post-colonial_translation

14 Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi
of writing as a struggle for a space created by the transformation of the
Indian text, the context and the English language. He points out that
Indian English writers do not so much translate Indian language texts
into English, but rather use different strategies to make their works
sound like translations. This conscious ‘thickening’ or defamiliarization
of English makes the act of reading more difficult, but proclaims the
right of Indian writers to translate the language for their own purposes.
A complex web of translations results, and a new space is opened up in
which bilingualism becomes the norm.
In ‘Translating and interlingual creation in the contact zone: border
writing in Quebec’, Sherry Simon argues that bilingualism leads to the
dissolution of the binary opposition between original and translation.
Following Mary Louise Pratt, she uses the notion of the ‘contact zone’,
the place where previously separated cultures come together.
Traditionally a place where cultures met on unequal terms, the contact
zone is now a space that is redefining itself, a space of multiplicity,
exchange, renegotiation and discontinuities. Simon looks at the work
of three Quebec writers, Jacques Brault, Nicole Brossard and Daniel
Gagnon, showing how these writers play on language relationships in
radically innovative ways. Their work, she claims, is deliberately, selfconsciously
provocative, blurring boundaries of cultural identity and
writing against a cultural tradition that has, as she puts it, ‘been deeply
suspicious of the work of translation’. Simon also points out that more
and more writers, from James Joyce and Samuel Beckett through to
Salman Rushdie and Derek Walcott, claim that they are never ‘at home’
in any language. Neither culture, nor language in today’s world offer
themselves as unifying forces, sharing a universe of references.
Contemporary understanding of translation both as reality and as ideal,
Simon suggests, has more to do with discontinuity, friction and
multiplicity.
André Lefevere takes up similar lines of argument in his chapter, in
which he proposes the notion of a ‘conceptual grid’ and a ‘textual grid’
that underpin all forms of writing. These grids, which he sees as
inextricably intertwined, derive from the cultural and literary
conventions of a given time. So, for example, the epic, once the great
literary form of European cultures, has virtually ceased to exist, and
has become strange and distant for contemporary readers. Any
translator wishing to translate an epic has therefore to deal with the
fact that this form is alien to readers, even though they may be aware of
its historical significance. In contrast, with a form like the Arabic
quasida, which has no precedent in Western literatures, the reader’s