I am sharing 'I am sharing 'Introduction _ History in Translation ' with you' with you.pptx
1. Presented by
Bhavna Sosa
Roll no. 02
Dhvani Rajyaguru
Roll no. 04
Hinaba Sarvaiya
Roll no. 09
Department of English
Maharaja KrishnaKumarSinhji Bhavnagar
University
Introduction:
History in Translation
-Tejaswini Niranjana
2. The article examines the "positive" or "uto- pian" response to the
postcolonial condition developed by Tejaswini Niranjana in Siting
Translation: her attempt to harness translation in the service of
decolonization.
It traces a postcolonial myth moving from pre coloniality through the
recent colonial past and current postcoloniality to an imagined future state
of decolonization in or- der to contrast nationalist versions of that myth,
with their emphasis on the purity of the precolonial and decolonized
states, to postcolonialist versions, which in- sist that all four states are
mixed.
Abstract :
3. Niranjana draws on Walter Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator" in order
to explore the ways in which translating, like rereading/re- writing history,
involves a "citing" or "quoting" of words from one context to another,
allowing translation to be used by colonists for purposes of colonial
subjugation but also by postcolonial subjects for purposes of
decolonization.
Finally, the article contrasts Niranjana's Benjaminian sense of literalism as
the best decolonizing translational mode with the variety of approaches
explored by Vicente Rafael in Contracting Colonialism.
5. Situating Translation :
The context is one of contesting and contested stories attempting to
account for, to recount, the asymmetry and inequality of relations between
people, races, languages.
One such site is translation. Translation as a practice of shapes and
takes shape within the asymmetrical relations of power that operate
under colonialism.
Conventionally, translation depends on the Western philosophical notions
of reality, representation, and knowledge. Reality is seen as something
unproblematic " out other" knowledge involves representation of this
reality; and representation provides direct unmediated access to
transparent reality.
6. 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."
Translation reinforces hegemonic versions of the colonised, helping
them acquire the status of what Edward Said calls representations, or
objects without history. Thomas Babington Macaulay's 1835 dismissal
of Indigenous Indian learning as outdated and irrelevant, which
prepared the way for the introduction of English education.
7. 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 colonised.
The Hegelian conception of history that translation helps bring into
being endorses teleologica,l hierarchical model of Civilizations based
on the "coming to consciousness" of " Spirit," an event for which the
non-Western cultures are unsuited or unprepared.
Her concern here is to explore the place of translation in contemporary
Euro- American literary theory through a set of interrelated readings.
8. In chapters 3,4 and 5, main focus is the work of Paul de Man Jacques
Derrida and Walter Benjamin. All three thinkers, becoming associated
with a major preoccupation in each: allegory or literature in de Man,
the problematic of Representation and intentionally Derrida, and
the question of materialist historiography in Benjamin.
The refusal of these Major proponents of deconstruction to address the
question of history in Benjamin suggests a critical drawback in their
theory and perhaps indicates why deconstruction has never
addressed the problem of colonialism.
In the final chapter, with the help of a translation from Kannada, a South
Indian language, into English, she discusses the "uses" of post
structuralism in postcolonial space.
9. This 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.
The rethinking of translation becomes an important task in a context where
it has been used in the European Enlightenment to underwrite practices of
subjectification, especially for colonised peoples.
This work belongs to the larger context of the “ crisis” in “English” that is a
consequence of the impact of structuralism and post-structuralism on literary
studies in a rapidly colonizing world.
10. It is a set of questions, perhaps a "field" charged with the force of all the terms
used, even by the traditional discourse on translation to name the problem, to
translate translation. translatio (Latin) and metapherein (Greek)at once suggest
moment, disruption, displacement.
The post - colonial distrust of the liberal-humanist rhetoric of progress and of
universalising master narratives has obvious affinities with post - structuralism.
Derrida would argue that the "origin" is itself dispersed, its
"identity" undecidable. A representation thus does not represent an
"original" rather, it re-presents that which is always already represented.
Another aspect of post-structuralism that is significant for a rethinking of
translation is it's critique of historicism, which shows the genetic and teleological
nature of traditional historiography.
12. Maconochie, a scholar connected to Edinburgh University, urged the
British sovereign to take steps “as may be necessary for discovering,
collecting and translating whatever is extant of the ancient works of the
Hindoos.”
William Jones- who arrived in India in 1783 to take his place on the bench
of the Supreme Court in Culcutta – that translation would serve “to
domesticate the Orient and thereby turn it into a province of European
learning.”
As translator and scholar, Jones was responsible for the most influential
introduction of a textualized India to Europe, Within three months of his arrival,
the Asiatic Society held its first meeting with Jones as president and Warren
Hastings, the governor- general, as patron.
13. In a letter, Jones declared that his ambition was “to know India better than any
other European ever knew it.”Jones’ works were carefully studied by the
writers of the age, especially the Germans- Goethe, Herder and others.
His translation of Kalidasa’s Sakuntala went through successive reprints;
Georg Forster’s famous German translation of the translation came out in
1791, after which the play was translated into other European languages as
well.
As a twentieth century scholar puts it, “It is not an exaggeration to say that he
altered Europe’s whole conception of the Eastern world, If we were compiling
a thesis on the influence of Jones we could collect most of our material from
footnotes, ranging from Gibbon to Tennyson.
14. In the preface of the 1984 Indian edition of Jones discourses and essays,
where the editor, Moni Bagchee, indicates that Indians should “try to
preserve accurately and interpret the national heritage by treading the path
chalked out by Sir William Jones.”
Here, scholar Niranjana’s 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 propose to do is to
examine the “outwork” of Jones’s translation- the prefaces, the annual
discources to the Aiatic Society, his charges to the Grand Jury at Culcatta,
his letters, and his “Oriental” poems- to show how he contributes to a
historicist, teleogical model of civilization that, coupled with a notion of
translation presupposing transparency of representation, helps construct a
powerful version of the “Hindu”.
15. The most significant nodes of Jones’s work are
a) The need for translation by the European, since the natives are
unreliable interpreters of their own laws and culture;
b) The desire to be a lawgiver, to give the Indians their “own” laws; and
c) The desire to “purify” Indian Culture and speak on its behalf.The
interconnections between these obsessions are extremely complicated.
17. Samual Weber charges Jameson with using the gesture of "Capitalizing
History" to address the "challenge of post-structuralist thought".
Weber's is one of the latest salvoes in the prolonged skirmishing
between the defenders of "post-structuralism" and those who accuse it of
denying "history".
If the former polemicize against history as "phallogocentrism", the latter
argue that is an "untranscendable horizon".
Neither specify whether the "history" in question refers to a mode of
writing history or to the "past" itself.
18. Tejaswini's central concern here is not to elaborate on the battle for
"history" now being staged in Euro-American theory but to ask a series
of questions from a strategically "partial" perspective that of an
emergent post-colonial practice willing to profit from the insights of
post-structuralism, while at the same time demanding ways of writing
history in order to make sense of how subjectification operates.
Her purposes, I take historicity to mean although not
unproblematically effective history, or that part of the past that is
still operative in the present.
I use the word historicity to avoid invoking History with a capital H, my
concern being with "Local" practices of translation that require no
overarching theory to contain them.
19. As Foucault declares, "effective history affirms knowledge as
perspective", it may be seen as a radical kind of "presentism", which we
may be able to work from.
The facts of "history" are inescapable for the post-colonial, since
attention to history is in a sense demanded by the post-colonial situation,
post-colonial theory has to formulate a narrativizing strategy in addition
to deconstructive one.
Louis Althusser's critique of historicism, which leads him, in Jameson's
words, to formulate the notion that "history is a process without a
telos or a subject", "a repudiation of master narratives and their
twin categories of narrative closure (telos) and of character (subject
of history)".
20. Walter Benjamin, who sees the historian (or we may even say the
translator) seizing the past image that comes into a constellation with the
past.
The discontinuity of the past we construct may provoke us to discuss the
"Why" of a translation and how it shows that we need to translate
history rather than to interpret it or "read" it.
It is interesting to speculate what impact this notion of a dispersed origin
might have on deep-rooted European histories of the cradle of civilization
and on post-colonial people's image of themselves.
21. 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 a repressive force that
obliterates difference and belongs in a chain that includes meaning,truth,
presence, and logos.
He has indicated more than once that translation perhaps escapes "the
orbit of representation" and is therefore an "exemplary question".
If representation stands for the reappropriation of presence, translation
emerges as the sign for what derrida would call "dissemination".
22. The denial of historicity to conquered peoples, and that suppress history
in order to appear as history, it is aware that the situation of the post-
colonial "subject", who lives always already "in translation", requires for
its articulation some notion of what history is.
The point is not just to criticize these characterizations as "inadequate"
or "untruth", one should attempt to show the complicity of
representations with colonial rule and their part in maintaining the
asymmetry of imperialism.
23. In an essay on the Subaltern studies historian's, Gayatri Spivak
argues that their practice is akin to "deconstruction", since they put
forward a "theory of charge as the site of displacement of functions
between sign-system" and this is "a theory of reading in the strongest
possible general sense".
Since it is part of my argument that the problematics of translation
and the writing of history are inextricably bound together, I shall
briefly go over Spivak's main points regarding the Subaltern historians.
May help us see more clearly how the nations of history and translation I
wish to reinscribe are not only enabled by the postcolonial critique of
historiography but might also further strengthen that critique.
24. History and translation function, perhaps,under the same order of
representation, truth, and presence, creating coherent and transparent
texts through the repressions of difference, and participating thereby in
the process of colonial domination.
The double inscription Derrida mentions has a parallel in Walter
Benjamin's strategy of citation or quotation.
For Benjamin, the historical materialist quotes without quotation marks in
a method akin to montage. It is one way of revealing the constellations a
past age forms with the present without submitting to a simple historical
continuum, to an order of origin and telos.
25. The hybrid therefore, involves translation, deformation displacement.
The nation 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 "ambitious and historically complex".
To restrict "hybridity", or what I called "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.
