55

Chapter 2

Author - Translator Interface

56

Contents

2.1. Literary Translation: An Introduction 57

2.1.1. The Indian Context 57

2.1.2. A Comparison: West and East 60

2.2. Spivak and Translation Theories 63

2.3. A Deconstructive Translator 68 67

2.4. Propriety in Translation 70

2.5. Spivak and Paratext 73

2.6. Aporias of Linguistic Transfer: Spivak‘s

Theory of Language 76

2.7. An Integrated Approach: Abusive and

Normative Translation 79

2.8. Culture and Translation 84

2.9. Mimesis in Translation 86

2.10. Translator‘s Subjectivity 90

2.11. Revision and Self-Correction 94

2.12. Contemporary Criticism 95

2.13. Conclusion 103

Notes 105

Works Cited 108

57

2.1. Literary Translation: An Introduction

With the emergence of multilingual societies all over the world and the

shrinking of the world to a global village, translation has emerged as an invisible

yet indispensable bridge across linguistic, cultural and geopolitical divides, not

for literary alone, but for politico-socio-cultural and commercial transactions as

well. Translation has always gone on in all periods of human history, made

imperative for the dissemination of oral and written literatures like folklore and

the classics among the masses. By and by, translation was resorted to in a formal

way which eventuality came to be taken as the origin of the history of literary

translation. In most cases the translator was invisible and the translated work was

taken for granted to be a faithful substitute for the original. With the

developments in literary theory and criticism, augmented by the modern sciences,

such as Linguistics, Psychoanalysis, Sociology, Ethnography/Anthropology and

ethics, the activity called translation has since become a complex and significant

practice in literary and cultural studies. It is only by a careful analysis of the inner

dynamics of translated texts can one most effectively assess the process(es) of

ideological and cultural transference and construction - an urgent task in an age

rive with the competing and conflicting demands of aesthetics and pragmatics.

2.1.1. The Indian Context

India being divided on the basis of linguistic regionalism, inter-regional and

inter-lingual transactions were made possible only by means of translations from

one language to another. And it is an undeniable fact that, since no one can read

all the major languages of India, translation is perhaps the only way to promote

the study of Indian language literatures both within and outside India.

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Considering the multilinguality of India1, it is generally said that India is a

veritable translation area, with most people knowing more than one language and

using English and Hindi as link languages. Devy in his essay, ―Translation and

Literary History: An Indian View‖, informs that ―the very foundation of modern

Indian literatures was laid through acts of translation, whether by Jayadeva,

Hemachandra, Michael Madhusudan Dutta, H.N. Apte or Bankim Chandra

Chatterjee . . .‖ (187). Admittedly, in today‘s post-colonial and global context,

translation has attained greater importance than ever before. It is a case in point

that on the occasion of the fiftieth year of India‘s Independence, an anthology,

Vintage Book of Indian Writing, assembling the best fifty works in Indian

Literature produced between 1947 - 1997, selected and co-edited by Salman

Rushdie, contained hardly any work by a vernacular language author. All the

works selected were by the few internationally popular Indian English writers,

mostly diasporic Indians, and the excuse given for the discrepancy was that

―there weren‘t good enough translations of Indian Literature in English‖ (Nayar

23). This episode underpins the belief that the concept of an Indian literature as

one Literature is possible only through translations into English, the link

language acceptable to all, irrespective of North or South, East or West India.

Indeed, Harish Trivedi, the erudite postcolonial critic in the Indian academy

today, has frankly observed:

The big dream cherished by nearly all writers in the Indian

languages whether great or small, is that one day, after they have

won the Sahitya Akademi award and the Jnanapith Award and have

had art films made out of their works, the ultimate will happen and

59

they will be translated into English and will burst upon the

international scene in a blaze of global glory. (―Politics 52)

Incidentally, Bengal was the most intense point of British influence that

provided the impetus for new literary genres in Bengali literature and English

translations. One of the foremost woman writers in Bengal, Mahasweta Devi,

who was bestowed with the Sahitya Akademi Award, and Jnanapith, even before

she was translated into English, had already been translated into Hindi - the

national language and into other major Indian languages. The credit for

translating her works into English for the first time goes to Gayatri Spivak, who

had translated Devi‘s ―Draupadi‖ in 1981 and ―Breast-Giver‖ (Stanadayini) in

1987. Since then many of her stories have been translated into English by other

scholarly translators, and to date almost a dozen translators have translated

Mahasweta‘s stories into English, among whom the foremost are Spivak and

Bandyopadhyay.

It‘s a fact that ―the motivation for most translators who undertake translating

a particular author‘s work, is as an act of personal love, homage, allegiance and

affinity and not with any exaggerated hope of effective public transmission and

dissemination‖ (Trivedi, ― Politics‖ 53). They realize only too well that the

political potential of the project of rendering Indian literature, or for that matter

any non-western vernacular literature, into English is inherently thwarted because

of its non-hegemonic/subaltern status. It is a double jeopardy because, on the one

hand, translations are considered inferior to the original and on the other it

belongs to the Third World. The hope that modern Indian literature, particularly

fiction in translation, will give the non-Indian readers the opportunity to realize

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and relish their greatness is wishful thinking, as Radhakrishnan Nayar frankly

notes in his article ―Vernacular Spectacular‖ in The Times Higher of 6 February

1998:

Unfortunately, those (western) readers are unlikely to take up the

chance. Western receptivity to non-Western literature has been

confined to brief enthusiasms in narrow literary circles for Sanskrit,

Persian, Chinese and Japanese classics and to short-lived interest at

a wider level in one or two modern Asian writers such as

Rabindranath Tagore and Yukio Mishima. (23)

Pointing out the fate of translated literature from Third World languages into

English, Trivedi blatantly notes that, ―…though the Empire translates back, the

metropolitan response seems to be that the Empire itself may lump these

translations‖ (―Politics‖ 52). But Spivak‘s translations of Devi are certainly not

out of love alone but for dissemination in the First World. Her competent

translations have secured Devi‘s translated works against the fate of being

lumped.

2.1.2. A Comparison: West and East

The study undertaken involves a Third World writer, Devi and a First World

migrant intellectual, Spivak. Spivak being at the same time First World and Third

World, it is pertinent to take a look at the discourse of translation in the West and

in the East that influences her praxis.. The multilingual context in India and the

monolingual contexts in the West, contribute significantly to the difference in

their approach to theory and practice in translation.

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The major difference between translation practice in the West and in India is

that in the West translation is considered a highly complicated linguistic and

literary act, while in India it is an inevitable way of life. In India, with its long

history of oral composition and transmission, the dominant tradition of ‗bhakti‘

or devotional poetry in which the poet surrendered to, and sought to merge his

individual identity with his divine subject, is re-enacted between an original

writer and a translator. Indeed, as Bassnett and Lefevere argues, Spivak‘s

uncharacteristically tender plea that a translator should adopt a procedure of

‗love‘ and ‗surrender‘ towards the original when translating, may be seen as a

vestigial persistence of these traditional practices (8-9). In the jargon of

Psychoanalysis, it may be attributed to the collective unconscious of Spivak, who

is an Indian first and an American afterwards.

In the West, translation has been subjected to scrutiny from a variety of

perspectives, such as, Structuralism, Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, Gender and

Postcolonial discourse. In contrast in India the focus has been more on the

pragmatic aspects of translation such as facilitating interlingual and intercultural

interaction, not just literary, but cultural and even commercial. Trivedi has put in

a nutshell the evolution of literary translation in the West down the years:

The old debate on what is the proper unit of translation-whether it

is a word, a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph, a page, or even a

complete text, has recently found a cogent new formulation in the

suggestion that what gets translated, and what may be sought to be

translated, is a whole ‗culture‘ into another. (―Politics‖ 48)

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Such a macro-project of translating ‗a whole culture‘, according to him, would

necessarily entail a greater awareness of the political implications of translation

than might a micro-project involving just literal translation. Spivak‘s translations

are definitely not micro-projects but macro-projects with a definite political

agenda to analyze the social text as it situates women, especially the subaltern

women. Intellectually equipped for the task, Spivak undertakes the translation

without any qualms, for as Sumanta Banerjee, the English translator of Devi‘s

four short stories in the collection titled Bait has described:

The plea that it is difficult to translate Mahasweta Devi‘s stories is

an understatement. For anyone who has ever ventured into that

exercise, it must have given the translator cramps! . . . awesome

task that her stories demand from anyone trying to render them into

a different language. The translator has to convey the suggestive

sounds of the dialect that her tribal characters speak, the fire of

anguish and anger that her heroines breath, the subtle nuances in

her description of the Bengali political scenario where most of her

stories take birth, the chilling asides while describing a murderous

plot which may be hatched in a police station, and the devastating

sarcasm that sears through the entire narrative. (vii)

It is noteworthy that plurilingual writers/translators, writing in the language of the

excoloniser or in their own vernacular languages today, are challenging and

redefining many of the putative notions in translation practice in India. In the

words of Choudhuri:

63

The extensive use of different ‗upbhasas‘ (wrongly called dialects)

by the Indian writers or the creation of new languages by Dalit

writers, or the deployment of tribal languages in the multilingual

contexts, problematize conventional notions of linguistic

equivalence or ideas of loss and gain in translation theory and

practice. These varieties of vernaculars and their hybrids are the

languages of ―in-between‖ and occupy a space ―in-between‖ and

challenge the conventional notions of translation in their effort to

decolonize themselves from two oppressors: the western

excolonizer who naively boasts of their existence and also the

traditional national cultures which shortsightedly deny their

importance. (31-32)

‗Translation‘ being a multi-dimensional process, the translators have to deal

judiciously with their material, means, resources and judicious objectiveness at

several levels at the same time. He has to ensure simultaneously the near

impossible norms of literary excellence and fidelity to various ideals, even when

challenged by a number of insurmountable constrains that entail infidelity to the

original. The task of the translator is therefore defined by these conflicting

demands, most of which are of particular significance, particularly in the case of

writers like Devi who incorporate so many registers including unfamiliar tribal

tongues.

2.2. Spivak and Translation Theories

Facilitating a theoretically informed critical evaluation of Spivak‘s

translations of Devi‘s selected works are the developments in translation studies

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that help in bringing to light the underlying integration of the surface level

dichotomies and make clear the symbiosis that ensues from their integrated

interface.

Dating back to the ‗Tower of Babel‘2, the practice of translation is taken to

be as old as 3000 BC, yet no science of the ‗approaches and methods‘ of

translating has been evolved till date. In Aspects of Translation, tracing the

history of translation theories, Sreedevi K. Nair informs that, in the sixteenth

century, the Frenchman Etienne Dolet had formulated five principles in his essay

―How to Translate Well from One Language into Another‖ (1540 ):

1. The translator must fully understand the sense and meaning of

the author, although he is at liberty to clarify the obscurities.

2. The translator should have a perfect knowledge of both the

source language and the target language.

3. The translator should avoid word for word rendering.

4. The translator should use forms of speech in common use.

5. The translator should choose and order words appropriately to

produce the correct tone. (18)

Dolet‘s principles encompass the mental, intellectual and literary skills required

for good translations and contain the kernel of modern translation theories. His

theory obviously posits Cicero (106-43 BC) and Horace‘s (65-8BC) view that

―the art of the translator consists in judicious interpretations of the source

language text, so as to produce a target language version based on the principles

of expressing not word for word, but sense for sense‖ (Nair 19), and links it

logically to Quintilian‘s (30-5 BC) theory that in literary translation there should

65

be the dominance of invention over imitation. Quintilian further counsels that

―during the initial stage (of translation) or in the paraphrase, there should be close

fidelity to the original while in the second stage, the writer (translator) can add

more of his own style‖ (qtd. Nair 19). Spivak‘s modus operandi as translator is

surprisingly in tune with Quintilian‗s postulation:

Let me summarize how I work. At first I translate at speed. If I stop

to think about what is happening to the English, if I assume an

audience, if I take the intending subject as more than a spring

board, I cannot jump in, I cannot surrender…surrendering to the

text in this way means, most of the time, being literal. When I have

produced a version this way, I revise. I revise not in terms of a

possible audience, but by the protocols of the thing in front of me.

(Outside 189-190)

Spivak‘s theory of surrendering to the text and its author certainly reminds one of

Longinus‘s view of translation as ―an act of wrestling with a stronger opponent

that ends in inevitable but honourable defeat‖ (Nair 20), a view that implies the

unquestioned superiority of the author over the translator. In the case of Spivak

and Devi, ‗the wrestling‘ culminates not in a defeat but in a ‗symbiotic interface‘,

where the original relationship of inferiority versus superiority is no longer there,

but is even reversed.

Perhaps the first English law giver of translation studies, Dryden‘s greatest

contribution to the history of translation theory is his suggestion that the

translator should build up a sympathetic bond with the original author so that, he

becomes not a mere interpreter but the author himself, reiterating his view that

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translation is more than metaphrase (word for word), paraphrase (sense for sense)

and imitation; it is recreation.

Examine how your Humour is inclined

And which the Ruling Passion of your Mind,

Then seek a poet who your way do‘s bend.

And chuse an Author as you chuse a friend

United by this sympathetic Bond.

You grow Familiar, Intimate, and Fond.

Your Thoughts, your Words, your Stiles, your Soules agree

No longer his interpreter, but he. (qtd. Nair 23)

Accordingly, Spivak picks out Devi as the author whose works she wanted to

translate: ―I choose Devi because she is unlike her scene…I remain interested in

writers who are against the current, against the mainstream‖ (―Politics‖ 189). It is

a sympathetic identification that leads to intimacy: ―My relationship with Devi is

easy going. I am able to say to her: I surrender to you in your writing, not to you

as an intending subject. There in friendship is another kind of surrender‖ (189-

190) from which ensues translation. The rapport Spivak establishes with Devi is,

also, in tune with Blackburn‘s notion that: ―He (translator) must be willing (and

able) to let another man‘s life enter his own deeply enough to become some part

of his original author. He should be patient, persistent, slightly schizoid, a hard

critic, a brilliant editor‖ (qtd.Venuti 247). And therein, one also find a delineation

of Spivak, the translator - persistent, slightly schizoid, a hard critic, a brilliant

editor, though not quite known to be patient. But she calls herself ―a careful

translator‖ (―Politics‖ 188). Also evident in her politics of translation is the fact

67

that, ―despite her keen and dispassionate intellectualism, the arguments that

Spivak formulates for her ‗higher standards‘ in translation praxis are often rooted

in a strange emotionality and the basis of her theory is love and intimacy‖ (Bose

275). At the same time, the revelation that Spivak gets in the course of her

interview with Mahasweta, draws attention to the instinctive or telepathic rapport

between the two:

In 2000, mourning the passing of old Harlem, I had written: ‗how

does one figure the cutting edge of the vanishing present?‘ I said

nothing when Mahasweta Devi spoke as follows during our

conversation. I had such great ‗asthirata‘ in me, such a restlessness;

and ‗Udbeg‘, this anxiety; I have to write, somehow I have to

document this period which I have experienced because it is going

away, it is vanishing! I said nothing, but I was filled with elation to

think that, already at the end of the seventies, Mahasweta Devi had

been driven by a kindred urge. Such resonances dictate the impulse

to translate (emphasis added). (Chotti 367)

A prolific translator and a theoretician who had greatly influenced twentieth

century translation studies, Ezra Pound‘s picturesque notion of a good translator

as an artist who molded meanings with words (Nair 32), is found to give greater

freedom to the translator. Also applicable to Spivak is I.A. Richards‘s postulation

that the translator should be a literary scholar, who has a perfect understanding

and can correctly reformulate a particular message (Nair 33). Conceding more

freedom to the translators is the twentieth century translation theory that,

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. . . an ideal translator should not look for ‗facts‘ in a literary text

which he can transfer without loss or damage to his readers. On the

other hand, he should make his own sensible reading of the text, so

as to be able to delineate artistically to his readers the impression

aroused in him by the original… He can read into the original,

meanings that are part of the sensibility of himself and his culture

(emphasis added). (Nair 113)

As Nair concludes, literal fidelity is no longer required, and the translator is

respected as a creative writer who gives his own interpretation of a literary work

in a medium similar to, but different from the medium of the original (42).

The above postulations unmistakably address Spivak‘s translation praxis.

Bringing into her translation praxis her extraordinary linguistic talents and her

prodigious mastery of theory, Spivak‘s qualifications as the translator of Devi are

unquestionably the best available in the translation industry. She even dares to

read into the original meanings that are part of her political and academic culture

and sensibility. The best illustration for it is her highly critiqued reading of the

short story ―Draupadi‖, which shows that ―in Spivak‘s acts of translation the

struggle exteriorizes a peculiar . . . self reflexivity. So much so that the issues

raised within the original story often end up simmering on the backburner‖ (Bose

266).

2.3. A Deconstructive Translator

In an interview to Peter Osborne in 1996, Spivak confessed that reading

Derrida for twenty seven long years, the importance of deconstruction to her way

of thinking had become a solid fact of her intellectual life (164). The

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extraordinary eighty-page long translator‘s preface to Of Grammatology turned

out to be a pivotal event in the history of Anglo-American literary theory and

criticism, and the anecdote goes - ―not all went on to read the book that it

prefaces‖ (Sanders 30). And in proof Sanders quotes Jane Gallop: ―In the 1990‘s

I am more interested in Spivak than in Derrida. I began to want to read Of

Grammatology as a text by Spivak rather than as a text by Derrida‖ (Sanders 30).

Gallop further notes that when Spivak draws her preface to a close with a plea for

a certain reader, she uses an effective deconstructive lever to displace the

authority of the original: ―‗Derrida‘, Spivak writes, ‗uses the business of

‗mistranslation‘ as an effective deconstructive lever‘‖ (Sanders 31). Quite

logically, Gallop finds in Spivak‘s invitation a translator‘s coup:

Spivak‘s ideal reader would find her ‗mistranslations‘ and rather

than thinking she should have said this, because it‘s closer to what

Derrida is saying, the reader would stay with Spivak‘s word

(‗fasten upon it in the sense not of catching it out but of hold to it)

and think: ‗that‘s where the text is, this is the text I want, not the

one that follows Derrida‘s direction‘. The reader would follow

Spivak in her displacement of the text, rather than try to bring it

back home to Derrida. The last paragraph of Spivak‘s translator‘s

preface is a stunning articulation of active or abusive translation. At

this moment she speaks not as a translator of deconstruction but as

a deconstructive translator. (Sanders 55)

Spivak‘s deconstructive approach to translation can be seen as a process of

textual manipulation where the concept of plurality defies dogmas of faithfulness

70

to the source text and the idea of the authenticity of the original is challenged

from various perspectives. Spivak thus conforms to her mentor Paul de Man‘s

ideal of ―translation as freedom in-troping‖ (A Critique 164).

To a great extent, Gallop‘s reaction to Spivak‘s translation of Derrida‘s Of

Grammatology and the notion of the ‗translator‘s coup‘ is true of at least some

readers‘ reception of Spivak‘s translations of Devi. At the same time, Spivak‘s

genuine attempt to provide the reader with the author‘s own reading and enough

information to help him/her form a perspective, exculpates her, for it draws the

reader‘s attention to what the author has to say, even though Spivak‘s

perspicacious deconstructive reading upstages the author‘s own reading. This

raises the serious issue of ethics or propriety of translation.

2.4. Propriety in Translation

Self-reflexivity in translation naturally takes the discussion to the need for

propriety or ethics in translation. ―On the Auchitya of Translation and

Translational Perspective‖ by Singh, it is stated that:

Auchitya in translation… should mean propriety in selection of a

text for translation, of methodology and strategy used for

translation, and of placing the translated text in proper perspective,

so that the source writer‘s/text‘s intended, not merely articulated,

meaning finds its proper expression in the translation. . . . placing

source writer‘s concerned feelings and thoughts in totality in proper

perspective for its target readers, . . . it should unfailingly fulfill the

social responsibility and contribute to the society in its own way.

(xi-xii)

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This pertinent reflection on the propriety of translation takes translation studies to

an aspect that is seldom considered seriously enough in discussions on translation

practice, that is, the society for which the translation is attempted. Shashi

Deshpande, one of India‘s most popular Indo-Anglian woman writers living

today, in one of her lectures had pointed out that translators needed to consider

the readers in their translation praxis, even though the authors were not bound to

do so. The transreader, whose reception is accountable to a good extent for the

success of translations, has to be borne in mind by the translator while

translating, and the intentions and feelings of the source writer is to be given

adequate expression in the translated text. Singh draws attention to yet another

significant, but hardly ever thought of, need required for constructing perspective

in the transreader which lies outside the translated text, which is making available

the other works of the original author in translation for the TL readers.

A close study of Spivak‘s translations reveals that she goes to great lengths

to construct ‗a proper‘ perspective in the transreader. Contemporary postcolonial

critics Jane Marcus, Brinda Bose, Minoli Salgado, David Hardiman, Robert

Young and Gabrielle Collu, to name a few, have reacted strongly against

Spivak‘s magisterial, authoritative and self-reflexive critical commentaries and

explications that she attaches to her translations, which according to them moulds

, if not thwarts the reception that Mahasweta‘s works get from the non-Bengali

readership. But it is apparent in her prefaces and postfaces attached to her

translations, that she is quite mindful of her audience or transreaders, whether it

be to create the authorial perspective or to orientate them to her own perspective,

or both. In her translator‘s preface to Imaginary Maps, speaking of the

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constraints on her praxis, she picks on the transreader as the first and the major

constraint:

This book is going to be published in both India and the U.S. As

such it faces in two directions, encounters two readerships with a

strong exchange in various enclaves. As a translator and a

commentator I must imagine them as I write. Indeed, much of what

I write will be produced by those two-faced imaginings even as it

will no doubt produce the difference. (xvii - xviii)

It is worth noting here that in an interview with the editors of The Spivak Reader,

Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean, she explains the reason for her insistence on

the correct version of a Bengali poem (in Bengali script) to be inserted in her

book, even at the cost of the withdrawal of the first run of her book:

Well, I don‘t really teach United States students unfamiliar with the

script to read this corrected version… The thing is, I think of the

fact that there are plenty of Bengali reading Americans. In fact,

many of them would be the natural readership of a book by a

Bengali person (303).

Further, Spivak in her conversation with Devi makes it explicit that she does not

translate for the Indian reader who does not read any Indian languages, but that

she translates for the readership in the rest of the world (―Telling‖ xix), meaning

that hers is a scholarly translation meant for teacher/scholars in the international

academia. Yet her detractors hold that, more than to put the original-textual or

authorial intentions in proper perspective, it is to put her own theoretical and

radical perspectives that Spivak has supplied copious paratextual material with

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her translations. This biased approach, has overlooked her genuine efforts to

supply the authorial intention and perspective by providing the texts of interviews

and conversations with the author on the particular text. She has even provided

the author‘s own reading of her story, in the case of her most controversial

translation, ―Breast-Giver‖. Spivak never takes for granted the transreaders‘

competence and she has made available to her readers, in her own translation,

some of the most remarkable and representative long and short stories, and a

novel by the same author, with which they are enabled to construct a ‗proper

perspective‘ to the author‘s works, all of which are powered by the same

commitment and politics. Her famous copious foot/end notes also facilitate the

transreaders‘ apprehension of the source-culture essential for a foreign reader to

form a perspective.

2.5. Spivak and Paratext

―By their footnotes ye shall know them‖ (Marcus 22). An admirer, yet an

impartial critic, Marcus ironically suggests a much critiqued characteristic of

Spivak‘s works. Her translation of Derrida‘s Of Grammatology carries an eighty

page long critical preface, besides elaborate foot/end notes. This initial practice

has become a signature style of her later translations. It is truly said that her

end/foot notes provide a comprehensive bibliography to her works. The use of

paratext in translation is not only unavoidable but essential, as is evident from

Simon‘s argument:

The translator fleshes out the skeleton of the narrative imagining

details which were barely suggested in the original, exploring

hypotheses for unexplained enigmas. The translator here is seen as

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an independent agent, adding new life to the narrative. This does

not mean that the translator takes liberty with the text…the

result…is practically identical with the original. Despite …the long

reveries which have allowed the translator to enter the imaginative

world of the text, the translation looks surprisingly just like the

original. (65)

Stressing the significance of paratext in fulfilling the translator‘s fidelity of a

different sort to the original text is Dharwadker‘s rare insight that ―. . . in giving

the reader a sense of the translated text‘s native tradition in the translation itself

as also in the scholarly discourse around it, the translator, together with his or her

reader, enters an immense network of intertextual relations, transactions and

confluences spanning both time and space‖ (122).

In translation studies, the range of paratextual commentaries allowed to the

translator is very great. In the form of introductions, prefaces/postfaces,

forewords/afterwords, foot/end notes, explicatory essays, texts of interviews,

appendices, glossaries, maps and parenthetical information, the translator often

embeds his/her work in a matrix that gives necessary cultural and socio-political

orientation to the target language reader on the source text. Such a running

commentary on the foreign text enable the translator to manipulate more than one

textual level simultaneously in order to encode and decode the source text and

facilitate ‗authorized‘ commentaries on their work. It is interesting to take a look

at the amount of paratext available with Spivak‘s translations of Devi‘s fiction.

The collection of three short stories, under the title Breast Stories, carry

about thirty two pages of paratextual material while her next collection,

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Imaginary Maps, assembling three long short stories carry twenty six pages of

paratext and the novel, Chotti Munda and His Arrow, is provided with thirty nine

pages of paratext. Old Women, a collection of two short fiction comes with

hardly any paratext for which the reason may be that Spivak has already

furnished in her earlier translations sufficient information on the socio- political

milieu and cultural ethos of Devi‘s universe of discourse. It is pertinent to bear in

mind that, If not judiciously executed, the deployment of such paratextual

elements, though sanctioned by translation theorists, may sometimes produce an

opposite effect, particularly when the paratext exceeds the text in sheer bulk. For

often,

Translators are . . . caught in the dilemma of producing texts with

large amounts of material that is opaque or unintelligible to

international readers on the one hand or having larger quantities of

explicit information and explanation on the other hand. The risk

involved for them in either choice threatens to compromise the

reception of the text as literature. (Choudhuri 29)

But in the case of Spivak, her intended readers being the First World teacher

/scholar and her intention being to disseminate and deconstruct third world

literature to teach her students to read Third World women‘s texts from below,

that is from a subalternist perspective with ethical responsibility, only makes her

liberal use of paratext welcome as a much needed study aid.

2.6. Aporias of Linguistic Transfer: Spivak’s Theory of Language

Spivak‘s essay, ―The Politics of Translation‖, begins, quite appropriately,

with the very first and important requirement for literary translation, namely,

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language skills. Spivak reiterates that a mere ‗talking‘ knowledge or being a mere

native speaker of the original language hardly qualifies one to be a translator. The

translator must be so versed in the multidimensional semantic nature of the

languages in question because ‗the politics of translation takes on a massive life

of its own, if you see language as the process of meaning construction‖ (Spivak

179). Influenced by Melanie Klein3, whose psychoanalytic observations on

human subject/ego formation Spivak could appropriate fruitfully in her

translation theory, she elaborates that:

It (TL) displaces itself in the place of the original (SL) in what is

later called translation … in order to access that original you have

to enter into the mysterious thickets of the so called original

language, which is not bound by the text that you are translating,

nor is it bound by anything you know, and because people don‘t

realize this they have the audacity to translate simply because they

are so-called native speakers born into the language. That‘s why we

have so much bad translation. (Sanders 110)

Spivak indirectly echoes Benjamin‘s view that any translation which intends

to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information –

hence something inessential. That he calls the hallmark of bad translation (16),

and a mere speaking familiarity with the original can only transmit surface

information for Spivak, thus critiquing the NRI or migrant academics who dares

to translate works from his/her mother-tongue.

In the book Conversations with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Swapan

Chakravorty draws Spivak‘s attention to the idea of natural language and

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artificial language. Spivak who considers herself a genuine bilingual postcolonial

intellect who is constantly shuttling from country to country, being at home in

several places, feels that there is no such thing as a natural or artificial language.

She has perspicaciously argued out her radical theory of language thus:

It seems to me when a child learns a language it is exactly not

organic because what happens miraculously is that the child, the

infant, invents something like a language because this possibility of

articulation is what makes a human being a human being. And the

parents and whoever is around begins to recognize the language

but, at the same time, the child gets inserted into something which

has a history before the child was born and which will have a future

after the child dies, in other words a language with a name...the

thing that exists outside and yet becomes for the span of a lifetime

an interior instrument, and, in fact the instrument with which we

know our interiority. … It seems to me when one learns another

‗language‘, another named language, it is that other possibility of

learning …any language as mother tongue…. And therefore seems

to me very strongly that not to have had a good solid confident

relationship with the first language is a misfortune. Because it is in

terms of that that (sic) all of the other languages are learnt. What

you are doing is that you are expanding your language base and it‘s

taking on different names… It‘s really the idea that the peculiarly

contradictory phenomenon of learning my first language is the one

that‘s animated even when I learn my second and my third and so it

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is language that is expanding and the mind‘s becoming more agile.

(Chakravorty 26-28)

The soundness of her hypothesis, though convincing, is not beyond challenge.

Spivak draws the inference helped by her own experience, as is evident from her

words:

But with this (on the run) is combined the fact that I write with

great difficulty in both English and Bengali. This relationship

between languages compels me to recognize that neither is a natural

or an artificial language. I‘m devoted to my native language; but I

cannot think it as a natural because, to an extent, one is never

natural… one is never at home. (Harasym 37-38)

In the same spirit she also challenges and refutes the commonly held notion that

between women writers there exist a natural bond, an intuitive rapport that

facilitates the intimate act of reading. Spivak challenges the putative notion, that

women have a natural narrative-historical solidarity, that there is something in a

woman or an undifferentiated woman‘s story that speaks to another woman

without benefit of language-learning, which might stand against the translator‘s

task of surrender. According to Spivak ―. . . instead of the empathetic ‗She is like

me‘ attitude, it is ‗She is not like me‘ attitude that makes the friendship more

effective as translation‖ (Outside 183), that is, it is the difference and not the

sameness that provokes the intimate act of surrender required for translation.

Her own experience of translating Devi‘s texts have taught her how the

three part structure works differently from English in her mother tongue Bengali.

For a postcolonial translator it is not enough if s/he merely speaks his/her native

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language, but must be strictly bilingual, for the task of the translator involves

surrendering her/himself to the linguistic rhetoricity of the original text – ―the

minimal consequence of ignoring this task will be the loss of ―the literarity and

textuality and sensuality of the writing‖ (―Politics‖ 189) as evidenced by Ella

Dutt‘s ―The Wet Nurse‖4.

It is a fact tha, the implications of the language of the original is unlimited,

and the responsibility of translation is the only way one can understand the

limitlessness of the original. According to Spivak, ―language does not have an

outline. At the same time . . . there is also a need to acknowledge that the

translator‘s job is not a hack‘s job‖ (Sanders 112). Spivak who demands high

standards in literary translation is obviously unmerciful in her attacks on hack

translators or ―these new fangled folks who take advantage of the fact that

nobody here knows this native language‖ (Sanders 112). Spivak is a practitioner

of what she propose.

2.7. An Integrated Approach: Abusive and Normative Translation

Spivak does not succumb to the common translator‘s temptation to erase

much that is culturally specific and to sanitize much that is odorous to the target

readers‘ sensibility. Her translation has been critiqued as both literal and free. Her

practice can be seen to obey Tymoczko‘s integrated approach where an

integration of the fairly aggressive presentation of unfamiliar cultural elements,

in which differences are highlighted using techniques of defamiliarization, with

an assimilative presentation, in which the likeness or ‗universality‘ is stressed and

cultural differences are muted and made peripheral to the central interests of the

literary work ( 21). As Tymoczko suggests, in Spivak‘s translation we find

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linguistic features related to the source culture (dialects, different registers,

unfamiliar lexical items, relating to relationship terms, designations, names of

offices, buildings, feasts and rituals, plants and trees, and the like) highlighted as

defamiliarized elements in the text, or domesticated in some way or circumvented

altogether. In the translator‘s foreword to Chotti Munda, Spivak at the very outset

clarifies:

It has been my practice to underline the words in English in the

original. I do this because I prepare a scholarly translation, in the

hope that the teacher/scholar will get a sense of the English

lexicalized into Bengali on various levels as a mark of the very

history that is one of the animators of the text. (vii).

On the issue of the translator‘s need to attend to the specificity of the

language s/he translates from and to, Spivak says: ―There is a way in which the

rhetorical nature of every language disrupts its logical systematicity. If we

emphasize the logical at the expense of these rhetorical interferences we remain

safe . . . from the risks or violence to the translating medium‖ (―Politics‖ 179).

Spivak translates from within the post-structural notion of language as three

tiered - rhetoric, logic, silence – ―as an actor interprets a script or as one directs a

play, making the agent (translator) go further than taking the translation to be a

matter of synonyms, syntax and local color (180). This makes Spivak‘s attempt to

translate Devi‘s stylistic experiments produce a text quite different from the

translation of the same text by others. For example, Devi‘s short story

―Stanadayini‖ is available in two versions - ―The Wet Nurse‖ by Ella Dutt, and

―Breast-Giver‖ by Spivak. Mahasweta has expressed approval for the attention to

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her signature style in the version entitled ―Breast-Giver‖ (literal translation of

―Stanadayini‖). The alternative translation gives the title ―The Wet Nurse‖ and

thus neutralizes the author‘s irony in coining an uncanny word. The story is about

a woman, who becomes a professional wet nurse to support her family, and in the

end dies of painful cancer of the breast, betrayed alike by the breasts that for

years became her chief identity and the dozens of ‗sons‘ she suckled. So the

translation ―The Wet Nurse‖ is enough to make the sense, but not enough to

shock, as does ―Breast-Giver‖ (―Politics‖ 183). According to Spivak,

the theme of treating the breast as organ of labor-power-as-commodity and the

breast as metonymic part-object standing in for other/woman-as-object and the

way in which the story engages with Marx and Freud‘s theories on the subject of

the woman‘s body, is lost even before one enters the story. In the text Devi uses

proverbs that are startling even in the Bengali. The translator of ―The Wet Nurse‖

leaves them out. In fact, Spivak argues that, ―if the two translations are read side

by side, the loss of the rhetorical silences of the original can be felt from one to

the other‖ (182-183). Indeed, unlike Dutt‘s, Spivak‘s praxis, according to

Salgado, observes the dictum that translation should ―maintain the strangeness of

a text‖ (140).

. In a ‗normative‘ translation the terms of linguistic negotiation are

deliberately obscured to allow easier insertion into the receptor culture and ready

reception by the target readership, while in an ‗abusive‘ translation the terms of

linguistic negotiations are foregrounded or defamiliarized. Thus, terms that

Dutt‘s work domesticates for a British readership, Spivak chooses to defamliarize

for the American scholar, as can be discerned from the samples below:

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A passage from ―The Wet-Nurse‖:

Seeing such a woman every Tom, Dick and Harry knows that the

ancient Indian traditions are alive and kicking. Old sayings,

celebrating the fortitude of women, were made to describe such

females. (12)

The same passage in ―Breast-Giver‖:

The creeps of the world understand by seeing such women that the

old Indian tradition is still flowing free- they understand that it is

with such women in mind that the following aphorisms have been

composed -‗a female‘s life hangs on like a turtles‘ – ‗her heart

breaks but no word is uttered‘ - ‗The women will burn, her ashes

will fly/Only then will we sing her praise on high‘. (47)

In the above passage from ‗Breast-Giver‘, the ‗creeps of the world‘ is certainly a

case of domestication for an American readership. But Spivak‘s foregrounding of

the traditional song- ―Is a mother so cheaply made? Not just by dropping a

babe!‖ (52) – constitutes a strategy in her overall project to bring out the varieties

of cadence and social inflection in spoken speech, to effect a foreignization of the

target language. Further as Salgado points out, in Spivak‘s translation,

. . . the dynamics of dialogue evident structurally in the

interjections of the oral narrator, and internally in slang, doggerel,

and colloquial simile, are heavily played out, making it truly

dialogic and celebrating the very plurivocity of which translation is

a part. Indeed what appears as mild abuses in Dutt‘s translation, in

Spivak‘s version appears to be the crudest of obscenities. (140)

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For example, ―the other fuckups of the time‖, ―You bastard ball-less crook!‖,

―You fucking jackal of a nard‖ (138, 145, 32), etc., are assimilative presentations

that domesticate the easy obscenities used by Devi in the original. In fact, in

―Politics of Translation‖ Spivak asserts: ―To decide whether you are prepared

enough to start translating, then, it might help if you have graduated into

speaking . . . of intimate matters in the language of the original.‖ (187). Spivak

further explains how the rhetoricity of the SL can be captured in translation:

First then, the translator must surrender to the text. She must solicit

the text to show the limits of its language, because that rhetorical

aspect will point at the silence of the absolute fraying of language

that the text wards off, in its special manner. (185)

Forestalling the critique that such an approach is abstract and farfetched,

Spivak takes a dismissive stand that no amount of criticism can refute the fact

that ―translation is the most intimate act of reading‖, and that the translator has to

earn the right to become the intimate reader before she can surrender to the text

and respond to the special call of the text. As hinted earlier, Spivak claims an

intimacy, not only with Devi‘s material, but also with the person of the author

and her activist work, and thereby has earned the right to become her intimate

reader.

2.8. Culture and Translation

It is an established fact that literary translation is a trans-cultural

phenomenon and that translation and cultural familiarity with the languages

involved in translation are mutually interactive. The case of Spivak as Devi‘s

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translator is an ideal instantiation of the above premise, for as a ‗genuinely

bilingual postcolonial‘:

She moves easily from Western cultures to Eastern, . . . (and) can

speak for the other and the other‘s world in a trans-cultural space

which is yet historically her own caste as an Indian, her gender,

education and politics, (even as she) inhabits the ―diasporic‖ space

of the post-colonial academic. (Marcus 22)

It is important that, in attempting to transfer the element of culture to the

target language text, the translator has to keep in mind the need to present

linguistic equivalence as far as possible, or else, his/her free choice of

lexis/syntax may bring in their idiosyncratic features in the target language text

rather than the cultural features of the source language text. Indeed there are

Anglophone Bengali readers who perceive Spivak‘s translations of Devi to be

rather too idiosyncratic representations of the original (Bose 277). Spivak herself

has cited one such accusation and has clarified her position:

Sujit Mukhurjee, the prominent intellectual of the publishing world,

particularly concerned with the quality of translations- has also

complained – and this is particularly important for U.S. readers

who are looking for either local flavor or Indian endorsement - that

the English of my translation is not sufficiently accessible to

readers in this country (India) … This may indeed be true, but not

be enough grounds for complaint. I am aware that the English of

my translations belongs more to the rootless American based

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academic prose than the more subcontinental idiom of my youth.

(Imaginary xxvi)

The self-confident translator that she is, Spivak realizes only too well that even in

the culture oriented approach the translator has to be governed by the language of

the original, and so has taken care to observe linguistic fidelity by seeking

authorial and editorial guidance and approval. Spivak too shares Sarmishta

Gupta‘s (another erudite translator of Devi‘s stories that are collected in Outcast:

Four Stories) confession: ―Working closely with the author has been a

tremendous help in ensuring that there are no misreadings. Mahasweta Devi‘s

prose contains many words which are not to be found in standard dictionaries‖

(viii). The fact is, as revealed by Devi herself in an interview to Kishore, the

publisher; she is interested in words, especially unusual words with a tale behind

it. ―There are so many more beautiful words. Bengali words. Whenever I come

across an interesting word, I write it down‖ (viii), to be used in her fiction.

Despite being a careful and pains-taking translator, Spivak is aware of the

intranslatability of certain cultural elements in the SL, and cites the South African

writer, J.M. Coetzee‘s explanation for similar difficulties faced by him in

translating the Dutch poet Achterberg into English:

It is in the nature of literary work to present its translator with

problems for which the perfect solution is impossible… there is

never enough closeness of fit between languages for formal features

of a work to be mapped across from one language to another

without shift of value… something must be ‗lost‘, that is, features

embodying certain complexes of value must be replaced with

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features embodying different complexes of values in the target

language. At such moments the translator chooses in accordance

with his (sic) conception of the whole…there is no way of simply

translating the words. These choices are based, literally, on pre-

conceptions, pre-judgment, prejudice. (Imaginary xxvi)

Unlike the expert readers, general readers of a translated text look for a total

effect. No translated text is valued either for literal fidelity or for cultural

transmission alone. It is implicit that translation is neither mere code-switching

nor trans-coding. An unduly literal translation may be awkward or even

unintelligible and a strict trans-coding may lead to intercultural confusion.

Recalling Rushdie‘s famous comment that when ‗something gets lost in

translation, something can also be gained‘, Prasad has explained that ‗this gain‘

is mirrored in the pollinated and enriched language that results from the act of

translation, an act not just of bearing across but of fertile coming together (41),

which again reminds one of Spivak‘s and Devi‘s symbiotic interface.

2.9. Mimesis in Translation

In the sixteenth century, George Chapman, who was the first one to give

serious thought to the process of translation, considered translation a direct

linguistic mimesis and focused on the entire artistic world of the original author

in order to access the ‗Spirit‘ of the original (qtd. Nair 20-21). The plight of the

Indian writer writing in English, which Raja Rao, one of the foremost South

Indian English novelists has poetically put as: ―One has to convey in a language

not one‘s own the spirit that is one‘s own‖ (5), is applicable also to translators

translating into English from vernacular languages. Even while realizing the

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dilemma, Devi insists on translators capturing ‗the spirit‘ of her work, which to

her is more important than technical or even artistic perfection and she readily

authorizes those translations of her fiction that have been faithful to the spirit of

her fiction. Ben Jonson, though an advocate of literal fidelity, believed that

―natural genius is needed to give second life to the works of a great writer …

verbal equivalence alone was not sufficient for a good translation, but the

translator should try to establish equivalence at all levels between the original

and the translation‖ (qtd. Nair 21). Spivak with her natural aptitude for languages

and her perspicacious critical and theoretical scholarship, has succeeded to a

great extent in establishing equivalence at all levels between the original and the

translation, particularly in her last translation of Mahasweta‘s, the novel - Chotti

Munda and His Arrow, where she dares and succeeds in maintaining equivalence

even at the level of the difficult Mundari dialect that Mahasweta had invented, by

inventing in English an argot for the Munda‘s speech as exemplified in this piece

of advice by Chotti:

No don‘ mek that mistake. If yer name comes up Lala will grab‘t.

What s‘ll I say to ye! We‘ve got out jest a bit from under Lala, got

jobs in t‘ forest, wit Chadha. Done nothin‘ wrong, still I walk

caref‘lly. We are in Lala‘s bite; I‘ve moved his teeth a bit. He‘s

mad angry. And now ye talk outta line... me land! So Sana, ye‘re

bonded wit‘ yer debt load . . . nothin‘ can be yer own. So ye put in

Jita‘s name. And ye‘ve told this to lotta folks? If Lala hears this

he‘ll show ye t‘ capital city me boy. (Chotti 187-188)

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Spivak herself is enthused by her invention and with the critical response it has

attracted, that she goes on to explain the inspiration behind her daring: ―One of

the most striking characteristics of the novel is the sustained aura of subaltern

speech, without the loss of dignity of the speakers… I had to try; straight archaic

prose killed the feel of the book‖ (Chotti viii). In her earlier translations of Devi,

Spivak had been inhibited or not so daring as revealed in her translator‘s

foreword to Breast Stories:

It follows that I have had the usual translator‘s ―problems‖ only

with the peculiar Bengali spoken by the tribals. In general we

educated Bengalis have the same racist attitude towards it as the

late Peter Sellers had toward our English. It would have been

‗embarrassing‘ to have used some version of the language of D.H.

Lawrence‘s ―Common People‖ or Faulkner‘s ―Blacks‖. (16)

But as is typical of her mental habit, constantly revising and reworking on her

own earlier practices and theories, Spivak overcomes this embarrassment in her

translation of Chotti Munda and His Arrow, and is rewarded by the author‘s

delighted approval. Her attempt is so daring that Spivak herself is conscious to

the point that she makes a sort of apology in her translator‘s foreword:

One of the most striking characteristics of the novel is the sustained

aura of subaltern speech, without the loss of dignity of the speakers.

It is as if normativity has been withdrawn from the speech of the

rural gentry. For the longest time I was afraid to attempt to translate

this characteristic. Yet as Barbara Johnson says felicitously, a

translator has to be a ‗faithful bigamist‘. In the interest of keeping

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faith, I had to try; straight slightly archaic prose killed the feel of

the book. (viii)

It is implicit that ‗dialect‘, especially of the subaltern was not accorded any

dignity in literature. Some of them did not even have a script. Catachrestically

called ‗dialects‘, these tribal bhasas are considered to be undeveloped and

uncivilized. But in Spivak‘s translation, as in Devi‘s original, the supposed

‗Mundari‘ dialect is accorded dignity and equal status with the other privileged

dialects used. At this point, it is thought provoking to dwell upon Spivak‘s theory

of translation-as-violation, a theory substantiated by the works of Anglo-Indian

colonial writers. Spivak in her essay, ―The Politics of Translation‖ cites:

Kipling uses many Hindustani words in his text – pidgin

Hindustani, barbaric to the native speakers, devoid of syntactic

connections, always infelicitous, almost always incorrect. . . . This

is British pidgin, originating in a decision that Hindustani is a

language of servants not worth mastering ‗correctly‘; this is the

version of the language that is established textually as ‗correct‘. By

contrast, the Hindustani speech of the Indian servants is

painstakingly translated into archaic and awkward English. The

servants‘ occasional forays into English are mocked in phonetic

transcription. Let us call this set of moves - in effect a mark of

perceiving a language as subordinate - translation-as-violation.

(162)

So Spivak premises that, whenever the violence of imperialism straddles a

subjected language, translation can become a species of violation as well. But

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Devi‘s purpose in recreating a unique underclass hybrid language of Eastern

India is quite different from that of Kipling and the likes of him. It was a

symbolic gesture not of belittling but of giving them a tongue/voice, as dignified

and singular as any other dialect. It is this inventiveness of Devi that is emulated

by Spivak in her translation of Chotti Munda and with due respect acknowledges

her indebtedness to the author for showing her the way to do it:

Gayatri, what I am really enjoying in your translation is how

you‘ve shown that dialect can be dignified‘. Shown! It was she

who had ‗shown‘ this in the text and created a test of faith for me.

(Chotti viii)

In this counter signature Sanders reads a reinstating of the authority of the author

that was subverted in her essay ―The Literary Representation of the Subaltern‖

and that there seems to be an acknowledgement that ―the translator has learned

from the writer that the miming that produces ‗a sort of English‘ is not unlike that

which produces the Bengali of the original, . . . both writer and translator play the

same game and take the same risks‖ (78).

2.10. Translator’s Subjectivity

In an interview to Sanders, Spivak recollects how

Naoki Sakai at Cornell . . . at a certain point talked about the

effacement of the subjectivity of the translator. It is so correct. But I

have never written that. I had written about accessing the other, but

it is true that when you translate, very practically, what you want to

do is bring out Mahasweta or bring out Derrida. And it would be a

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fault if the reader felt your presence. So it‘s practical. And I think

that‘s where one should really start. (109)

Indeed, in her ―Politics of Translation‖, Spivak asserts that, ―If you want to make

the translated text accessible try doing it for the person who wrote it‖ (Outside

191), a statement that implicitly demands the effacement of the translator‘s

identity. Such an effacement of the subjectivity of the translator has been well

addressed by a noted French translator, Vitalyos5, in an interview ―Translation as

Absence‖. She explains that translation is a double process.

An author‘s expression deserves to be interiorized until you hear

the author speaking French in your head. For me, translating

involves a double process of disappearance and creation. Ideally

there should not be any trace of my own ‗style‘ in my translations.

If at all, I would love to be recognized through my absence. (4)

Apposite to Vitaloys‘s view, one may read Blackburn‘s psychoanalytical insight:

I don‘t become the author when I‘m translating his prose or poetry,

but I‘m certainly getting my talents into his hang-ups. Another

person‘s preoccupations are occupying me. They literally own me

for that time. You see, it‘s not just a matter of reading a language

and understanding it and putting it into English. Its understanding

something that makes the man do it, where he is going. And it‘s

not an entirely objective process. It must be partly subjective: there

has to be some kind of projection (emphasis added). (qtd. Venuti

245-246)

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Unlike Vitaloys, Spivak the translator is more present in her translations than

absent for some critics by way of her esoteric approaches and idiosyncratic lexis,

and Blackburn‘s perspicacious argument may be used in defense of the oft

repeated critique of Spivak‘s ‗apparent‘ appropriation of Devi‘s stories and her

―all encompassing self-reflexivity‖ in the event ( Bose 266). Implicated in the

issue of appropriation is the ‗cannibalistic aspect‘6 of translation. Vieira notes

that ―the use of the text one is translating as a source of nourishment for one‘s

theorization gives a cannibalistic dimension to one‘s work (98). It is an accepted

fact, and accepted even by Spivak, that she has used Devi‘s stories to formulate

her theories on translation and explicate her radical subaltern theories, which

naturally implicates Spivak in a cannibalistic relationship to Devi‘s works as

translator. But the above allegations need not detract from the merit and

authenticity of her translations, especially in the present day when there is a very

strong assertion of the individuality of the translator. At this juncture it is

enlightening to mark what A.K. Ramanujan, the eminent post-colonial theorist

and practitioner of translation from South India, has to say on the issue. Fully

recognizing the complexities of the conflict within the translator between self-

effacement and self-articulation, or between transmission and expression, he

says:

A translation has to be true to the translator no less than to the

originals (author). He cannot jump off his own shadow (emphasis

added). Translation is choice, interpretation, an assertion of taste, a

betrayal of what answers to one‘s needs, one‘s envies. (qtd.

Dharwadker 120)

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Illuminating Spivak‘s challenges as a translator, who risks being labeled a traitor

after the famous Italian proverb7, is Ramanujan‘s insight that:

A translator is ‗an artist on oath‘. He has a double allegiance,

indeed several double allegiances. All too familiar with the rigors

and pleasures of reading a text and those of making another, caught

between the need to express himself and the need to represent

another, moving between the two halves of one brain, he has to use

both to get close to ‗the originals‘. He has to let poetry win without

allowing scholarship to lose. Then his very compromises may begin

to express certain fidelity, and may suggest what he cannot convey.

(qtd. Dharwadker 120)

Ramanujan‘s insight puts one in mind of Iser‘s ‗reception theory‘ which is

applicable, also to translation. According to Iser, the literary work has two poles

– the artistic and the aesthetic; the artistic refers to the text created by the author

and the aesthetic to the realization accomplished by the reader/translator – the

literary work lies half way between the two (Lodge 190). Spivak is certainly

aware of the fact that ― if the translator fails to achieve a balance between

representation and appropriation, then he (or she) undercuts the utility of the

translation as representation of something otherwise inaccessible, as well as (its

value) beyond its ‗utility‘ (Dharwadker 120). Spivak‘s praxis exemplifies the

modern view that ―a translator need not be the servile follower of a creative

genius but is in his/her own right a creative writer at par with the original author‖

(Nair 42).

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2.11. Revision and Self-Correction

An intellectually agile and adventurous mind, Spivak is well known for her

self–corrections and revisions of her earlier critiques and theories as adduced by

many of the essays in her later publications, which are revised versions of already

published and much debated essays by her. Such a creative bend is evidenced in

her translation praxis as well. A close study of Spivak‘s theory and practice of

translation will serve to prove that she has come a long way from her first

attempts at translation (Of Grammatology [1976], ―Draupadi‖ [1981]). Her latest

translation of Devi, Chotti Munda and His Arrow, shows how she has turned out

to be an innovative past master of literary translation. Indeed, Sanders in his

evaluation of Spivak‘s literary career has pertinently noted that the experience of

translating Devi has changed or at least led to develop in crucial ways Spivak‘s

thinking on translation.

Referring to Spivak‘s latest translation, Chotti Munda, Sanders, struck by

the audacity of her translation, observes that her rendering of Devi‘s

representation of the Bengali of the tribals in an idiosyncratic English, in a way

appears to relax the stricture adopted by her in her prefatory essay to her

translation of ―Draupadi‖, and wonders if her politics of translation had of late

undergone a drastic change and asks her what had encouraged her to depart so

radically from ‗Straight English‘ in Chotti Munda, and whether there was any

relationship between her evolving translator‘s practice and her theories on

translation? (109). Conceding to Sanders‘s insight, Spivak confesses to new

influences on her: ―I‘ve done a lot of translation in between …in 1981… But in

1981 I was also not so turned off as I have been by the great African writers –

95

writers as great as Ngugi in Petals of Blood – deciding to express the subjecting

of the subaltern African by a sort of poetic language‖ (109). It has been rightly

said by Tymoczko that,

. . . post-colonial authors remake the languages and literatures of

their of their former colonizers through the importation and

adaptation of native mythos, mythopoeic imagery, an alternate

lexis, vibrant textures of idiomatic speech and new formalisms, . . .

It is ironic that the rich presence of these elements confers prestige

in contemporary post-colonial literature while the same elements

have been so often rejected in translations. (32)

Influenced by the postcolonial Afro-Anglo/French writers like Frantz Fanon,

Ngugi Wa Thiong‘O, and Wole Soyinka, Spivak‘s translation praxis undergoes a

transformation that takes her to yet another level of identification with the author

as cited above, but instead of being rejected, the argot she created is greatly

applauded by all concerned. In the ―Task of the Translator‖, Benjamin

significantly affirms the desirability that a translation allows the language of the

original to transform that of the translation (19).

2.12. Contemporary Criticism

Critical response to her translations and translation praxis has gradually

shifted from critique (in the traditional sense) to appreciation. Even those who

had critiqued her cannot help being awed by her wide-ranging scholarship and

creativity. But in these modern times, with the birth of the patented individual

copyright- holding author, whose ‗death‘ has been celebrated by the

poststructuralists, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, such an author can no

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longer be ‗mistranslated‘ or ‗appropriated‘; s/he needs to be scrupulously, even

faithfully translated. Spivak, well aware of the risk, has been a very careful and

literally faithful translator of Devi‘s fiction as far as the body of her texts are

concerned, all the same, it is only quite normal that the proclivities of the

individual translator make their way into her translations .

Devi‘s stories, written in a distinctive style, pose particular challenges for

the translator. As noted earlier, not only is the surface realism of her stories

destabilized by mythic and satiric configurations but the language used is itself

unfixed, incorporating a mixture of folk dialects and urban Bengali slang and

Shakespeare, Hindu mythology and quotations from Marx.

For Haldarbabu suddenly dies of heart failure. Shakespeare‘s

welkin breaks on Kangali and Jashoda‘s head.

Haldarbabu truly left Kangali in the lurch. Those wishes of the

Lionseated were manifesting themselves around Kangali via- media

Halderbabu disappeared into the burning promises given by a

political party before the election and became magically invisible

like the heroine of a fantasy. A European witch‘s bodkin pricks the

colored balloon of Kangali and Jashoda‘s dreams and the pair falls

in deep trouble.. . .

Such is the power of the Indian soil that all women turn into

mothers here and all men remain immersed in the spirit of holy

childhood. Each man the Holy Child and each woman the Divine

Mother. Even those who, deny this and wish to slap current posters

to the effect of the ‗eternal she’ – ‗Mona Lisa‘ - ‗La passionaria‘ –

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‗Simon de Beauvior,‘ et cetera, over the old ones and look at

women that way are, after all, Indian cubs. (―Breast-Giver‖ 47)

It can be seen that this very plurivocity and discursive diversity has resulted in

vastly differing translations of her work. In this context, the words of Sarmista

Gupta, the translator of Outcast: Four Stories by Devi is highly pertinent: ―I do

not consider it sacrosanct to always conform to an accepted register of Indian

English, as it were, because I believe every translator should have the freedom to

define his/her own terms of writing"(vii).

Comparing the translations by two very different critic-cum-translators,

Salgado finds that the translations reflect their very different cultural and political

biases. A look at the comparative study is helpful in making the argument clear.

In ‗Breast-Giver‘, Jashoda‘s reaction to the offer of a wet-nurse‘s job, in Dutt‘s

normative translation reads: ―when Halderjima made the proposal to Jashoda, the

poor woman felt she had been offered a cabinet ministry‖ (18). While Spivak

writes: ―Jashoda received a portfolio when she heard the proposal‖ (―Breast-

Giver‖ 57). It is a fact that despite being careful (as she claims), Spivak is made

visible in such tranlatorial blunders. Hence Salgado argues that ―her translations

are ostensibly marked by discontinuity, self-reflexivity, discordant dialogicality

and the overt inscription of cultural borders which collectively work to reveal the

very resistance to interpretation that the act of translation conventionally

obscures‖ (142).

Kishore, the Managing Editor of Seagull Books Private Limited 8

, in a

personal interview, had categorically stated that Spivak was indeed a most

reliable and faithful translator of Devi:

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N K: She is a reliable translator …we counter check every time we

publish a work. Her translations – it is authentic. She does

something which she does in an authentic voice – with greater ease

and gets the same voice as Mahasweta Devi‘s. No doubt, she is a

good translator; her translations are very good.

And added that one should keep in mind that,

. . . Spivak‘s implied readers are those in educational institutions –

her translations are meant for scholars. Mahasweta Devi is an

intuitive writer, and has a philosophy and ideology of her own.

Spivak has captured it in her translations – remove the

introductions, the translations are really authentic. (Interview)

There are scholars, particularly in West Bengal, who will not readily endorse the

above assessment. One such scholar is Sarkar who, in his paper ―Mistranslating

Mahasweta‖9, has cited a number of obvious discrepancies - mistakes of

omission, ignorance and carelessness - and argues that Spivak‘s (an ‗auto-

commissioned‘ translator) ―real intention is not so much to translate and

popularize Devi as to validate her own theories‖ (1).

Sarkar, quoting Lefervere, notes that ―the audience, which does not know

the original, trusts that the translation is a fair representation of it. The audience

trusts the experts and by implication, those who check on the experts‖ (2).

According to him:

. . . translating Mahasweta is always difficult. This difficulty arises

chiefly because she uses a plethora of untranslatable culture-

specific words in a plural language. . . . Notwithstanding the

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courage displayed by the translators, the fact remains – after a

simultaneous reading of both the original and the translations – that

the translated texts abound in errors of various kinds, some of

which border on the ludicrous. (1-2)

Sarkar lists Spivak‘s mistranslations under the headings ‗acts of omission‘ and

‗acts of commission‘. ‗Acts of omission‘ he identifies as unique to Spivak alone

among the three translators he subjects to scrutiny. Sarkar finds that Spivak

occasionally ‗forgets‘ to translate one word or another, at times misses a whole

sentence, or even an entire paragraph. For example, in the very first paragraph of

―Draupadi‖, an important line ―wound in the shoulder (in Bengali)‖ revealing that

Dopdi had been shot. It is a sentence that gives us information about Draupadi‘s

past. In ―Breast-Giver‖ a line originally in English (although written in Bengali

script): ―the growth is purposeless, parasitic and flourishes at the expense of the

human host‖ is altogether left out, and in ―Behind the Bodice‖, a sharp and

cutting remark about the commercial film culture is ignored: ―this is making and

using of the weapons of war. Through cassettes, Bombay factory-made mass

culture is being circulated in half of the world at the speed of a jet‖ (in

translation). In ―The Fairytale of Mohanpur‖, she mistranslates the kinship term

―son of the eldest son‖ as ―the eldest son‖ thus causing confusion for the

bilingual readers. Sarkar next turns to acts of commission which he considers

more serious, because according to him it tells upon the translator‘s

comprehension and competence. One may here bear in mind how self-

consciously Spivak assures the readers on her competence, both linguistic and

cultural, and reiterates the same in interviews and writings on the issue. He finds

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Spivak occasionally mistranslating due to miscomprehension. For example,

where she translates as ―kingdom‖, Sarkar feels ―state‖ would have been closer to

the meaning of the text and naturally more appropriate (Breast Stories 40). A

culture specific term translated as blind alleys (41) Sarkar suggests should have

been retained to give the local tinge and be explained in the glossary. In the same

text what Spivak renders as ―exceedingly sparsely peopled‖ (139) gives a

meaning just the opposite of what the author had intended and on another

occasion translates the title of a popular Hindi film song as ―subsequent hanky-

panky‖ (139). Another pitfall for translators is when they handle idioms, for

example, an idiom which means ―abused by their mother‖ is translated as

―abused their mother‖ (46), and for the context ‗thoroughly overwhelmed by

fever‘, Spivak uses ―cooking with fever‖ (71). In Old Women where a simple

phrase like ‗are we lucky enough to have fish‘ – is rendered as ―Hey, is there fish

in our future that we will eat fish‖ (75). The most hilarious mistake Sarkar finds

in Spivak‘s translation is in the line ―there is too much influence of ‗fun and

games‘ in the people who traffic in studies and intellectualism in West Bengal

and therefore they should stress the wood apple correspondingly‖ (139), where

the original Bengali word for dysentery has been translated as ‗fun and games‘.

Once again in ‗Behind the Bodice‘ where a simple word ‗afar‘ would have served

the purpose, Spivak uses the technical phrase ―by remote control‖. Sarkar finds

fault with Spivak‘s methodology, too, for he says, ―Spivak is confused, she never

follows a well defined methodology, the reader is always kept guessing. She at

times translates as ‗aunties‘ (in ―Breast-Giver‖) while at other times she uses the

trans-literated Bengali words mashi [in ―Fairy Tale of Mohanpur‖] and pishi [in

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―Statue‖] (mother‘s and father‘s sisters respectively). Similarly in ―Breast-Giver‖

while she translates as ―herbal remedies‖ and ―best variety of bananas‖(65), in

the ―Fairytale of Mohanpur‖ ‗thankuni‘, ‗telakuchos‘, ‗agniswar‘ and the like

are all kept in toto (74,82,77). Another quarrel Sarkar has with Spivak is on the

issue of the circulation of two versions of ―Draupadi‖. Bandyopadhyay writes in

his introduction to Bashai Tudu,

Gayathri‘s translation of Draupadi has already appeared… With

her ‗reading‘ of the story ‗influenced by deconstructive practice‘.

But the text that appears here is somewhat different, after a few

changes, not quite substantial but significant (emphasis added) in

some respects, she has made after I had pointed out some omissions

and a couple of mis-translations from oversight. (xiv)

So Spivak‘s text is corrected by herself following Bandyopadhyay‘s suggestions,

but to his consternation he finds that Spivak has published and circulated the

earlier text again. Sarkar‘s surmise is that in an auto-commissioned translation

(the case of Spivak), when the translator has some theoretical axe(s) to grind, the

intention is bound to hamper the performance (7). And he concludes that Spivak

is careless, forgetful and absurd at times, besides marring the total effect by

literal translation. He even suspects if she has been (mis)directed by market

prospects (8).

Jharana Sanyal, a Bengali academician and a ‗Mahasweta Devi expert‘ who

has also translated Devi‘s short story ―Talaq‖, with Sarkar finds the local flavor

missing in Spivak‘s translations, but concedes that Spivak‘s translations are

comparatively very good (Interview). To forestall such critiques, in her anxiety of

102

authenticity, Spivak has claimed that her later translations are authorized. At the

very outset of her preface to Imaginary Maps she writes:

I thank Mahasweta Devi not only for the interview but also for her

meticulous reading of the manuscript of the translation. She made

many suggestions, noted omitted passages, corrected occasional

mistranslations, and supplied names for government agencies. This

is indeed an authorized translation. (xvii)

Her translation of Chotti Munda ebang Tar Tir, perhaps her last, subjected

to the publisher and the editor‘s counterchecking and editing, and the author‘s

own approval, can be considered an exemplarily authentic one sans her usual

esoteric mistranslations, until (so far none) some heuristic critique proves

otherwise.

Salgado finds Spivak a fundamentally abusive translator because ―there are

times when Spivak‘s attempt to defamliarize—or to use the Spivakian

expression: ‗to perform an intimate act of reading‘, involves a shift in

signification which is found troubling‖ (143). Raveendran, in the essay

―Postcolonialities and the Indian Diaspora: A Minority View‖ in his recent book

Texts, Histories, Geographies, commends Spivak‘s efforts at translating the

works of Mahasweta Devi and ―taking them to the broad international audience

as a location where some of the postcolonial questions could be fruitfully raised,

and adds that her translation of ―Stanadayini‖ itself could be treated as her

interpretation of the story, she goes on to give, in typical deconstructive fashion‖

(53), but does not go along with her highly nuanced alternative readings.

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2.13. Conclusion

In an interview to Sanders, Spivak draws attention to the need to know

literary history in order to translate competently, and exclaims: ―How few the

people who live in the theoretical universe and critically write about translations,

how few of them actually do translate‖ (Sanders 112). Sanders had quite

admiringly observed earlier to her that ―Like Benjamin‘s ‗Task of the translator‘,

which was his preface to his translation of Baudelaire, your texts on translation

are prefaces to your own translations to Derrida, to Devi‖, and Spivak adds, ―to

Mazhar‖10

(112). It is a well known fact that many classical poets/writers were

also great critics and translators.

As for Spivak‘s ascent in the international galaxy of literary stars, made

possible by her famous translations, radical theories and interpretations of both

the old and new world order, the role played by her translations and readings of

Devi‘s stories is not the least insignificant. It is a common allegation against her

that she has appropriated Devi‘s stories for her own intellectual and material

enhancement. But Devi has only grateful appreciation for Spivak‘s competent

translations, for revitalizing the after-life of her fiction and universalizing it.

Gabrielle Collu: What do you think of Spivak‘s translations [of

your work]?

Mahasweta Devi: I think she is the best. As far as I am concerned,

as far as my stories are concerned, she‘s the best… (Collu 143)

There are critics who believe that it is only a courtesy on Devi‘s part to endorse

Spivak‘s translations as it was through her that she was first outsourced to the

First World readers, and hence her ready endorsement cannot be taken at face

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value. They also hold that Naveen Kishore‘s evaluation, too, cannot be fully

accepted as an objective one as he is a businessman and her publisher.

Spivak‘s translation of Devi‘s fiction and her commentary on that practice

are part of her relentless attempt to analyze the social text as it situates women

as/the subaltern. She concludes her translator‘s afterword in Chotti Munda, her

last translation of Devi, as of now, with the hope:

I have followed Mahasweta Devi for over twenty years. I have

seen, again and again, how her fiction overflows her plans. I will

look forward to fighting women, whatever their names, and look

forward to translating their story. (368)

Spivak‘s engagement with the high theory of ethical responsibility in the

writer/reader/translator and her concept of teaching/learning to read the world

and her literary activism run parallel to Devi‘s own practice as a creative writer

and activist to learn from below. The enabling impact of her literary interface

with the author has been frankly acknowledged by Spivak in her appendix to

Imaginary Maps:

Ignoring all warnings, Mahasweta Devi has pulled me from the web

of her fiction into the weaving of her work. I present my services to

her work – translation, preface, appendix – in the hope that you will

judge the instructive strength of that embrace. (Imaginary 210)

105

Notes

1 Multilnguality of India: In India there are 22 national languages and

about 1652 spoken languages including 418 listed tribal languages, with English

and Hindi as link languages.

2 The phenomenon of linguistic translation is probably as old as mankind

itself, although this cannot be ascertained with any concrete evidence. Mankind‘s

collective memory surviving in mythology, quotes the biblical story of the

―Tower of Babel‖ (Genesis 11: 19) and its disastrous consequences as the

beginning of translation History.

3 Melanie Klein (1882 - 1960). Drawn to Klein‘s explication of the idea of

‗ethical responsibility‘ in her work - The Psychoanalysis of Children (1932) and

in her subsequent essays, Spivak engages with Klein‘s key concept of

‗reparation‘ applied in explaining the development of conscience (superego) in

early infancy, to generalize and reorient her own concept of translation.

4―The Wet Nurse‖ – Ella Dutt‘s translation of Mahasweta Devi‘s

Stanadhayini, was first translated for Women‘s Press Anthology - Truth Tales:

Indian Women’s Writing and published by Kali for Women (1990).

5Dominique Vitalyos – a noted French translator of Indian, especially

Malayalam authors, her most recent translation is O.V. Vijayan‘s Khasakkinte

Ithihasam (Les Legendres de Khasak) and her first was Unnayi Variyar‘s

Nalacharitham. Her other translations from Malayalam are the poems of G.

Sankara Kurup and Ayyappa Paniker, and Manthracharadu by Basheer,

Vimanathavalam by O.V.Vijayan, and Driksashi by Kamala Das.

106

6 Cannibalistic aspect of translation is the idea generated by Haraldo de

Campos‘s poetics of translation called ‗Anthropophagia‘ that engages specifically

with the digestive metaphor. Cannibalism is a metaphor actually drawn from the

Brazilian native‘s ritual where by feeding from someone or drinking someone‘s

blood, as they did to their totemic ‗tapir‘, a means of absorbing the other‘s

strength, thus offering a vanguardist poetics of translation as textual

revitalization.

7 Italian Proverb refers to Voltaire‘s: traduttore traditore – translator you

are a traitor.

8 Seagull Books Limited, Calcutta, recognizing Mahasweta Devi as a

significant figure in the nascent field of socially committed literature, conceived

of a publishing programme which encompasses a representational look at the

complete Devi, in English translation. The project was also meant to be an

overdue recognition of the importance of her contribution to the literary and

cultural history of India/Bengal.

9 ―Mistranslating Mahasweta‖ is a research paper presented by Dr.

Subhendu Sarkar of the University of Calcutta, examining the three expert-

translators of Mahasweta: Gayatri Spivak, Ipsita Chanda and Samik

Bandyopadhyay against the original.

10 Farhad Mazar, a Bangladeshi activist and environmentalist, is the most

radical exponent of socially committed poetry, besides being a leading member

of Bangladesh‘s Nayakrishi Andolan (New Agricultural Movement), which

practices and promotes biodiversity-based ecological agriculture.. A front

ranking intellectual, he has been put in detention by Mrs. Zia‘s government for

107

120 days from July 30, 1994. Spivak joined the Asian Writers and citizens

abroad who organized a protest against the government action and demanded the

immediate release of the poet.

108

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