Borrowed Plumage: Polemical Essays on Translation (review)

Borrowed Plumage is an eclectic set of essays all relating to the topic of translation, which cover such issues as the translation of humor, the marginality of translation, the specific challenges of traditional Chinese poetry, the importance of orality in translation studies, and the role of toponymy in multilingual and multicultural Hong Kong. Thus, the collection contains pieces which take a broad overview of translation and others which focus in specifically on questions of a more technical nature.

Polemic is at best an art of immanence. The reader's annoyance or exasperation is the most achieved tribute to the polemicist's skill. Explicitly advertising controversy, on the other hand, as Borrowed Plumage does in its subtitle, excites suspicion. If the essays are so controversial, then why as readers do we need to be told this? Given advance notice, the reader is likely to feel more irritated by the pretensions of the polemicist than by the substance of the polemic. The book's purpose seems to be to inveigh against the fetishization of the text in translation theory, to challenge the pieties of the postcolonial, and to take issue with the hermetic literalism of sinological translation practice. The author is modest in his claims, arguing that what is being proposed is not a "seamless exposition of a grand 'string' theory of translation: they [the chapters in the book] offer what might be occasional insights now and then" (9). Modesty, however, is a dubious virtue in translation studies, as both practice and theory have long cowered in the shadow of self-effacement. The consequence for theory in the area of literary translation in particular is a plethora of belle-lettristic essay collections which indulge the enthusiasms of the author and as a rule reach the same unvarying conclusion that translation is damnably difficult but that some translators despite everything produce some decent work. Another difficulty is that you cannot denounce, as the author does, "theorists bent on abstractions" or "rhetoricians eager to make a point" (79) and then proceed by rhetorical fiat to describe a "heuristics of translation" (146) with only three translation examples to sustain a generalizable model for translation in different cultural settings.

Borrowed Plumage repeatedly denounces post-colonial theory. Relying heavily on the Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin edited collection, The Empire Writes Back (now 15 years old) and a Fredric Jameson essay, "Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism" (now 18 years old), Eoyang criticizes postcolonialism and all its works on the grounds that demonizing the hegemonic produces its own form of hegemony. But from Albert Memmi to David Lloyd, writers and thinkers on the condition of the colonial and the postcolonial have been acutely aware of this dilemma and have sought various means, both theoretical and practical, to escape the tyranny of the counter-hegemonic. When more recent scholarship by Bassnett, Trivedi, Cheyfitz and Niranjana is invoked on the topic of translation and postcolonialism (there is mysteriously no mention anywhere of Maria Tymoczko's superlative book on the topic), Eoyang accuses these scholars of being solely preoccupied by translation from the "colonized language into the colonizing language" (166), but this claim is untenable as their work repeatedly addresses the impact of hegemonic languages on the languages of the less politically strong and culturally powerful. Eoyang is justified though in his skepticism about the inclusiveness of world literature, which sees translation (into English) as the ultimate act of cultural salvage, and in his suspicion of bibliographies which demonstrate a narrow range of linguistic reference.

Borrowed Plumage impresses by the author's knowledge of different translation traditions in both the East and the West, and he is at his most interesting in his technical discussion of the place of deictic markers in Chinese literature and the potential problems these pose for translators. Eoyang's difficult argument is sometimes problematic. At one point he argues that translation involves the acknowledgement of difference and similarly that true intercultural understanding begins when we understand this...