The Postcolonial Turn in Literary Translation Studies

The Postcolonial Turn in Literary Translation Studies: Theoretical Frameworks Reviewed Bo Pettersson University of Helsinki

In 1990 Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere, two towering translation studies scholars, famously announced what had been under way for some time: the "cultural turn" in translation studies. In brief, they envisaged that "neither the word, nor the text, but the culture becomes the operational ‘unit’ of translation" (Lefevere and Bassnett 1990: 8). The collection in which their piece appeared (Bassnett and Lefevere 1990) has recently been hailed by Edwin Gentzler (1998: xi), one of the leading synthesizers of translation theory, as the "real breakthrough for the field of translation studies" - which is true in the sense that it epitomized what is sometimes termed "the coming of age" of the discipline. In the 1990s translation studies has in many ways been informed by this cultural turn, which, as Bassnett (1998: 132-133) has shown, includes a rapprochment between cultural studies and translation studies, due to their related efforts to understand the process and status of globalization and national identities. This focus, together with the veritable explosion of postcolonial studies in literature in the last few years of the millennium, has entailed that the cultural turn in translation studies increasingly has become intercultural or multicultural. More specifically, owing to the wide-ranging interest in postcolonial literature and criticism, it might be termed the postcolonial turn. In this paper I set out critically to review this postcolonial turn in literary translation studies. In order to do so, I must first at some length consider the theoretical - often poststructuralist - frameworks of postcolonial criticism, which so extensively have informed postcolonial translation studies. Then I go on to survey how and to what effect such frameworks are employed in the discipline. Finally I evoke some roads not taken--or not yet taken--that might be fruitfully explored if the aim is to pursue postcolonial studies with some degree of rigor. 2. Postcolonial Translation in Theory and Practice As we move from postcolonial theory to the theory and practice of postcolonial translation, we see that much is taken over from the former or from the theoretical frameworks that inform the former. The most widely discussed and cited translation scholar in the last few years has probably been Lawrence Venuti (especially Venuti 1995), who advocates foreignizing (as against domesticating) translation at all costs. First we should note what is obvious: this attitude is at least as old as Schleiermacher (1813/1992) in translation studies. Another point I have made elsewhere is that there are, especially in literary translation, instances in which the source text includes features such as the ones Venuti advocates - "discursive variations, experimenting with archaism, slang, literary allusion and convention" (Venuti 1995: 310). In such cases perhaps the convention of "faithful" or "invisible" translation Venuti (1992a, 1995, 1998) so despises would better convey the features that prompted their translations in the first place. What is more, it is at least potentially paradoxical that the translator should be "visible" and employ "foreignizing" features at the same time, since foreignizing features, at least in the Schleiermacher tradition (see Lefevere and Bassnett 1998: 7-10), were primarily introduced into the target text from the source text, not by the translator’s invention (on the last two points see Pettersson 1998: 338-339). The influence Venuti has exerted on translation studies - not least postcolonial translation - has been widespread enough to warrant scrutiny of his theoretical framework. In fact Venuti’s major studies (1995, 1998) include little overt reference to literary theoreticians that inform his work. But in other fora he has been more outspoken. In his introduction to and selection in the edition Rethinking Translation. Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (Venuti 1992b) and in a recorded debate (in Schäffner and Kelly-Holmes 1995), he puts his cards on the table: "Poststructuralism has in fact initiated a radical reconsideration of the traditional topoi of translation theory. Largely through commentaries on Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Task of the Translator,’ poststructuralist thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man explode the «binary opposition between ‘original’ and ‘translation’» which underwrites the translator’s invisibility today." (Venuti 1992a: 6) "[...] the methodological framework I’m coming from is the post-structuralist framework with a very heavy dose of the Marxist tradition of the Frankfurt school." (Schäffner and Kelly-Holmes 1995: 41; yet he voices his scepticism of Derrida’s "free play with the signifier", 1995: 35) In fact poststructuralist thinkers did not initiate the reconsideration, let alone the explosion, of "the binary opposition between ‘original’ and ‘translation’" in translation studies. The relevant changes were largely part of a development within the discipline more generally and could be identified already at the famous Leuven conference in 1976 and in the collection entitled The Manipulation of Literature. Studies in Literary Translation by Theo Hermans (1985) (see Gentzler 1998: ix-xi). In this collection there are only two overt references to poststructuralism and its predecessors: Leon Burnett (1985: 169-70) briefly paraphrases Walter Benjamin’s famous essay "Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers", which, as we have seen, Venuti (1992a) considers seminal for poststructuralist translation theory (as does Niranjana 1992: 4-5); and Lefevere (1985) invokes Paul de Man’s view of criticism as a kind of literature and on that basis launches his famous view of "translation as one, probably the most radical form of rewriting in a literature, or a culture" (see Lefevere 1985: 219, 241 quote). However, as the "manipulation" view later gained ground, it was certainly cross-fertilized by poststructuralist frameworks, such as Venuti’s. A brief review of the theory and practice of postcolonial translation studies quickly reveals the extent to which translation scholars draw on poststructuralism, "the Holy Trinity" (especially Bhabha 1994), and Venuti (1995). Two of the earliest and most explicitly poststructuralist studies are Vicente L. Rafael’s (1988/1993) Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule and Tejaswini Niranjana’s (1992) Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context. They are lucidly reviewed by Douglas Robinson (1998) in his survey Translation and Empire. Postcolonial Theories Explained. In fact Robinson (1998: 108-113) presents such a useful four-point list of criticisms of the frameworks of these two works and Venuti (1995) that I am content to list his points in brief. He asks: (a) whether the impact of foreignizing vs. domesticating translations on a target culture is as different as has been claimed; (b) whether the impact of either type of translation (if such a naive division in fact should be made at all) is as monolithic as has been supposed; (c) whether foreignizing translations are not inherently elitist; and (d) whether the stable separation of source and target languages in the assimilating-foreignizing distinction is tenable. The importance of these four critical points lies in the fact that Robinson considers the results of employing theoretical frameworks in translation studies and goes on to suggest that acts of translation should be contextualized. (I return to Robinson 1998 and this point in section 3.) Even more recently Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi (1999b) have edited a collection titled Post-Colonial Translation. Theory and practice which is largely informed by poststructuralist frameworks. In their introduction Bassnett and Trivedi (1999a: 6, 12) invoke Bhabha’s "inbetweenness" (and "Third Space"), and so does Sherry Simon (1999) in her essay on bilingualism in Quebecois writing. Maria Tymoczko (1999) draws on Venuti and Bhabha - and other translation scholars - in her analysis of how Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Chinua Achebe, among other African authors, employ, without supplying explanations, African terms in the original as a foreignizing device (forgetting that Achebe 1959/1984: 192 added a glossary to his first novel, Things Fall Apart, and thus trained his readers in Igbo terminology). G. J. V. Prasad (1999: 54 quote, 54-55) situates his intriguing conclusion that "Indian English writers are [...] using various strategies to make their works read like translations" in relation to Bhabha and two like-minded critics (Sherry Simon 1992 and Samia Mehrez 1992, both in Venuti 1992b). Else Ribeiro Pires Vieira (1999) describes the way in which Haroldo de Campos launches his "poetics of transcreation" from a Brazilian point of view. De Campos’ evocations of Benjamin and Derrida are thus held to be inscribed within a larger project aimed at effecting a liberation from the Eurocentric tradition by "cannibalizing" it. Even though Rosemary Arrojo (1999: 159) briefly cites Spivak in her critique of Hélène Cixous’s "masculine" appropriation of the intriguing Brazilian fiction writer Clarice Lispector, she also suggests - and I take it that she intends this suggestion as a negative assessment - that Cixous’s translation strategy "seems to follow a similar rationale" as do Venuti and Niranjana (Arrojo 1999: 148). However, the most dissenting voice in Bassnett and Trivedi (1999b) is that of Vinay Dharwadker (1999), who, in the longest paper in the collection, shows what indigenous scholarship cross-fertilized with Western traditions of literary studies, linguistics and anthropology has accomplished in the translation theory and practice of A. K. Ramanujan. In the course of so doing, Dharwadker (1999: 123-126, 130-135) amasses much evidence for his argument against the criticism Niranjana (1992) directs against Ramanujan - and Dharwadker thus turns the tables on Niranjana, whose theory and practice are, it seems, effectively dismantled. Dharwadker (1999: 126-30) gets to the bottom of Niranjana’s theorizing when examining Benjamin’s and Derrida’s pronouncements on translation, which prove to be parochial and of little use, respectively, when viewed in the light of A. K. Ramanujan’s practice. What is more, expressly unlike Bhabha, for whom, Dharwadker (1999: 129) rightly claims, "all identities are ineluctably ambivalent and hybrid in the end", "Ramanujan accepted the hybridity of languages and cultures as a starting point and tried to show, instead, how different degrees and kinds of hybridization shape particular languages, and how, despite the universal fact of mongrelization, no two mongrels are actually alike." The aim of my critical view has been, not to invalidate everything the above theorists and critics have done, but to point to the damage that the misguided theoretical frameworks have caused - and continue to cause - in the theory and practice of postcolonial translation studies. However, one should remember that even though I here have singled out the poststructuralist frameworks that translation scholars employ, many of them draw on a broad array of translation theories and (in some cases) practices. To conclude, let us briefly consider where translation studies in general and postcolonial literary translation studies in particular are today, and where they might go. 3. Roads to be Taken and Roads Not to be Taken The above section title probably irks people who feel that translation studies should be past prescriptive admonitions, since the disciplinary watchword for more than two decades has been description rather than prescription. But why, then, have so many of the most eminent names in the field, from Lefevere (1975) to Gideon Toury (1995), continued to offer us various rules and regulations for translation praxis? What is more, Andrew Chesterman (1998: 226, 227) has recently suggested that "a prescriptive statement is simply a form of hypothesis, usually concerning the desirability parameter", and, if this is the case, then "we should incorporate it [prescriptivism] into our empirical theory, testing its hypotheses just as we would test any others". Chesterman (1998: 201) also identifies "the shift from philosophical conceptual analysis towards empirical research" as "the most important trend" in current translation studies, in conjunction with the general movement from translational to translatorial studies. It is evident that if such a shift is to take place in postcolonial literary translation studies - and such a shift, I believe, is sorely needed inasmuch as the relevant approaches have been highly theory-driven since their inception -, then much should be done in order to effect rewarding interaction between theory and practice. Perhaps the discipline should even be turned on its head: translation studies could be practice-driven, rather than theory-driven. Since each act of postcolonial translation has such manifold contextual parameters, perhaps a meticulous study of those parameters would benefit not only the object of study and possible comparative theorizing, but also lead to a better understanding of the relevant postcolonial situation and its ties with the (former) colonizing culture - and other cultures. Moreover, some ingrained notions in translation rhetoric - especially evident in the work of poststructuralist scholars but in that of others too - are definitely unhelpful. First, translation is often employed as an overriding and rather one-dimensional metaphor for interpretation of all kinds. Second, Lefevere’s notion of translation as rewriting is of little help, unless rigidly specified. Third, comparisons of postcolonial literature and translation are certainly of some interest, but should be combined with more enlightening studies of their dissimilarities. In all three cases it is the complexity of the act of translation and its position in its various sociocultural (etc.) contexts that should be closely examined. Despite the fact that this paper has primarily presented a critical review of poststructuralist frameworks that have extensively informed postcolonial translation studies, let me note what should go without saying: other frameworks too should be subjected to similar scrutiny. For instance, Eric Cheyfitz’s (1991) The Poetics of Imperialism. Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan does not draw on poststructuralism but is seriously flawed by the rather common view in postcolonial translation studies of the precolonial society as a utopia and translation as the colonizer’s demonic tool (for a critical reading of Cheyfitz 1991 see Robinson 1998: 63-77, 105-108). José Lambert, who for many years has struggled to see translation studies in a more global perspective, proposed "A Program for Fieldwork" a few years ago. Some of the central points in the program - the call for "hypotheses on communication principles" together with "microscopic and macroscopic research" (Lambert 1996: 414) - could certainly be of use in postcolonial translation. What is more, Lambert (1994: 21) has noted that since "the target pole and - even more - the binary opposition source/target have been stressed excessively in recent publications, the discussion of the source-target-transfer aspects of translation research has hardly taken place". This would suggest that Anthony Pym’s (1992) multidimensional approach to text transfer in translation should still be pursued and renewed - and introduced into postcolonial translation studies. In short, what postcolonial translation studies now need is at least (a combination of) the following: theoretical eclecticism, so that, for instance, the polysystem, Handlung and Skopos schools could be made use of; case studies firmly grounded in sociocultural fieldwork; and an interdisciplinary openness to related work in ethnography, anthropology, sociology, history, linguistics (especially pragmatics) and literary studies (especially literary pragmatics). This way translation studies might be able to accomplish what Robinson (1998: 79) - arguing against linguistic equivalence in translation studies - envisages: "Translation in its multifarious social, cultural, economic and political contexts is impossibly more complex a field of study than abstract linguistic equivalence (which is already complex enough); but the chance of perhaps coming to understand how translation works in those contexts, how translation shapes cultures both at and within their boundaries, offers a powerful motivation to push on despite the difficulty of the undertaking." This aim is potentially of such great consequence, not just for literary studies and translation studies but also for the future of the cultures involved, that the theoretical frameworks within which postcolonial translation studies are conducted must be subjected to scrutiny, and, if found wanting, replaced. The author would like to thank Andrew Chesterman and Yves Gambier for references and interesting discussions.

What might one understand by ‘postcolonialism’?

RY: I have been writing about postcolonialism for over twenty years now, written two “Introductions” and countless essays, which makes this a very big question for me. Postcolonialism means what it says, which is “after the colonial.” There are many different ways in which we can take this. For countries that were colonized, it means dealing with the aftermath and the debris of colonial rule, institutional, economic, material, cultural and psychic. For countries that were formerly (or indeed remain) colonial powers—all Western European countries with the exception of Norway (though even there the Norwegian Lutherans were involved in forms of colonialism), as well as Russia, China and Japan, together with countries that arguably continue colonialism in different modalities, above all the United States (the United States is both an imperial and formerly colonized power), it means deconstructing and revising their own cultures and historical narratives with respect to their own values, assumptions and hierarchies that were developed in the colonial period, and adjusting their own cultures to accommodate the migrants who have now brought the empire home, so to speak, and come to live in the formerly imperial centre. One effect of that is that the monolingualism that was developed so remorselessly during the state formations that took place during the period of European nationalism has now had to give way to new kinds of multilingual societies.

TC: Was there any such notion in the ancient world?

RY: Of the postcolonial? I know that ideas about the postcolonial have now spread both to the medieval and classical worlds of academic scholarship, and the analogy can be developed quite fruitfully. Having said that, the formation of the Roman Empire, and the world of Christendom that developed in its wake, took place under very different conditions than those of modern European empires. Nevertheless, we can see that the postcolonial perspective can be helpful in thinking through certain aspects of earlier historical periods. All of Anglo-Saxon poetry, for example, could be said to be marked by its own sense of being postcolonial with respect to the departed Romans (though that was not, of course, a word that they used!).

TC: What is the relationship between postcolonialism and translation?

RY: Many scholars have now investigated this question, and emphasized the role that translation played in the development of empire—from the role of interpreters for early explorers and conquerors, to the role of translations of local texts, particularly legal and religious texts—as a way to facilitate the institution of colonial rule, as in British India. Moreover the imposition of the colonizer’s language, and the devaluation of local languages so that they had no official status, meant that for local people, translation, together with bilingualism for some, became the mark of their colonial condition. At the same time, in this context some of the problems of translation, the impossibility for example of producing a perfect translation, became manipulated in certain power games. On the one hand, it was utilized for the colonizer’s benefit, as in the Treaty of Waitangi, where the English version is very different from the Māori where the language is simplified and vaguer. On the other hand, translation offered a mode of resistance for local people, a practice that is explored in Brian Friel’s wonderful play about British rule in Ireland, Translations [5]. Friel’s play concerns the translation process with respect to maps as a form of domination. In this respect we should add the work of José Rabasa on mapping [6]. The map gives one of the clearest instances of the ways in which knowledge, and the mediation of knowledge through a particularly powerful language and set of representations, can be a significant as well as highly symbolic part of the exercise of political and epistemological control.

The major theoretical impact, we could say, of the work that has been done on the relationship between postcolonialism and translation is to highlight the ways in which translation is always involved in a relation of power, both in terms of the institutional practice of translation and in the general relationship between languages, which are never neutral but always involved in larger formations of power. I think that has been postcolonialism’s most original and significant effect on translation studies.

TC: What is the role of translators in the postcolonial world?

RY: From a social and human perspective, the most important people are interpreters, in particular the people who are interpreting in legal situations such as applications for asylum, refugee status, the right to remain, etc. These people have tremendous power in such processes, and an awareness of the social and cultural issues faced by migrants, by people dispossessed through war, famine and poverty, is extremely important for them if they are to fulfill their roles effectively and humanely. I think interpreting in legal contexts is so important and greatly under-examined. I would like to know much more about its processes. For the most part the courts assume that interpretation, and indeed translation, are straightforward processes, whereas in fact they are often exerted as forms of control and reduction. In more general terms, the role of translators is not essentially different in the postcolonial world than in any other, except with respect to the general social consensus today that interaction and understanding between cultures has become more urgently important. Translators are the people who are most able to facilitate and enable understanding between people of different cultures.

TC: Who might be in a position to judge the quality of a translation?

RY: I don’t think fundamental thinking about this has changed at all in recent years. You can judge a translation from a linguistic point of view, with respect to its accuracy, the success of its rendition from source to target language. On the other hand you can judge a translation from the point of view of the reader. It may be a good translation technically, but unreadable, or it may be a poor translation, technically, but a powerful rendition, or simply useful from a practical point of view.

TC: What might one mean by ‘de-translation’?

RY: This is Jean Laplanche’s term, in his interpretation of Freud on translation [7]. Initially Freud discusses the dream work as a kind of translation that converts unacceptable material into a form that the dreamer can assimilate. Laplanche develops this further, by pointing out that since the dream itself is, from a Freudian point of view, the problem to be decoded, then what the analyst has to do in the analysis is in effect to detranslate it back to the original, unacceptable dream thoughts. These then need to be retranslated into a form that will enable the analysand to cope with his or her life more effectively in the future. I’ve used the concept quite extensively to discuss the ways in which we need to detranslate many of our concepts about other cultures—previous translations, as it were—in order to redevelop them into forms that are more appropriate to our modalities of understanding and cultural awareness in the twenty-first century.