In the doctor's forest...

...while I certainly don't ignore new books, I don't focus on them, either. I'm a slow reader and can't keep up with the publishers, the professional reviewers, the advanced bloggers. After I finish one book, I like to choose the next at random from a range of "genres" - classics, historical fiction, mysteries, world literature, history, biography, drama, the usual. There are many "old" books that I read long ago but still feel like talking about. The current "hot topic" won't even be tepid by the time I get to it. I also like to bring in other cultural matters - art, theatre, music, opera - when they fit in the context of a certain literary work. The content of "the Canon" and literature in translation also pop up occasionally.

February 5, 2007

From the soap box: Read world literature and improve American foreign policy...

Valdimir Nabokov claimed that he translated Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin in order to move his readers “to learn Pushkin’s language and go through EO again without this crib.” Nabokov believed, according to writer David Remnick, that the translation of literature was an “impossibility” and an “insult.” Perhaps Nabokov had a similarly caustic opinion of the concept of “world literature,” since it is so frequently read in translation.

Other critics, however, have pointed out that we read literature in translation in order to expand our understanding of cultures not our own. While I agree with this point, I think more needs to be said about what the literatures of other cultures can teach us. During this time of our government's ever-expanding hegemony, we Americans should read the literature of other cultures in order to understand the effects of one country’s military, political and cultural dominance over another.

For most of the twentieth century, the translations of Western masterworks of prose and poetry entailed all that might have been included under the term “world literature” in the minds of most American. Any anthology would have reflected the Eurocentric concept of “the world” since it would have included no text from beyond the borders of Europe and North America. Beginning in the 1970s, however, the canon has gradually expanded to encompass the literature of the actual world. The latest edition of the Norton Anthology of World Literature, published in 2003, includes six volumes and literature translated from Japanese, Chinese, indigenous North American languages, Bengali, Hindi, Nicaraguan, Mexican and Chilean Spanish, Egyptian Arabic, and Martiniquan and Senegalese French, among other languages.

But even as the concept of world literature has expanded, translation itself has remained controversial. As Peter France has pointed out, no definitive set of criteria exists for judging the quality of a translation, and - as Nabokov perhaps proves - “many evaluations...are personal, metaphorical and hard to argue with.” Other critics admonish readers to remember that knowing the translation is not the same thing as knowing the original.

Translation is perhaps most problematic where colonial and post-colonial literatures are concerned. In her introduction to Masks of Conquest (a history of how literature was taught in Indian schools and colleges during British rule), Gauri Viswanathan describes how Sanskrit texts were banned in the early nineteenth century by the imperial authorities because their “immorality” and “impurity” were too dangerous for the Indian mind since it could not “discriminate between decency and indecency.” As this ridiculously condescending censorship was being imposed in India, audiences in England were enjoying immensely the translated versions of Sankrit poems and plays.

In her article “Imperialism and Sexual Difference,” Gayatri Spivak discusses how both the failure to translate and the translation of the language of a colonized people can play roles in the oppression of the colonized. In his story “William the Conqueror,” Rudyard Kipling frequently used Hindusthani words and phrases incorrectly. As Spivak points out, Kipling was using the pidgin Hindusthani of the British colonizers. He did not need to bother to translate it at all, much less translate it accurately, because the “narrative practice” of the imperialist power “sanctioned this usage.” The language of the servants was “not worth mastering correctly." At the same time, Kipling “painstakingly” translated the Indians’ speech in Hindusthani into “archaic and awkward English” and mocked their English with “phonetic transcription.” Spivak calls this “translation-by-violation.” She believes that this violation continues when “third-world” literatures are taught and critiqued from a state of “sanctioned ignorance” by professors or critics with no knowledge of the original languages or the actual societies and cultures from which the literature comes.

I don't think Spivak is discouraging the reading of third-world or post-colonial literatures in translation. Rather, she is pointing to the strong possibility that the erroneous discourses that we engage in from our positions within the culture that dominates much of the rest of the world will taint our well-intentioned reading of world literature unless we correct those discourses. The close reading of the literatures of Asia, Africa and Latin America - the areas of the world that have suffered under the political and cultural hegemony and imperialism of Europe and the United States - can at least begin to affect a change in the Eurocentric discourses, including those developed by Euro-ethnic America, on the rest of the world.

Much of the literature of Asia, Africa and Latin America deals in some fashion with the experience of living in these regions during and after colonization by an invading power. The term “post-colonial literature” - literature written after independence but frequently about the period of colonization - with its fluid definition, applies to this literature in translation, though it also includes texts written originally in English, French and other languages of the colonizers. Novels in translation from former colonies such as Algeria and Lebanon, as well as post-colonial texts written in English by authors such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Kenya), Salman Rushdie (India) and Michael Ondaatje (Sri Lanka), all present the reader with narratives of countries at various stages of the struggle to reclaim their national identity from an imperialist power, either during or after colonization, or of individuals striving to discover, understand or adjust their own personal identities in relation to their participation in the national struggle.

Rather than one of the colonizer with the colonized, the relationship between the United States and Latin America is one of a hegemonic power and its victim. While Latin American literature may not be historically post-colonial, it can certainly be read as such. Carlos Fuentes of Mexico, Nobel Laureate Miguel Angel Asturias of Guatemala and Sergio Ramirez of Nicaragua, to name just a few, have all written novels that deal with the repercussions of American military force and political and cultural hegemony in their countries.

Considering that the current focus of discourses on global relations and American military and foreign policies is the Muslim world, authors from this part of the world should be of special interest. Nobel Laureates Naguib Mahfouz and Orhan Pamuk, of course, quickly come to mind, along with Nawal al-Saadawi (Egypt), Ahlam Mosteghanemi (Algeria) and Hanan Al-Shaykh (Lebanon). Tahar Djaout, another novelist, poet and journalist from Algeria, wrote about the militant Islamic fundamentalism that developed in his country after the end of French colonialism. He was assassinated by fundamentalists in 1993.

America has never been the ruler of a “traditional” empire. But it has occupied through military force, and taken great economic advantage of the nations that it has occupied. It has also controlled by political and cultural hegemony when not actually engaging in military occupation. It is this “non-traditional” empire - and the discourses developed and maintained by its power structures - that Americans must understand in order to begin to change it. Reading post-colonial literature and understanding narratives about the confrontations between imperialist or hegemonic powers and the countries they dominate, independence movements, and the repercussions and consequences of domination and independence can help Americans begin to change the hegemonic foreign policies and Orientalist-like discourses developed and maintained by previous generations.

Sources

Remnick, David. “The Translation Wars: How the Race to Translate Tolstoy and Dostoevsky Continues to Spark Feuds, and Create Small Fortunes.” The New Yorker November 7, 2005, 98-109.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Imperialism and Sexual Difference.” Oxford Literary Review 8:1- 2 (1986): 225-40. Rpt. in Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature. Ed. David H. Richter New York: Bedford/St. Matins, 2000. 31-40.

Viswanathan, Gauri. “Introduction.” Masks of Conquest. New York: Columbia UP, 1989. Rpt. in
Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature. Ed. David H. Richter New York: Bedford/St. Matins, 2000. 60-68.