post-colonial_translation

72 Sherry Simon
the creation of new commonalities. Culture no longer offers itself as a
unifying force; language, nation, culture no longer line up as bounded
and congruent realities. Language, in particular, has lost its ability to
ground us in a shared universe of references. In recognizing that ‘everyone
is potentially, to a greater or lesser extent, a nonnative speaker’ (Kramtsch
1997: 368) language professionals have started to sound like Joyce,
Beckett and Nabokov, Rushdie, Derek Walcott or Jacques Derrida in
claiming that we are never ‘at home’ in any language. 9 It has become a
commonplace of critical discourse to speak of the hybrid aesthetics of
contemporary post-colonial writing, its creolization and multiplicity.
Texts, like cultures, like national territories, are more and more the sites
of competing languages, diverse idioms, conflicting codes. This ‘Otherness
within’ works to reconfigure a practice of translation defined in the West
since the Renaissance as a transfer between linguistically unified texts.
Increasingly, translation and writing become part of a single process of
creation, as cultural interactions, border situations, move closer and closer
to the centre of our cultures. Writing across languages, writing through
translation, becomes a particularly strong form of expression at a time
when national cultures have themselves become diverse, inhabited by
plurality. Whether in the context of the tensions of bilingualism or the
developing modes of global vehicular idioms, the mixing of codes points
to an aesthetics of cultural pluralism whose meanings have yet to be fully
explored.
Notes
1 It is significant that in a recent issue of the important journal Essays on
Canadian Writing (56 (Fall 1995)) devoted to post-colonial theory, ‘Testing
the limits: post-colonial theories and Canadian literature’, Quebec is hardly
mentioned at all.
2 Brossard, born in 1943, has published more than fifteen books of poetry
and seven novels. Five of her books have appeared in English translation:
Surfaces of Sense, trans. Fiona Strachan, (Toronto: Coach House Press,
1989); The Aerial Letter, trans. Marlene Wildeman (Toronto: The Women’s
Press, 1988); French Kiss, trans. Patricia Claxton (Toronto: Coach House
Press, 1986); Lovhers, trans. Barbara Godard (Montreal: Guernica
Editions, 1986); These Our Mothers, trans. Barbara Godard, (Toronto:
Coach House Press, 1983); Daydream Mechanics, trans. Larry Shouldice
(Toronto: Coach House Press, 1980).
Brault, born in 1933, has published several volumes of poetry (including
Moments fragiles, 1984), a novel (Agonie, 1985) and several volumes of
essays. Agonie was translated as Death-Watch by David Lobdell (Toronto:
Anansi, 1987); Barry Callaghan has translated Moments fragiles as Fragile
Moments (Toronto: Exile Editions, 1987). Gertrude Sanderson translated