Translating Culture vs. Cultural Translation.pdf

Harish Trivedi 1

Translating Culture vs. Cultural Translation

Harish Trivedi

It is widely agreed to be the case that translation and translation studies have never

had it so good. Over the last two or three decades, translation has become a more prolific,

more visible and more respectable activity than perhaps ever before. And alongside

translation itself, a new field of academic study has come into existence, initially called

Translatology (but not for long, thank God!) and now Translation Studies, and it has

gathered remarkable academic momentum. There has of course always been translation, for

almost as long as there has been literature. But the historical reasons for the present boom

are probably traceable back to three distinct moments across the span of the twentieth

century.

The first of these was the concerted movement of translating Russian fiction into

English which began in the 1890s and went on until the 1930s, which revealed to readers in

English a body of imaginative work from an area outside Western Europe which was so new

and exciting as to be shocking and indeed to induce a state of what was then called the

“Russian fever,” with writers as diverse as Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence not only

enthusing about the newly discovered nineteenth-century masters of Russian fiction but

actually helping to translate them in collaboration with the Russian emigre S. S. Koteliansky.

The other two moments belong to the other end of the twentieth century, occurring as they

did in the 1970s and the 1980s when two other bodies of literature from hitherto

unregarded parts of the world were translated into English and caused a comparable

sensation: from Latin America, and from the East European countries lying behind the Iron

Curtain.

Unlike with Russian literature, these latter literatures when made available in

translation helped to transform globally our very expectations of what literature looks like or

should look like. If I may digress for a moment to touch native ground, perhaps the first

instance when readers in English and in other European languages were similarly shocked

and exhilarated by the discovery of an alien literature was in the last two decades of the

eighteenth century when Charles Wilkins, Sir William Jones and other orientalists began

translating from Sanskrit, and caused in Europe what Raymond Schwab has called The

Oriental Renaissance and J. J. Clarke The Oriental Enlightenment . But those were different

times, and what that discovery through translation led to was not any enhanced interest in

translation but rather the founding of the discipline of comparative philology, and of course,

if we are to believe Edward Said, further and more effective colonization.

As comparative philology and colonialism are by now both areas of human

endeavour which may be regarded as exhausted, the three newer flashes of translational

revelation have given rise instead to a worthy impulse to look more closely at the process and

effect of translation itself. Though translators themselves and some rare literary critics too

had for a long time been reflecting on the practice of translation, such activity was, as we say

now, theorized into an autonomous field of academic enquiry only about two decades ago, in

or about the year 1980. In England and in many other parts of the Anglophone world, the

birth of Translation Studies was signalled, insomuch as such gradual consolidation is signaled

by any single event, by the publication of a book under the very title Translation Studies by

Susan Bassnett-McGuire (now Susan Bassnett) in 1980. This short introductory handbook

has had remarkable circulation and influence, being reprinted in a second edition in 1991

and in an updated third edition in 2002.

Harish Trivedi 2

But a new field of study is seen in our times to have become well and truly

established when not only monographs but Readers (or anthologies of primary and critical

materials) and Encyclopedias of the subject begin coming out, and this has been happening

steadily in Translation Studies over the last few years: for example, the Routledge Encyclopedia

of Translation Studies edited by Mona Baker (1998), the Encyclopedia of Literary Translation

into English edited by Olive Classe (2000), the Oxford Guide to Literature in English

Translation edited by Peter France (2000), and the five-volume “History of Literary

Translation into English” projected by the Oxford University Press, as well as a seven-

volume Encyclopedia now in progress for some years in Germany. To these one may add

anthologies of theoretical and critical statements such as Theories of Translation: An Anthology

of Essays from Dryden to Derrida edited by Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (1992), The

Translation Studies Reader edited by Lawrence Venuti (2000), Western Translation Theory:

from Herodotus to Nietzsche by Douglas Robinson (2001) and critical surveys of such

materials, such as Contemporary Translation Theories by Edwin Gentzler (1993; updated

edition 2001), not to mention a Dictionary of Translation Studies by Mark Shuttleworth and

Moira Cowie (1997). New journals exclusively devoted to the subject such as The Translator

have been founded, publishers big and small such as Routledge and Multilingual Matters

have launched their Translation Studies series, and a whole new publishing house exclusively

devoted to the subject, St Jerome, has not been doing too badly.

My assiduous citation of this select bibliography (such as is generally relegated to the

end of a paper) is intended to show not only the new embarrassment of riches available in

the field but also a tendency to push the range of the discipline as wide and retrospectively as

far back as possible (to Dryden and to Herodotus, for example), so as to give it a more

respectable scholarly lineage. It is all reminiscent of the ways in which Postcolonial Studies

emerged as an area of study just a few years before Translation Studies and, in fact, the

resemblance here is not only incidental but interactive, for at least four studies have been

published in recent years making an explicit connection between these two newly burgeoning

areas: Siting Translation: History, Poststructuralism and the Colonial Context (1992) by

Tejaswini Niranjana, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The

Tempest to Tarzan (1997) by Eric Cheyfitz, Translation and Empire: Postcolonial Theories

Explained (1997) by Douglas Robinson, and Postcolonial Translation: Theory and Practice

(1999), a collection of essays edited by Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi. Altogether, the

newly won pre-eminence of translation and translators is itself reflected, wittingly or

unwittingly, in the titles of two recent books, The Translator’s Turn

Before these new developments took place, any study of translation was subsumed

under either of two different subjects or disciplines: Linguistics and Comparative Literature.

Traditionally, translation was seen as a segment or sub-field of Linguistics, on the basic

premise that translation was a transaction between two languages. J. C. Catford’s book A

Linguistic Theory of Translation: An Essay in Applied Linguistics (1965) was perhaps the last

major work written on this assumption, in which he defined translation as comprising a

“substitution of TL [i.e., Target Language] meanings for SL [i.e., Source Language]

meanings” (quoted in Bassnett:2000, 15)

But shortly afterwards, it began to be noticed that literary texts were constituted not

primarily of language but in fact of culture, language being in effect a vehicle of the culture.

In traditional discussions, the cruxes of translation, i.e., the items which proved particularly

(by Douglas Robinson,

1991), which it now seems to be, and The Translator’s Invisibility (by Lawrence Venuti,

1995), which now seems to have been replaced by a foregrounded, lime-lit visibility.

Harish Trivedi 3

intractable in translation, were often described as being “culture-specific” – for example,

kurta , dhoti , roti, loochi , dharma , karma or maya , all items peculiarly Indian and not really

like the Western shirt, trousers, bread, religion, deeds both past and present, or illusion. But

then the realization grew that not only were such particular items culture-specific but indeed

the whole language was specific to the particular culture it belonged or came from, to some

degree or the other. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, to the effect that a language defined and

delimited the particular world-view of its speakers, in the sense that what they could not say

in their language was what they could not even conceive of, seemed to support the view that

the specificity of a culture was coextensive with the specificity of its language. The increased

valorization of diversity and plurality in cultural matters also lent strength to this new

understanding of language and culture in a way that earlier ideas or ideals of universalism

had not.

Thus, in a paradigmatic departure, the translation of a literary text became a

transaction not between two languages, or a somewhat mechanical sounding act of linguistic

“substitution” as Catford had put it, but rather a more complex negotiation between two

cultures. The unit of translation was no longer a word or a sentence or a paragraph or a page

or even a text, but indeed the whole language and culture in which that text was constituted.

This new awareness was aptly described as “The Cultural Turn in Translation Studies” in the

title of a chapter jointly written by Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefevere in their book

Translation, History and Culture (1990). It was precisely the formulation and recognition of

this cultural turn in Translation Studies that served to extend and revitalize the discipline

and to liberate it from the relatively mechanical tools of analysis available in Linguistics.

As it happened, it was about the same time that Translation Studies achieved a

similar liberation from subservience to another discipline of which it was for long considered

a subsidiary and merely instrumental part, Comparative Literature. But this had as much to

do with the decline of Comparative Literature itself, especially in the United States where the

energising impulse and vision of multilingual European emigres from before and during the

Second World War, such as Rene Wellek, had spent itself out, as with the rise of Translation

Studies. It was Susan Bassnett again, who had for many years headed virtually the only full-

fledged Comparative Literature department in the U.K., at Warwick University, who in her

book titled Comparative Literature (1993) declared, “Today, comparative literature in one

sense is dead” and “Comparative literature as a discipline has had its day” (pp. 47, 161),

going on to explain that while the rise of Postcolonial Studies had stolen the thunder of its

thematological concerns, the rise of Translation Studies had left it bereft of much of its

methodological preoccupations. Increasingly now, comparative studies of literature across

languages have become the concern of Translation Studies; it is the translational tail now

that wags the comparative dog.

Through the 1990s, alongside the rise of Translation Studies, we also saw

interestingly the rise of a larger and more influential field of study, Cultural Studies, without

however any perceptible overlap or interaction between the two. This lack of convergence or

imbrication was again taken note of by Bassnett and Lefevere in their next book, Constructing

Cultures (1998), in which they now had a final chapter titled, “The Translation Turn in

Cultural Studies.” They noted that these “interdisciplines,” as they called them, had moved

beyond their “Eurocentric beginnings” to enter “a new internationalist phase,” and they

identified a four-point common agenda that Translation Studies and Cultural Studies could

together address, including an investigation of “the way in which different cultures construct

their images of writers and texts,” a tracking of “the ways in which texts become cultural

capital across cultural boundaries,” and an exploration of the politics of translation (Bassnett

and Lefevere 138). Finally, they pleaded for a “pooling of resources,” and stressed again the

Harish Trivedi 4

commonality of the disciplinary method and thrust between Translation Studies and

Cultural Studies:

. . .in these multifaceted interdisciplines, isolation is counter-productive. . .

.The study of translation, like the study of culture, needs a plurality of voices.

And similarly, the study of culture always involves an examination of the

processes of encoding and decoding that comprise translation. (Bassnett and

Lefevere 138-39)

However, this plea for a joining of forces has apparently fallen on deaf ears. The clearly

larger and certainly more theoretically undergirded juggernaut of Cultural Studies continues

to rumble along its way, unmindful of the overture made by Translation Studies to be taken

on board. One possible reason may be that for all the commonality of ground and direction

pointed out by Bassnett and Lefevere, one crucial difference between the two interdisciplines

is that Cultural Studies, even when concerned with popular or subaltern culture, nearly

always operate in just the one language, English, and often in that high and abstruse variety

of it called Theory, while Translation Studies, however theoretical they may get from time to

time, must sully their hands in at least two languages only one of which can be English. In

any case, while the Cultural Turn in Translation Studies had proved to be an act of

transformative redefinition, the Translation Turn in Cultural Studies still remains an

unfulfilled desideratum, a consummation yet only wished for.

Meanwhile, instead of a cultural turn in Translation studies, we have on our hands a

beast of similar name but very different fur and fibre – something called Cultural

Translation. This is a new collocation and in its specific new connotation is not to be

confused with a stray earlier use of it in the old-fashioned sense of translation oriented

towards the target culture, what may be called a reader-oriented or “domesticating”

translation. In fact, the term Cultural Translation in its new and current meaning does not

find an entry or even mention in any of the recent encyclopedias and anthologies of

translation listed above.

It would thus seem to be the case that while wishing for the practitioners of Cultural

Studies to come and join hands with them, those engaged in Translation Studies have not

even noticed that something called Cultural Translation has already come into existence,

especially in the domain of postcolonial and postmodernist discourse, and represents

something that could not be further from their hearts’ desire. For, if there is one thing that

Cultural Translation is not, it is the translation of culture. In fact, it spells, as I shall go on to

argue, the very extinction and erasure of translation as we have always known and practised

it.

The most comprehensive, sophisticated and influential formulation of the concept of

Cultural Translation occurs in the work of probably the foremost postcolonial-postmodernist

theorist of our times, Homi Bhabha, in the last chapter (bar the “Conclusion”) of his book

The Location of Culture (1994), titled “How newness enters the world: Postmodern space,

postcolonial times and the trials of cultural translation.” In Bhabha’s discussion, the literary

text treated as the pre-eminent example of cultural translation is Salman Rushdie’s novel

Satanic Verses , a novel written originally in English and read in that language by Bhabha. A

clue to the new sense in which the term translation is here being used is suggested by a

remark made by Rushdie himself (which Bhabha incidentally does not cite) in which he said

of himself and other diasporic postcolonial writers: “we are translated men” (Rushdie 16).

Rushdie was here exploiting the etymology of the word “translation,” which means to carry

or bear across, and what he meant, therefore, was that because he had been borne across,

Harish Trivedi 5

presumably by an aeroplane, from India and Pakistan to the United Kingdom, he was

therefore a translated man. He neglected to tell us as to whether, before he became a

translated man, he was at any stage also an original man.

But a second and overriding sense in which too Rushdie claimed to be a translated

man is precisely what is expounded by Homi Bhabha in his essay, with specific reference to

The Satanic Verses . Bhabha begins with an epigraph from Walter Benjamin’s classic essay on

translation: “‘Translation passes through continua of transformation, not abstract ideas of

identity and similarity’” (qted. in Bhabha 212). Later, in a key passage, Bhabha brings in

Derrida’s deconstruction of Benjamin’s concept of translation as an after-life or survival, in

order to deploy it in a wholly new context unintended by either Benjamin or Derrida, i.e.,

the context of Rushdean migrancy and hybridity. To quote Bhabha:

If hybridity is heresy, then to blaspheme is to dream. . . . it is the dream of

translation as “survival” as Derrida translated the “time” of Benjamin’s

concept of the after-life of translation, as sur-vivre , the act of living on

borderlines. Rushdie translates this into the migrant’s dream of survival; an

initiatory interstices; an empowering condition of hybridity (Bhabha 226-27).

A little later Bhabha says: “Translation is the performative nature of cultural

communication” (Bhabha 228), and he goes on, in another new figurative equation, to speak

of the residual cultural unassimilability of the migrant as an instance of what Benjamin called

“untranslatability.”

Here, as indeed at numerous other places, one may get the feeling that one is still

trying to catch Bhabha’s shadow while already living in it. What is nevertheless clear and

indisputable in Bhabha’s formulations of what he calls cultural translation is, firstly, that he

does not at all by this term mean literary translation involving two texts from two different

languages and cultures, and secondly, that what he means by translation instead is the

process and condition of human migrancy. To evoke an irresistibly alliterative and

beguiling, mantra-like phrase that Bhabha elsewhere uses more than once, what he is talking

about is the “translational transnational” (Bhabha 173) i.e., the condition of Western

multiculturalism brought about by Third World migrancy.

Since Bhabha first articulated it, the distinctly postmodernist idea of cultural

translation in this non-textual non-linguistic sense has found an echo in much contemporary

writing, both critical and creative. To cite a few select examples, the first of which is perhaps

an ur-illustration or an analogue from a work which was written before Bhabha’s essay was

published, Tejaswini Niranjana in her book Siting Translation uses the term “translation” by

and large to denote the colonial power-play between the British rulers and Indian subjects,

and herself conscious of the fact this is not what translation normally means, she resorts early

in her work to the Derridean deconstructive ruse of claiming that she has used the term

translation “under erasure” (Niranjana 48 n.4) to suit her own chosen context and purpose.

As for creative writing, Hanif Kureishi seems to represent in his career a phase of

cultural translation even more acute and advanced than that exemplified by Rushdie. Unlike

Rushdie, Kureishi had one English parent, was born in England, and grew up in the “home

county” of Kent, thinking of himself as quite and completely British rather than

Indian/Pakistani or even hybrid. “I was brought up really as an English child,” he has

claimed; “. . . I wasn’t influenced by Asian culture at all” (qtd. in Ranasinha 6). As he

forthrightly put it in another interview, “I am not a Pakistani or an Indian writer, I’m a

British writer” (qted. in Ranasinha 6). It is true that, unlike Rushdie’s, Kureishi’s work

contains no reference to popular sub-continental culture such as Hindi films and film-songs;

instead, Kureishi has co-edited The Faber Book of Pop (1995), meaning of course British and

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