Abstract
Many words have been expended on defining, defending and criticizing the term ‘postcolonial’ used in the title of this book.1 I do not want at this point to add very much to them apart from saying that I use it here as a flag of convenience, since, whatever the pros and cons of the term might be, it does at least have the minimum virtue of identifying for readers one of the areas within which this book is set.
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Notes
I have in mind Vicente L. Rafael’s Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (1988; Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). A concise discussion of metaphoric uses of translation is Ruth Evans’s article ‘Metaphor of Translation’, in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies ed. Mona Baker, assisted by Kirsten Malmkjaer (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 149–53.
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Essays in which he deals with cultural translation include ‘The Commitment to Theory’ (pp. 19–39) and ‘How Newness Enters the World: Postmodern Space, Postcolonial Times and the Trials of Cultural Translation’ (pp. 212–35). As a rough idea of what I mean by ‘mainstream’ in this context, I would point to the student-oriented text Beginning Postcolonialism by John McLeod (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). This is not a criticism of McLeod’s helpful book; I intend only to indicate that the topics discussed in it are generally taken to be the central areas of postcolonial theory. Another introductory book, Robert J. C. Young’s Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) does discuss translation (chapter 7), but without really moving beyond the parameters of accounts such as Bhabha’s.
George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 312.
Friedrich Schleiermacher, ‘On the Different Methods of Translating’, trans. Susan Bernofsky, in The Translation Studies Reader 2nd ed., ed. Lawrence Venuti (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 43–63 (p. 43).
Both the epistle and the address to the reader are conveniently reprinted in Douglas Robinson ed. Western Translation Theory: From Herodotus to Nietzsche (Manchester: St Jerome, 1997), pp. 131–5. The quotations can be found on pp. 131 and 134 respectively.
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens’, in Illuminations ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973), pp. 69–82 (p. 80). A full discussion of the two strategies and their implications can be found in Lawrence Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995).
Donald Davie, Poetry in Translation (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1975), p. 13.
Lawrence Venuti, Introduction to Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology ed. Venuti (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 1–17 (p. 5).
Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 59.
Anthony Pym, ‘Schleiermacher and the Problem of Blendlinge’, Translation and Literature 4 (1995), pp. 5–30 (p. 7).
Godfrey Lienhardt, ‘Modes of Thought’, in E. E. Evans-Pritchard et al, The Institutions of Primitive Society: A Series of Broadcast Talks (Oxford: Blackwell, 1954), pp. 95–107 (pp. 96–7).
Clifford Geertz, ‘Found in Translation: On the Social History of the Moral Imagination’, in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (1983; London: Fontana, 1993), pp. 36–54 (p. 44).
Octavio Paz, ‘Translation: Literature and Letters’, trans. Irene del Corral, in Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida ed. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 152–62 (p. 154).
Prasenjit Gupta, Introduction to Indian Errant: Selected Stories of Nirmal Verma trans. Gupta (New Delhi: Indialog, 2002), pp. xxxviii, xl. Surface and deep resistance are discussed on pp. xxxv–xlii. The pagination here is that of the bilingual hardback edition. The paperback edition, which prints only the translations of the stories, puts this material in an afterword.
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© 2007 Ashok Bery
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Bery, A. (2007). Cultural Translation. In: Cultural Translation and Postcolonial Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286283_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286283_2
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