post-colonial_translation

Introduction 13
back to its origins. As André Lefevere suggested, ‘the time may have
come to move beyond the word as such, to promote it to the realm of
metaphor, so to speak, and leave it there’ (Lefevere 1994: vii).
Meanwhile, however, the old business of translation as traffic
between languages still goes on in the once-and-still colonized world,
reflecting more acutely than ever before the asymmetrical power
relationship between the various local ‘vernaculars’ (i.e. the languages
of the slaves, etymologically speaking) and the one master-language
of our post-colonial world, English. When the very first translation from
Sanskrit into English was published in 1785 (the only one to precede
Jones’ Sacontala), of the Bhagavad-gita by Charles Wilkins, the then
Governor-General Warren Hastings remarked that ‘works such as
this one will survive when the British dominion in India shall have long
ceased to exist’ (quoted in Brockington 1989: 97). He could not have
foreseen the post-colonial turn in world history, through which the
Bhagavad-gita now augurs to circulate and survive rather better in
English translation than in the original language – perhaps even within
India in the decades to come.
III
The contributors to this volume are concerned in many different
ways with both the theory and practice of translation in a post-colonial
context. In her chapter, ‘Post-colonial writing and literary translation’,
Maria Tymoczko suggests that there are strong similarities between
these two types of textual production. Both are concerned with the
transmission of elements from one culture to another, both are affected
by the process of relocation, hence it is hardly surprising that so many
post-colonial writers have chosen to use the term ‘translation’
metaphorically. Tymoczko focuses on the way in which African writers
such as Ngãugãi wa Thiong’o have consciously chosen to import African
words into their writing, which creates variations in the standard
language and highlights the hybridity of the text. She points out that in
translation studies a distinction is always made between whether to
take an audience to a text, or to take a text to an audience, and argues
that the same distinction applies also to post-colonial writing. By
defamiliarizing the language, post-colonial writers can bring readers
face to face with the reality of difference, and call into question the
supremacy of the standard language.
G.J.V. Prasad, in similar vein, considers the case of the Indian English
novel, starting with the views of the novelist Raja Rao, who sees the act