Flesh and Fish Blood: Postcolonialism, Translation, and the Vernacular

4. The “Problem” of Translation

103 chapter 4 The “Problem” of Translation Postcolonialism, I have argued, whether understood as theory, historical condition, or literary canon, cannot be homogenized. While actually existing postcolonialism can be plotted along and between at least two axes of analysis (the transnational and the vernacular), scholarship within the North American academy has shown a strong predilection to standardize it along the first rather than the second. How can “the (post)colonial condition” be properly figured without an acknowledgment of the existence of both the vernacular and the transnational axes of orientation and, indeed, points in between? The temptation to fix and reify—to nail down one perspective on the postcolonial as “truer” than the other—is to be resisted; instead, we need an acknowledgment of existing plurality. In practical terms, such acknowledgment would take us directly to translation, to suggest sensibly that translation has an especially important part to play in redirecting attention to that dimension I call the vernacular. It bears repeating that the vernacular is not reducible to a linguistic phenomenon; it is not exclusively a matter of a vernacular language. Previous chapters have been partly concerned with elucidating this assertion. I have noted that in the domain of postcolonial literature, for example, the difference between transnational and vernacular postcolonialisms cannot be sketched merely as the difference between, say, Indian literature written in English and in Tamil. Such provisos notwithstanding, the practice of translation can certainly 104 | The “Problem” of Translation play a role in enriching our notion of postcolonial literature by making a greater variety of colonial and postcolonial texts, sensibilities, and conundrums available for critical attention. It is worth remarking that the prevalence of an inadequate notion of the colonial and the postcolonial within the North American academy and allied academic sectors elsewhere is directly linked to the archive available for critical study. Within academic circles, it is not sufficiently acknowledged that theoretical positions emerge out of practical procedures (such as close reading in literary studies and fieldwork in anthropology); and that if the terrain available for such practical procedures is impoverished, then the effect is accordingly discernible within “theory.” Because “theory” presents itself as a metadiscourse, it is easy to overlook how historically conditioned it really is. In this context, translations present an invaluable opportunity to redress the easily observable incommensurability of theory and archive within the field of postcolonial studies. As currently constituted, the theoretical ambition of postcolonial studies bears little relationship to the reality of the impoverished archive with which the field works. It is as if a towering facade had been imposed on a shack of modest proportions , with little thought to how one fitted the other. If a suspicion of hollowness has continued to linger around postcolonial studies, it is partly because of this incommensurability between theory and archive, claim and evidence, that marks so much of the work that passes under the label of “postcolonialism.” Translation has a vital role to play if this incommensurability is to be addressed. Yet translation—the actual practice, not the trope, for the recourse to trope is quite a contrast in this respect—has been generally undervalued in postcolonial theory, including within the literary and cultural studies wing of it, where the importance of translation would seem to be self-evident. Why has there been such undervaluation? Why has translation practice not appeared inviting to the postcolonial critic? Why has its absence not provoked even the kind of theoretical self-critique I am advocating here? Aside from the general disregard for translation in the North American academy , an answer to these questions may lie precisely in the tropic use to which many postcolonial critics have put the notion of “translation.” For the point I am trying to develop here, it is worth reviewing such usage. When discussing the variety of historical phenomena now referred to telegraphically as “colonialism” or “postcolonialism,” a number of critics have exploited the undeniable tropic richness found within the The “Problem” of Translation | 105 notion of translation to raise it to a metaphorical level, to make it into a copious and comprehensive figure for the many different kinds of transformations worked by colonialism upon the colonized. One interesting example of such usage is Eric Cheyfitz’s The Poetics of Imperialism , where he writes, “Translation was, and still is, the central act of European colonization and imperialism” (1991, 104), going on to add later in the book, “The imperialist believes...