Andre Lefevere: ideological tensions in the translated text

The motivations for rewriting are

· Ideological (conforming or rebelling against the dominant ideology)

· Poetological (-||- the dominant/preferred poetics)

Literary system in which translation functions is controlled by three main factors:

1. Professionals within the literary system

2. Patronage outside the literary system (the powers that can further or hinder the rewriting of literature: ideological, economic, status components, undifferentiated/differentiated)

3. The dominant poetics (literary devices, the concept of the role of literature)

An example given by Lefevere is of Edward Fitzgerald, the 19^th century translator (or ‘rewriter’) of the Persian poet Omar Khayyam.

Fitzgerald considered Persians inferior and felt he should ‘take liberties’ un the translation in order to ‘improve’ on the original, at the same time making it conform to the expected western literary conventions of his time.

Using a 15^th century Oxford manuscript, Fitzgerald recreated the poem in the mid-Victorian style that was loosely based on the original Persian text (11^th century).

Relying more on his intuitive guess than his knowledge of Persian in interpreting The Rubaiyyat, Fitzgerald was guilty of more paraphrasing, omission and addition.

Postcolonialism

Prefix ‘post’ – after colonialism

Colonialism: extension of a nations rule over the territory beyond its borders; a population is subjected to one’s domination.

Two sides of colonialism: militaristic & civilizational (conquest of minds of people)

Post-colonial criticism: to study the effects of imperialistic views in postcolonial societies (on the oppressed) and the counter-narrative (resistant literature)

Postcolonial theory: “ When third world intellectuals have arrived in the first world academe ”

Edward Said

· Moved colonial discourse into the first world academy and into literary and cultural theory

· Coined the term “ Orientalism ”

· Described the binary between the Orient and the Occident (West)

· Attempted to explain how European/Western colonizers looked upon the “Orient”

· A mystical plane that was stereotyped due to lack of knowledge and imagination

· Said redefined Orientalism as a conglomeration of false suppositions, derived not from facts, but from preconceived standards (Western depiction as an inferior world, a place of backwardness)

 

 

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Professor of Columbia University, US

Spivak (born 1942) is an Indian literary critic and theorist. She is best known for the article Can the Subaltern Speak?, considered a founding text of postcolonialism.

Seminal essay “ The politics of translation ” (1993)

English as a language of power translationese – eliminates the identity of politicaly less powerful individuals and cultures; overassimilating the work to make it accessible to the Western readers.

Homi Bhabha

Homi K. Bhabha (born 1949) is an Indian postcolonial theorist.

“The Location of Culture” (1994)

He constructs his theoretical tropes of mimicry and hybridity, third space, cultural ambivalence.

He examines how Indians responded to the assimilative projects of the British colonial rule.

 

Mimicry vs hybridity

What was required for them was some form of imitation of the British – their language, religion and customs. The strategy they used to evade these Eurocentric demands is the basis of what Bhabha defines as mimicry. It is, again, a repetition with a twist? An immitation which appropriates the colonial discourse and puts it in new contexts that virtually send it off track.

For Bhabha, hybridity is the process by which the colonial governing authority undertakes to translate the identity of the colonised (the Other) within a singular universal framework, but then fails producing something familiar but new.

Bhabha contends that a new hybrid identity or subject-position emerges from the interweaving of elements of the coloniser and colonised challenging the validity and euthenticity of any essentialist cultural identity.

Cultural hybridity is a in-between place, which brings together contradictory knowledges, practices and discourses: signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized, and read anew (c.f. remixing culture) is termed as the third space.

 

Third space

For me the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to me is the “Third space”, which enables other positions to emerge. (H. Bhabha)

According to Bhabha, this hybrid third space is an ambivalent site where cultural meaning and representation have no “primordial unity or fixity” (Bhabha 1994)

Example J

One of the most thought-provoking papers at the Warwick conference in 1988 wa presented by the Indian scholar Mahasweta Sengupta with the title ‘Translation, colonialism and poetics: Robindranath Tagore in two worlds’ (Sengupta 1990)

Her example is Tken from Tagore’s collextion of poems Gitanjali: Song Offering, for which in 1913 – as the first non- European – he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature. Sengupta first cited Tagore’s (prizewinning) English version (1990: 56), then gives her own literal translation from the original Bengali 1990:57).

One can notice clearly that Tagore changes not onle the style of the original, but also the imagery and the tone of the lyric, not to mention the register of language which is made to match the target language poetics of Edwardian English. These changes are conscious and deliberately adopted to suit the poetics of the target system. As a result, none of the lyrical qualities of the originals are carried over into the English translations. (Sengunta 1990:57)

Tagore’s contact zone

Sengupta assumes that the reason why Tagore made his own poems in English is so different from what they were in Bengali lay in his understanding of English language and literature as it was disseminated in India at the time. That was, in Pratt’s terminology, the contact zone, and he translated his own poems to suit the aesthetic ideology of the dominating culture.

Hydrid identity with counterhegemonic agency

The hybrid identity is positioned within this third space, as ‘lubricant’ in the conjunction of cultures.

The hybrid’s potential is with their innate knowledge of ‘Transculturation’, their ability to transverse both cultures and to translate, negotiate and mediate affinity and difference within a dynamic of exchange and inclusion. They have encoded within them a counterhegemonic agency.

At the point at which the colonizer presents a normalizing, hegemonic practice, the hybrid strategy opens up a third space of/for rearticulation of negotiation and meaning (Bhabha 1996).

Critical discourse analysis

· Norman Fairclough

· Teun van Dijk

· CDA can be applied to defining ideological and power implicitness in various discourses.

· “a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context” (Ivan Dejk)

CDA as a research tool

Main tenets of CDA

- Discourse is a form of social action or social practice

- Discourse does ideological work

- Power relations are created and maintained through discourse

- Discourse is a intertextual and historical

- Discourse must always be analysed in context

- The link between the text and society is mediated through a range of institutional practices

- CDA is interpretative and explanatory

- CDA is a form of social action. CD analysts are socially-committed

 

Acc. To Fairclough: СDA

Norman Fairclough developed a three-dimensional framework for studying discourse:

1. Analysis of language of the texts – MICROLEVEL

2. Analysis of discourse practice (processes of text production, distribution and consumption) – MESOLEVEL

3. Analysis of discursive events as instances of sociocultural practice MACROLEVEL

-at the micro-level, the analysts considers various aspects of textual/ linguistic analysis, for examples syntactic analysis, use of metaphor and rhetoric devices

-the meso-level or “level of discursive practice” involves studying issues of production and consumption, for instance, which institution produced a text, who is the target audience, etc”

- at the macro-level, the analyst is concerned with intertextual and interdiscursive elements and tries to take into account the broad societal currents that are affecting the text being studied