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Siting Translation

University of California Press

The passion for English knowledge has penetrated the most obscure, and extended to the most remote parts of India. The steam boats, passing up and down the Ganges, are boarded by native boys, begging, not for money, but for books. ... Some gentlemen coming to Calcutta were astonished at the eagerness with which they were pressed for books by a troop of boys, who boarded the steamer from an obscure place, called Comercolly. A Plato was lying on the table, and one of the party asked a boy whether that would serve his purpose. "Oh yes," he exclaimed, "give me any book; all I want is a book." The gentleman at last hit upon the expedient of cutting up an old Quarterly Review , and distributing the articles among them.
Charles Trevelyan,
On the Education of the People of India

In a post-colonial context the problematic of translation becomes a significant site for raising questions of representation, power, and historicity. The context is one of contesting and contested stories attempting to account for, to recount, the asymmetry and inequality of relations between peoples, races, languages. Since the practices of subjection/subjectification implicit in the colonial enterprise operate not merely through the coercive machinery of the imperial state but also through the discourses of philosophy, history, anthropology, philology, linguistics, and literary interpretation, the colonial "subject"constructed through technologies or practices of power/knowledge1 is brought into being within multiple

"[Power] produces knowledge . . . [they] directly imply one another," says Foucault (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison , trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1979], p. 27). He further suggests that the "individual" or the subject is "fabricated" by technologies of power or practices of subjectification.

discourses and on multiple sites. One such site is translation. Translation as a practice shapes, and takes shape within, the asymmetrical relations of power that operate under colonialism. What is at stake here is the representation of the colonized, who need to be produced in such a manner as to justify colonial domination, and to beg for the English book by themselves. In the colonial context, a certain conceptual economy is created by the set of related questions that is the problematic of translation. Conventionally, translation depends on the Western philosophical notions of reality, representation, and knowledge. Reality is seen as something unproblematic, "out there"; knowledge involves a representation of this reality; and representation provides direct, unmediated access to a transparent reality. Classical philosophical discourse, however, does not simply engender a practice of translation that is then employed for the purposes of colonial domination; I contend that, simultaneously, translation in the colonial context produces and supports a conceptual economy that works into the discourse of Western philosophy to function as a philosopheme (a basic unit of philosophical conceptuality). As Jacques Derrida suggests, the concepts of metaphysics are not bound by or produced solely within the "field" of philosophy. Rather, they come out of and circulate through various discourses in several registers, providing a "conceptual network in which philosophy itself has been constituted."2 In forming a certain kind of subject, in presenting particular versions of the colonized, translation brings into being overarching concepts of reality and representation. These concepts, and what they allow us to assume, completely occlude the violence that accompanies the construction of the colonial subject.

Derrida, "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy," in Margins of Philosophy , trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 230.

Translation thus produces strategies of containment. By employing certain modes of representing the otherwhich it thereby also brings into beingtranslation reinforces hegemonic versions of the colonized, helping them acquire the status of what Edward Said calls representations, or objects without history.3 These become facts exerting a force on events in the colony: witness Thomas Babington Macaulay's 1835 dismissal of indigenous Indian learning as outdated and irrelevant, which prepared the way for the introduction of English education.

In creating coherent and transparent texts and subjects, translation participatesacross a range of discoursesin the fixing of colonized cultures, making them seem static and unchanging rather than historically constructed. Translation functions as a transparent presentation of something that already exists, although the "original" is actually brought into being through translation. Paradoxically, translation also provides a place in "history" for the colonized. The Hegelian conception of history that translation helps bring into being endorses a teleological, hierarchical model of civilizations based on the "coming to consciousness" of "Spirit," an event for which the non-Western cultures are unsuited or unprepared. Translation is thus deployed in different kinds of discoursesphilosophy, historiography, education, missionary writings, travel-writingto renew and perpetuate colonial domination.

My concern here is to explore the place of translation in contemporary Euro-American literary theory (using the name of this "discipline" in a broad sense) through a set of interrelated readings. I argue that the deployment of "translation" in the colonial and post-colonial contexts shows us a way of questioning some of the theoretical emphases of post-structuralism.

Chapter 1 outlines the problematic of translation and its relevance to the post-colonial situation. Reading the texts of different kinds of colonial translators, I show how they bring

Said, discussion with Eugenio Donato and others ("An Exchange on Deconstruction and History," Boundary 2 8, no. 1 [Fall 1979]: 6574).

into being hegemonic versions of the non-Western other. Because they are underpinned by the powerful metaphysics of translation, these versions are seen even in the post-colonial context as faithful pictures of the decadence or depravity of "us natives." Through English education, which still legitimizes ruling-class power in formerly colonized countries, the dominant representations put into circulation by translation come to be seen as "natural" and "real." In order to challenge these representations, one must also examine the historicist tenets that endorse them. I will, therefore, discuss the pertinence of the critique of historicism to a world undergoing decolonization. Given the enduring nature of Hegelian presentations of the non-West and the model of teleological history that authorizes them, a questioning of the model could underwrite a new practice of translation.

In chapter 2, I examine how "translation" works in the traditional discourse of translation studies and in ethnographic writing. Discussing the last two, which are somewhat marginal to literary theory, may nevertheless help us sharpen our critique of translation. Caught in an idiom of fidelity and betrayal that assumes an unproblematic notion of representation, translation studies fail to ask questions about the historicity of translation; ethnography, on the other hand, has recently begun to question both the innocence of representation...