WACANA VOL. 8 NO. 2, OKTOBER 2006 (157—169)
The Coloniser and the Colonised:
Reflections on Translation
as Contested Space
Harry Aveling
Abstrak
Tulisan ini mengemukakan pentingnya pemahaman penerjemah mengenai
“kata” dari sebuah karya. Kata “coloniser” dan “colonised” yang muncul dalam karya Albert
Memmi memiliki relevansi dengan pengertian kolonial yang bersifat metaforis. Oleh karena
itu, seorang penerjemah, dalam melihat kedua kata itu, haruslah terfokus pada teks itu sendiri
dan merefleksikannya. Secara singkat ada banyak cara untuk melihat karakteristik yang
beragam dari hubungan antara penerjemah beserta terjemahannya dan penulisnya
Kata Kunci
coloniser, colonised, colonial metaphor, translator, translated
In her “critical introduction” to postcolonial theory, Leela Gandhi speaks
the “new fields of knowledge – often classified under the rubric of the ‘new
humanities’ – [which] have endeavoured first, to foreground the exclusions and
elisions which confirm the privileges and authority of canonical knowledge
systems, and second to recover those marginalised knowledges which have
been occluded and silenced by the entrenched humanist curriculum “(Gandhi
1998: 42). These fields are, in the words of Michel Foucault, “subjugated
knowledges … knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their
task or insufficiently elaborated: naïve knowledges, located low down on the
hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity (Foucault
1980: 82); Gandhi 1998: 43).” From among these knowledges, Foucault cites
“that of the psychiatric patient, of the ill person, of the nurse, of the doctor … of
the delinquent, etc” (Foucault 1980: 82). Gandhi’s examples are perhaps these
days more respectable: “disciplines such as women’s studies, cultural studies
and gay/lesbian studies” – and postcolonial studies, of course (Gandhi 1998:
42). Translation Studies is one of “the new humanities”1 and sits somewhere
between the types of knowledge which Foucault and Gandhi describe.
In this paper, I come as both a practitioner and a scholar of translation. I
1
Susan Bassnet’s book Translation Studies, Methuen, London 1980, p. 1, credits the name
of the new discipline to a proposal made by André Lefevere in 1976: her book is “an attempt
to demonstrate that Translation Studies is inded a discipline in its own right; not merely a
minor branch of comparative literary study, nor yet a specific branch of linguistics, but a vastly
complex field with many far-reaching ramifications.”
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have translated extensively from Indonesian and Malay, co-translated from
Hindi, and have done some preliminary work on Francophone Vietnamese
writing. Here, I am interested in using Albert Memmi’s book, The Colonizer
and the Colonized, as providing a metaphor which might be useful for thinking
about the act of translation and its problems.
Albert Memmi
Albert Memmi was born in Tunisia in 1920, a Jew in a predominantly Muslim
French colony. His father was a saddler. Memmi’s maternal language was
Arabic. He was educated firstly in a rabbinical school, then at the Alliance
israélite, and finally at a French high school in Tunisia. His studies at the
University of Algiers were interrupted by the Second World War, when he
was interned in a forced-labour camp in 1943, but he later proceeded to the
Sorbonne, receiving his agrégation in philosophy. Returning to Tunisia, with
a French wife, he began work in the field of child psychology and campaigned
actively for Tunisian independence as editor of the literary page of the Tunisian
daily L’Action. After Tunisia acquired its independence in September 1956, he
settled permanently in Paris, where he subsequently divided his time between
academic work and writing.
Memmi has written five novels, La Statue de sel (1953), Agar (1955), Le
Scorpion (1969), Le Désert (1977), and Le Pharoan (1989), as well as a collection of
poetry, Le Mirliton du Ciel (1990). His most influential work is the essay Portrait
du Colonisé précédé du Portrait du Colonisateur (A Portrait of the Colonized,
preceded by a Portrait of The Coloniser), first published in 1957 and translated
into English by Howard Greenfield in 1965. Memmi has also published
other studies,including Portrait d’un Juif (1962), La Libération du Juif (1966),
L’Homme Dominé (1968), La Dépendance (1979) and Le Racisme (1982). He is the
subject of two volumes of interviews, Entretien (1975) and La Terre intérieure
(1976); and has also edited two anthologies of North African Francophone
writing: L’Anthologie des écrivains maghrébins d’expression française (1964) and
L’Anthologie des écrivains française du Maghreb (1969) (Monego 1984: 91—93);
Déjeux 1973: 303—304).
In describing his own life in La Terre intérieure, Memmi says: “This
will be, in sum, the history of a certain type of provincial Frenchman, who
earned the necessary capital with which he was able to lead an acceptable
life. There is nothing more to add but the date of my death …”. But, in fact,
he continues: “it is not that simple; there was also colonisation, the war,
decolonisation … Let me say things differently: I was the first son in a family
which had eight children; my father, a saddle-maker, had some difficulty
in earning enough to procure what we needed. We were thoroughly Jewish
in an Arabic country which, even if the land was a French protectorate, still
created many difficulties. Finally, we were Tunisians, both colonised and
belonging to the second zone of France. I always wanted to write, I’m sure of
that. Always, through every difficulty, the experience of being humiliated, the
daily witnessing of injustice, the atrocious brutality of modern warfare, the
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German occupation, the extraordinary historical surprise of decolonisation,
my journeys throughout the world, where I was exposed to other situations,
discovered other itineraries similar to my own, has all made me a polemical
writer (un écrivain de combat). Finally, in that regard, I have said almost all that
I would like to say: I would like to return permanently to writing fiction, to
the novel. Let us add, for the sake of completeness, that I would have liked to
have been a physician or a priest … But I was required to study to become a
professor; very well, I have learned to love this trade, I feel comfortable in it,
and I can write a little almost every day …” (Memmi 1985: 216—217).
The Colonizer and the Colonized
As a writer, Memmi has been associated with the “Generation of 1952”,
described by Joan Monego as “the first generation of accomplished
Maghrebian writers (Memmi 1984: 21); (Ibnlfassi 1996: 11—30).” Memmi says
of these writers in his introduction to L’Anthologie des écrivains maghrébins
d’expression française: “For the first time, North Africa can be seen to take itself
on. Accepted, assumed, or discussed, she ceases to be a simple décor or a
geographic accident. These new authors are at grips with their country as with
the essential of themselves … It was necessary to dare at last to grasp at one’s
own life, at that of one’s fellow citizens, at the relations with the colonizer. It
was necessary, in sum, to discover and affront one’s veritable domain, one’s
specific object. And that isn’t to be taken for granted when one has lost the
habit of disposing of one’s own destiny”(Memmi 1984: 20—21).
In the 1965 Preface to The Coloniser and the Colonised, Memmi similarly
suggests that: “I undertook this inventory of conditions of colonized people
mainly in order to understand myself and to identify my place in the society
of other men” (p. 4). His conclusions are given briefly in this opening preface
and worth summarising here. At the heart of the colonial relationship is the
economic privilege of the coloniser. The deprivations of the colonized – his
daily humiliation and objective subjugation – are the almost direct result of
the colonizer’s advantages (p. 8). The relationship is, thus, one of “implacable
dependence”, which has “molded their respective characters and dictated their
conduct”. Nevertheless: “Just as there was an obvious logic in the reciprocal
behavior of the two colonial partners, another mechanism, proceeding from
the first, would lead, I believed, inexorably to the decomposition of this
dependence” (p. 5). Memmi concludes: “It was probably sufficient to describe
with precision the facts of colonization, the manner in which the colonizer was
bound to act, the slow and inevitable destruction of the colonized, to bring to
light the absolute iniquity of colonization; and at the same time, to unveil the
fundamental instability of it and predict its demise” (p. 13).
As a postwar commentator on French colonialism, Memmi’s work is
contemporary with that of Franz Fanon, a physician from Martinique, and
(Dominique) O. Mannoni, an Italian psychologist practising in Madagascar. He
has a similar interest to them in the emotional consequences of oppression, and
especially the factor of dependence. Here I wish simply to describe the rest of
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Memmi’s book in brief detail, before I look for the possible parallels between
the colonized and the colonized, and the translator and the translated.
The Colonist
Part One of The Coloniser and the Colonised presents a “Portrait of the Colonizer”.
Memmi opens with a paragraph drawn straight from the French equivalent of
the Boys Own Paper: “We sometimes enjoy picturing the colonizer as a tall man,
bronzed by the sun, wearing Wellington boots, proudly leaning on a shovel
– as he rivets his gaze far away on the horizon of his land. When not engaged
in battles against nature, we think of him laboring selflessly for mankind,
attending the sick, and spreading culture to the nonliterate. In other words,
his pose is one of a noble adventurer, a righteous pioneer” (p. 47).
Such a picture of “the cultural and moral mission” of the colonist “is no
longer tenable” – if it ever was (p. 47). The colonist’s major motive is economic:
“a colony [is] a place where one earns more and spends less” (p. 48). His
position (Memmi uses the masculine pronoun throughout) has a “double
illegitimacy”: “he has succeeded not merely in creating a place for himself
but also in taking away that of the inhabitant, granting himself astounding
privileges to the detriment of those rightfully entitled to them” (p. 53).
Memmi’s next chapters deal respectively with “The colonizer who refuses”
and “The colonizer who accepts”. The colonizer who refuses is “astonished
by the large number of beggars, the children wandering about half-naked,
trachoma, etc., ill at ease before such obvious organization of injustice, revolted
by the cynicism of his fellow citizens” (p. 63). If he does not immediately return
home, “he lives his life under the sign of a contradiction which looms at every
step, depriving him of all coherence and tranquillity” (p. 64). Renouncing
a part of himself, he will also discovers that: “if the colonized have justice
on their side, if he can go so far as to give them his approval and even his
assistance, his solidarity stops here; he is not one of them and has no desire
to be one” (p. 67).
Having set aside “both the problem of his own privileges and that of his
emotional difficulties, only his ideological and political attitudes remain to be
considered” (p. 71, punctuation modified). Memmi suggests that the dissident
colonist’s attitudes (“political democracy and freedom, economic democracy
and justice, rejection of racist xenophobia and universality, material and
spiritual progress”, p. 78) are not always important to those with whom he
seeks to identify himself. They, perhaps, “aspire to be religious”, or “show
no concern for individual freedom” (p. 76). Ultimately, they do not “love”
him (p. 81); they “are “not his people and never will be” (p. 83), and “he will
go on being what he is, with his language intact and his cultural traditions
dominating” (p. 84). Eventually, everything will confirm “his solitude,
bewilderment and ineffectiveness” (p. 87) before he is finally reduced to
silence (p. 88).
“The colonizer who accepts” confirms and affirms the colonial relationship.
He is, no doubt, “mediocre” enough to persist (p. 92); conservative in his
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politics; able to “approve discrimination and the codification of injustice” (p.
99); and faithful to the memory of his homeland (p. 105), to which, however,
he also feels superior (pp. 108-9). Racism is “the consubstantial part” of
colonialism (p. 118). It requires: “one, the gulf between the culture of the
colonialist and the colonized; two, the exploitation of these differences for
the benefit of the colonialist; three, the use of these supposed differences
as standards of absolute fact” (p. 115). The “final act of distortion” is that:
“Custodian of the values of civilization and history, he accomplishes a mission;
he has the immense merit of bringing light to the colonized’s ignominious
darkness. The fact that his role brings him privileges and respect is only justice;
colonization is legitimate in every sense and with all its consequences” – there
will be no end to his domination. In this “new moral order”, “he has no duties
and the colonized have no rights” (p. 120).
The Colonized
Part Two of The Coloniser and the Colonised also begins with an image, a
“Mythical portrait of the colonized”. The colonized is, of course, “lazy” (p.
123) and “a weakling” (p. 125), and so on – all these are “negations” which
are considered to be the result of psychological or ethical inadequacy (p. 128).
The colonized is further depersonalized by “the mark of the plural” – the
indiscriminate use of the pronoun “they” (“They are all this.” “They are all
the same”, p. 129). Finally, the colonized is not free, and certainly “not free
to choose between being colonized or not being colonized” (p. 130). In these
ways, the colonized becomes an object, existing only as “a function of the
needs of the colonizer” (p. 130).
These definitions confine the colonized to acting in what Memmi next
describes as “situations of inadequacy”. These situations are characterized
by the destruction of the colonized’s sense of history (p. 136) and the
“mummification of the colonized society” (p. 142); by the lack of contemporary
power and community (p. 139); as well as by the loss of a living language (p.
150) and a living literature (p. 152).
The colonized has “two answers” to his oppression. The first is assimilation,
which can only “meet with disdain from the colonial masters” (168), because
its only outcome would be the end of the colonial relationship – which the
colonialist would never allow (pp. 170-1). The other is revolt, beginning with
the creation of a “counter-mythology” in which everything in his own culture
“is good, everything must be retained among his customs and traditions,
his actions and plans; even the anachronous or disorderly, the immoral or
mistaken. Everything is justified because everything can be explained” (p.
183).
In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon insists that “decolonization is always
a violent process (Fannon 1969: 27; Alessandrini 1999: 235—237). Memmi’s
sense of what comes after colonization is more moderate, perhaps more
existentialist. In his Conclusion, he suggests, firstly, that: “Having abandoned
the colonial framework, it is important for all of us to discover a new way
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of living with that relationship. I am one of those who believe that to find
a new order of things with Europe means putting a new order in oneself”
(pp. 190-1). Memmi does say that “To live, the colonized needs to do away
with colonization.” But, more subtly, he immediately continues: “To become
a man, he must do away with the colonized being he has become” (p. 195).
To become “a whole and free man” (p. 197), enjoying “complete liberation”
(p. 195), “he must conquer himself and be free in relation to [the] nation …
[and] the religion of the group” (p. 196). Then at last he will become “a man
like any other” (p. 197).
The Translator and the Translated
These myths of power, the dominance of the colonialist and the dependence
of the colonized potentially have their parallels, and contradictions, in the
small scale field of translation. Much of what I will say comes out of my own
experience, and my own examples will be largely drawn from Indonesian
and Malay writing in English.
Translation and Power
Let us begin our study of the colonization metaphor with a heroic myth of
translation, taken in this case from the web-site of the American Literary
Translators Association: “Translation Studies is a formal branch of academic
study that addresses critical, creative, and research issues involved in the
linguistic and interpretive transferral of sense and sound from one language to
another and from one cultural context to another. Translation Studies explores
all dimensions of the translation process … [Translation] is an exacting art
that demands creative expression, philological precision, minute knowledge
of historical and cultural contexts, and a nuanced sense of style in both the
source and target languages.”
Sometimes yes, and sometimes no, it must be admitted. Translations are
done for all sorts of reasons, for all sorts of audiences, and within all sorts of
constraints. And translations are not simply disinterested “intellectual and
creative activity”. Even if the rewards are not great, perhaps the majority of
translators work full time as a way of earning a living. Others (ALTA members
and their colleagues, perhaps) turn their professional skills into other forms
of capital – exactly in the shape of “promotion and tenure”. While a few even
translate purely for their own personal satisfaction. Those who are most
dependent on translation for their living are, of course, the most caught up
in the patterns of national and international literary trade. They are the ones
who are most conscious of the importance of the dominant norms in their
own literary systems and the need to adopt specific norms, behaviours and
policies. Scholar-translators too must also take account of the principles of
prestige and dominance which characterise their own educational systems
– and the relationship of those systems to international education. They are, in
a sense, both colonizer of the foreign literature and colonized by the demands
to conform to their own cultures if they are to be successful.
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Another way of understanding this colonizing is to recognize that
translations inevitably involve an ideological element. As Susan Bassnett and
Andre Lefevere state in their Introduction to Edwin Gentzler’s Contemporary
Translation Theory,: “All rewritings, whatever their intention, reflect a certain
ideology and a poetics and as such manipulate literature to function in a given
society in a given way. Rewriting is manipulation, undertaken in the service of
power, and in its positive aspect can help in the evolution of a literature and
a society. Rewritings can introduce new concepts, new genres, new devices,
and the history of translation is also the history of literary innovation, of
the shaping power of one culture on another. But rewriting can also repress
innovation, distort and contain, and in an age of ever increasing manipulation
of all kinds, the study of the manipulative processes of literature as exemplified
by translation can help us towards a greater awareness of the world in which
we live”(Bassnett 1999: ix).
The play of manipulation in the service of power in bridging the differences
between the differing factors of both the source and target literary polysystems
(these factors include different producers, consumers, institutions, repertoires,
market and product) inevitably holds even between literatures that are
relatively close. (And despite American poet Wallace Stevens’ optimistic
pronouncement – “French and English constitute a single language”(Auster
1984: xxvii) – we know that this is not really so. Those who doubt this should
begin with the first sentence of Marguerite Duras’s “Ecrire”: “C’est dans une
maison qu’on est seul.”2) When the relationship between the two systems is
based on distinct inequalities, as in colonial or global market relations, the
differences can be much stronger and much more obvious. Douglas Robinson
provides a convenient summary of Richard Jacquemond’s four hypotheses
on “the problems of translating across power differentials”:
1. A dominated culture will invariably translate far more of the hegemonic
culture than the latter will of the former.
2. When the hegemonic culture does translate works produced by the
dominated culture, those works will be perceived and presented as
difficult, mysterious, inscrutable, esoteric and in need of a small cadre of
intellectuals to interpret them, while a dominated culture will translate a
hegemonic culture’s works accessibly for the masses.
3. A hegemonic culture will only translate those works by authors in a
dominated culture that fit the former’s preconceived notions of the
latter.
4. Authors in a dominated culture who dream of reaching a large audience
will tend to write for translation into a hegemonic language, and this
will require some degree of compliance with stereotypes (Robinson 1997:
31—32).
To be a translator from a dominant culture is thus to be part on an ongoing
process of colonization. However, this discussion of power too needs to be
2
see Ecrire, Gallimard, Paris 1993, p. 15. On the cross-cultural nature of Duras’s own
work, see Catherine Bouthors-Paillart: Duras la métisse: Métissage fantasmatique et linguistique
dans l’oeuvre de Marguerite Duras, Droz, Geneva 2002.
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further nuanced, because it suggests that there is only one center of power,
that to be found in Europe. In the same lectures we referred to earlier in this
paper, Foucault has argued: “Power must be analysed as something which
circulates, or rather as something which only functions in the form of a chain. It
is never localised here or there, never in anybody’s hands, never appropriated
as a commodity or a piece of wealth. Power is employed through a net-like
organisation” (Foucault 1980: 98). Within the literary system of English, there
are, in fact, multiple centers and multiple dominations – it is not the same thing
to publish a translation in Brisbane, Australia, as it is to publish in Athens,
Ohio; and not the same thing to publish in Athens, Ohio as it is to publish
in New York City, New York. Within the so called “dominated culture” – in
Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and New Delhi, publishers may also
want to publish English translations, for various reasons – including prestige,
sentiment, the desire to publicise national cultures, and the hope of wider
markets. Here other chains of power come into play: dominated cultures may
be hegemonic cultures in their own territories.
The Translator
The “translator who accepts” the norms, behaviors and policies of the
dominant literary system will produce works that are congruent with the
expectations of the home market. In the case of translation from Indonesia,
the most commercially successful translations have confirmed the impression
that Indonesia is governed by a heavily authoritarian military regime, which
has a brutal disregard for human rights. The Indonesian writers translated
have been promoted in the West as brave individuals committed to democracy
and personal freedom. Pramoedya Ananta Toer, imprisoned by the Suharto
regime for almost two decades, fits this mould exactly, as did Mochtar Lubis
(on the right) before him, under Sukarno. The translator who accepts confirms
that there are differences between “us” and “them” of a moral and political
nature, in which we are superior.
The “translator who refuses” can move in two different directions. One
direction is to attempt to introduce the translated literature into the home
literary system on its own terms, as a literary sub-system perhaps, that of the
translated text, but still as one that has an interest in its own right. (Books
which are too much “like our own” will need to be extraordinarily good to
make any impression at all.) This interest will normally consist in the variations
of the source literary norms from, and their challenges to, the target literary
system. An Indonesian woman writer may stand as an example of new styles
of feminism, saying things that women writers elsewhere have not yet said. An
example is Dorothea Rosa Herliany, whose poem entitled “Wedding Diary”
begins: “When I married you, I never promised to be faithful/ in fact you
agreed to be my slave …” (Herliany 2004: 166). A dramatist, such as Arifin
C. Noer, can show different ways of moving theatrical action between the
world of the real and that of the dream, through the use of wayang shadow
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play techniques.3 A surrealist short story writer, such as Danarto, can open
the world of narrative to mystical pantheistic influences that are important in
Javanese culture but less obvious in most contemporary English literature.4
Or so one hopes anyway.
Another direction is to translate and publish in the dominated region
itself. Here the translator’s case is similar to that of the liberal colonist. In
translating books that are central to the literary norms of the dominated system,
it may well be found that methods of characterisation, plot development, and
moral assessment are not those with which one is necessarily comfortable.
Commissioned translations are often of works that are important in the source
culture but likely to be of lesser interest to the assumed target audience.
In my youth, I decided to translate the great Malay novel Salina – great
most especially because it is almost five hundred pages long – but once
started, I also felt that it was unnecessarily repetitive and unlikely to sustain
the interest of readers used to a more concise style. Consequently, my final
translation was about half the size of the original, and appared even shorter
when it was published in a small book format on thin paper (Said 1961: 495);
Said 1975: 278). Today graduate students in Malaysia write doctoral theses
on my shortcomings. What I didn’t realise at the time was that my translation
would only be read in the region itself: the local norms applied to both the
English and the Malay texts. (I have also had the opposite honor of being
told by a young Philippine scholar: “You are our gateway to Indonesian
literature”. As none of my translations have been published in the Philippines,
the student had presumably relied on photocopies of those books which were
published in Singapore and Hong Kong – by Heinemann Educational Books
(Asia) Pty Ltd.)
Both the translator who accepts and the one who refuses are, in their
different ways, colonized by the text – its words, grammatical problems,
rhythm, tone and its linguistic, social and cultural meanings (Bly 1983). They
may be colonized by the assumption of inferiority that translators often labor
under, and the sense that what “they” translate is not as important as what
“we” write. There is another form of potential colonization of the translator
as well – by the colonized. Translators are often sought out by authors who
recognise, more clearly than the translator does, that translation into English
gives the local author access to a vast literary circuit of publishers, conferences
and grants. As a translator who tries to refuse, in this case to refuse to translate
work which I do not think is of high standard within its own literary system,
or is not likely to be appreciated by English readers (and these two things
are not necessarily identical), I have also been abused in public forums by
those whom I have slighted in some way or another. The translator can be
criticised in considerable linguistic detail by those for whom English is not a
first language. One can also be soundly abused by those one has not translated
at all. It is hard not to feel, sometimes, that translation is a lose-lose game. As
Howard Goldblatt asked in the Washington Post in April 2002: “Who are these
3
4
see Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, Kuala Lumpur on Moths (1975).
see a mystical pantheisteic influences in Javanese culture on Abracadabra, (Danarto
2001).
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people everyone loves to hate, and, if they’re so bad, how do they get away
with what they’re doing?”5 They are the colonized, translators.
The Translated Writer
The translated writer (or the writer who hopes to be translated) can agree to
translation gracefully, actively seek out a translator, produce work which is
“appropriate” for translation, accept invitations to be translated when they
come, ignore them when they do not, or consciously refuse them. Most writers,
no doubt, do not see translation as the ultimate validation of their work or
acceptance by a “dominant” culture as superior to publication in their own.
Despite the belief of postcolonial theorists that the center (England) is superior,
and the standard by which everything in the Empire measures itself, this is
not widely accepted in those “peripheries” which, in fact, commonly regard
themselves as the “center” of all that matters – in literature as in everything
else. Here the Empire does not “write back”; as I have suggested elsewhere,
it simply writes to itself.6 At this point, silence is possible – but not inevitable.
Relationships between translators and translated authors are many and
complex. Foucault, again, reminds us that: “there are no relations of power
without resistances; that the latter are all the more real and effective because
they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised;
resistance to power does not have to come from elsewhere to be real, nor is
it inexorably frustrated through being the compatriot of power. It exists all
the more by being in the same place as power; hence, like power, resistance
is multiple and can be integrated in global strategies” (Foucault 1980: 142).
The Space In-Between
Margaret Anman has suggested that: “we can talk of ‘translation’ when a
source text (of oral or written nature) has, for a particular purpose, been used
as the model for the production of a text in the target culture” (Hatim 2001:
27). Memmi provides us with one metaphor of potential relations based on
domination and subordination between the translator and the translated
text and author, which I have tried to suggest is worth exploring. There are,
indeed, many other ways of imagining this coming together of writer and text,
source and target language, foreign and domestic literature and culture, one
market-place and another. The relationship has also been seen, positively, as
an act of love, a mutually faithful marriage, a creative partnership, a temporary
flirtation, or, negatively, as an act of betrayal, violent possession, rape, even
murder and cannibalism.7 The metaphor one prefers may in the end depend
5
see “The Writing Life”, Washington Post, Sunday April 28, 2002, Book World, p. 10. I
have discussed Goldblatt’s remarks in my paper, “Mistakes” in Translation: A Functionalist
Approach, presented to the Third Workshop on “The Art of Translation”, SOAS, University
of London, September 2002; subsequently published in CELT: A Journal of Culture, English
Language Teaching & Literature, 3:1, July 2003, pp. 1-12.
6
see “Non-English Postcolonial Fictions? The Malaysian Case”, SPAN, 36:II, October
1993, p. 405.
7
see in The Translator’s Invisibility, Venuti speaks of “the violence that resides in the very
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on the needs of the moment and the personalities of those involved.
Another way of conceptualising the meeting is to see translation as the
creation of a “meta-literature”, of developing a third space between the
original text and the translated text, potentially separate from both. The term,
“meta-literature” stems from the essay “Poem and Meta-poem: Poetry from
Dutch to English” by the late James Holmes.8 Holmes returns us to what I
have described above as the heroic myth of translation when he insists that the
“meta-poet” must have “acumen as a critic, craftsmanship as a poet, and skill
in the analysing and resolving of a confrontation of norms and conventions
across linguistic and cultural barriers. Like the critic, the meta-poet will strive
to comprehend as thoroughly as possible the many features of the original
poem, against the setting of the poet’s other writings, the literary traditions of
the source culture, and the expressive means of the source language. Like the
poet, he will strive to exploit his own creative powers, the literary traditions
of the target culture, and the expressive means of the target language in
order to produce a verbal object that to all purposes is nothing more nor less
than a poem. He differs ... from the critic in what he does with the results of
his critical analysis, and from the poet in where he derives the materials for
his verse. Holmes argues that “meta-literature” makes use of language to
communicate something about literature itself. “Meta-poems” are different
kinds of objects from the poem from which they derive. Meta-poems make
a comment about the original poem, they clarify what it is doing, what it
is about, paraphrase, shift emphases, and even distort its meanings. They
interpret “by enactment.” What Holmes does not talk about is the differential
of power, which transverses the meeting, even in a so-called neutral space.
This dimension, it should now be clear, must be of concern to all translators.
The third space is not necessarily neutral territory.
And this brings me back to Memmi for the last time. In translation too, “it
is important for all of us to discover a new way of living with that relationship”
(p. 190). The translator must find a personally satisfying way of participating,
consciously, honestly and openly, as one member of “two psychical and
cultural realms”, in which “the two worlds symbolized and conveyed by
the two tongues” are, and are not, in conflict (p. 151). The translator, in this
postcolonial world, “must conquer himself [or herself] and be free” (p. 196),
an authentic human being in equal relationship with another free human
being.
purpose and activity of translation” (p. 18). Rosemarie Waldrop’s essay: “Silence, the Devil and
Jabès”, in (ed.) R. Warren: The Art of Translation, Northeastern University Press, Boston 1989,
describes “the pleasure of destruction” involved in breaking apart “this seemingly natural
fusion of elements.” She insists: “We must wrench apart. We must kill” (p. 226). The energy
so released is, in the best Dionysian manner, creative energy.
8
see and check on The essay is included in Holmes: Translated Papers in Literary
Translation and Translation Studies, Rodopi, Amsterdam 1988.
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WACANA VOL. 8 NO. 2, OKTOBER 2006
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