post-colonial_translation

16 Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi
device for appropriating Lispector’s work to serve her own ends. Cixous’
discovery of Lispector has, as she points out, been perceived as a reversal
of traditional colonial, patriarchal encounters, with a European writer
worshipping the work of a woman from a colonized continent. But
Arrojo suggests that the outcome of this relationship is merely a
reinforcement of the colonial model, with Cixous in the dominant
position, deliberately ignoring, disregarding or even destroying
Lispector’s own ideas. Ultimately, Arrojo believes, Cixous does nothing
more than repeat the model of oppressive, masculine patriarchy that
she claims to oppose.
Vanamala Viswanatha and Sherry Simon, who also started out from
very different places, collaborate in a chapter significantly entitled
‘Shifting grounds of exchange’. They point out that in both India and
Canada, their homelands, translation is a particularly sensitive indicator
of cultural tensions. Translation practice, they suggest, is always
grounded in a set of assumptions about ways in which linguistic forms
carry cultural meanings – in short, in an implicit theory of culture. A
post-colonial perspective foregrounds the asymmetrical relationships
between cultures that are also evidenced in the translation of literary
texts.
Understanding the complexities of textual transfer through
translation is of especial importance at the present time, for
multilingualism, and the cultural interactions that it entails, is the norm
for millions throughout the world. European languages, once perceived
as superior because they were the languages of the colonial masters,
now interact with hundreds of languages previously marginalized or
ignored outright. Translation has been at the heart of the colonial
encounter, and has been used in all kinds of ways to establish and
perpetuate the superiority of some cultures over others. But now, with
increasing awareness of the unequal power relations involved in the
transfer of texts across cultures, we are in a position to rethink both the
history of translation and its contemporary practice. Cannibalism, once
the ultimate taboo of European Christians, can now be put into
perspective, and the point of view of the practitioners of cannibalism
can be put through the medium of translation.
References
Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G. and Tiffin, H. (1989) The Empire Writes
Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures (London:
Routledge).