post-colonial_translation

Introduction 15
resistance may effectively block its translation altogether. Lefevere
argues that translators need to keep in mind a double set of conceptual
and textual grids, in both source and target systems, but points out also
that Western cultures ‘translate’ non-Western cultures into Western
categories, imposing their own grids regardless. To illustrate his
argument, he considers three Dutch texts, written between 1740 and
1820, that construct an idea of Dutch India (now known as Indonesia)
specifically for Dutch readers. These are texts produced in a colonial
context, for consumption at home, and Lefevere shows how the three
writers, in different ways, used forms that reinforce their attitude to
the Dutch colonizing venture.
Else Vieira moves us from epics of colonialism to the cannibalistic
undertaking of the twentieth century in her chapter on the Brazilian
translator Haroldo de Campos. She draws attention to the wealth of
metaphors he has used to define what he perceives as a new kind of
post-colonial translation: ‘transcreation’, ‘transluciferation’,
‘translumination’, ‘transtextualization’, even ‘poetic reorchestration’
and the profoundly significant ‘reimagination’. De Campos’ translation
practice, which is as radical as is his theory, derives from the deliberate
intention to define a post-colonial poetics of translation. Translation,
says de Campos, is a form of patricide, a deliberate refusal to repeat
that which has already been presented as the original. Vieira looks at
the importance of the metaphor of cannibalism in twentieth-century
Brazil, and shows how de Campos presents cannibalism as both a break
with monological (colonial) truth and a form of nourishment.
Translation, she claims, disturbs linear flows and power hierarchies,
and unsettles the logocentrism of the original.
The unsettling power of translation is also the subject of Vinay
Dharwadker’s chapter on A.K. Ramanujan’s translation theory and
practice. He examines the work of the great Indian translator, showing
how Ramanujan voiced the idea that the task of the translator was to
‘translate’ the foreign reader into a native one, and argues that
Ramanujan’s work effectively demonstrates the eurocentrism of Walter
Benjamin’s and Derrida’s theories of translation, by offering an
alternative Indian translation poetics. In the second part of his chapter
he defends Ramanujan against his critics, seeking to show that he was
not, as has been suggested, a colonialist translator.
The case against dominant European models is also the theme of
Rosemary Arrojo’s chapter on Hélène Cixous’ versions of the work of
Clarice Lispector. Although recognizing that Cixous has an authentic
passion for Lispector’s writing, Arrojo argues that Cixous uses this as a