post-colonial_translation

Composing the other 79
[Jacob Haafner’s Adventures and Early Travels by Sea], edited and
published by his son, C.M. Haafner, in Amsterdam in 1820. Here the
text type is the first-person narrative of discovery, and the conceptual
grid is also anti-Dutch, more virulently so than in Agon, not least, I
suggest, because Haafner does not have to observe any kind of
neoclassical decorum, nor does his diction have to be lofty and his
characters heroic and virtuous. If, as he did, you want to expose the
vices, the folly, and the corruption of Dutch colonization in the East
Indies, the first-person narrative of discovery may well, indeed, be the
text type that will serve you best.
Let us start with Jan de Marre’s Batavia, an example which, as is
often the case in the writings of those who propose a new hypothesis,
‘proves’ that hypothesis almost to perfection, and which should
therefore be approached with some caution by the reader. In his
‘Toewying’, or ‘Dedication’, de Marre begs the reader’s pardon in the
following terms: ‘Should you discover something [‘aught’ would be a
more contemporary translation] in my Singster’s nature / That is wild
to your decorous ears / Remember that she was born on a keel.’ (n.p.).
It transpires that de Marre was a merchant trader, who wanted to write
a description of ‘India’. This description, which he calls a ‘eulogy’, was,
he tells us in his Preface, ‘composed in my artlessness, since before that
time I had read little poetry, and even less dedicated myself to that
pastime’ (p. 2). As a result, his eulogy initially ‘then consisted of few
pages’ (p. 2). Yet it came ‘under the eye of famous poets, who thought
they found something in same’ (p. 3). As a result, de Marre resolved ‘to
decorate the work with inventions, the soul of poetry, and to augment
it with a story of wars, of the founding, the commerce, and the navigation
of the city’ (p. 3). To do so as best he could, he sought ‘the judgment of
famous people, and masters in the art of poetry’ (p. 4). He is probably
referring to members of the then thriving ‘dichtgenootschappen’ or
‘writers’ societies’, the successors to the late medieval and Renaissance
‘rederijkerskamers’, the Dutch equivalent of the ‘master singers’, which
dominated literary production in the Dutch Republic in the eighteenth
century and exerted an influence so conservative that it may rightly be
called stifling. De Marre succeeded so well in ‘seeking their advice,
following the example of the most decorous poets’ (p. 4) that he feels
obliged to offer the reader two cryptic apologies: ‘But it will appear
even stranger that I praise the City of Commerce to such an extent, as if
nothing could be compared to it, because incoming news bears witness
of its unhealthy air, its dry and stinking canals, the decay of its buildings,
and its depopulation as the result of much dying’ (p. 5). This description,