SITING TRANSLATION (HISTORY, POST-STRUCTURALISM, AND THE COLONIAL CONTEXT) by TEJASWINI NIRANJANA

SITING TRANSLATION (HISTORY, POST-STRUCTURALISM, AND THE COLONIAL CONTEXT) by TEJASWINI NIRANJANA

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 realize natation,  and knowledge. IS seen as something unproblematic, "out there"; knowledge involves a representation of this reality; and representation provides direct, unmediated access to a transparent reality. 

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 net-work 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.

In creating coherent and transparent texts and subjects, translation participates-across a range of discourses-in the fixing of colonized cultures, making them seem static and ~n-changing rather than historically constructed. Translation functions as a transparent presentation of something that al-ready exists, although the "original" is actually brought into being through translation. Paradoxically, translation also pro-Vides 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 dis-courses-philosophy, historiography, education, missionary writings, travel-writing-to renew and perpetuate colonial domination.

In the final chapter, with the help of a translation from Kannada, a South Indian language, into English, I discuss the "uses" of post-structuralism in post-colonial space. Through-out the book, my discussion functions in all the registers-philosophical, linguistic, and political-in which translation "works" under colonialism. If at any point I seem to dwell on only one of these, it is for a purely strategic purpose". This work belongs to the larger context of the English" that is a consequence of the impact of structuralism and post-structuralism on literature studies by the civilizing mission of colonialism is still propagated by discourses of "literature" and "criticism" in the tradition of Arnold, Leavis, and Eliot. These disciplines repress what Derrida, in the words of Heidegger, calls the logocentric or ontotheological metaphysics by which they are constituted, which involves all the traditional conceptions of representation, translation, reality, unity, and knowledge. 

My study of translation does not make any claim to solve the dilemmas of translators. It does not propose yet another way of theorizing translation to enable a more foolproof "method" of "narrowing the gap" between cultures; it seeks rather to think through this gap,. this difference, to explore the position in . of the obsessions and desires of translation, an thus to describe the economies within which of translation. My concern is to probe the absence, lack, Or re ression of an awareness of asymmetry and historici in several kin sown ng on rans a on. tough Euro-American literary modernists such as Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Samuel Beckett persistently foregrounded the question of translation, I have not discussed their work, since it has, in any case, been extensively dealt with by mainstream literary critics, and since the focus of my interrogation is not poetics but the discourses of what is today called "theory."

My main concern in examining the texts of Jones IS not necessarily to compare his translation of Sakuntala or Manu's Dharmasastra with the so-called originals. Rather, what I pro-pose to do is to examine the "outwork" of Jones's .translations the prefaces, the annual discourses to the A SIatic Society, his charges to the Grand Jury at Calcutta, his letters, ad his "Oriental" poems-to show how he contributes to historicist, teleological model of civilization that, helps construct a powerful version of the "Hindu" .that tater writers of different philosophical and political persuasions incorporated into their texts in an almost seamless fashion.

The sign of origin, for Derrida, is a writing of a writing that can only state that the origin is originary translation. Metaphysics tries to re appropriate presence, says Derrida, through notions of adequacy of representation, of totalization, of history. Cartesian-Hegelian history, like the structure of the sign, "is conceivable only on the basis of the presence that it defers and in view of the deferred presence one intends to re appropriate" (SP, p. 138). Here Derrida points to historicism's concern with origin and telos and its desire to construct a totalizing narrative. "History," in the texts of post structuralism, is are press force that obliterates in a chain that includes meaning, truth, presence, and logos. We shall see later how Walter Benjamin, in a similar critique of monolithic histories, instead uses materialist historiography as a means of destabilization. Derrida's critique of representation is important for post-colonial theory because it suggests a critique of the traditional notion of translation as well. In fact, the two problematics have always been intertwined in Derrida's work. He has indicated more than once that translation perhaps escapes "the i\ orbit of representation" and is therefore an "exemplary question."90 If representation stands for the re appropriation of If.1 presence, translation emerges as the sign for what Derrida y would call "dissemination."91 We must, however, carefully f' interrogate the conventional concept of translation that be-longs to the order of representation, adequacy, and truth.

Clearly, the notion of hybridity, which is of great importance for a Subaltern critique of historiography as well as for a critique of traditional notions of translation, is both "ambiguous and historically complex." 96 To restrict "hybridity," or .A\' what I call "living in translation," to a post-colonial elite is to deny the pervasiveness, however heterogeneous, of the transformations wrought across class boundaries by colonial and neocolonial domination. This is not to present a meta-narrative of global homogenization, but to emphasize the need to reinvent oppositional cultures in non essentializing ways. Hybridity can be seen, therefore, as the sign of a post-colonial theory that subverts essentialist models of reading while it points toward a new practice of translation.