tautology. In our age of (the valorization
of) migrancy, exile and diaspora, the word translation seems to have
come full circle and reverted from its figurative literary meaning of an
interlingual transaction to its etymological physical meaning of
locational disrupture; translation itself seems to have been translated