post-colonial_translation

82 André Lefevere
(p. 130), the doe (p. 134), the evil-doer (p. 140) and the tiger (p. 148).
Stock epic features also appear in the ‘allocutions’, mostly addressed
to the enemies of the Maatschappij and designed to make them give up
their wicked ways (pp. 148 and 206) and, perhaps most obviously, in
the ‘epitheta ornantia’ such as ‘the East rich in spices’ (as on p. 143), the
‘countries rich in cloves’ (also as on p. 143), ‘the all-restoring East’ (as
on p. 270). The sea is often either ‘the never resting salt’ (as on 267) or
‘the busy salt’ (as on p. 209), and the Western parts of Dutch India are
referred to as ‘the pepper-bearing West’ (as on p. 216). Next to the
epitheta, de Marre also makes use of epic clichés: the sea is, of course,
always ‘ploughed’ (as on p. 165), and those ships are attacked in battle
by ‘the fury of iron thunderballs’ (as on p. 271). In this case it is worth
also citing the original Dutch, ‘het woên der ijzren donderkloten’,
because of the shift in semantic connotation the word ‘kloot’ has
acquired between de Marre’s time and ours. That shift has restricted
the word to a merely sexual connotation (as in the English ‘balls’), which
it did not have for de Marre. For those able to read Batavia in Dutch,
this dates the text more than could ever be rendered in any English
translation.
De Marre’s use of the epic arsenal is most enlightening when he runs
his variations on epic ‘topoi’. Obviously, his own epic will outlast time
(pp. 156–9), he makes the obligatory nod to ‘Maro en Homeer’ (p. 229),
sings the praises of the happy peasant, who is not weighed down by the
cares of state (p. 309–10), and tells Batavia’s potential rivals, such as
‘Dantzich’ (p. 163) and Lemnos (p. 171), where Vulcan/Hephaistos
had his smithy in the mythology of antiquity, to ‘be silent’.
De Marre’s Batavia becomes most interesting for our present
purposes when its author gets carried away by a stock topos, and pursues
it to the extent where it begins to conflict with the general tenor of his
epic. This happens on p. 176, among other pages, when the ‘vanitas’
topos leads to the following diatribe: ‘What do you gain, oh fool, after
struggling through these miseries / Nothing [‘naught’] but a body
labouring under the yoke of illnesses, / A soul as wild as the wet you
have ploughed; / A handful of gold, a status everybody will disdain’.
This is the side of the Maatschappij we find most obviously documented
in Haafner, and to some extent also in van Haren. It is obvious that an
epic constructed around the Maatschappij, and in which the
Maatschappij functions as the muse, could hardly go much further in
its criticism than in the passage just quoted and still maintain a claim to
logic and unity. Again, the text type makes impossible for one writer
what it allows the other two.