Crosscultural Transgressions Research Models in Translation Studies IT Historical and Ideological Issues Edited by Theo Hermans St. Jerome Publishing Manchester, UK & Northampton MAry C7 Published by St. Jerome Publishing 2 Maple Road West, Brooklands Manchester, M23 9HH, United Kingdom Tel +44 161 973 9856 Fax +44 161 905 3498 [email protected] huip://www.stjerome.co.uk ISBN 1-900650-47-9 (pbk) © Theo Hermans and Contributors 2002 All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without ei- ther the prior written permission of the Publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA), 90 Tottenham Court Road, London, WIP 9HE. 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Hermans, Theo. 306.5 C76 2002 418'.02°072 — de21 2001006630Contents Preface Theo Hermans Connecting the Two Infinite Orders Research Methods in Translation Studies Maria Tymoczko ‘The Quest for an Eclectic Methodology of Translation Description Edoardo Crisafulli What Texts Don’t Tell ‘The Uses of Paratexts in Translation Research Sehnaz Tahir-Giirgaglar Translation Principle and the Translator’s Agenda A Systemic Approach to Yan Fu Elsie Chan Systems in Translation A Systemic Model for Descriptive Translation Studies Jeremy Munday A Model of Structuralist Constructivism in Translation Studies Jean-Mare Gouanvic Translatability between Paradigms Gramsci’s Translation of Crocean Concepts Derek Boothman Translation as Terceme and Nazire Culture-bound Concepts and their Implications for a Conceptual Framework for Research on Ottoman Translation History Saliha Paker Power and Ideology in Translation Research in Twentieth-Century China An Analysis of Three Seminal Works Martha Cheung 26 61 76 93 103 120 144Tlaloc Roars Native America, the West and Literary Translation Gordon Brotherston Culture as Translation - and Beyond Ethnographic Models of Representation in Translation Studies Michaela Wolf A ‘Multilingual’and ‘International’ Translation Studies? Sebnem Susam-Sarajeva Notes on Contributors Index 165 180 208 211Preface Poor Holmes! Intrigued by what others overlooked, he gathered his evidence into a speculative but coherent whole, a bold and lucid vision which he set down in crisp, disciplined paragraphs. The construction had everything going for it. An object of inquiry had presented itself, a critical mass of hungry investigators was itching to take it on, all that was needed was a sense of purpose and a sound meth- odology. That was what the vision fleshed out. In 1972 Holmes wrote it up, in an elegant essay that has come to be seen as one of the founding documents of the emergent discipline of translation studies. ‘The Name and Nature of Transla- tion Studies’ outlined a branch of the human sciences that would combine observation and explanation, description and prediction, fieldwork and theory. The discipline would systematically quarry, catalogue, document and explicate the phenomena of translation. Perhaps the discipline lacked discipline. Maybe it proved too rich for its own good. Or the climate changed. At any rate, while the study of translation received a momentous boost from Holmes’ pioneering blueprint, it did not develop along the measured lines of accumulation and progression he foresaw. The explosive growth of interest in translation in recent decades has brought in its wake a proliferation of types and areas of research. Translation studies today look more varied and volatile than Holmes can ever have imagined. Even the discipline’s name is now less as- sured than it once seemed, as at one end the field embraces travel, sign language and intercultural pragmatics while on the other ‘translation’ has come to encompass all forms of crosscultural and intracultural negotiation. Like its companion volume (Jntercultural Faultlines. Research Models in Trans- lation Studies I: Textual and Cognitive Aspects, edited by Maeve Olohan), the present collection charts old and new territory. It deals with research in translation, its na- ture, aims, range, procedures, contexts and modalities. The focus is more specifically on historical and ideological issues, from epistemological questions of historiography to the politics of language — often in combination. The aim is to offer a sampling of approaches and case studies that, together, reflect innovative directions in and raise pertinent questions about current translation research. The volume falls into roughly two parts. The first part (chapters 1-7) is primarily concerned with elaborating and updating the methodological toolbox of translation description and history. In part two (chapters 8-12) issues of ideology are more in the foreground. There is no sharp dividing line separating the two halves. Both parts tackle not just the question how to do research on translation, but some of the underlying issues as well: why certain questions are asked, who asks them, with what aim, in which language, and why that matters. What all the contributions have in common is a strong self-reflexive element. The heart-searching and self-examination have as their object both the speculations2 Crosscultural Transgressions about methodology and the more politicized scrutiny of the institutional positioning of research and scholarship, but they extend to the epistemology of representation — which here includes the representations produced by translators and by those who write on translation. All the essays are also mindful of their desire to capture the unphotographable: assumptions and motivations, relations and agency, the social and intellectual forces which elude direct observation and must be inferred. Much attention is paid to this process of triangulation and its conditioning, to the reporting of findings and inter- pretations, and to the constructed nature of the ensuing edifice. They know, too, the limitations of research models and frameworks. Paradigms have their blind spots, and conceal as much as they reveal. Maria Tymoczko’s linking of micro-level and macro-level investigation serves as a reminder not only of the perennial problem of marrying texts with contexts — so simple in theory, so hard in practice — but also of the expanding purview of transla- tion research, for which the micro is becoming miniaturized and the macro a matter of geopolitics. In rehearsing the ground rules of scholarly research, Tymoczko throws dictionary definitions of ‘hypothesis’ and ‘theory’ at the reader, stresses such things as clarity of focus and replicability of procedure, and recalls that research is con- ducted within certain paradigms. But she goes much further. She acknowledges the social positioning of researchers and the institutional constraints within which trans- lation research is conducted. In this respect she takes note of those other eminently crosscultural disciplines, anthropology and ethnography, and the crisis of represen- tation as experienced there in recent decades ~ a key event also referred to in Michaela Wolf's contribution (chapter 12). That crisis — how to offer a representation of a cultural practice without doing violence to it — has led to ironic modes of academic writing. The irony stems from the awareness of transgression, from the knowledge that any representation is com- promised and therefore problematic, but that we cannot do without representations. It is an irony that pervades not only ethnography but also such disciplines as historiography, sociology and critical linguistics. In a crosscultural field like translation studies, the material we work on consists of representations of texts in other codes, languages, scripts, traditions, thought-worlds; in turn, our studies offer representations of those representations. The appreciation of the problematic nature of representation feeds a self-reflexive stance, the translation scholar’ s criti- cal double. Edoardo Crisafulli’s meta-level discussion, straddling theory and methodol- ogy, testifies to the continuing quest for a viable framework for historical research. Sceptical of hasty generalizations and the idea of detached observation dear to much descriptive work, Crisafulli aims at a reassessment of descriptive studies and argues for what he calls ‘historical empiricism’, which seeks to combine descriptivism and hermeneutics, the quantitative and the qualitative, the historical and the political, the empirical and the ideological. Such a form of eclecticism, he suggests, will beHermans: Preface 3 able to do justice to the unique occurrence, the special case, that which is histori- cally significant but does not fall into a pattern — the singular, the creative — not at the expense of the transindividual but as a complement to it. Like Jeremy Munday (chapter 5), Crisafulli is willing to see his proposals put to the test and ends up with a actual checklist. Sehnaz Tahir-Giirgaglar ogy and historiography. Her investigation of translation norms as manifested in twentieth-century Turkish renderings from European languages has led to a par- ticular interest in the paratexts of translation. The essay brings Gérard Genette’s terminology to bear on the matter, but not after a critical disagreement in which Tahir-Giirgaglar takes issue with Genette’s characterization of translations as paratexts and thus as subordinate — a view she regards as unnecessarily restrictive. Tahir-Giirgaglar’s study illustrates the potential that paratexts offer for research. Their assertions and judgements, their covert and overt polemics, their very vo- cabularies are indicative of the way the nature, function and boundaries of translation are perceived, and thus allow the researcher to construct the underlying conceptions of translation. At the same time, the paratexts shed light on the sociocultural world in which the texts were produced. Insofar as scholarly comments also live paratextually off original and translated texts, Tahir-Giirgaglar pays heed to the implications of the descriptive terminology used by the researcher. Genette distinguishes, for example, between authorial and allographic prefaces; the former are written by the author of the book in question, the other by a third party. As Tahir-Gurgaglar astutely notes, calling a translator's preface ‘allographic’ disempowers that translator as the authorial voice of the trans- lated text, The terms of our descriptions release more than just descriptions. Elsie Chan’s essay about the Chinese translator Yan Fu takes its cue from Even- Zohar’s polysystem theory, but builds equally on André Lefevere’s work on patronage, ideology and institutions. The aim however is not to confirm or disprove the validity of a theoretical apparatus but to use elements of it to prise open the social, political and cultural environment of Yan Fu’s famous three terms describ- ing the requirements of good translation. The essay focusses on agency, in the form of the complex interplay between the translator's agenda and the social and cultural forces around it. Where the range of meanings of Yan Fu’s terms, their historical echoes and their interrelations are at stake, Chan is mindful that writing about this in English brings its own problems of translation and representation. Jeremy Munday’s article, which takes up Maria Tymoczko’s emphasis on sys- tematic and replicable studies, is entirely methodological. Munday operates close to Gideon Toury’s vision of descriptive studies as following a set of explicit analytical procedures. In this respect he continues the tradition of Kitty van Leuven-Zwart, combining a clearly defined linguistic model with more interpretive moves. Like Van Leuven-Zwart, Munday derives his linguistic arsenal from Halliday’s systemic- functional grammar, but his tool is not restricted to narrative texts and it avoids both imilarly preoccupied with issues of methodol-4 Crosscultural Transgressions the formal identification of units of comparison and the pigeon-holing of transla- tion shifts that made Van Leuven-Zwart’s model conceptually problematic as well ‘as cumbersome to apply. Another advance on Van Leuven-Zwart is Munday’s flex- ible deployment of computer technology and corpus linguistics to take care of number-crunching and suggest aspects that might repay closer examination. It also goes beyond previous models in its attempt to tie description to explanation, draw- ing on political and sociocultural contexts to supply motivations and reasons for the patterns observed. Not only is the model fully illustrated with an analysis of a text by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in three English translations, but Munday, like Crisafulli, provides checklists to facilitate further applications and testing. The sociocultural context which Munday incorporates into his model but does not elaborate, receives detailed attention in Jean-Marc Gouanvic’s approach. Gouanvic builds on Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural sociology, indeed his Sociologie de la traduction (1999) is the major example of a Bourdieu-inspired brand of transla- tion studies to date. The essay in the present collection serves as an introduction to Bourdieu’s key concepts of habitus, field and trajectory, heuristic tools which are here illustrated with a case study of two twentieth-century French translators of American fiction. An unusual feature of Gouanvic’s historical analyses is that they are process-oriented or, more precisely, production-oriented. Their focus is on the shaping of specific translations, texts which emerge with a certain form, at a certain moment, in a certain context, as the outcome of singular trajectories, The question of agency resurfaces here, as the concepts of habitus and trajectory connect the individual translator's actions with the social forces that make up the field in which he or she operates. For all their differences, Gouanvic has much in common with Crisafulli in that both are in search of explanatory models to relate the individual to the collective and the singular to the social and historical context. For Derek Boothman, translation happens not just between different natural languages but also intralingually between theoretical or conceptual frameworks, that is, between paradigms. The case in point is Antonio Gramsci translating terms and concepts from the idealist philosophy of his compatriot Benedetto Croce into his own Marxist frame of thought. Even the terms denoting the two ‘languages’ involved are fluid: Gramsci also speaks of translating from speculative into histori- cist or ‘realist historicist’ language. Interestingly, the process can be viewed in both directions, as Gramsci equally regards Croce’s philosophy as the ‘retranslation’ into idealist terms of the ‘realist historicism’ of his own Marxist philosophy of praxis. In patiently scrutinizing how Croce’s concept of ethico-political history is as similated into Gramsci’s notion of historical block, and how Croce’s dialectic of ‘distincts’ is rendered applicable to Gramsci’s discourse about levels of the super- structure, Boothman makes it clear that what we are witnessing is not a matter of matching term for term and concept for concept, but a complex philosophical and ideological negotiation whereby the other’ s terms and concepts are not just renamed but inspected, reinterpreted, criticized, rearranged and relocated in a differentHermans: Preface Tir yysiem 2 sae ST profile TT profile Figure 1: Four areas of analysis The actual workings of this model brings together ideas and tools from (1) systemic functional linguistics and (2) corpus linguistics with (3) an analysis of the cultural context. The particular relevant strengths and uses of each element are as follows: (1) Systemic functional linguistics: Systemic functional grammar (SFG), pio- neered by Michael Halliday (see e.g. Halliday 1970; 1985/94), involves the detailed and systematic analysis of three interconnected strands of meaning in a text.' These ‘ There is a close link between SFG and what is known as “discourse analysis’ (which may be described as the analysis of stretches of texts or, preferably, whole texts, above sentence level,Munday: Systems in Translation 79 three strands, called ‘metafunctions’, are the ideational, the interpersonal and the textual, which are linked to different linguistic or ‘lexicogrammatical’ realizations ina text: the ideational metafunction is broadly ‘meaning as representation’, often termed “content” (Halliday 1994: 109). Apart from the obvious importance of the denotational component of the lexical items chosen, the major lexicogrammatical realization of this function is the transitivity system: the process described by the verb, the participants in the process and the circum- stances associated with the process (for example, an adverbial group or prepositional phrase). © the interpersonal function involves meaning as “an exchange” (Halliday 1994: 68), whether of goods, services or information. In English, it is realized above all by modality, which is defined as “the speaker's judgement of the prob- abilities, or the obligations, involved in what he is saying” (Halliday, p. 75). Expressing obligation, probability, usuality and wanting, modality allows the writer or speaker to indicate his or her opinion with great subtlety and, as is stressed by Simpson (1993), in literature it is quite closely linked to the de- velopment of narrative point of view. © the textual function deals with meaning as “message” (Halliday 1994: 37), that is, the organization and structure of the clause and the text. It is realized by the thematic structure (the order of elements in a clause and the way infor- mation is structured) and by patterns of cohesion (including the use of refer pronouns, as well as collocation, lexical repetition, synonymy, conjunction, amongst others). Because of the close links between lexicogrammatical patterns and metafunctions, it should be possible, by analysing patterns of transitivity, modality, thematic struc- ture and cohesion in a ST and TT, to see how the metafunctions are working. By following a similar procedure for both ST and TT and by comparing the patterns in the two texts, any shifts on the level of metafunctions should become clear. This approach lends itself well to the analysis of translation shifts and of the decision- making processes of the translator. Indeed, it has heavily influenced work in translation studies by scholars such as Baker (1992), Hatim and Mason (1990; 1997) and Taylor (1990). Although SFG-oriented analysis has been used in other studies, it is still true that there is a shortage of systematic studies of complete published translations with particular attention being given to their communicative role in writer-reader interaction in their given sociocultural context). Halliday makes the case for detailed lexicogrammatical analy- sis: “a discourse analysis that is not based on grammar is not an analysis at all, but simply a running commentary on a text” (1994: xvi).80 Crosscultural Transgressions (rather than short and isolated passages). The reason for this is mainly the logistical problem posed by the detailed analysis of a long text. The present model proposes that this can be overcome by the use of tools from corpus linguistics to analyse electronically-held versions of the texts under investigation.? (2) Corpus linguistics: Tools used in corpus linguistics are becoming increas- ingly available to researchers and enable rapid access of linguistic items. The kind of information that can be generated covers on-screen concordances of any search word or other search term, including total text length (the number of ‘tokens’), the number of different word forms (‘types’), type-token ratios (which give some indi- cation of variety of language), word frequency lists, and so on (see Sinclair 1992 and Baker 1995 for more details of the possibilities). The tools provide two very important advantages: they can reveal phenomena which, because they may be spread over a lengthy text, might escape the attention of a researcher conducting manual analysis; and the analytical process is speeded up and far more reliable (ail instances of a given term can be called up in a matter of seconds). This frees the researcher to concentrate on close analysis of the phenomena within the immediate linguistic context. Thus, in a detailed computer-assisted analysis of short fiction (Munday 1997), the computer was asked to produce word-lists for each text; these lists were trawled for realizations of the metafunctions (e.g. all verb or process forms in the case of the realizations of the ideational metafunction), which were then called up ‘on screen and checked against the translation using an interlinear form of the ST- TT pair. There are various software packages that can do this; perhaps the most widely available and user-friendly is Wordsmith (Scott 1999). Therefore the first two stages of the model function as follows: a profile of the ST can be built up by systematically identifying the shifts using an SFG model aided by tools from corpus linguistics. In this way patterns of shifts can be identi- fied throughout a text and the norms adopted (consciously or not) by the translator deduced. This is potentially a very important development. Then, by (3) locating the results within the wider publishing, political and so- ciocultural contexts, it may be possible to identify factors other than purely linguistic ones which motivate the shifts. In this respect, SFG is useful in that it systematically relates linguistic choices to the sociocultural context. For instance, the lexico- grammatical patterns ‘realize’ the metafunctions, which in turn are determined by the immediate environment of the text (that is, what is known as the ‘context of situation’: the field, the tenor or writer-reader relationship, and the mode or form of communication). The context of situation is regulated by what is called the ‘context ? Copyright authorization should be obtained to use the texts for research purposes. As more material becomes readily available on Web, this is less likely to be a problem in the future. Indeed, as web-based publication becomes the norm, so should corpus-based analysis be- come indispensable.Munday: Systems in Translation él of culture’, which is the higher-level fabric and ideology of the social system and the language genre to which a specific text belongs (Halliday 1978: 189). ‘The main goal of the present paper is thus to propose a methodology for replica- ble descriptive studies. The following sections will give an indication of the model in action. The texts used in this illustration are English translations of an essay by the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcfa Marquez concerning the case of the shipwrecked Cuban boy Elién Gonzalez. 2. The model in action: the Elian Gonzalez story The six-year old Eliin Gonzdlez became headline news in late 1999 when he was taken by his mother and her boyfriend in a small boat in an attempt to flee from Cuba to Florida. The boat capsized and his mother drowned, but Elian was rescued from the sea by the US navy and soon became the subject of a tug-of-war between his relatives in Miami and his father in Havana who was insisting on his return. The political ramifications of the confrontation between human pain and political sys- tems dominated the media around the world at the beginning of the year 2000. This was the context in which Garcfa Marquez, a firm supporter of Fidel Castro, wrote a two-page column about the story, ‘Naufrago en tierra firme’ published initially in the Cuban Communist organ Juventud Rebelde and later reprinted in a range of media outlets, including the Spanish daily El Pafs on 19 March 2000. Several Eng- lish translations appeared of this: The Guardian published it under the title ‘Torn in the USA’ on 25 March; The New York Times entitled it ‘Shipwrecked on dry land” on 29 March; and the Cuban group Granma International published another Eng- lish translation on 21 March, which was made available on the Internet. 2.1, The location of the texts within the sociocultural context The difference in context between ST and TTs can immediately be seen in the ways in which the story is presented in the different sources. This is especially evident in the photographs that are chosen to illustrate the text: while El Pafs, for example, shows (1) the boy with his grandmothers on their visit to see him in Miami, (2) Fidel Castro meeting Elidn’s father, Juan Miguel, in Havana, and (3) thousands of ‘Cubans demonstrating in the capital in support of his return to his father, The Guard- ian has a less than flattering portrait of the father, arms crossed, described as one of the ‘contenders’ in the struggle, the other being illustrated by placard-waving dem- onstrators in Miami “demand[ing] that the boy stays in the US”. The contrast between the choice of demonstration photographs may possibly be due to the ease of access to the different language communities, but it definitely has the effect of focussing the reader’s attention on the perspective of one of the arguments in the case. Both newspapers, however, print a similar photograph of a bewildered Elién, seen82 Crosscultural Transgressions behind a wire fence, with The Guardian posing the question “Stuck in the middle [...] will Elian Gonzalez be allowed to go home to his father in Cuba?” The use of different illustrations places the texts in different frameworks linked to the ideological contexts of culture in which the texts are published. The Spanish context merges more with the Cuban perspective. The Guardian headline, ‘Torn in the USA’, playing on Bruce Springsteen's 1980s polemic hit ‘Born in the USA’, shows that its focus is on the human and emotional battle for the child. It also gives added background to the story (“The plight of a Cuban child washed up ona Florida beach [...] the battle for custody continues”), information with which the Spanish reader is expected to be familiar. Both texts are presented as original writing; the English prints Garcfa Marquez’s name in bold as part of the headline and gives no indication anywhere that it is a translation. This is certainly not the case with the other two TTs. The New York Times trans- lation carries the name of Edith Grossman, the famous translator of Garefa Marquez’s fiction since 1985 and stresses Garcia Marquez’s status as a Nobel laureate. The Cuban Granma International Digital Edition introduces the text with the downbeat “Colombian writer Gabriel Garcfa Marquez wrote this article in Havana; it has been published in various Latin American and Spanish newspapers” but at the same time authorizes reproduction, presumably in an attempt to gain maximum publicity for the Cuban cause, and invites readers to e-mail their opinions. Such presentation of the texts may be linked to ideological aims driving publication. The following analysis will attempt to identify linguistic shifts that occur within this framework. 2.2. Computer-generated statistics of the texts Analysis will move from general computer-generated statistics to the more specific close analysis. Table J shows the kind of statistics that serve to suggest further lines of inquiry for the researcher: ST | GranmaTT | Guardian TT | NY Times TT (Gin) (Ga) (NYT) ‘word count (tokens) 3146 [2998 2396 1621 different words (types) | 1097 | 1059 866 621 type-token ratio 34.87 | 35.32 38.16 38.31 average sentence length | 28.34 | 24.37 21.59 20.26 in words Table 1: Word and sentence statistics for ST and TTs The most striking finding from this table concerns the word count for the different texts. In all cases the ST is longer than the TTs. This counters conventional thinking (e.g. Vinay and Darbelnet 1958/1977: 185) which has considered that a TT tends to be longer than its ST due to explicitation, The differences in Table 1, however, goMunday: Systems in Translation 83 beyond explicitation or condensation. There are also huge differences between the different TTs: the Granma International text is 600 words longer than the Guardian TT and nearly twice as long as the New York Times TT. Closer analysis of the actual texts in section 2.3.3 will indicate what has occurred. The statistics for sentence length highlight that the New York Times and the Guardian texts stand out because they have a shorter average sentence length (20.26 and 21.59 words respectively compared to 24.37 in Granma International and 28.34 in the ST). Garcfa Mérquez’s writing is marked by extremely long sentences (see Munday 1997: 187); reasons for the shift in translation will again be discussed in section 2.3.3. The type-token ratio, an indication of the variety of lexis in the text, has long been known to vary according to text length (Jones 1991: 18). In Table 1, it would ‘only be meaningful to compare ratios for the ST and the Granma International TT, which has very few omissions. The type-token ratio for the two is very similar. st Gin TT Ga TT NYT TT | [88 [oe 205 [684 | the | 165 a1 [561 | wa {ios [337 [ef os [284] [70 ee, | 106 [337 ga [280 | and [or [255 |t [a6 | 284 | aor [32l fue 48 [296 7 [2m ast [2olin jar [ass =lele 77 [2s fin [49 [205 [a [3s [216 y [77 |243 |in | 68 [227 [of | 47 [196 [of [33 [209 nd en Pat | 226 on tos [59 [ise [his [44 | 047 | etn [34 [142 Twas [27 [1.67 that | 55 [18s [his | 37 [154 This [32 [197 | ran [50 [159 [was [39° [03 [had [34 [1 [on [24 [Ts ide. | “J | a ae ih Sa oak Ps | Twas Poe PO ewe PY 2 12 se 37 1.18 | for | 29 97 | for | 25 1.04 | Elida | 18 au (rote sayy") “Jeteyeyor sy] [so [37 [ae | site we [a [he 25 [10 Te fas Pair | i he? | hein, Ta [ror [33 [105 |had | 28 [93 | they | 23 | 96 [wit [is [tat fon ts fe [at [9 [he [27 9 | suan [ar Yee | ian 77 [10s im) | | ve [~ [30 [9s [it [24 [80 Ton [21 [88 [Mig [16 | 99 0 al 17 [ua [a7 [#6 [as [23 [a7 [Mig [20 [83 |they [16 | 99 | ® Pa 18_| Bin [95 | 99 | they | 33 [77] with [20 [3 Tar [as | 93 wf fas [fis [22 fe fs i [7 [ame as] 98 2 fo |24 | be far [7 [om [16 | 67 bm [14 [86 | on L LL J Table 2: Word frequency statistics for ST and TTsa Crosscultural Transgressions What is evident is that the computer-generated statistics highlight areas that may be worthy of close critical analysis. This is especially the case with word frequency lists. Table 2 shows the twenty most frequent words in each text. To the right of these words is the number of times they occur in the text and the percentage this represents of the total words in the text. A typical English correspondent of the Spanish words is given in brackets. Thus, de (often with the meaning of) is the most common word in the ST, it occurs 184 times and represents 5.85% of the total word forms in the ST. Many of these common word-forms such as de or the will be the most frequent in any text in Spanish or English. More interesting are the comparative frequencies which can be followed up by close examination of instances. It would also be possi- ble to extend the study considerably to look at very many different word-forms; because of space considerations, I shall limit myself to just two examples. First, the ‘occurrence of the name Elian is, in percentage terms, far more frequent in the Guard- ian TT compared to the ST or the other TTs. Proper name referents are important for the cohesion of a text, so this discrepancy will be examined in section 2.3.3 on cohesion and the textual metafunction. A second example is the word that, which is most common in the Granma International TT. It is sometimes predicted (e.g. Baker 1995: 236) that the overuse of the relative pronoun that is a characteristic of transla- tions from languages such as Spanish where the corresponding pronoun que cannot be omitted as it can in English. Computer-assisted analysis draws attention to the different frequencies and then allows all the instances to be accessed and examined quickly onscreen. Analysis of our examples reveals that only four of the instances of that in the Granma TT can be discarded as demonstrative pronouns (e.g. “that Friday”). Of the others, there are several occasions where the Granma International TT closely fol- lows the ST structure and includes the translation that. Example 1 is a comment from the Elidn’s father complaining about interference when he phones his son: la.A veces le hablan a gritos al nifto mientras conversamos, suben al maximo el volumen de los dibujos animados en la television o le ponen un caramelo en la boca para que no se le entienda lo que dice. 1b. Sometimes they talk to the boy in loud voices while we're having a con- versation, they turn up the volume of the cartoons on the television as high as possible, or put a candy in his mouth so that I can't understand what he's saying. (GIn) Ic. Sometimes they shout at the boy while we're talking, or turn the volume all the way up on television cartoons, or put a candy in his mouth so it’s hard to understand what he’s saying. (NYT) Here, translation 1c, omitting the word that, is more informal and perhaps better suited to the translation of speech.Munday: Systems in Translation 85 The admittedly restricted number of examples presented in this section is de- signed to indicate some of the possibilities offered by computer analysis, which allow relatively rapid access to features of whole texts and bring features to the attention of the analyst that might otherwise go unnoticed. As will be seen in the following sections, the computer is also a powerful tool when combined with the systemic-functional framework to look at all examples of the different metafunctions in two texts and to compare the markedness of the profiles in ST and TT. 2.3. The metafunctional analysis of the texts An analysis of the metafunctional profiles in the two texts reveals differences. For reasons of space, the focus will be on comparing patterns between the ST and the Guardian TT, but, where particularly relevant, comparison will be made with the other TTs. 2.3.1, Ideational metafunction Transitivity patterns are often altered in the TT, as can be seen in example 2, de- scribing Elin’s fellow fugitives’ use of a drug to counter sea-sickness: 2a, la mayoria de los pasajeros se inyectaron gravinol intravenoso 2b. most passengers were injected with Gravinol (Gd) While 2a suggests the passengers did the injecting themselves, 2b removes respon- sibility for the action. The implication is that this was an action done to them, presumably by those in charge of the crossing, who stood to gain a large sum of money were it to be successful. Yet example 2 is atypical because the majority of shifts in ideational profile in the Guardian TT deflect responsibility from the rela- tives in Miami. Thus, a passive is used in the TT when the heavy outboard motor is thrown overboard (a blunder that causes the boat to capsize), whereas the ST clearly describes it as an action committed by those in charge (los responsables del viaje): 3a. los responsables del viaje desmontaron el motor desahuciado 3b. the engine — a write off — was dismantled (Gd) Furthermore, the responsibility for the change in Elfan’s character while he is in Florida is also shifted. This is seen in the report of his grandmothers’ return from their visit to him in the United States: 4a. De modo que [las abuelas] volvieron a Cuba escandalizadas de cuanto lo habfan cambiado. 4b. They [the grandmothers} returned to Cuba outraged at how much the child had changed. (Gd)86 Crosscultural Transgressions The ST’s ‘Io habfan cambiado’ (‘they had changed him’) shows that it is the Miami-based relatives who have provoked the change; the passive in the TT again obscures this responsibility. 2.3.2. Interpersonal metafunction Many markers of the interpersonal metafunction, especially what Halliday (1994: 354) terms ‘interpersonal metaphors’, are omitted in the TT. One such example is parece que (“it appears’): Sa. Parece que habfan zarpado el 20 de noviembre... Sb. They sailed on November 20... (Gd) This omission of such hedging makes Garefa Mérquez’s account far more factual. On some occasions, this can have the effect of removing emotion. This occurs in the following description of what happens in the sea when Elién's mother, Eliza- beth, somehow managed to help her son: 6a. Lo que es dificil de entender, aunque merece ser cierto, es que ella tuvo la serenidad y el tiempo para darle al hijo una botella de agua dulce. 6b. She is said to have had the foresight and time to give Elidn a bottle of water. (Gd) In the ST, Garcfa Marquez emphasizes the astonishing feat this action represents, if it is true (“Lo que es dificil de entender, aunque merece ser cierto” — “what is diffi- cult to accept, although it deserves to be true”). The TT’s “she is said to” removes the astonishment altogether by a replacement of interpersonal elements with a pas- sive and neutral reporting verb. A reduction in the interpersonal force of the text is also evident in the omission of attitudinal epithets (for an explanation of these see Halliday 1994: 184): Elidn’s father is described as “de buen cardcter” (‘of good character’) whereas he is just “laidback” in the TT, and “anfitriones interesados” (‘self-interested hosts’) in Mi- ami are merely “hosts” in the English. Such omissions affect the relative merits of both sides of the family as they face each other across the straits. Another example concerns the situation of the father, with whom Elian lived until he was taken away: 7a. Juan Miguel, por su parte, se cas6 més tarde con Nelsy Carmeta, con quien tiene un hijo de seis meses que fue el amor de Ia vida de Elian hasta Elizabeth se lo Nevé para Miami, 7b. Juan Miguel had married Nelsy Carmeta: the couple have a six-month- old baby. (Gd) The whole of the last clause has been omitted in the TT. It is translated in the Granma International TT as “a six-month-old son who was the love of Elidn’s life untilMunday: Systems in Translation 87 Elizabeth took him off to Miami”. The selection of such detail in the ST obviously adds a positive light to the Cuban family and a strongly negative one to the albeit luckless mother who was prepared to destroy Elién’s happiness. The same occurs with the later suggestion that the United States will suffer a “pérdida juridica e hist6rica”. The “legal and historical loss” of the ST becomes the “overall loss” of the TT. While juridica and histérica might normally be classed as descriptive and not attitudinal, their collocation with pérdida adds a negative evaluation because of the connotations of infringing the law and being tainted in the eyes of history. Those connotations disappear in the Guardian TT, although they are alll retained in the Cuban translation. 2.3.3, Textual metafunction In the statistics in section 2.2 above, we noted the increased frequency of the name Elidn in the Guardian TT, the difference in sentence length and overall text length between the different texts. These points all fall within the ambit of the textual metafunction, especially of the cohesion of the texts. Closer examination of spe- cific instances using a computer-generated concordance to cross-check occurrences gives an indication of what is happening. Thus, the search-term £lidn brings up the 34 occurrences in the Guardian and the 25 in the ST. Those which appear in the TT but not the ST can quickly be identified, as in example 8, where Munero, the moth- er’s companion, threatens Elian: 8a. Se ha dicho también que Elidn tomé conciencia allf mismo de los peligros de la travesia, y loraba a grito herido para que lo dejaran. Munero, temeroso de que los descubrieran por ¢l Hanto, amenazé a la esposa: “O lo callas ti, a lo callo yo”. 8b. Elidn also became aware of the dangers of the crossing and screamed, begging to be allowed to stay in Cuba. Munero, fearful they would be discov- ered because of Elidn’s crying, threatened Elizabeth: “Either you shut him up, or I'll do it myself.” (Gd) The TT shows greater cohesion, with the translation Elidn’s crying instead of sim- ply the crying or the screaming. Elsewhere in the TT, Elidn is used to replace a synonym such as the boy or the child. Interestingly, example 8b indicates the i creased use of Elizabeth’s name (rather than his wife). The same translation occurs in the Granma International TT: 8c. Munero, fearful of being discovered due to the child’s wailing, threat- ened Elizabeth: “Either you shut him up, or I will.” (Gln) Increased cohesion is generally felt to be a characteristic of translated texts (e.g. Blum-Kulka 1986); computer-assisted analysis provides a tool to enable cohesive ties to be checked.88 Crosscultural Transgressions Similarly, shifts in sentence length were revealed by the computer, the most evident differences being between the ST and the New York Times TT. Specific examples were checked. Typical is example 9: 9a. Elizabeth quedaba encinta pero sufria abortos espontaneos en los cuatro primeros meses de embarazo. Al cabo de siete pérdidas, y con una asistencia médica especial, nacié el hijo tan esperado, para el cual tenan previsto un nombre tinico desde que se casaron, Elian. 9b. Elizabeth would conceive but miscarry in the first four months of preg- naney. After seven miscarriages, the child they had longed for was born. They had decided on a unique name for him: Elién. (New York Times) The ST comprises two sentences of 14 and 29 words; the TT in 9b carries this information into three chunks of 12, 11 and 10 words. Sentence length is closely linked to punctuation; the formal use of the semi- colon in 9a and the colon in 9b prompted an investigation of their frequency in all the texts. The ST contains one semi-colon and ten colons (which mainly introduce quotations); the New York Times TT has one semi-colon and five colons, Granma International uses four semi-colons and eleven colons, whereas the Guardian text contains ten semi-colons and sixteen colons. Punctuation conventions do vary be- tween Spanish and English, and it would be worth investigating how much they differ between British and US English, but for the moment it can certainly be stated that the Guardian TT demonstrates greater formality, as in example 10b where first acolon and then a semi-colon punctuate the translation: 10a. Estas artimafas fueron sufridas también en carne propia por Raquel Rodriguez y Marcela Quintana, las abuelas de Elidn, durante su tormentosa visita a Miami, cuando un agente de la policia a drdenes de una monja renética les arrebaté el teléfono celular ici nifio a sus familias de Cuba. La vista que habia sido prevista para dos dias se redujo al final a noventa minutos, con toda clase de interrupciones provocadas, y con no mds de un cuarto de hora a solas con Elidn. 10b. Raquel Rodriguez and Marcela Quintana, Elién’s grandmothers who made a stormy visit to Miami had the same problems: at the order of a frantic nun, a police officer snatched their mobile phones so that they could not pass on news to the family in Cuba. Their two-day visit was eventually reduced to 90 minutes, with all kinds of manufactured interruption; they only had a quarter of an hour on their own with Elian, (Gd) Sentence length and punctuation may seem relatively minor differences, but they do indicate that one characteristic of Garcia Marquez’s writing is shifted in transla- tion, Alterations to the cohesion and coherence profiles of the two texts can also have repercussions for the reading of the article. Thus, reference to the two coun- tries involved through the use of synonyms reflects the perspective from which theMunday: Systems in Translation 89 story is told. In the ST, the United States is once referred to as /a otra orilla (‘the other shore’) and the Cuban régime as /a revolucién. In the Guardian TT, the first loses any emotive or poetic referent to become in the US, and the positive connota- tion of the revolution is turned into the dictatorial sounding Castro's Cuba. Although, for ease of analysis, SFG analyses the different metafunctions sepa- rately, the following extract demonstrates how many of the phenomena discussed in this paper (ideational and interpersonal as well as textual) interact within the same passage: 11a. Segtin ellos, a la medianoche del 22, los responsables del viaje des montaron el motor desahuciado y lo tiraron en el mar para aligerar la carga. Pero la barca, descompensada, dio una voltereta de costado y todos los pasajeros cayeron al agua. Sin embargo, una suposicién de expertos es que la voltereta pudo haber roto las frdgiles soldaduras de los tubos de alumnio, y la barca se hundié. 1b. At midnight on the first day out, the engine — a write off - was disman- led and thrown into the sea to lighten the load. But the boat was destabilized and turned over on to its side. All the passengers fell into the water. Experts suspect that the capsize may have broken the fragile soldering on the alu- minium tube, causing the boat to sink. ‘The first line, as was discussed in example 3, exhibits a shift in transitivity struc- ture, removing responsibility for the accident from those organizing the trip (los responsables del viaje) to an agentless passive (was dismantled). The omission of segtin ellos (“according to them”) in line | also affects the interpersonal profile and truth value of the TT. Furthermore, the cohesion of lines 3 to 5 of the Spanish is altered in translation. The frequent use of the conjunction y (“and”) is characteristic of Garcia Marquez's writing, especially in his fiction where a fairy-tale type frame is often followed, and where extremely long sentences and paratactic, non-causal structures typify the language and thinking of children. The structure alters com- pletely in the TT: the y conjunction of line 3 is replaced by a full stop, a stronger break that requires greater cognitive work on the part of the reader to establish the links between the two sentences. There is also no translation of sin embargo, fronted in line 4 of the ST, where it functions as a discourse marker and guide to the reader to expect a contrast. It is possible that the translator felt that there was no real con- trast here, that the breaking of the soldering was a logical result of the capsizing. Finally, the TT again avoids use of ‘and’ to translate the y of the last line, this time preferring a hypotactic present participle (causing) which strengthens the links be- tween the ideas and clauses. The result of such pattern changes in English is a dislocation of Garcia Marquez’s style in translation. In addition to such differences, the mode] also reveals more striking shifts. Analy- sis of the New York Times TT version of example 10 surprisingly shows the omission of the underlined segment in 10a:90 Crosscultural Transgressions 10c. These kinds of stratagems were also suffered in person by Raquel Rodriguez and Marcela Quintanta, Elién’s grandmothers, during their turbu- ent trip to Miami. Their visit with him, scheduled to last two days, was reduced to 90 minutes, with all kinds of intentional interruptions, and they said they spent no more than a quarter of an hour alone with Elién. (NYT) The detail that has been omitted (“at the order of a frantic nun, a police officer snatched their mobile phones”) paints an extremely negative picture of the US authorities. Closer examination of the rest of this TT shows that the many omis- sions fall mainly into two categories: first, mention of geographical place names such as Cardenas or the names of the hotels in which Elizabeth had worked; sec- ondly, the final 800 words which discuss the history of Cuban-US relations and the possible political damage to Al Gore’s presidential campaign in November 2000. This explains the word count statistics for the text in section 2.2 above. 2.4. Possible motivations for the translation shifts That there have been substantial shifts between ST and TTs is not open to doubt. The question is what has caused this and here further reference needs to be made to the sociocultural and political framework in which the translations have been pro- duced. There are a number of possibilities: the translator of the Guardian TT has followed a non-systematic translation strategy that has produced a non-systematic and somewhat distorted translation; the shifts might be related to the skirting of specific translation problems in the text (thus, in 3, the word responsables is not easy to translate succinctly, and, in example 6, the translator may have been sur- prised by the wording of “lo que es dificil de entender, aunque merece ser cierto”); some of the punctuation changes may well have been carried out by a copy-editor, while the omissions in the TTs may have been down to the constraints of space in the media and the need to cut the original, but then the question would be, why these cuts and not others? Ideologically more exciting is the possibility that the shifts have been intentionally motivated by a publisher or even a translator to create a different image of the story in the minds of its readers. It may not be far- fetched to suppose that omissions of certain anti-US sentiments in the New York Times TT were motivated by a desire to reduce the possible political fall-out from the publication of a polemical text written by the enemy. Not surprisingly, the TT published by the Cuban Granma International is a full translation of the ST and retains the anti-US comments. 3. Conclusion Although I have attempted to locate the two texts in their immediate socioculturalstems in Translation or Munday: framework, there is more investigation that can be done. Interviews with the news- paper editors and translators, if possible, would illuminate some of the reasoning behind the translation decisions, and the reception of the two texts might be gauged by looking more closely at the subsequent reactions in the media. It is noteworthy that the week following the publication of this article saw a serics of letters in the UK and the USA supporting or attacking the Cuban position, none of which re- ferred to the English TT as anything other than Garcfa Marquez’s writing even though some quoted his words in English. These readers would probably have no access to the fuller Cuban translation. This SFG analysis of ST-TT pairs has successfully identified important aspects that have undergone shifts in translation. The analysis has been assisted by the use of corpus linguistic tools that enable rapid manipulation of text and an uncovering of trends that may not be obvious to manual analysis. Finally, the setting of the results within the sociocultural and political context of the texts has enabled some conclusions to be drawn as to the norms at work in the translation process. Of course, some areas of the model may need to be adapted to the subjects under investigation; thus, strict SFG analysis, especially of textual and transitivity structures, may not work so well with non-European languages, while detailed analysis of shorter texts can be carried out without the use of a computer. That is why I stress the flexibility of the model: by examining the relative markedness of the metafunctional profile of text pairs (rather than merely listing the specific lexicogrammatical realizations) adjustment can be made for languages that are differently structured, Importantly, too, it means that the model is still replicable. That is, other studies can and should be undertaken to test the hypotheses: do translations of the Elién Gonzalez text into other languages exhibit the same phenomena as the English translation? Is Garcia Marquez’s non-fiction generally subject to greater shifts in translation than his fiction? If so, what are the reasons? Are these ideological reasons? Is non-fiction generally treated differently in translation? In this way, with a model designed to be replicable, testable and applicable to other texts and language pairs, we can begin to build up a more systematic picture of translation phenomena that can lead to the testing of further hypotheses and to a refining of what Toury terms as ‘laws’ of translation. References Baker, Mona (1992) In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation, London & New York: Routledge. (1995) ‘Corpora in Translation Studies: An Overview and Suggestions for Future Research’, Target 7(2): 223-43. Blum-Kulka, Shoshana (1986) ‘Shifts of Cohesion and Coherence in Translation’, in92 Crosscultural Transgressions J. House and S. Blum-Kulka (eds) Interlingual and Intercultural Communication, Tiibingen: Gunter Narr:,17-35. Brown, M. (1994) The Reception of Spanish American Fiction in West Germany 1981+ 91, Taibingen: Niemeyer. Garcia Marquez, Gabriel (2000a) ‘Néufrago en tierra firme’, El Pafs 19.3.2000: 6-7. (2000b) ‘Torn in the USA’, The Guardian Review 25.3.2000: 1-2. (2000c) ‘Shipwrecked on dry land", The New York Times 29.3.2000: Op. Ed. (2000d) ‘Shipwreck on dry land’, Granma International Digital Edition, 213.2000. Halliday, M.A.K. (1978) Language as Social Semiotic, London & New York: Edward Arnold, ~~ (1985, 2" edition 1994) An Introduction to Functional Grammar, London: Edward Arnold. Hatim, Basil and lan Mason (1990) Discourse and the Translator, London & New York: Longman, — (1997) The Translator as Communicator, London & New York: Routledge. Hermans, Theo (1995) ‘Toury’s Empiricism Version One’, The Translator (2): 215-23. Holmes, J.S, (1988) Translated! Papers on Literary Translation and Translation Stud- ies, Amsterdam: Rodopi. House, Juliane (1977) A Model for Translation Quality Assessment, Tabingen: Gunter Narr. _— (1997) Translation Quality Assessment: A Model Revisited, Tibingen: Gunter Narr. Jones, S. (1991) Text and Context: Document Processing and Storage, London: Springer. Lambert, José and Hendrik van Gorp (1985) ‘On Describing Translations”, in T. Hermans (ed) The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation, London & Syd- ney: Croom Helm, 42-53. Leuven-Zwart, Kitty van (1989) ‘Translation and Original: Similarities and Dissimilari- ties, I’, Target 1(2): 151-181. oes (1990) ‘Translation and Original: Similarities and Dissimilarities, II’, Target 2(1): 69-95. Munday, Jeremy (1997) Systems in Translation. Unpublished PhD thesis. University of Bradford. Nord, Christiane (1991) Text Analysis in Translation, trans. C. Nord and P. Sparrow, Amsterdam: Rodopi, originally published 1988. Scott, M. (1999) Wordsmith (software), 3rd edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Simpson, P. (1993) Language, Ideology and Point of View, London & New York: Routledge. Sinclair, J.M. (1991) Corpus, Concordance, Collocation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, C. (1990) Aspects of Language and Translation: Approaches for Italian- English Translation, Udine: Camponette. Toury, Gideon (1980) In Search of a Theory of Translation, Tel Aviv: Porter Institute. - (1995) Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond, Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Vinay, J-P. and J. Darbelnet (1958/1977) Stylistique comparée du frangais et de U'anglais. Méthode de traduction, Paris: Didier.A Model of Structuralist Constructivism in Translation Studies JEAN-MARC GOUANVIC Abstract: The article proposes a theory of translation based on Pierre Bourdieu’s structuralist constructivism. By constructivism Bourdieu means a twofold social genesis, one constitutive of what he calls ‘habitus’, the other of social structures. The habitus of a translator is a durable, transposable disposition acquired by the socialized body, by which the translator exercises his practice in a field to which a text to be translated belongs. The field is the locus where the translator posits the text's action, at the conjunction of a subjectivity and an historicity. Two cases of translators’ habitus are taken as illustrations, with reference to Maurice-Edgar Coindreau and Marcel Duhamel. Their respective habitus appear profoundly different, although their translations appeared with the same publisher, Gallimard, The heuristic status of the notions of habitus and field and the conditions of historicization are examined with respect to translation, Following Bourdiew’s structuralist constructivism, translating agents are seen as playing the role of practical operators who exercise their power in a relational way, i.e. competitively as well as cooperatively. To be fully understood, literary production has to be approached in relational terms, by constructing the literary field, i.e. the space of literary prises de position (position-takings] that are possible in a given period in a given society. Prises de position arise from the encounter between particular agents” dispositions (their habitus, shaped by their social trajectory) and their position in a field of positions which is defined by the distribution of a specific form of capital. (Bourdieu 1983: 311) 1. Introduction In translation studies a distinction is usually made between studies which deal with extant products and those which attempt to analyze determinations specific to the process of translation, The distinction between process and product, first introduced by James Holmes in 1972 (Holmes 1988),' has become classic. It is useful in that it denotes different states of reflexivity. The study of translation as process can con- centrate more particularly on mental operations or on discourse analysis in ' To this distinction between product and process Holmes added a third possible option, function-oriented research, which does not quite work on the same level of pertinence, since the study of translation both as product and as process may be functional94 Crosscultural Transgressions translation, or on more programmatic concepts aimed at understanding what trans- lation can or must be. Studying translation as product means investigating from a descriptive angle the social and historical factors bearing on translation in a given time and work. As a result, process-oriented approaches are much less concerned with the historical dimension of the activity and much more with synchronic as- pects of translation, whereas product-oriented studies aim to reconstruct the historic logic which has presided over its emergence. The study of translation as product is geared — this is its final horizon — towards the historical knowledge of a cultural segment of a given space at a given time, and it seeks to posit translation as one of its determinants in this space at this given time. There is another theoretical possibility, even though it does not quite amount to a new view on translation. It consists in viewing translation in terms of ‘produc- tion’. It is on this problematic of translation as production that I wish to concentrate here. In doing so, I will simultaneously elucidate what is at the heart of this ap- proach, the model of structuralist constructivism as developed by Pierre Bourdieu. Before dealing with structuralist constructivism, it may be useful to recall that Bourdieu has begun to attract the attention of translation scholars. For example, Daniel Siméoni, in his article ‘The Pivotal Status of the Translator’s Habitus’ (1998), examines the issue of the specialized habitus of the translator and the primary role it might play in translation studies. In his Translation in Systems (1999) Theo Hermans reviews André Lefevere’s contribution to a discussion par- ticularly on Bourdieu’s notion of ‘cultural capital’. For my own part, my book Sociologie de la traduction (1999) addresses the history of the translation of Ameri- can science fiction in the French cultural space in the 1950s from the viewpoint of Bourdieu’s sociology of culture. Bourdieu’s theory of culture, then, is definitely gaining ground in translation studies. I will now briefly examine the foundations of this theory and its possible application to translation. Bourdieu defines ‘constructivism’ as follows: There is a twofold social genesis, on the one hand of the schemes of per- ception, thought, and action which are constitutive of what I call habitus, and on the other hand of social structures, and particularly of what I call fields and of groups, notably those we ordinarily call social classes. (Bourdieu 1989: 14) Bourdieu’s model of constructivism (the structuralist component of it will be discussed at the end of this article) can readily be applied to translation. Fur- thermore, it sheds light on aspects which are frequently overlooked in translation, as we will sec. A sine qua non of social constructivism is that it deals with actual states of af- fairs in a given society and at a given moment in the history of that society. Social constructivism cannot be content with vague periodizations of disparate corpora.Gouanvic: A Model of Structuralist Constructivism 95 For an analysis which claims to draw its inspiration from this model, it is imperative that it places the activities it investigates in a social milieu, in the full meaning of this term. In other words, this type of analysis will focus, on the one hand, on inter- ventions by agents who are the producers of the texts under discussion, and, on the other, on the structural and institutional conditions which are at the origin of the production in question. The social milieu is here anything but a mere framework in which to lodge a text that would somehow predate the milieu or exist independently of it, Any text, translated or not, results from a social production process. It is im- possible to consider it divorced from the social, for that would take away what makes it into a text, with all it contains, from the creativity of its producer to the stereotypes which it rehearses and which are anchored in the prevailing doxa. The corpus possesses characteristics that are specific, and for the purpose of contrastive analysis, distinct corpora will be compared so as to determine those specificities. How does translation define itself in this context? 2. Habitus and translation Translation, like other forms of written production, is open to a scholarly analysis. But it is unlike other written works in that at least four elements intervene in its operation. These are the source text (and its determinants), the target text (and its determinants), the translator as a subjectivity, and the translator as historicity. These elements entertain relations which tie them together, and which can be described in Bourdieu’s terms through the notions of habitus and field. The habitus (Bourdieu 1990: 53) of a translator as producer may be defined as a durable, transposable disposition acquired by the socialized body, which invests in practice the organizing principles that are socially constructed in the course of a situated and dated experience. In today’s world it would appear as natural, for ex- ample, that a French translator working on American literature has learned English at secondary school. The skills needed for the exercise of translation will typically have been acquired in a translator training institution. These acquired dispositions however do not turn him or her into a translator. To become a translator, s/he will have to implement his/her activities with respect to a given field. The relationship between the actualized dispositions of the translator’s habitus and the translator’s position vis-d-vis a text to be translated, that is vis-a-vis a text belonging to a given field, this relationship takes shape as the activity of translating becomes a matter of routine, when the habitus has been internalized as an integral part of the operation of translation in the field. Translation as production is here considered in the very moment of its genesis, the instant of its emergence, not a posteriori as a product viewed in terms of the use subsequently made of it in a given framework according to norms reconstructed with the benefit of hindsight. The practical operator that is the translator locates his96 Crosscultural Transgressions or her action at the conjunction of a subjectivity and an historicity, as the site of an historicized subjectivity or subjectified historicity. The translator's practical sense? is the ease with which s/he produces a translation that is inscribed in a given field. The field as historicity gives way to subjectified practices which are themselves simultaneously produced in the exercise of activities stemming from the field, an exercise that builds up subjective dispositions specific to the translator as agent. These subjective dispositions, shaped in the historic practice of the field and em- bodied in a habitus, are then re-invested in the field which at first presided over its genesis, and they find there conditions favourable to their expression. What is constitutive of experience in abstracto is related to a habitus acquired in a particular field, which is also the field to which the text to be translated belongs. Fields however are not hermetically sealed. Due to their relative permeability, the translation habitus may be transferred from one field and from one text to another, for example from sociology to ethnology. Very distant fields that do not share adja- cent stakes, such as physics and philosophy, do not show connecting traits expressed in the form of transferable dispositions acquired in a field and valid in another one, 3. Two cases of translator’s habitus: Maurice-Edgar Coindreau and Marcel Duhamel How does a translator acquire the translation habitus? Put differently, how is the disposition to translate internalized? Let us take the example of the literary field, and two of its most renowned Francophone translators. Maurice-Edgar Coindreau, the translator of William Faulkner, took a degree in Spanish and at first showed little interest in the literatures of North America. In Madrid in the early 1920s he struck up a friendship with Pepe Robles, who introduced him to John Dos Passos. In 1923 Coindreau emigrated to the United States, where he taught French at Princeton. He undertook the French translation of Manhattan Transfer (published in 1928) in order, as he said in an interview, to learn American slang (Coindreau 1974: 36-37). This is one of the characteristics of his constructed habitus: he had to learn American slang so as to be able to translate it subsequently, and he learned it through translation. His knowledge of slang and colloquial English is at the outset bookish. After this first experience he was hooked, becoming the main propagator and translator into French of a particular American literature, the literature of the southern states of the USA. Contemptuous of the so-called /ost generation writers (a designation coined by Gertrude Stein), Coindreau turned with gusto to the south- ern United States. He compared the southern states’ experience in the American 2 The sens pratique of the translator is a necessary coincidence between a habitus and a field, by which one finds immediately, without deliberating, things to be done and to be done in a proper way in the situation of translation (Bourdieu 2000: 135-6).Gouanvic: A Model of Structuralist Constructivism - Civil War and its aftermath to that of the Chouannerie, the Vendée’ s failed counter revolution at the time of the French Revolution. This is deeply constitutive of Coindreau’s habitus and it is at the core of his social trajectory: he had a very clearly marked preference for southern states writers (William Faulkner to begin with) due to the similarity of their Weltanschauung with that of the Chouans, a Weltanschauung characterized by failure overcome. Had he possessed the talent of a writer, he re- flected, he would not have translated but would have written about the Chouans instead (Coindreau 1974: 103). For a sharply contrasting case, let us take the example of Marcel Duhamel (1972). The comparison is natural since Coindreau and Duhamel ‘jointly’ translated John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath in 1947.’ Duhamel is very much a self-taught translator. His formal education ended with elementary school and he did not know a word of English when he was fifteen. In 1915 he found himself in Manchester, where he learned English on the job, working for a time in a hotel owned by an uncle of his. Afier the First World War he did his military service, mainly in Istan- bul, where he met Jacques Prévert. During the 1920s he became the manager of his uncle’s hotels in Paris and lived in the rue du Chateau with Jacques Prévert and the painter Yves Tanguy, enjoying the bohemian lifestyle of the Surrealists. He tried his hand at translating detective novels, Green Ice by Raoul Whitfield and subse- quently Little Caesar by W. R. Burnett (the latter published by France-soir). The translation of Little Caesar made his name and he joined the Tobis Klangfilm com- pany as an Anglo-American film dubber. One day Marcel Achard gave him three books to read: This Man is Dangerous and Poison Ivy by Peter Cheyney and No Orchid for Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase. In a fit of enthusiasm he trans- lated all three without having any prospect of sceing any one of them appearing in print. They eventually became the first three titles of the Série noire which Gaston Gallimard agreed to publish from 1944 onwards. Gallimard sent him to England to negotiate the translation rights of works by Erskine Caldwell, John Steinbeck, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, in addition to Chase and Cheyney whom he met in person. Following a trajectory in keeping with his past history, his career of translator and publisher of American authors and of Série noire writ- ers had taken off. The main feature of Duhamel’s translations is his use of slang and colloquial linguistic forms, which was quite an original way of translating at the time. Until after the Second World War, and whatever the kind of literature to be translated, French translations invariably amounted to a heightened ‘literarization’ of the origi- nal texts, raising ~ Antoine Berman (1986: 70) aptly speaks of exhaussement — the > Coindreau translated approximately the first fifty pages; Duhamel then took over, trying to mimic Coindreau’s style (Duhamel 1972: 533). Coindreau plays a dominant role here, since it is his way of translating that Duhamel strives to adopt in the translating that remains to be done. For more details see Gouanvic (2000)98 Crosscultural Transgressions original’s stylistic level. Duhamel, by contrast, adopts a decidedly plebeian way of rendering style. This is undoubtedly related to his primary habitus, acquired in the practical learning of English in Manchester during World War I and in the 1920s when he and his companions were living in the Surrealist commune of the rue du Chateau. 4. The translator’s habitus and the literary field in translation It is not hard to appreciate the distance separating Coindreau, a university graduate (he was an agrégé of Spanish) and professor, who assigns a quasi-philosophical function of overcoming historical failure to literature, from Duhamel, for whom literature offers above all pleasure, even jubilation and a rather poetic enjoyment. The gap is inscribed in the choice of texts to be translated, in the translated texts and in the ways they actually translate them. Whereas Coindreau translates William Faulkner, eminently high-brow realistic literature, Duhamel tackles low-brow gen- res such as the detective novel. This different choice of texts is obviously connected with the translator’s tastes based on their acquired habitus. In Coindreau’s case, his habitus drives him homologically towards texts demonstrating a tragic image of life, an image he imposes on the text in translation beyond its original signifi- cance.‘ In Duhamel’s case, his habitus (constituted of colloquial English learned and used on the job, his participation in the Surrealist movement, his professional activity of a film dubber) predisposes him towards the genres and authors he actu- ally translated. The translation determinants and the hierarchies of socio-aesthetic taste they convey are expressed through the actualization of the translators’ habitus. But, be- yond these determinants, it is a certain image of translated literature and of literature per se that the translator's habitus calls for and that the translator chooses to trans- late, actualizing his habitus. The literary translators’ habitus influences the field of literature, i.e. the space which acts as a scene for the struggles between different literary producers to determine the shape of literature to come. Now, a translation is not an indigenous work, a work deemed to inscribe itself in the continuity or discontinuity of a national literary tradition. As a rule, translations are brought out in special series, recognized as ‘foreign authors’ series with titles like Du monde entier or Prosateurs étrangers modernes. In this way publishers keep translations at a respectable distance from the indigenous literary field and its + Annick Chapdelaine (1994) has analyzed how the translations of Faulkner (especially The Hamlet by René Hilleret) into French did not see the comic effects of the text and obliterated the sociolects specific to the Black vernaculars in the Southern states. This observation also applies to Coindreau’s translations.Gouanvic: A Model of Structuralist Constructivism 99 tradition, and at the same time they classify them within the indigenous literary field. The principal effect of this classification into ‘in’ and ‘out’ is that translations are not allowed to upset the hierarchy of literary taste in the target field. Instead of provoking violent and sudden upheaval, translations bring about exogenous change by stages, in the form of gradual, progressive influence in the midst of endogenous change. Their workings are not recognized as exogenous since they are mixed with local, ongoing, undifferentiated change. 5. The heuristic status of habitus and field The examples will have made it clear that the notions of habitus and field are inex- tricably related. One cannot be conceived without the other, What is the theoretical model these notions convey? The objectivation they give rise to is that of an inves- tigative tool. The status of habitus and field is heuristic, which is to say that these concepts do not aim strictly speaking at attaining the real but at providing a vantage point from which to view the real. Their production mode is that of an ‘as if’. The notions of habitus and field operate on the plane of this ‘as if’, which is of course the very condition of scientific discourse. In other words, we behave — and write — is if” there existed a field of literature in France in which cultural producers, in- cluding translators, struggle to impose their production as preferable to that of others, and their struggle is supported by the dispositions they have acquired in previous struggles. In actual fact it is incorrect to say that the producing agents ‘struggle to impose their productions as preferable to that of others’. The struggle does not take place on a conscious, deliberate level; rather, it is ‘as if’ agents were struggling to impose their vision and division on the reality of the field. In Bourdieu’s model, the power of habitus, the driving force that moves things, is located not at the level of con- sciousness but of beliefs, that is to say, it operates “at the deepest level of bodily dispositions” (Bourdieu 2000: 177). 6. Source field, target field and historicization Among all cultural producers, translators have a special role to play owing to the fact that the work which is to emerge in the field already exists as a foreign text in the source field. The struggles of translators to impose themselves in the target field are not entirely of the same sort as those engaged in by a writer in the literary field. Once a publisher has taken the decision to translate, the work to be translated is not subject to the same intense struggles in which original writings are involved. Of course there are numerous examples of works to be translated which are discovered by translators who then act as series editors or literary directors. But translators qua translators are cultural agents who take charge of a foreign text and put it into the target language; their translating practice is oriented towards both the source text and the target text.100 Crosscultural Transgressions The link tying the translator to the source field is momentarily obliterated in the translation operation: the text is decontextualized from the source field and dehistoricized, then re-contextualized and re-historicized in the target field. Trans- Jation effectuates a break with the source field, its struggles and the stakes of those struggles. But this does not mean that the source society is absent from translation. In fact it is present under a certain guise in the target text. From the moment the text is recognized as having been translated from a foreign language and culture, from the moment its foreign provenance is flagged by the indication ‘translated from x by y’ on the title page, a relation is established with the original society, producing a view of that society as perceived through the eyes of the target society. As soon as “translated from x by y’ appears on the title page, the legitimacy of the source soci- ety in the target society is actualized, i.e. historicized and subjectified. In the case of the translation of American literature in the context of postwar French culture, it is fair to say that if legitimacy can be assessed by (among other things) the number of translations made, American society commands considerable legitimacy in French society — compared, that is, with the volume of translations of non-American work published during the same period. It is the image of a whole society which comes into view through translation. The image can be erroneous, fair, or partial. Of course, no text offers a full view of its society, not even Balzac’s panoramic Comédie humaine; a text holds up a partial image, valid only for the section dealt with in the particular enunciation framework which the text itself establishes. The image created of a source society by means of translation taken in its entirety is worth a certain amount of symbolic capital, which circulates among those target social groups who use this literature in translation. 7. A structuralist constructivism Bourdieu’s constructivism is not idealized: it is a structuralist constructivism. “By structuralism or structuralist, I mean that there exist, within the social world itself and not only within symbolic systems (language, myths, etc.), objective structures independent of the consciousness and will of agents, which are capable of guiding and constraining their practices or their representations” (Bourdieu 1989: 14). It is a constructivism in which symbolic power is exercised with the collaboration of those who are subject to it. But an ‘awareness’ of this collaboration is not enough for symbolic power to be effectuated. Power, we have seen, is expressed in fields through the body socialized by beliefs. What we have therefore is a constructivism which takes account of the unconscious dimension in human action. At this point it is useful to remind ourselves of another component of Bourdieu’s model, one which highlights the relational nature of power. In fields, it is compe tion which institutes the game that is being played out between various agents, all of them eager to acquire the best position for themselves and their allies. CooperativeGouanvic: A Model of Structuralist Constructivism 101 competition or conflictual cooperation between agents is what brings the field into existence in the first place. This is visible in the struggle among publishers to obtain the texts for translation and to have exclusive contracts signed by foreign authors and agents. For example, a hard-headed competition took place between the pub- lishers Stock, Delamain et Boutelleau on the one hand, and Gallimard on the other, in which the translation rights were acquired by the former as regards Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night. The novel was translated by Marguerite Chevalley and published in 1951 under the title Tendre est la nuit, with a preface by the liter- ary director André Bay. The translating agent deploys his or her know-how on a text in accordance with the given target field to which that text belongs. And the text’s belonging is negoti- ated in the target field through the translator's particular manner of translating. As a result, the economy of symbolic exchanges is also differential in that the transla- tor’s manner of translating represents a form of negotiation between the ‘possible’ which the field affords and the distinctions which it allows. The differential dimen- sions of translation can be studied when there are several translations for one text, ie. when a text has been retranslated after a while for reasons that remain to be examined. In that case contrastive analysis of translations is feasible, and the posi- tions taken by a publisher and by a translator in his/her translation appear clearly. ‘The novel /9/9 by John Dos Passos was first translated by Maurice Rémon as. 1919 and published by Editions sociales internationales in 1937, and re-translated by Yves Malartic in 1952 as L’An premier du siécle (1919). This version was published in Gallimard’s series Du monde entier. A comparison of both translations reveals quite different positions in the French literary target fields. 8. Conclusion In the approach outlined here translation as production is not viewed through the uses that are made of it, the functions to which it corresponds, or the factors which determine it. The study of translation as production investigates the moment of the translation’s emergence according to the habitus of translating agents active in the fields for which the translations are destined. Translation as production therefore rests on the empathy between, on the one hand, the mode of socialization embodied in a habitus that supposes the social practice of translation, and, on the other, the historicized subjectivity resulting from the translated text's belonging to a given field. This empathy or, in Berman’s terms, this “drive to translate” (pulsion @ traduire, Berman 1986), is to be found in the translators’ subjectivity, as expressed in biogra- phies and autobiographies, prefaces, introductions, afterwords, translator's notes and the like. But, as we all know, there is a painful shortage of documents in which translators explain how they perceive themselves and ply their trade. The lack re- lates to what Lawrence Venuti (1995) terms the ‘invisibility’ of translators. But102 Crosscultural Transgressions then, translation studies will not reach maturity until translators too have acquired their rightful place in the field of cultural production and feel free to give voice to their particular experience of translation. References Berman, Antoine (1986) ‘L’essence platonicienne de la traduction’, Revue d'esthétique, Nouvelle série 12: 63-73. Bourdieu, Pierre (1983) “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed’, trans. Richard Nice, Poetics 12: 311-56. ----- (1989) ‘Social Space and Symbolic Power’, trans. Loic J. D. Wacquant, Sociologi- cal Theory VIM(1): 14-28. - (1990) The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice, Cambridge: Polity Press. - (2000) Pascalian Meditations, trans. Richard Nice,Cambridge: Polity Press Chapdelaine, Annick (1994) ‘Transparence et retraduction des sociolectes dans The Hamlet de Faulkner’, TTR/Etudes sur le texte et ses transformations VIK(2): 11-33. Coindreau, Maurice-Edgar (1974) Mémoires d'un traducteur. Entretiens avec Chris- tian Giudicelli, Paris: Gallimard. Duhamel, Marcel (1972) Raconte pas ta vie, Paris: Mercure de France. Gouanvic, Jean-Marc (1999) Sociologie de la traduction: La science-fiction américaine dans espace culturel francais des années 1950. Arras: Artois Presses Université. ----- (2000) ‘Polemos et la traduction: la traduction de The Grapes of Wrath de John Steinbeck’, Athanor, new series, X(2): 268-79. Hermans, Theo (1999) Translation in Systems, Manchester: St, Jerome. Holmes, James $ (1988) ‘The Name and Nature of Translation Studies’ [1972}, in his Translated! Papers on Literary Translation and Translation Studies (ed. R. van den Broeck), Amsterdam: Rodopi, 67-80. Lefevere, André (1998) ‘Translation Practice(s) and the Circulation of Cultural Capital Some Aeneids in English’, in $. Bassnett and A. Lefevere (eds) Constructing Cul- tures. Essays on Literary Translation, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 25-40. Siméoni, Daniel (1998) ‘The Pivotal Status of the Translator’s Habitus’, Target 10(1): 1-39. Venuti, Lawrence (1995) The Translator’s Invisibility. A History of Translation, Lon- don & New York: Routledge.Translatability between Paradigms: Gramsci’s Translation of Crocean Concepts DEREK BOOTHMAN Abstract: Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (/962) posed, among other things, the problem of whether and how it is possible to translate between scientific paradigms. Thirty years earlier a similar problem of translatability between philosophical and scientific languages had been raised in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, then published in the immediate postwar years. This paper examines how Gramsci undertook a translation into his own realist-materialist paradigm of certain key concepts used in the philosophically idealist one of Benedetto Croce, the dominant Halian professional philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century; ‘for purposes of illustration and clarity, a reconstruction is given of these terms translated between the paradigms. Additionally, a comment is offered "s approach to the differences between national cultures, and his view of what leads to greater or lesser exactness in such intercultural translations. Finally, some examples are briefly discussed of interpara- digmatic translations involving either Gramsci’s paradigm or other similar and compatible ones. on Gramsi 1. What does it mean to translate between paradigms? In the first number of the new series of New Left Review Luisa Passerini comments on the “break-down of any common tradition or transmission of meanings” in one specific area of the social sciences, involving historians of different political gen- erations; this suggests, she goes on to say, “not only a multiplication of different intellectual languages, but great difficulty in translating between them” (Passerini 2000:140). The late Thomas Kuhn made a rather similar point in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970: 203), then going on to comment in the debate on that book that much of the social sciences seems typified by “claims, counter-claims and debates over fundamentals”, just as in Presocratic discourse, with the result that it does “not at all resemble science” in his conception of the ‘normal science’ phase of the so-called hard sciences (Kuhn 1974: 6). Between such types of ‘critical dis course’ there exist, in Kuhn’s view, not only problems of the translatability of the same homophonic terms, or of terms that play equivalent roles in the structure of rival paradigms, but sometimes real untranslatability because of the conflicting de- scriptions of reality offered by what he calls incommensurable paradigms. This ‘incommensurability’ is easy enough to understand in some cases in the exact sciences: there is quite evident incompatibility, for example, between the old heliocentric system and the Copernican one that replaced it. But whereas Kuhn was.104 Crosscultural Transgressions dealing with formal languages, some authorities, for a variety of motives, take a similar view for natural languages too. We may here point to the Sapir-Whorf anthropological hypothesis and to Quine’s view that rival conceptual schemes are under-determined by experience: in the limit of someone landing in an alien culture with no knowledge of its language, the resulting radical translation be- comes indeterminate. What I should like to do in the following pages is try to link some aspects of the above to the short group of paragraphs headed the ‘translatability of scientific and philosophical languages’ in the eleventh of Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. Approaching the matter from a different angle, Gramsci too uses the concept and even the actual term ‘paradigm’, but in his case as referred to the human sciences. It may seem strange to some to quote Gramsci on matters regarding language and translatability, given that the interest shown in his Notebooks has been largely po- litical, but his writings go far wider than that. It should not be forgotten that his university training was in linguistics and, indeed, since the integral version of the Notebooks became available in Italy in the mid-1970s, linguists there and now else- where have begun to take up a number of the insights contained in his writings. In the English-speaking world, among other things, three separate versions of some or all the notes he wrote on translatability have now been published.' Gramsci starts from the premise that for translation to be possible between lan- guages, natural or otherwise, or between cultures, there must be some fundamental underlying similarity. However, caution is here necessary in specifying what the nature of the translation actually is. Gramsci’s own words come in useful: “translat- ability is not ‘perfect’ in every respect, even in important ones (but what language is exactly translatable into another? what single word is exactly translatable into an- other language?), but it is so in its basic essentials” (Gramsci 1995: 309). Typical of his overall approach, he does not take up a rigid and absolutist position on whether concepts can be translated or not, and in this seems to adopt a different stance from Kuhn’s implied approach on the human sciences as stated in the brief quote above. What Gramsci has in mind is, in effect, three different types of translation, which renders his notes on the subject not entirely easy to condense or comprehend imme- diately. First as regards ‘orthodox’ interlingual translation, he later on expands his comment here in an aside of a fairly standard nature. In speaking of high school translation exercises from the classical languages he notes that ' The versions are due to Carl Marzani (Gramsci 1957), Steven R. Mansfield (Gramsci 1984) and the present writer (Gramsci 1995); for purposes of convenience all references in the text to the translatability notes will be made to this latter volume, which also gives information on when these and other notes were written and where to find them in the Critical Edition of the Note- books. Here dates have been mentioned only where strictly necessary; for further information the reader is referred to Francioni (1984).Boothman: Translatability between Paradigms 105 what identity there seemed to be at the start of the exercise (Italian ‘rosa’ Latin ‘rosa’) becomes increasingly complicated as the ‘apprenticeship’ progresses, moves increasingly away from the mathematical scheme and ar- rives at a historical judgement or judgement of taste, in which nuances, “unique and individualised” expressiveness prevail; this also applies in a single lan- guage to diachronic semantic variations and to functionally determined variations within a sentence. (Gramsci 1985: 384-5) Secondly, Gramsci speaks of what now we might call intralingual translation, not so much as this term is used by Jakobson (1971: 261) in the sense of reformulation in a natural language, but as interparadigmatic translation, i.e. translation between paradigms. By way of example he cites the comments of the liberal economist Luigi Einaudi on the ability of the pragmatist philosopher Giovanni Vailati to furnish proofs of the same theorem in the languages typical of different schools of eco- nomic thought (Gramsci 1995: 308). In a slightly carlier note on the same subject he describes this process as a “mutual translatability of these languages” (Gramsci 1995: 183). He goes on in the latter note to cite another example: whether, using the mar- ginal utility economic paradigm, one may arrive at the same explanation of profits as that given by the labour theory of value.” Gramsci here refers to Engels’s asser- tion that the marginalist economist Wilhelm Lexis’s formulation of the theory of profits “amounts to the same thing as the Marxian theory of surplus value” and “in reality [...] is merely a paraphrase of the Marxian” (Engels 1967: 9-10). In these examples, different conceptual schemes are seen to cover the same reality in differ- ent ways. As such we are dealing with translations of concepts between different paradigms, rather than from one natural language to another. The third step that Gramsci takes is that of sketching out the conditions whereby a translation may be effected from the culture of one country to that of another (an intercultural translation). Here one is dealing with whole discourses which may be in superficially unrelated fields, but which reflect deeper-level social processes, a point with which no one with a nodding acquaintance with Marx (or Lévi-Strauss) should have difficulty. His own description of the process is “two fundamentally similar structures have ‘equivalent’ superstructures that are mutually translatable, whatever the particular national language” (Gramsci 1995: 312), where ‘fundamen- tally similar’ is to be understood as referring to societies that have reached comparable socio-economic stages of development . The present contribution attempts principally to look at the second of these types of translation in probably the main example treated by Gramsci himself. This is the 2 For the economists of the post-1870 ‘marginal utility’ school the value of a given commodity, which then has somehow to be related to its market price, is determined by its utility to the individual, i.e. by the significance the individual subjectively attaches to the commodity for his/ her want-satisfaction; for Marx, on the other hand, a commodity’s value is determined by the different quantities and qualities of labour used in its manufacture (Roll: 321 and 269).106 Crosscultural Transgressions translation into his own Marxist paradigm of concepts taken over from the Italian idealist philosopher Benedetto Croce. In Gramsci’s own terminology, the operation is sometimes referred to as a translation from speculative into historicist, or realist historicist, language, rather than the more normal terms of idealist and Marxist re- spectively. By exploring this area and then citing certain other translations between paradigms, I hope to indicate possible ways in which differences or similarities between paradigms might be shown up more clearly, thus leading to a better under- standing of problems of compatibility between different conceptual schemes. 2. The Gramscian paradigm Ttis not accidental that, in the second half of 1932, while Gramsci was giving final form to his notes on translatability, he was also engaged in doing the same thing to his notes on Benedetto Croce. In the Italy of the first half of the twentieth century, Croce was the major representative of the philosophical idealist tradition and a key figure for non-Marxist democratic culture, dominating the fields of philosophy, his- tory and literary aesthetics. Gramsci says of himself (1995: 355) that he had been “tendentially somewhat Crocean” during and just after his university years; his set- tling of accounts with Croce takes place through the interparadigmatic translation he carries out on Croce. Textual justification for this claim comes at the start of the second part of the tenth notebook, which Gramsci headed ‘The Philosophy of Benedetto Croce’. We there find two brief paragraphs in which he comments that his notes on the ‘translatability of scientific and philosophical languages’, in the adjoining eleventh notebook, should be brought together with those on the relation- ship between his ‘philosophy of praxis”? and ‘speculative philosophies’, meaning principally Croce’s (Gramsci 1995: 306). He also makes the explicit claim that the former of these philosophies is able to translate the latter into its own terms. Gramsci’s work on Croce is, then, to be considered his translation into the paradigm of the philosophy of praxis of the high point reached in Italy by idealist philosophy. In speaking of translation a problem does arise, however, for a writer like Gramsci. At first sight his approach seems highly eclectic; indeed the concepts he uses are drawn from a wide range of thinkers, especially those coming after the turning point that he identifies in the French Revolution, but also going back to earlier theorists such as Machiavelli. What Gramscian scholars of the last generation have noted is that when he incorporates into his discourse a term taken from elsewhere, without 3 The formulation ‘philosophy of praxis’ has often been taken as merely a circumlocution for historical materialism’ to avoid censorship problems. Maria Rosaria Romagauolo (1987-8: 123- 66) demonstrates that, after about the middle of 1932, ‘philosophy of praxis’ substitutes the term ‘historical materialism’ even in rewritten versions of first draft notes. This conscious change testifies to Gramsci's emphasis on the aspect of human intervention as against positivist and mechanistic readings of MarxismBoothman: Translatability between Paradigms 107 changing the words used, its meaning is often modified. On other occasions he may take a term from elsewhere and, under a different label, reinterpret it for developing a concept that has a similar or equivalent function within his own discourse. Both are examples of translation between paradigms, with the common property that, whether the terms incorporated are the same or different, the concepts undergo a semantic shift on being carried across (“trans-lated’) from one paradigm to the other; simultaneously the position they occupy in the hierarchy of one paradigm may not automatically be the same as in another (see also Kuhn 1970: 200). A whole number of such ‘translations’ appear in Gramsci’s discourse,‘ but here we shall concentrate on certain terms that Gramsci adopted and adapted from Croce, namely ‘ethico-political history’ (see section 3 below); and the ‘dialectic of distincts’ (section 4) and, with it, the general question of the dialectic; and the relationship between ‘error’ and ‘ideology’ or ‘illusion’ (section 5). 3. Ethico-political history, historical materialism and hegemony: empirical canons and hierarchical rank The importance of Croce within Italian culture has already been commented on above and, indeed, Gramsci’s Notebooks contain more references to Croce than to anyone else, bar none. Of the notions developed by Croce that of ‘ethico-political history’ was of particular interest to Gramsci. Indeed two books which Gramsci received in prison, Croce’s History of Italy 1871-1915 (1928) and his History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century (1932), which applied this concept, were regarded by Gramsci as “destined to become the paradigm of Crocean historiography”, his “crowning achievement” (Gramsci 1995: 348 and 367 respectively) What Croce meant by the term ‘ethico-political history’ is explained in the es- says he published in book form in the mid-1920s (Croce 1926) and available in English under the titles ‘Economico-political history and ethico-political history’ and ‘The unending struggle between Church and State’ (Croce 1946); here the rep- resentatives of the ‘Church’, incidentally, are to be understood in the broad figurative sense of “those who, in modern and lay society, are represented by [...] the custodi- ans of ideas” (Croce 1946: 129), i.e. a moral élite of ‘intellectuals’, using a noun not then in common use in its Italian form. In these essays Croce explains that what he means by his concept of ethico-political history is a ‘moral’ history, seeing the main trend in human history as the expansion of morality as represented by these élites. Commentators are agreed that Croce’s concept of morality is then intimately linked “ With no great effort, one can pick out at least three dozen major items that characterize Gramsci’s discourse, of which about a third seem borrowings from the lexis of other thinkers. Some of these are listed in a recent paper discussing the concepts implicit in the notions of ‘historical bloc’ and “hegemony” (Boothman 1999: 58-9),108 Crosscultural Transgressions to liberty, and that further liberty for him is linked substantially and not just etymologically to liberalism (Bobbio 1998: 39-40). It is this notion of liberty that characterizes ‘ethico-political’ history, as indicated below. In discussing Croce’ s two paradigmatic ethico-political histories Robert Caponigri notes that the “positive and effective ethico-political force in the nineteenth century was liberalism, which supplies both the ideality and the effective moral will of the century”, and that one of the central themes of these histories is how liberty, defin- ing liberalism, is translated into the institutions (Caponigri 1955: 175). In Croce’s own words the object of ethico-political is “not only the State [...] but also that which is outside the State, [...] namely the moral institutions” (Croce 1946: 73). He tends to gloss over the Marxist historiography with which he (Croce) had flirted at the close of the nineteenth century, accepting — acritically in Gramsci’s view — a version of Marxism of which at the turn of the century he had written scathingly (Gramsci 1995: 415-6). Thus, true to the revision — or renunciation — of Marxism announced in the preface to the 1917 edition of Materialismo Storico ed Economia Marxistica (one of a number of things not in the English translation of that book), Croce observes that “‘as regards political theory, the concept of power and of strug- gle, which Marx had subtracted from States and handed over to classes, seems now to have made its return from classes to States” (Croce 1917: preface, xvi). Caponigri draws the double conclusion that, for Croce, firstly, “liberty is the concept which defines the human spirit in its ontological character; through this concept [of liberty] the human spirit is discerned in its ultimate quality of being [...]. Ethico- political history [...] is the history of human freedom, because liberty is the constitutive form of the human spirit itself’ and that, secondly, the “concept of history as the history of liberty had as its necessary practical complement liberty as a moral ideal, thatis, as an end, the chief end of all practical activity” (Caponigri 1955: 176-7 and 186). This view is confirmed by Croce, who makes all “histories pertaining to practi- cal activity [...] lose their autonomy and become part of moral [i.e. ethico-political] history” (Croce 1946: 75). Liberty or freedom is both the moving force and the outcome or end of history. While Croce does not ignore times of stress, of pov- erty, etc., he does not include them in his model, limiting himself to noting that there are “times of poverty and hardships, or of frenzied mammonism, of tyranny and slavery; during such times the moral or religious spirit [...] can hardly breathe. Yet that spirit is never absent and inactive” (Croce 1946: 127). And indeed this spirit is always uppermost in Croce’s mind, assuming a real form and substance. The conclusion he arrives at as regards the relationship between ethico-political history and historical materialism is that just as he was “among the first to recom- mend the study of the concepts of historical materialism, [he] always advised that its dictates be treated as simple empirical canons of research” (Croce 1946: 68, where the more precise ‘canons’ substitutes ‘rules’ in Castiglione’s translation),Boothman: Translatability between Paradigms 109 thereby relegating historical materialism to a subordinate position in the structure of ethico-political history. Croce’s approach here has the weight of a considerable intellectual tradition of, in particular, German nineteenth-century historiography behind it, and as such is not to be dismissed lightly. It modifies this tradition by including both what the German school “in too narrow a manner” considered the State (Croce’s ‘political’ member; see Gramsci 1995: 372) and “what is considered society” (the ‘ethico’ member, see Croce 1946; 72-3). The ground covered is much the same as in Gramsci’s paradigm but, for him, Croce stops short. Crocean historiography con- sists of a reconstruction of what, in analogy with Kuhn’s concept of ‘normal science’, might be called ‘normal history’. But just as we cannot fully understand aspects of, say, today’s normal science, such as quantum mechanics or relativity, without know- ing the background to the failures of the previous paradigms (classical mechanics applied at the sub-atomic level or certain aspects of Newtonian gravitation) and the revolution that ushered in the new ones, so Gramsci similarly makes the point, in one of his most rhetorically impassioned passages, that the histories of nineteenth- century Europe and of post-1871 Italy cannot be understood without the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars in the former case and the struggles of the Risorgimento in the latter (Gramsci 1995: 348-9 and 330) All this is far from suggesting that Gramsci rejects Crocean ethico-political his- tory. Two of Gramsci's statements are of interest here. In his reading, Marx’s approach contains “in a nutshell the ethico-political aspects of politics or theory of hegemony and consent, as well as the aspect of force and of economics” (Gramsci 1995: 399). The implications of the latter phrase emerge more clearly and are better integrated into the Gramscian paradigm elsewhere: “ethico-political history, in so far as it is divorced from the concept of historical bloc,’ in which there is a concrete correspondence of socio-economic content to ethico-political form in the recon- struction of the various historical periods, is nothing more than a polemical presentation of interesting philosophical propositions, but it is not history” (Gramsci 1995: 360). Here there are two of what M.A.K. Halliday calls semantic discontinuities or leaps (Halliday and Martin 1993: 82-84). In the first quotation Gramsci is obvi- ously speaking of the base-superstructure metaphor, it being well-known that for Marx “the economic structure of society [is] the real foundation” of a given soci- ety “on which arises a legal and political superstructure” (Marx 1970: 20) which would, for Gramsci, include Croce’s ‘ethico-political history’ as one aspect. The second semantic gap is the partial equivalence between ‘historical bloc’ and the $ The ‘historical bloc’ is a concept taken principally from the French political theorist Georges Sorel, with an unacknowledged input from Marx's Theses on Feuerbach. Gramsci’s fundamen- tal definition of itis the unity of structure and superstructure (Gramsci 1971: 137), but it differs from the static structure-superstructure metaphor in emphasising the aspect of diachronic histori- cal movement. For a more detailed philological study see Boothman (2000).110 Crosscultural Transgressions “base-superstructure’ model. This latter metaphor progressively disappears between 1932 and 1933, to be replaced with that of ‘blocco storico’ (Cospito 1990), except when the division into the two parts is being made for purposes of analysis. The major points that follow from the above are that, as long as account is taken of the element of force, Croce’s ethico-political history is compatible with Gramsci’s paradigm. Here force may be a type of external constraint, such as the relations into which men and women enter, independent of their will, for Marx’s “social produc- tion of their existence”, or it may be the force that creates a new situation, such as the struggles of the Risorgimento or the Napoleonic period, both missing from Croce’s histories. Hegemony in a broad definition is like Machiavelli’s centaur, half-beast and half-man, that symbolizes both force and consent, while in the narrower definition of hegemony as consent, “ethico-political history is the mechanical hypostatization of the moment of hegemony, of political leader- ship, of consent in the life and development of the activity of the state and civil society” (Gramsci 1995: 343). A second point is that, whereas Croce states in his main essay on ethico-political history that it “alone seems to be History, history par excellence”, the conception of ethico-political history for Gramsci “may be adopted as an ‘empirical canon’ of historical research which needs constantly to be borne in mind [...] if the aim is that of producing integral history and not partial and extrinsic history (history of eco- nomic forces as such etc.)” (Gramsci 1995: 358 and, in a slightly different formulation, 332). There is compatibility between ethico-political history and Gramsci’s paradigm, but it is of interest to note that in the reciprocal translations one thinker does of the scheme upheld by the other (with Croce of course giving his reading of Marx rather than of Gramsci) there is an inversion of rank. On the one hand, for Croce the dictates of historical materialism are “simple empirical canons of research” and Marx’s historical materialism “an interpretative canon of history” (Gramsci 1995: 335). If the German school wrote an “integral history” (Croce 1946: 72), ethico-political (or ‘moral’) history, in going beyond it, is even more of an “integral history”, while other “histories pertaining to practical activity [...] lose their autonomy and become part of moral history” (Croce 1946: 73-4); indeed any- thing that is not ethico-political history is inevitably partial and one-sided (Croce 1946: 130). For Gramsci, on the other hand, ethico-political history is, as we have seen, not rejected; however, unless firmly sited within the historical bloc, it is a “polemical presentation of interesting philosophical propositions, but it is not his- tory” (Gramsci 1995: 360). In this entire dialogue, Croce’s contribution to which is in his historical writings themselves and partially in his post-war reviews of Gramsci’s Prison Letters and Notebooks, each side accepts a certain partial validity of the stance of the other. Ethico-political history is accepted by Gramsci as forming part of his concept of hegemony, while historical materialism is accepted by Croce as a subordinate partBoothman: Translatability between Paradigms Hd of his brand of historical research. There is however an inversion in hierarchical rank, in which one thinker’s concepts form merely a subordinate part of the other's overall view. 4. Distincts, their dialectic and the question of superstructural rank Another reinterpretative translation of importance is that made of the Crocean con- cept of the dialettica dei distinti, i.e. the dialectic of four ‘distincts’ or ‘distinctions’, depending on the context. Outlines of what is meant are given by Mure (1967), H. Wildon Cart (1917: 136-52), Orsini (1961: 19-21) and Roberts (1987: 77-8). Orsini (1961: 317) further notes that the Nuovi Saggi di Estetica (Croce 1920), available in English as The Essence of Aesthetic (1921), provides a good commentary by Croce himself on what is involved, and this has been drawn on here. As Croce sees it, the human spirit is divided two-fold into the theoretic (know- ing) and the practical (doing), the former being subdivided into aesthetic (intuitive, ‘the beautiful’) and concrete conceptual thought (‘the true’), and the latter into the ethical (‘the good’) and the economic or utilitarian, which represents Croce’s specific addition to the three categories that have come down to us from classical Greek thought. The category of the economic or utilitarian is broad enough to deal with anything — including, as Gramsci points out, love — that may have a bearing on the production and reproduction of the existence of humanity. Croce’s dialectic of the distincts allows circulation among these categories that character- ize all human activity. Gramsci’s concept of historical bloc likewise aimed at being all-embracing and likewise had the problem of finding a mechanism of actively correlating one sphere of activity with another. It is only after quite some hesitation regarding, for exam- ple, whether the dialectic of the distincts can be regarded as really dialectical (Gramsci 1995: 369; April-May 1932), that he concludes there is something of importance in it. While certainly it is for him merely a verbal solution, it does indicate “a real methodological exigency” (Gramsci 1995: 399, dating to the last few months of 1932). More or less at the same time as writing this latter paragraph Gramsci was beginning to revise the notes on political theory he had sketched out in the early months of the year and gave their final form some time between May 1932 and the end of 1934. It is here that Gramsci starts to explore the application of the Crocean distincts to his own schema, “translating speculative language into his- toricist [i.e. Marxist] language [...] seeing whether this speculative language has aconcrete instrumental value, superior to previous instrumental values” as he says elsewhere (Gramsci 1995: 344). First of all, for the ‘translation’ into his paradigm of the Crocean concept of distincts/distinctions, Gramsci observes in his notes on political theory that the112 Crosscultural Transgressions ‘distinction’ will be between “the ranks [gradi] of the superstructure”, the problem being that of “establishing the dialectical position of political activity (and of the corresponding science) as a particular level of the superstructure” (Gramsci 1971: 137). He goes on to say that such activity constitutes “the first moment or first level; the moment in which the superstructure is still in the unmediated phase of a merely confused assertion of the will [affermazione volontaria] at an elementary stage” He then asks: “can one really speak of a dialectic of distincts, and how is the con- cept of a circle joining the levels of the superstructure to be understood?” (ibid.). The answer he suggests is through the “concept of ‘historical bloc’, i.e. unity between nature and mind (structure and superstructure), unity of opposites and distincts” (ibid.). Similarly he asks “what relationship will there exist between the politico-economic moment and other historical activities? Is a speculative solu- tion of these problems possible or only a historical one given by the concept of ‘historical bloc’ presupposed by Sorel?” (Gramsci 1995; 399-400). Once again Gramsci is carrying out a translation. The Crocean concept of the dialectic of distincts is reinterpreted so as to apply to the levels or ranks of the superstructure rather than the aspects of the human spirit, but it may be noted that the function in the two paradigms is the equivalent one of satisfying the need to actively correlate the different sectors of human activity. We thus would seem to have an example of what Kuhn describes as a coming together of members of dif- ferent language communities, at least one of which has “learned to translate the other's theory and its consequences into his own language” (Kuhn 1970: 202). 5. Ideology and error Within the historical bloc, where “material forces are the content and ideologies are the form” (Gramsci 1971: 377), another question of translation between Gramsci and Croce arises, this time regarding ‘ideology’ and ‘error’, Here ‘ideology’ is of- ten for Gramsci “the whole ensemble of the superstructures” (Gramsci 1995: 413) that relate to a given economic structure of society. But different from some read- ings of Marx, and maybe from what Marx himself intended, Gramsci’s ‘ideology’ is not a simple reflection of the economic base of society. It can be the ensemble of ideas consonant with that base, but it can also be those ideas that derive from the states of affairs in previous stages of society, or alternatively it can represent a sub- limation at another plane of current states of affairs. Ideology and the superstructures are for Gramsci an objective part of operative reality, and anything but arbitrary constructs (Gramsci 1995: 395). However they are not permanent and universal, but transient due to these practical origins (Gramsci 1971: 445). In the 1917 preface to his Materialismo Storico ed Economia Marxistica (as noted above, not in the English translation) Croce had rejected the position that the superstructures have an ‘objective and operative reality’ for Marxism, claiming in- stead that Marxism considers them as mere appearance.Boothman: Translatability between Paradigms 2. There is however a point of contact. A concept that plays for Croce a similar role to one aspect of Gramsci’s ‘ideology’ is ‘error’, which consists in mistaking for permanent, real thought (philosophy) those mental facts that are transitory or fleeting, unmediated products of practical activity (Gramsci 1995: 413). Indeed Croce himself poses the rhetorical question “[...] in what way is error born except as the interference of practical activity in the theoretical spirit?” (Croce 1926: 89), ie. an unwarranted intrusion of the lower levels of his hierarchy of distincts into the higher ones. While Gramsci is not convinced by the rigid distinction be- tween ideology and philosophy, he does see here an influence of, if not the actual derivation from, Marxism. Crocean ‘error’ occupies the place of the Marxist con- cept of ‘illusion’, which, as part of the superstructural phenomena and thus of ideology, is nothing other than a “historical category transient in nature because of changes in practice” (Gramsci 1995: 413). In terminology introduced at the end of Section I above, he sums this up in his claim that “Croce’s philosophy is to a quite notable extent the retranslation into speculative language of the realist historicism of the philosophy of praxis” (Gramsci 1995: 355). 6. Intercultural translation It may be, as Gramsci speculated, that there is an “instrumental value” in Croce’s principle of distinctions; there certainly is in a type of dialectic that allows one to pass from one hierarchical level to another. Here the wheel turns full circle and we go back to the problem, posed at the beginning of this paper, of the reciprocal translation of different cultures. This might appear in the guise of interlingual translation but is — as translation between languages must of necessity be — an intercultural translation, For Gramsci what is being dealt with is a cultural homologue. He notes the fact that different societies, citing France and Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century, express basically the same ideas in the different cultures that characterize them (Gramsci 1995: 310-3). His immediate source here was an article of Croce’s (1950 reprint: 291-302) referring to a pamphlet by the academic lawyer Adolfo Rava (Rava 1909). The principal reference point for Gramsci was, however, Marx’s youthful work The Holy Family, which extends the comparison by classing French political practice and literature and classical German philosophy together with Eng- lish economics (David Ricardo): all of them in their specific time expressed similar underlying movements in their societies. The implications of Gramsci’s position are that each of these currents of thought in the ‘superstructure’ of society is con- nected to the ‘base’ by a chain running through the different levels (ranks) of the superstructure (Gramsci 1971: 137), and probably, in his view, running through different levels within fundamentally equivalent structures, i.c. the ensemble of14 Crosscultural Transgressions productive relations which people enter into. He is thus making use in his para- digm of the reinterpretative translation of Croce’s dialectic of distincts discussed in Section 4 above. While Gramsci was here taking as his paradigm the Europe of the French Revo- lution and of the first industrial revolution, his model is of course far more general in its scope. If his reasoning is anywhere near correct, it would seem to go at least some way towards explaining why similar social and cultural movements spring up more or less simultaneously in differing countries at the same stage of civilization. More modern examples of this are the Modernist movement in its various manifes- tations, followed chronologically by minimalism, deconstructionism, neo-liberalism, ‘weak thought’ as the refusal in contemporary Italian philosophy of great meta- physical systems, all of them forms of the postmodern reaction to past overarching doctrines. Factors like these, and their relative strengths in one country or another, help define the hegemonic discourse that in part characterizes the ‘national-popular’ analysed by Gramsci. Where caution needs to be applied is in addressing Gram: question “whether one can translate between expressions of different stages of civi- lization in so far” as he claims “as each of these stages is a moment in the development of another” (Gramsci 1995: 307). How far, for example, one can actually translate the experience of a colonial society from a position within the culture of an imperial country is open to doubt; their relations of production and superstructural factors are widely different. An analogous comment also applies in the case of trying to translate the experiences of gender and ethnic groupings. Probably we have to use the fall-back position cited in Section 1 above, that “translatability is not ‘perfect’ in every respect, even in important ones [...] but it is so in its basic essentials” (Gramsci: 309). As Gramsci wisely reminds us, “the intellectual element ‘knows’ but does not always understand and in particular does not always feel” (Gramsci 1971: 418). Without that understanding and feeling no community can come near to ‘translating’ another's experience. To go further than that means pushing his model beyond its limits of applicability and arriving at a situation of untranslatability; ‘go- ing native’, in the concepts of Kuhn, Quine and others, has been a solution proposed by Marxism regarding parti ion in class and anti-imperial movements, but this solution is not always possible and perhaps not always relevant. 's non-rhetorical 7. Some tentative conclusions In this paper the term paradigm has been used quite frequently in a familiar Kuhnian sense, and we have seen that Gramsci too uses it in a similar way to describe what Croce was attempting to do in two of his histories in particular. The term is not used inappropriately by or of Gramsci. Recently the linguist Stefano Gensini has ob- served that in Gramsci “every keyword [...] is organized at the formal level thanks to its relationship [...] with the rest of the system” (Gensini 1991: 72), and theBoothman: Translatability between Paradigms 115 philosopher of language Ferruccio Rossi-Landi (1983: 26) makes a similar general point. The various terms of Gramsci’s discourse do in fact ‘hang together’ in the way described, each piece interacting with others and being normally definable only by calling into play the others in a way that is consonant with the features of a Kuhnian paradigm. Initially those who invoked a strict definition of paradigm were sceptical of what, for example, Hilary Putnam calls the “sloppiness, the lack of precise theories and laws, the lack of mathematical rigor” of the social sciences (Putnam 1975:152). For what we are faced with is a mix of fundamentally a natural-language system with elements of formal language. Putnam is to my mind quite right, but only if one recognizes the difference between, in semiotic terms, the ‘signals’ used to denote concepts in the exact sciences and the ‘signs’ used in the human sciences, Here ‘signals’ are technical means for indicating the objects, actions, processes and such- like which generally reflect the non-ideological or at least minimal ideological content of most established theories in the ‘hard science’. The social sciences are couched more in terms of ‘signs’ that indicate an ideological theme. Signs “reflect and re- fract another reality [...] the domain of signs coincides with the domain of ideology” (Vologinov, 1973: 10). It is the ‘sloppiness factor’ inherent in ideological discourse that perhaps until relatively recently has obscured for many people the paradigmatic nature of discourses such as Gramsci’s. One aspect of such a paradigmatic discourse is, as has been noted, that in pass- ing from one discourse to another it is not enough for a given term in one paradigm to be translated as either homophonically the same, or as a rather different term in another paradigm. The location of the term within a hierarchical structure can also be of importance. When a term or concept is incorporated from outside, there may also be other differences. Either its intension or its extension may be modified. Such is the case of “ethico-political history as the history of the moment of he- gemony” (Gramsci 1995: 345). It is to be emphasized at this point that we are not primarily concerned here with whether Gramsci's or Croce's (or someone else’s) paradigm gives a better result, but rather to indicate, as Kuhn says in his ‘Reflections on my critics’, that “lan- guages cut up the world in different ways”, which is one reason why translation “between theories or languages” is “so difficult” (Kuhn 1974: 268). And, as Kuhn constantly reminds us, there is “no neutral observation language to appeal to” (1970: 146 and 201; 1974: 266 and 268). The only appeal that can be made is to the human praxis of a ‘discourse community’, understood not as an academic community but as society itself through, according to Gramsci, the identity of history (practice) with philosophy (theory) and therefore with politics (Gramsci 1995: 382-3): indi- vidual translators may translate words on a sheet of paper but such a sign, inserted, it must be remembered, within its own social and ideological context (Ponzio 1976: 6) can only be incorporated into a culture and thus be fully translated by the mem- bers of the target culture.16 Crosscultural Transgressions The importation of terms into a paradigm is theorized by Gramsci quite explic- itly in his Eleventh Notebook. Thus it is not merely a turn of phrase that was being used when Carl Marzani, the first translator into English of the notes on translat- ability, entitled his Gramscian anthology The Open Marxism of Antonio Gramsci (Gramsci 1957), Gramsci, without being aware of it, was methodologically distane- ing himself from the rigid system, closed to outside influences, of what became codified as ‘Marxism-Leninism’, in effect decreeing its demise as a theoretical edi- fice over half a century before the socio-economic system on which it was built finally collapsed. At the same time it may be noted that he rejects certain notions put forward by fellow Marxists, not easily reconcilable with his own humanist and Hegelian dialectical approach, as in his polemic against Bukharin (Gramsci 1971: 419-72). There is an ‘incommensurability’ factor between these rival paradigms, not easy to isolate but most likely due to a determining position in the conceptual hierarchy of their relative paradigms. ‘The Gramscian paradigm covers much of the ground covered by other para- digms such as Crocean idealism, some other tendencies within Marxism, and at least some types of post-Marxist deconstructionism. The situation is akin to what Herbert Butterfield says of the transpositions early modern scientists had to carry out: here too one is “handling the same bundle of data as before, but placing them in a new system of relations with one another by giving them a different framework” (Butterfield 1949: 1). Metaphorically, we might conceive the paradigms as consist- ing of three-dimensional webs which are spread over the same terrain but which may sometimes invert the vertical, i.e. hierarchical, position of a concept in one paradigm as compared with that of a like concept in another. ‘The implications of this include the possibility of translating other paradigms, in the sense of seeing what terms correspond, where they fit into a hierarchy, and how reasonable is the resulting structure. A case of this type that springs readily to mind is that of another great indirect debate of the twentieth century. The late Lucien Goldmann comments that in Being and Time Heidegger differentiates himself from three other philosophers, but names only two of them. Heidegger's subject matters leave minimal doubt that the third philosopher is Lukacs (Goldmann 1977: 27). In Goldmann’s analysis, there is between Heidegger's phenomenologist Being and Time and Lukécs’s Marxist History and Class Consciousness an identity of or at least a very close relationship between concepts that express at times nearly identi- cal ideas. For Goldmann the “radical difference of terminology” between the two works can be resolved “by respectively translating the developments of each thinker into the terminology of the other” (Goldmann 1977: 10-11; my emphasis, DB). A much more recent example is provided by the leading Afro-American prag- matist intellectual Cornel West, who has acknowledged a debt to Gramsci regarding the nature of his philosophical engagement. On the important question of the role of intellectuals West first uses the Gramscian division between traditional intellectu- als who see themselves as an independent social group, and ‘organic’ ones, moreBoothman: Transtatability between Paradigms 17 intimately linked to a social class. There then turns out to be near-identity between the two thinkers on the nature of the relationship established between the elabora- tion of ideas by the organic intellectuals and the culture of the socially oppressed to whom these latter relate (West 1997: 312-3). On this non-trivial point, Gramscian Marxism — though not necessarily other types of Marxism — ‘translates’ through identity of concepts into the discourse of ‘prophetic pragmatism’, as West calls his own development of pragmatist thought. Then, taking the case of deconstructionist post-Marxism as exemplified by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, we can ask: is there a fit or is there incommensurability between Gramsci’s view, which makes a social class playing a fundamental role within a socio-economic formation into the “single unifying principle” in all hegemonic formations (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 69), and their own deconstruc- tionist position, which does not allow for an organizing centre of this type? Or, again, what sort of compatibility is there between Gramsci’s historicist Marxism and Althusserian structuralist Marxism? The last point to make returns to intercultural translation. In ‘translating’ into his schema Croce’s dialectic of distincts, Gramsci provides a means of linking the various ranking levels of the superstructure one to another and thence to the base, in Marx’s metaphor. If, for given societies, the bases (i.e. relations of production in an extended definition of production according to Marx’s 1859 Preface) are ‘funda- mentally similar’, then, by ascending upwards in terms of the base-superstructure metaphor, these societies “have ‘equivalent’ superstructures that are mutually trans- latable” (Gramsci 1995; 312), where the ensemble of the superstructures correspond. to the ‘broad’ definition of Gramsci’s ‘ideologies’. Thus a model is furnished to explain homologous cultural movements in different national societies. It may be crude, but as realist philosophers of science observe, such models, without neces- sarily being complete, can explain important phenomena. One of the tasks of Kuhnian ‘normal science’ is then to improve the fit of theory to facts — often by reinterpret- ing ‘theory-laden facts’. It must be noted, however, that the Gramscian model proposed for intercultural translation depends on the existence — within a complex and contradictory Hegelo- Marxist totality — of an organizing centre, provided by the base (hence the reservations on compatibility with deconstructionist post-Marxism and anti-Hegelian post- structuralism). The more similar the societal bases, the more exact and convincing the intercultural translation. Can theories, like deconstructionism, that depend on infinite regression and reject the notion of an organizing centre, provide a model that also furnishes an explanation of the mutual translatability of superstructural phenomena? Or, as Gramsci claimed, is it “only in the philosophy of praxis” that “the ‘translation’ [is] organic and thoroughgoing” (Gramsci 1995: 307)? It is an open question and one that is, to my mind, worth pursuing.18 Crosscultural Transgressions References Bobbio, N. (1998) ‘Croce maestro di vita morale. Conversazione con Norberto Bobbio’, in P. Bonetti (ed.) Per conoscere Croce, Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 35-43. Boothman, Derek (1999) ‘Ipotesi linguistiche sui Quaderni del Carcere’, in R. Medici (ed.) Gramsci e i linguaggi della politica, Bologna: CLUEB, 39-62. — (2000) ‘L’ Uomo’ (editorial title), supplement to Rinascita della Sinistra, Il (12): xvii. Butterfield, Herbert (1949) The Origins of Modern Science 1300-1800, London: Bell. Caponigri, A. Robert (1955) History and Liberty, the Historical Writings of Benedetto Croce, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Carr, H. Wildon (1917) The Philosophy of Benedetto Croce, London: Macmillan. Cospito, G. 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Recchia Luciani, Roma: Editori Riuniti; originally The American Evasion of Philosophy. A Genealogy of Pragma- tism (1989).Translation as Terceme and Nazire Culture-bound Concepts and their Implications for a Conceptual Framework for Research on Ottoman Translation History SALIHA PAKER Abstract: This paper questions the de-problematization, in scholarly discourse, of terceme as a culture-specific concept covering a wide range of Ottoman translation practices from the thirteenth to the twentieth century. It proposes a conceptual framework for research to break through restrictive approaches that arise from ideological concerns or modern concepts of translation. It calls for research to engage in in-depth investigation into the ivity of poet-translators and their texts which have been identified as translations or which researchers can assume to be translations, depending on the evidence in tradition or in modern scholarship. In this way not only terceme but also the concept and practice of nazire, or parallel and competitive poetry, is incorporated in the framework. A context for the study of both is found in the notion of an Ottoman interculture conceived asa site where Ottoman poet-translators engaged in intertextual operations in the overlap of Turkish, Persian and Arabic cultures. It is argued that Ottoman interculture evolved into an autonomous system through a process of linguistic and literary hybridization, and that research within this context calls for a recognition of overt and covert changes in the dynamics of culture over the centuries as well as in practices and conceptions of translation. 1. Introduction In the following pages I propose a conceptual framework for the historical-descrip- tive and interpretative study of Ottoman literary translation practices. The framework is intended to help define the field of research in terms of three concepts: terceme (translation practice of a very wide range), nazire (imitatio in the form of parallel and response poetry) and Ottoman interculture. I argue that terceme, which was practised from the thirteenth century onwards, and nazire, which became prominent from the fifteenth century, are culture-bound concepts of translation and should be recognized as such, and designated as terceme and nazire in translation discourse. 1 also suggest that since poets were the primary agents of Ottoman literary trans- lation and transmission, their activities could be profitably studied in terms of an ‘interculture’. Ottoman interculture is conceived as a hypothetical site where poet- translators! operated in the overlap of Turkish, Persian and Arabic cultures, an '*Poet-translator’ is my designation in this paper. Latifi (d.1582) in his literary-biographicalPaker: Translation as Terceme and Nazire 121 overlap that should be distinguished from the generally held notion of a ‘common Islamic culture’. My final argument is that by the end of the sixteenth century Otto- man interculture can be characterized as a literary-cultural system, which had acquired autonomy as a result of hybridization. In this framework, the concept of interculture can open up a perspective for researchers to observe the changes in Ottoman (inter)culture through the study of changes in the terceme and nazire practices of the poet-translators. It would also facilitate questioning certain established para- digms in Turkish literary-historical scholarship. The issues raised here will be of relevance to researchers who seek to problematize ‘translation’ both in English and in the language(s) of the culture(s) in and on which they work. Questioning and theorizing in English, which in my case means working outside the home language, can have a liberating effect on the researcher who is perhaps looking for an alternative forum for discussion and feedback. It can also have revitalizing effects on the home (research) context to which these discussions generally travel back, in English (as lingua franca) or in translation. Doctoral research formulated in English but with a historical focus on Turkish translation discourse and on translations into Turkish has gained considerable mo- mentum in recent years.? In $ebnem Susam-Sarajeva’s (2002) and Sehnaz Tahir-Giirgaglar’s (2001) theses primary sources cover translations belonging mainly to the republican period (1923-). Academic research into the history of translation into Turkish is still largely confined to this period. Implicit is the need for further serious research on the long tradition behind modern notions and practices. The history pre-dating the modern period (presumed to have started in the second half. of the nineteenth century), in other words, at least five and a half centuries of Ottoman translation history,’ has hardly been touched upon in the current para- digm of research in translation studies.‘ The Ottoman Turkish language and script are not accessible to all researchers in the field,’ which makes interdisciplinary dictionary of poets (tezkire) writes about “plain-speaking translator poets (miitercim, sade-gu sairler) [...] numerous” in the fifteenth century (in Tolasa 1983:276). Latifi also mentions poets who followed the “path of translation (tarik-i terceme)” which, in the case of Ahmed Pasa (d.1497), “was regarded favourably by some, but not by others” (ibid. ). See, for instance, the Ph.D. theses by Ozlem Berk (1999), Sebnem Susam-Sarajeva (2002) and Sehnaz Tahir-Giirgaglar (2001). S There are some excellent critical editions of the works of early poets who translated Persian narrative poetry for the pleasure and instruction of Turkish princes in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries while Persian continued its dominance as the literary language. But scholarship has not particularly focused on such works as translations. The period is generally held to be important because the early poet-translators who, in Zehra Toska’s words “were the creators of the lan- guage of Turkish literature” served as models for later poets (2001: 3). * Taceddin Kayaojlu’s (1998) work on translation institutions from the seventeenth to mid- twentieth centuries is important in providing the existing data for those who do not have access, to Ottoman seript, but remains a documentary history without analytical concerns. S-The Arabic script of Ottoman Turkish was officially replaced by Romanized letters for Turkish122 Crosscultural Transgressions collaboration between translation scholars and Ottoman cultural and literary histo- rians the more pressing. Nevertheless, very few scholars have actually stressed the need for collaborative studies. Contemporary historian Cemal Kafadar is one of the few, although he does not particularly have translation studies in mind (1995: 64). In his insightful analysis of the medieval Anatolian warrior epies which figure as Turkish versions of Persian and Arabic sources, Kafadar observes that (Qhe transmission of these narratives over time, place, milieux and media presents many problems that have not been dealt with. The currently rather sharp boundaries that exist in Turkish studies between historical and literary- historical scholarship must be crossed in order to deal with some important questions that arise from the existence of this intricately interrelated body of narratives. (ibid.) The diversity in the pre-Ottoman and Ottoman translation tradition and its multi- plicity of variants’ calls for rigourous research into foundations, from which a plurality of “histories” of translation can be reconstructed (Tahir-Giirgaglar 2001:1). Sec- ondary sources that can offer historical data on concepts and practices of translation are scant. Examining this long-standing translation tradition will reveal much about continuity and change in culture and literature and language. A certain illusion has been dominant: that Turkish translation history began with renderings from European sources in the middle of the nineteenth century, and that the preceding five hundred or more years of Ottoman intertextual and intercultural tradition involving Persian and Arabic were not really about translation. The fact that it was easier to observe differences between the source texts stemming from the European ‘other’ and the Turkish target texts naturally played a part. But the repub- lican ideological revolution, with its emphatic focus on westernization, also had a role in constraining retrospective analysis on translation to go back no further than the mid-nineteenth century Tanzimat, the period of extensive reforms brought about as a result of Turkey’s first major political and socio-cultural encounter with Eu- rope. However, now that the paradigms of cultural and historical criticism are changing, it is time that rupture with the Ottoman past and subsequent alienation are seen as challenges to rethink discontinuity in terms of both change in tradition and continuity. The now archaic term terceme itself is telling in this context. Adopted from Arabic into Turkish before the thirteenth century, it did not drop out of the translation discourse immediately with the republican purist language reforms in the 1930s, but remained in currency as a technical term well until the 1960s.” following the republican alphabet reform of 1928. See Tahir-Gurgaglar (pp. 78-92) for a discus- sion on the cultural consequences of the change in script and the subsequent language reform. * Walter Andrews, for instance, describes Ottoman culture as “a culture of variants” (1997: 8). 7 Terceme, of Arabic origin, appears as an older form in written Turkish than ferciime, its modern orthographic variant, In modern literary-historical discourse on Turkish literature they can bePaker: Translation as Terceme and Nazire 123 2. Translation as terceme and nazire The need to problematize terceme was prompted by thoughts and discussions aris- ing from two interconnected sources: from the research seminars in the History of Translation in Ottoman/Turkish Society in the Department of Translation and In- terpreting at Bogazi¢i University, which materialized thanks to the contributions of specialists in Ottoman Turkish literature, and from the joint interdisciplinary projects initiated by the same department and that of Turkish Language and Literature.’ In order to view the range of Ottoman translations for observations of their functions, we began by computerizing a catalogue of texts from all centuries, which was fol- lowed by a subsidiary project to form a corpus of translations of romance narratives in the mesnevi genre of poetry from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.? While some of these works were paratextually designated as translations (in terms of terceme and of related verbs of Arabic, Persian and Turkish origin), many others could only be characterized as having some intertextual relation with Persian/Arabic sources.” In retrospect, the problem can be formulated as follows: what would our criteria be for ‘assuming’ certain texts as translations in Ottoman culture? In other words, we were faced with the problem of defining Ottoman notions of what we call ‘transla- tion’ in English, and geviri in Turkish today? used interchangeably. Terciime, gradually lost its place to geviri, a modern Turkish neologism, which denotes (like ferciime) the concept, process, and product of translation and derives from the verb gevir-mek, to turn (transitive). Such neologisms began to gain ground with the ‘Turkish language reform movement for purism in the 1930s. Ceviri has displaced rerctime in modern discourse on translation, but terciime is still in use e.g. with reference to commercial translation, and to indicate a traditionalist stance, which sometimes, not always, implies also a certain ideological antagonism towards republican reforms, In Levend’s literary history (1984: 80-90) the section on translation combines all three, the archaic, the modern and the traditional: it is headed“Terciime", and discusses translation in terms of both terceme and ceviri. See Tahir-Giirgaglar (pp, 154-167) for examples of the use of ferciime in early repub- ican discourse on translation, * Translations and their functions in the continuity of Ottoman culture: fourteenth — nineteenth centuries and Early Ottoman translations and their functions in the formation of Ottoman liter- ary models. Both projects are conducted by members from the Translation & Interpreting and Turkish Language & Literature Departments of Bogazigi University, and were supported by the Bogazigi University Research Fund in 1997-1999 and 1999-2001 respectively. The present pa- per is a contribution to both projects. ° Mesnevi is a team of Arabic origin for narrative poetry in rhymed couplets. "© For the first project we examined secondary sources such as catalogues, Ottoman poets" biog- raphies, literary histories and critical editions to see if certain unidentified works were in any way assumed to be translations either by tradition or by modern scholarship; if sources could be traced or established for certain so-called “adaptations”; or if versions claimed to be of “original” qual- ity had been identified in any way as translations or related to translational practice.124 Crosscultural Transgressions 3. The problem of definition: problematizing terceme I take as my point of departure the brief but significant statement by the eminent literary historian Agah Sunt Levend in his Tiirk Edebiyatt Tarihi (History of Turk- ish Literature): “In our old [i.e.pre-Ottoman & Ottoman] literature, terceme signifies more than what we mean by ceviri today” (1984:80). The statement is immediately followed by Levend’s classification of four “forms of terceme” : (a) “Literal”, as in the interlinear, earliest translations of the Kur'an; (b) “faithful”, as in the later ren- derings of the Kur’an and in many literary translations; (c ) literary translations involving “the transfer of subject matter”; and (d) “expanded (literary) translations”. This classification, in which groups (c) and (d) are not clearly demarcated, is not meant to be analytical but merely descriptive. Fortunately, Levend has more to say ‘on group (d), thus giving us the chance to form a critical opinion of his views on terceme. In the case of expanded literary translations, he writes, the poets never think of translating the source text as it is; they do not con- sider themselves dependent on the source text. They transfer some pieces, translate others as they are. Those parts they consider important are trans- ferred in an expanded form, to which they have added their own thoughts and feelings. They transform the work in such a way that it would not at all be right to name such work a translation (¢eviri)”. (ibid.) Here, Levend seems to draw our attention to the distinction he made in his initial statement between Ottoman terceme and the modern Turkish sense of geviri. His explanation for “expanded translations” is intended to define terceme as an Otto- man practice of translation in opposition to geviri, which in his mind seems to stand for something like ‘translation proper’. But we have to be careful, for Levend’s explanation lacks in terminological precision. His often indiscriminate reference to ceviri, as in the following statement, generally leads to confusion if not read care- fully: “Although they [poets] sometimes call their work a translation [designated first as geviri, but in the second instance as rerceme], this is out of deference for the source author” (1984: 81). As examples of this practice, Levend cites three works by three poet-translators: Giilsehri’s (14th century) translation of Mantzku’t Tayr by Attar (d.ca. 1220), Kutb’s (14th century) translation of Husrev i Sirin by Nizami (ca.1141-1203/17) and Seyf-i Serayi’s (14th century) translation of Giilistan by Sadi (ca.1213-ca.1292). None of these is, in his view, “translation proper” (tam bir ceviri degildir, ibid.). A fourth example, Nevai’s (1441-1501) Lisanii’t Tayr, a version of Attar’s Persian work mentioned above in Chagatai Turkic, “cannot even be consid- ered a translation” (¢eviri bile sayilmaz, ibid.)."' At this point it becomes fairly clear to me that Levend’s explanation of this particular form of terceme practice is "' Kuth, Seyf-i Serayi and Nevai wrote in Turkic dialects different from early Anatolian Turkish.Paker: Translation as Terceme and Nazire 125 indeed formulated in opposition to the notion of geviri as ‘translation proper’. We can conclude that groups (a) and (b) in his classification conform with his notion of ‘translation proper’, the modern Turkish concept of translation, but group (d) does not. In other words, according to Levend, in groups (a) and (b) terceme and geviri are understood to overlap as concepts and terms, but this is not the case in group (d), where terceme is described as Ottoman culture-bound. Levend’s group (c), literary translations which “transfer subject matter”, also turns out to be problematica. In his section headed “Terciime”,!* Levend says about this group that “authors do not translate the work sentence by sentence, but transfer the meaning in the manner they have grasped” (ibid.). However, in the preceding section headed Nazire and Cevap (parallel and response poetry) he apparently had more to say on the subject, but without any cross-reference to his “Terciime” sec- tion (1984: 70-80). Having stated that “in Islamic literature nazire is not imitation in the modern sense of the word, but a similar poem written in the same metre and rhyme as the work of another poet, in order to honour that poet,’" Levend goes on to explain how poets practised nazire “on a much broader scale in their romance narratives (mesnevi)” by drawing on “common themes”, i.e. the same subject mat- ter as those of acknowledged Persian masters (1984: 70). Zehra Toska (2002: 65) has pointed out that the sixteenth-century literary biog- rapher Latifi praised the poet Seyhi’s (d.ca. 1431) romance narrative Hiisrev ié $irin as a nazire. But we also know that the same work was identified as terceme by other biographers, like Agik Celebi (1520-1572) who had some words of praise for it, and Taci-zade Cafer Celebi (d.1515) who criticized it sharply (cf.Timurtas 1980: 89-90). What is intriguing here, in view of following arguments on nazire in this paper, is that a fifteenth-century work could be described in terms of both terceme and nazire in the sixteenth century, and that it could be criticized as terceme but praised as nazire. In Levend’s view nazire romances treat “common themes”, such as the romance of Leyla and Mecnun, of Hiisrev and Sirin, which “should not be studied in terms of theft, but in terms of differences in treatment and of personal contributions by each poet” (1984: 70). In some cases “only the same metre, rhyme and essence” are adopted, in others the same form of textual segmentation too (1984: 71). Among the many examples which Levend gives in this section of his book, there is also a significant one which is described as “exactly similar” to its Persian source. “It would not be wrong to call this a translation (geviri)”, Levend writes (ibid. ). In view of his explanations on the Ottoman practice of nazire as imitation in the form of parallel or response poetry, ferceme forms in Levend’s group (c) gain a much wider scope or dimension. They are now understood to include nazire. But " See footnote 4. " For the intertextual workings of nazire in lyric poetry, see examples in English translation in Toska (2002:67-10) and Andrews (2002:19-24).126 Crosscultural Transgressions once more it depends on the reader to make this connection. It is also up to the reader to tease out of Levend’s words the opposition between his conception of Ottoman terceme and his notion of ‘translation proper’ expressed in his use of the term ceviri. One of the greatest difficulties for today’s researchers is that this oppo- sition has not been clearly identified or explained by Levend. We have to deduce it from his brief comments, loose explanations and list of examples. ‘To make matters worse, there is hardly any chronological framework in Levend’s above-mentioned sections to guide the student or the non-specialist through his ex- amples. For instance, in the “Terctime” section there are numerous critical comments on ferceme made in verse by individual Ottoman poets, which obviously reflect the practitioners’ time-bound notions. But these comments are far from being informa- tive for lack of context and chronology. For example, the following prose quotation from the sixteenth-century chronicler Nergisi is also included by Levend among the verse comments. It provides us with an important description of two strategies in terceme practice, ‘word for word’ and ‘sense for sense’: “some express the trans- lated words in exactly the same word order” (e/faz-t miitercemeyi bi‘aynihi terkibi ile ta‘birdiir) but are “dull in expression” and lack “clarity” and “rhetorical elegance” (Levend 1984: 83). “The second takes the sense of the (source) language (me’al-i kelamt ahzidiip...) and, in order to pour the inner meaning of the (artistic) language of the original author into the mold of beautiful expression, gives it an attractive polish by means of appropriate words and phrases and compounds and metaphors, so as to confirm and represent the desire of that (original) author in a pleasant form and worthy manner” (ibid.; in Walter Andrews’ translation, quoted in Holbrook 2002: 98). In the same extract in Levend, Nergisi also claims that he himself prac- tises the second type of terceme because he wants to “serve his friends” who, he expects, will not revile him but tolerate his lapses once they have grasped the rea- sons for any expressions added to or omitted from his translation (ibid.). However, there is no indication in Levend’s section that Nergisi was not a poet but an eminent chronicler of the sixteenth century, who wrote in ornate poetic prose. This is yet another instance of lack of context. We must also bear in mind that although Nergisi’s description of two basic types of terceme is helpful, it cannot be taken as the norm that applied to all Ottoman poetic and prose terceme practices over several centu- Ties; it stands as one understanding of translation in the sixteenth century. Levend’s other example in prose is Latifi, who was a poet but also a critic- grapher of poets (1984: 83). About his sixteenth-century contemporaries Latifi wrote: “some poets translate (ferceme) and crib (11 ras) from poets in another language or they observe a meaning and deal with it in a better way, borrowing (iktibas) it. Some distinguished people look favourably on such theft and prefer it to pieces that the poet was following [rendering]”. Although there is refer- ence above to two forms (tzmg and iktibas) of intertextual transfer not mentioned before or after in his section, Levend does not comment on either of them or on their relation to terceme.Paker: Translation as Terceme and Nazire 127 Nevertheless, it is of prime significance for us that Levend has given us a de- scription of what type of texts in his view can be assumed as representing terceme and nazire. Despite the lack of analytical rigour which mars Levend’s presentation and discourse, his statements, groupings and examples are still the principal au- thoritative source on which we can rely for a definition, however loose, of terceme. Or, to be more precise, they constitute, as a whole, his definition of terceme, which seems to me to be the most useful working definition to be adopted in a study of the Ottoman practice of translation — the most useful, because it provides us with au- thoritative criteria to make assumptions on what ferceme might be, in a very broad field where many instances of terceme appear to lie concealed (Toury 1995: 31-35, 70-71; cf. Paker and Toska 1997: 80,87-88). There are a few more points to be clarified at this juncture, with special refer- ence to translation (in English). In describing the field of of terceme — from which, I conclude, emerges a culture-bound concept — Levend identifies some forms of Ottoman translational behaviour as conforming to the modern Turkish concept of geviri, others as not. That is, his criterion for identifying terceme has recourse to ceviri, which is the closest Turkish term to correspond to the modern concept of translation (in English) but which itself is a culture-bound concept. $ehnaz Tahir- Girgaglar (2001: 150-226) has recently demonstrated in her analysis of the Turkish discourse on translation from 1923 till the 1960s, that the modern Turkish notion of translation was construed over at least four decades of debate and discussion on the functions, definitions and strategies of translation, using both the old terms terceme or ferciime and the modern verb gevir-mek and its various derivatives. This culmi- nated in what I conclude to be the consensus on the modern concept as geviri. As researchers, therefore, we have to bear in mind that there are two principal notions of translation in the continuity of Turkish culture. The relationship between terceme and geviri is similar to that between traductio (corresponding to terceme) and translatio (corresponding to geviri) as discussed by André Lefevere (1990). But it is also different in one significant respect: the Turkish distinction has to be con- nected to a modern nation-building process and a concomitant ideological revolution which aimed at a political and cultural break with the past. Terceme and geviri are to be taken as both culture-bound and time-bound, each pointing to the other’s cul- tural otherness. Recognizing this seems to be part of the process of rethinking rupture in terms of changes in cultural continuity." In revisiting Gideon Toury’s In Search of a Theory of Translation, Theo Hermans raised the question: “If we are trying to gauge Amharic tirgum [which incidentally is identical in etymology with terceme, SP], do we take translation [i.e. the culture- bound “concept of translation as it exists in modern English usage”] or translation, [as an assumed universal, supra-lingual concept] as a basis?” (1995: 221). Before '* See footnote 4, on the co-existence of the old and the new as terciime and geviri..128 Crosscultural Transgressions commenting on this question, I would first like to focus on Hermans’ own response, which is centred on “we as researchers”, that is, “we” as the subject, who will have to account for the fact that we have no option other than to approach tirgum — or whatever terms are used, say, in medieval European cultures or by the Nambikwara of the Amazon region ~ as members of a particular cul- ture who have construed the concept of translation in a certain manner. (ibid.) For me, the question here is who is “we”? If “we” refers to the community of schol- ars who operate in a monolingual area by taking English as their sole or most important basis of reference, then this would signify a one-way, Anglo-centric im- portation and interpretation of data from lesser known or ancient cultures (and one that would give weight to the way they are processed in English). But if we think of the subject as scholars representing different cultures who offer their data both in the language of that culture and in English, this would mean that we expect those scholars, rather than the Anglo-centric ‘observer’-cum-interpreter, to contribute to (at least) a bilingual discussion, by providing a context, a definition or an interpre- tation of tirgum or any other concept they are dealing with. 1 am inclined to think it is the latter condition Hermans has in mind when he draws attention to the need for “renewed questioning of exactly what kind of cultural translation they [i.e. “transla- tion scholars, who are constantly dealing with cultural otherness” are performing when they are interpreting — Luse the word advisedly — different concepts of trans- lation” (1995: 222). ‘The need for “renewed questioning” in this respect applies not only to thinking and formulating in English, but also in Turkish. In view of the proliferation of hi torical translation studies carried out both in English and in Turkish, we have to bear in mind that the cultural specificity of terms and concepts needs problematizing rather than glossing over. The ways in which terceme has been de-problematized or explained away in Turkish is a case in point. I would argue that an awareness of this can in fact lead the way, if we are prepared to follow it, to the heart of some of the difficulties in the historical and current paradigms of Turkish research. 4. How terceme was de-problematized Going back to Hermans’ question (cf. 1995: 221) quoted above, it is worth em- phasizing its relevance also in terms of the Ottoman Turkish context: if we (modern scholars) are trying to figure out what terceme is, do we take “as our basis” geviri, our modern culture-bound concept connoting fidelity to the source text, hence minimum tampering with its fullness, or something that seems to function like a ‘universal’ as in Hermans’ “translation,”? In view of the analy- sis of Levend I have presented so far, I think the answer is clear. It is our (i.e. the researchers’) ‘universal’ concept. For it is this ‘universal’ notion that seemsPaker: Translation as Terceme and Nazire 129 to stand for an awareness, a recognition of the distinction between our modern, culture-specific concept of translation and what we expect to find as translation in Ottoman culture, If this distinction has so far been overlooked or remained unformulated, it is due to the fact that rerceme as an ensemble of translational practices was de-problematized. I think one of the most important reasons for this is that modern Turkish schol- ars, including Levend (who came close to some form of problematization but failed to clarify his terms), have followed a certain ideological paradigm in scholarship. This had been established over the years as a result of the widely influential studies of Mehmed Fuad Képriilii (1890-1966), a pioneering modern historian, literary cul- tural critic and a prolific scholar of exceptional erudition. Actively involved in the cultural movement underlying the Turkish nation-building process, Képriilii set up the Institute of Turcology (Tiirkiyat Enstitiisii) in the University of Istanbul in 1924, a year after the foundation of the Republic. The nationalist paradigm his work set for Ottoman literary scholarship in republican Turkey was adopted by following generations both in terms of ideology and methodology. Pre-Ottoman and Ottoman Turkish was examined in terms of gradual contamination by an increasing Perso- Arabic linguistic influence: an artificial literary language was thought to have been wrought for the élite (in the so-called Divan literature), as opposed to the Turkish discourse of folk poets such as that of the (13th-century) mystic Yunus Emre. The Divan poets, in adapting syllabic Turkish to the Perso-Arabic aruz metre, were con- sidered instrumental in forging the ‘artificial’ Ottoman poetic discourse, American scholars in Ottoman literature, Walter Andrews (1985) and Victoria Holbrook (1994), have argued that such views were and still are motivated by the early ideology of the Turkish nation-state, reflected in ‘narratives’ (or in discourse) which reconstructed Ottoman culture in terms of a dichotomy, i.e. two mutually alienated, isolated enti- ties (the people and the court) in order to justify dissociating the élitism of the Ottoman past from the populism of the Turkish republic. In such a context, linguistic and poetic inventiveness or originality in Turkish became important elements for literary studies to seek, locate and foreground, while translations identified as terceme by their authors or by tradition were su- perficially evaluated in terms of the modern concept of fidelity. Reluctance to discuss in terms of terceme those works that were judged not faithful but some- thing different, led to the de-problematization of the Ottoman terceme practice. Intertextual transfer from Persian and Arabic was examined mostly in terms of ‘influence’ emerging from a common Islamic heritage of linguistic, literary and cultural conventions, not in terms of translation.'* 6 This approach which conceals translations, is abundantly clear in Levend’s (1984: 44-51) “Comparative Literature” section where the focus is on “imitation” and “influence”, without any reference to terceme.130 Crosscultural Transgressions In her critical review of Képriilii’s Edebiyat Arastirmalart (Literary Research, 1966), Ebru Diriker has observed that in this work Képriilii used the terms terceme and taklid (imitation), miitercim (translator) and mukallid/taklitgi (imi- tator) interchangeably; and that his tendency was to dismiss ‘faithful’ terceme and elevate those that were expanded or abridged in ways that enriched Turkish culture in fine Turkish (Diriker 1997: 97). Works rendered into Turkish with minimum Persian contamination, were, in Képriilii’s view, of great merit. For instance, evaluating Giilsehri (14th century)’s translation of Attar’s Persian Mantiku’t Tayr, Képriilii wrote: This great poet, who seems to have produced not a casual translation (gelisigiizel bir terceme) but a work of his own, was well aware of the signifi- cance of what he was doing, He said that his work was no less worthy than the Persian Manttku’t-Tayr and that no one before him had produced as fine a work in Turkish (1966 1:274-275; 1993:239-241) Képriilii accepted Gillsehri’s self-assessment but ranked him not specifically as a translator but as a poet who made an important contribution to Turkish poetry, es- pecially by his inventive use of additional poetic sources (ibid. ). Thus, in Diriker’s words, “the translator [in this case, Giilsehri ] was made ‘visible’, but no longer considered a translator” by Képriilii (Diriker 1997: 97). This sums up what I mean by ‘terceme de-problematized’ . Comparing Levend’s comments (below) on the same ion, we find that his last statement illustrates yet another attempt to : “For example Giilsehri’s translation of Attar’s Mant eku’t Tayr and [...] are not proper translations (ceviri). The authors have made many contributions of their own while translating (¢evirirken). They have designated their works as terceme (or is it terciime) out of deference to the author of the source text whom they considered a master” (Levend 1984; 81). Referring to such statements, Zehra Toska writes: “Even though Levend describes such works as ‘expanded transla- tions’, he also says that ‘one cannot call them translations’. How then is it possible for us to distinguish them from original works?” (2002: 63). Similar questions that have been coming up repeatedly in our Bogazigi University project seem to arise not only from such conceptual and terminological ambiguity as in the use of terceme and geviri in Levend’s discourse, but more importantly from a gen- eral literary-ideological thrust to “conceal” (cf. Toury 1995) terceme in order to highlight what was thought to be innovative and original and contributing to Turkish poetry and culture. It cannot be said that Képriilii which there is criticism of imitative and plagiarizing practices in translz as tolerance for the interventions of competent, manipulative poet-translators. But the distinction Képriilii made between, on the one hand, translators as imitators and, on the other, poets who used their talent to make worthwhile individual liverged from the Ottoman literary discourse in ‘ion as wellPaker: Translation as Terceme and Nazire 131 contributions to the source texts they worked on, was instrumental in (a) restrict- ing the researchers’ scope in examining Ottoman terceme practice and (b) de-problematizing its diversity, thereby (c) erasing ferceme from Turkish literary- critical discourse as a functional concept for linguistic, literary and cultural analysis.'® In this context it is important that Zehra Toska, a scholar in Ottoman literature who leads the second Bogazigi University project, criticizes tendencies in current research to gloss over the translational features of work by Ottoman poets (2002: 59-61). Itis equally important that she draws attention to a need for studying the work of Ottoman biographers of poets to see if their terminology (such as nazire) can be adopted in describing translations today (2002: 66). 5. Problematizing aspects of Ottoman translation practice in terms of translation (in English) In this section, and in the following one, I shall focus on two recent essays, one by Victoria Holbrook (2002), the other by Walter Andrews (2002). Both Andrews and Holbrook ground their arguments in the notion of a shared Perso-Ottoman language of poetry and culture. They also foreground poets as agents of translation and trans- mission. These points help in reinforcing the connection between poet-translators and the notion of an ‘Ottoman interculture’ in my conceptual framework. In her essay Victoria Holbrook reviews Ottoman literary translation practice in terms of “outright” and “concealed” translation. The context for both is set in a discussion about literature by the followers of the Persian mystic poet Mevlana Celaleddin-i Rumi (d.1273) for the dissemination of his mystical precepts, that is, in an intercultural domain shared by Turkish, Persian and Arabic. Holbrook’s no- tion of “concealed” translation covers strategies of transfer in which the cultural context that gave rise to them remains hidden. She defines “outright” translation as “translation in the conventional sense” (2001: 13). Her subsequent reference to the sixteenth-century chronicler Nergisi shows that “outright” corresponds to his de- scription of literal translation. His words on free translation, on the other hand, are interpreted as “reworkings of thematic material which exhibited the independence of Ottoman style [...], praised for their originality"(ibid.), that is, an activity akin to the nazire/imitatio practice which will be discussed below, It will be remembered, however, that Nergisi described each strategy specifically as a form of terceme. We must bear this in mind while reading Holbrook’s statements below, which follow upon her contention that “outright” translation was no longer practiced by the six- teenth century, i.c. once Ottoman imperial authority had been firmly established: © Amil Gelebioglu’s (1999) study of thirteenth- and fifteenth-century mesnevi narratives is the most recent example of the restricted and de-problematized view of rerceme practice.132 Crosscultural Transgressions Once Arabic-Persian-Islamic literate culture had been absorbed by a suffi- ciently large Turkish-speaking but multilingual coterie, from which the ruling classes of a now vast empire were drawn, there was no reason to produce translations; they could read the originals, they were writing works in Ara- bic and Persian as well as Turkish, and Ottoman Turkish had achieved widespread authority as a literary language. The conditions favorable to cultural transfer from Persian had ceased to obtain; the culture which had been assimilated was no longer regarded as foreign, but rather as part of the ‘organization of life’ in Even-Zohar’s phrase, and so did not need to be translated, (2002: 99) It is difficult to see why there should be no need to translate, unless we connect “cultural transfer” in the above context to Holbrook’s view that “medieval transla- tion [for purposes of acculturation] from Persian and Arabic into Turkish in general ceased to be a significant activity among the Ottomans” by the middle or end of the fifteenth century (2002: 97). At this point my main questions are: can we assume that all translations in the early period were “outright” or literal translations? And, even if we accept that “outright translation” came to an end by the sixteenth cen- tury, how do we account for so many texts identified as ferceme in the Ottoman tradition up to the early twentieth century? Since Holbrook does not refer to the practice of translation as the Ottomans named it, one can only conclude from the above quotation that Ottoman translation practice before the sixteenth century, is judged not in terms of the culture-bound serceme but in terms of “translation in the conventional sense”; and that the latter appears to stand for a concept covering both English and Ottoman, involving not much more than literal interlingual transfer. Intentional or not, terceme as a culture-bound practice and notion is erased from Holbrook’s discourse. Holbrook’s main concern, however, lies in certain forms of “concealed” transla- tion, the most significant one of which, in my view, involves the politics of Ottoman culture and language. In her discussion of the poetic transmission of Rumi’s literary mystical tradition, Holbrook leads us to consider some forms of “concealed transla- tion”. About the most significant of these she says: It may be true that texts assumed to be translations in their time also con- ceal - by not mentioning, not revealing — what may likely have been fierce contests [i.e. between Turkish and Persian] for power and identity intimately connected with language by way of the changing status of one language, and the form of political power associated with it, relative to another (2002: 94). Holbrook’s subsequent reference to “nationalist-teleologist judgements” (ibid.) which have ignored the implications of such concealment, brings to mind certain points which we could connect to the use of Persian and Arabic in Ottoman trans- lations, and the way it has been interpreted by modern Turkish scholars.Paker: Translation as Terceme and Nazire 133 Some comments by Cem Dilgin on the poet-translator Hoca Mesud (d. ca.1370), for instance, may serve to illustrate this point. Hoca Mesud in the formal ending (“hatm siiden-i kitab ve dzr averden”) or epilogue to his Siiheyl ii Nevbahar (Persian source-text unidentified), states that he “translated word for word” (lafzen- be-lafz eylediim terciime; Dilgin 1991: 575). Mesud also complains of the difficulties he encountered in translating poetry into Turkish and refers specifically to metric constraints: (literally) “when the Arabic or Persian wording is rendered in Turk- ish verse, sometimes it is in harmony with the original, sometimes it is not, because the metre does not accept it” (Dilgin 1991: 574, 11.5593-4). Cem Dilgin, in his excellent critical edition of Siiheyl ii Nevbahar, attributes Hoca Mesud’s com- plaints and certain flaws in his Turkish verse to the fact that the poet did not have accomplished mentors (like Persians) to follow in Turkish; he explains that if, in a period where Persian poets were so influential on Turkish literature, Hoca Mesud “had filled up his language with Persian and Arabic words, as did the poets in later centuries, that way of writing too would have been severely criticized today Contrary to our expectation, it is significant that he produced works in plain Turk- ish” (Dilgin 1991: 19). Such an explanation seems to overlook in Hoca Mesud’s words possible hints of a poetic-linguistic struggle between the pull of Persian and Turkish. At the same time it gives expression to a certain ideological anx- iousness to emphasize the importance of plain Turkish against that ‘contaminated’ by Persian and Arabic. Hoca Mesud is not the only one among the early poets and writers to complain about the constraints of Turkish on his work. Dilgin himself has drawn attention to several: Giilgehri, Seyhoglu, Agrk Pasa, Sarica Kemal (1991: 6-7,19). Kadi-i Manyas is another (Ozkan 1993: 10). We cannot ignore the fact that in the four- teenth and fifteenth centuries poets themselves found it a problem to express themselves in Turkish. Levend (1984: 83-87) quotes many examples, mostly from poets of the sixteenth century, who took pains to show that, in their verse, they shunned translating Persian poets. It is worth looking deeper into the context of such statements and their possible underlying reasons. Why indeed did those po- ets protest so much? Was it simply to draw attention to the difficulty of finding precise Turkish correspondences to Perso-Arabic lexical and metric elements, or were they also acknowledging certain pressures and tensions in a struggle for dominance between Turkish and Persian linguistic and cultural identities — tensions which remain hidden from view until we tease them out? This is what Holbrook may have been pointing to in her reference (above) to translations that conceal. However, the related question of Perso-Arabic preponderance in the Ot- toman translations after the fifteenth century, which I shall illustrate below with +" In his statement of purpose, Hoca Mesud specifically identifies himself as a terceman (transla- tor): “sebeb-1_nazm-1 terceman-1 in-kitab” (Dilgin 1991; 213). He also defines his activity in terms of (literally) “doing a commentary (seth eyleyem Tiirkice)” (Dilgin 1991: 218),134 Crosscultural Transgressions some examples, is also relevant to Holbrook’s argument for the end of “outright translation” in the sixteenth century. Zehra Toska and Nedret Kuran-Burgoglu point out that a random episode taken from Zaifi’s (16th century) translation of Attar’s Mantiku't Tayr kept unchanged up to 70 words out of 136 in the Persian source-text (1996: 259), i.e. more than half. But we have to bear in mind that Persian poetic source-texts already contained Ara- bic elements; that the number of Arabic lexical items syntactically incorporated in an episode in Persian prose (in Sadi’s Giilistan, for example) could be as high as fifty percent or even higher (Apak 1999: 28, 31). So Ottoman translators working on Persian source-texts were dealing with an already hybrid poetic language. An- other comparative study of a random episode taken from sixteen versions of the Persian prose-and-verse classic Giilistan by Sadi (d.1291), shows that 26 of the 28 Arabic words as well as 17 of the 27 Persian words in the source-text were kept in the translations ranging from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries; that in the versions up to the twentieth century more correspondences were found in Arabic rather than Turkish to translate the Persian work, and that the overall number of Arabic elements reached over fifty percent of the total lexical items in the seven- teenth and cighteenth-century versions (Apak 1999: 28, 31-32). In his comparative study on five translations of Mantsku’t-Tayr, Cem Dilgin reminds us that while the earlier translators of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were largely concerned with translating “the meaning” into Turkish, the poets Kadizade Mehmed and Zaifi (16th century) and Fedai Dede (17th century) also tried to preserve the Perso-Arabic stylistic and narrative features of their source-texts (Dilgin 1993: 36). In this context of obvious trilingual hybridity, it is perhaps easier to understand the reasons for Victoria Holbrook’s contention that “outright”, i.e. literal transla- tion, had lost its importance by the sixteenth century. 6. Problematizing nazire The erasure of rerceme observed in Victoria Holbrook’s discourse is also to be seen in Walter Andrews’ arguments in “Starting Over Again: Some Suggestions for Re- thinking Ottoman Divan Poetry in the Context of Translation and Transmission” (2002). Here we find a groundbreaking problematization of “nazire (imitatio)”, in terms of its creative translational function in parallel and response poetry (2002: 19)."8 Nazire appears as the culture-bound concept of translation par excellence, in opposition to “substitutive translation”, which I read as Andrews’ English for terceme (and Holbrook’s “outright translation”). ‘Andrews begins by pointing to the problem he has “separating out what we usu- ally think of as ‘translation’ from a spectrum of activities, some of which would "© Cf, Levend (1984: 70-80) on nazire (imitatio) and cevap (response) practices and Toska (2002: 65-6) on nazire, referred to above.Paker: Translation as Terceme and Nazire 135 correspond to anybody’s definition of ‘translation’ and some which would not”; he adds: “it is precisely the activities which seem the least like ‘translation’ that inter- est me the most as instances of translation” (2002: 15). Here I note the distinction Andrews makes between a modern concept of translation and a specific one, nazire. By drawing on Harold Bloom’s notion of “inter-poem” and relating it to the wide range of “parallel or competitive or response poems”, “additive poems” and “allu- sive poems” in the Ottoman poetic repertoire, Andrews urges an exploration of translation in terms of intertextuality. He concludes that “by recognizing relation- ships between poems that are ‘primary’ and ‘creative’ (as the now common notion of ‘rewriting’ already implies) in addition to those relationships that we think of as secondary and to some degree ‘substitutive’ we are induced to ask some quite unu- sual questions about translation” (2002: 16-17). ‘Andrews argues that nazire most commonly served as the means of translating other Ottoman lyrics as well as Persian lyric poetry, except in cases of “outright theft” (2002; 25). In his view, the nazire form is also important for “understanding how the development, transmission, and dissemination of the Perso-Ottoman episteme occurred from the early fifteenth century on” (2002: 19). It is important at this stage to see nazire as a metaphor in itself: Itis in the nature of Ottoman nazire (and nazire-like gestures) to efface bor- ders (or to elide ‘difference’ in a hegemonic way). Just as itis in the nature of ‘translation’ — in the most limited sense ~ to reinforce them [...] The similarity implicit in the notion of nazire reflects or tropes a sense of essential similar- ity at the level of poetic (or poeticised) language that extends across the languages of the epistemic domain. (2002: 33) Because they are languages belonging to the same “epistemic domain”, Andrews finds the Ottoman, Persian and Urdu poetic languages mutually “untranslatable” in the sense Walter Benjamin uses it with reference to “sacred” texts (ibid.); it is im- plied, therefore, that we should not be thinking of Ottoman Turkish translations of Persian poetry. Instead, Andrews argues, we ought to be looking at how the Otto- man poetic language was transmitted or translated “into other sociolects of Turkish”, e.g. from the idiom of the to that of the populace. [Because the language of Ottoman literature is the central productive agent of the Ottoman culturaV/epistemic universe, it is transmission and translation from this language that establishes the character of Western Turkish in the Ottoman period and becomes the primary ancestor of today’s Turkish. (An- drews 2002: 28-29) (my italics, SP) Andrews is thus pointing to an area of intra-lingual transfer” which has escaped °° Intra-lingual translation into modern Turkish still continues for post-republican generations so that they can understand texts in Ottoman Turkish.136 Crosscultural Transgressions critical notice due to adherance on the part of scholars to the notion of Turkish as a “national core language”, whereby Ottoman Turkish is considered contaminated by Persian and Arabic. He assumes that “an intermediate class of poets and storytell- ers” who were instrumental in introducing Turkish into the courts of Persian-speaking princes in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries “went on to mediate between the Persianized Turkish of the elites and the language of the populace, constantly recre- ating (through various kinds of “translation”) the vocabulary and sentences of Turkish” (2002: 35). This form of intralingual translation Andrews regards as a different kind of activity (and one more worthy of study in terms of ‘translation’) than what he calls “substitutive translation”. He reminds us that the latter, close to “slavish imitation”, was held in contempt by some Ottoman poets and literary biographers because they knew how thin the line was between Ottoman and Persian poetry (2002: 30). His examples from certain poets who express their contempt show, as expected, that they were actually referring to ferceme, a term Andrews never actually uses. Clearly the reason is that he regards this term as an example of Borgesian hrénir, perpetu- ated by “our [i.c. Turkish] scholarly tradition [that] has insisted - based on the presumed lucidity of the present — that they [the poets] were indeed translating, and were indeed imitating” (ibid.).Here 1 think Andrews is right in being critical of scholarship because it has failed to observe and to study certain cultural specificities like nazire in Ottoman translation. This is one of the main points of my argument. But in equating terceme (or any other term in Turkish to denote ‘translation’) with a modern concept of translation (in English) to which he refers at the beginning of his essay as “anybody’s definition of translation”, Andrews too seems to be overlook- ing a certain culture-specific practice If we are to re-examine certain established assumptions in the light of what the Ottomans said about themselves and their works, first we have to bear in mind that what the Ottomans referred to so often as terceme seems to be an important activity which they continued to engage in and struggle with in their cultural life. Secondly, we also have to be aware of a certain ambiguity in modern Turkish literary-critical discourse. This discourse, which Andrews is critical of, depends heavily on terceme (or terciime) as a term which is used to refer to and identify certain works in the Ottoman tradition, or to dismiss certain works and elevate others, but not on ferceme as a culture-specific, functional concept. Scholarship has de-problematized the con- cept, taking as its basis, the modern notion of translation (i.e. what geviri seems to stands for) not ferceme as a culture-bound notion. Therefore, in my view, their in- sistence on “translation”, to which Andrews refers above, remains inconsequential. To sum up, the strength of Andrews’ argument for nazire as a creative trans- lation practice and a culture-bound concept makes it imperative to include it in a conceptual framework intended to expand the researchers’ field of inquiry in Ottoman translation history. In problematizing nazire as creative translation, An- drews has foregrounded the active agency of Ottoman poets deeply involved inPaker: Translation as Terceme and Nazire 137 intertextual operations in an intercultural space. Within that same space he has also drawn attention to the role of intra-lingual translators as mediators between canoni- cal and popular poetry. His arguments serve as an excellent introduction to the concept of ‘interculture’. 7. Ottoman interculture Anthony Pym, in his initial broad definition of “interculture”, uses the concept “to refer to beliefs and practices found in intersections or overlaps of cultures, where people combine something of two or more cultures at once” (1998: 177). More recently, he has argued for “at least two definitional constraints”: that “people” should be groups of a more or less professional status, and that the “intersections” should be considered hierarchically “secondary to a division of cultures” because “as soon as the line between cultures becomes non-operative, as soon as there is no functional barrier to overcome, interculturality loses its derivative status and be- comes indistinguishable from general cultural practice” (2000: 5). Pym also points out that, however loose, these restrictions should warn us against “any universalist common base shared by different cultures” (ibid.) — such as ‘a common Islamic culture’. Thus, an Ottoman interculture would have to be conceptualized in the in- tersection of three cultures (Persian, Arabic and Turkish), as the trilingual, tricultural site of operation of Ottoman poet-translators.” While ‘interculture’ seems to be a simple construct, the notion of an Ottoman interculture certainly is not. Its very simplicity, or flexibility, lends itself to a much wider range of studies on the work and the practices of the Ottoman poet-translators, allowing researchers to adopt, if they wish, within the frame of ‘interculture’, such postcolonial theoretical con- structs as Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact zone” (1992: 6-7) or Homi Bhabha’s “hybridity"(1996: 58).”" Given the systemic foundations of the conceptual framework I have in mind, my interest at this point concerns the question whether an Ottoman interculture can also be conceived of as a system in its own right. Taking up Gideon Toury’s refer- ence to “intercultures” (Toury 1995: 172n), Pym criticizes Toury for failing to deal ® Rina Drory, in a most interesting article (on a Hebrew work modelled on an Arabic genre in the cultural climate of Christian Spain, by al-Harizi, a Jewish author of the twelth century) draws attention to a point often forgotten: “very often we find cultural dynamics to be much more complex and elaborate, as literary contacts and relationships are often established among more than two literatures concurrently, and in ways more subtle and intricate than can be defined as the ‘influence’ of one literature over the other [...] At times a whole cultural context has to be reconstructed in order to understand the actual circumstances that made possible the writing or production of a particular text” (1994: 66), In fact, in view of the arguments below, I think studies on “the hybrid strategy [e.g. in the Ottoman nazire or terceme] or discourse [which] opens up a space of negotiation where power is unequal but its articulation is equivocal”, would be of primary significance (Bhabha 1996: 58).138 Crosscultural Transgressions with this concept effectively, arguing that thinking the concept through would have “upset numerous other parts of his theory” (1998: 180). In his discussion Pym draws attention to a point which is rather important from our perspective: “[...] Toury naturally finds substantial interculturality ‘totally unthinkable’, declaring that ‘as Jong as a (hypothetical) interculture has not crystallized into an autonomous (tar- get!) systemic entity [...] itis necessarily part of an existing (target!) system’” (ibid.). However, Toury’s actual statement contains two crucial points (underlined below) which Pym has omitted from his quotation. Toury writes: What is totally unthinkable is that a translation may hover in between cul- tures, so to speak: as long as an (hypothetical) interculture has not crystallized into an autonomous (target!) systemic entity, e.g., in processes analogous to pidginization and creolization, it is necessarily part of an existing (target!) system. (1995: 28) Would it be possible to argue that Ottoman literature and culture had in fact “crys- tallized into an autonomous systemic entity” through a process similar to that delineated by Walter Andrews? Here is Andrews, who in this instance takes his cue from Richard Rorty: New usages, new meanings, new words come about, he [Rorty] argues, as metaphors gradually become concrete. Thus literary and especially poetic usage, in which words are constantly thrust into new relations, are primary generators of the language that makes new conditions of knowledge possi- ble. [...][IJt seems indisputable that new literary languages arise at times of major change and share certain salient characteristics. For example, the new language is a major departure from the old literary language (i.e. it is not explicable solely as a development of the old language), it is chock-a-block full of foreign elements, it is often the product of a multi-lingual élite, it is contaminated by ‘translation’, it is ungrammatical (in that its features are not fixed by a formal exposition). The language of Ottoman poetry is certainly like this, but so too are New Persian, the Arabic, Hebrew, and Spanish of al- Andalus, Provengal, Middle English (...] If we take the position that the Ottoman literary language developed (much as New Persian developed) as the lingua franca of a new cultural, territorial, linguistic, and epistemic domain, then it is precisely ‘its nature’ to do the things it does, to write the poems it writes in the rhythms and words it uses. The vocabulary it shares with Persian, and Arabic or Perso-Arabic (not to mention with Greek and Italian) are its own vocabulary and not something ‘borrowed’ from somewhere else. (Andrews 2002: 27) In view of Toury’s and Andrews’ arguments, the answer is yes: we can think of the Ottoman literary-epistemic domain as an interculture that had evolved through hy- bridization by the sixteenth century.Paker; Translation as Terceme and Nazire (py Would it then also be possible to hypothesize, insofar as Ottoman interculture- as-a-system is concerned, that Persian and Arabic literatures and cultures served as sources for Ottoman, while Perso-Ottoman literature and culture functioned prima- rily as target for Arabic and Persian? If we accept the following argument by Andrews, our answer is again positive: The scope of ‘Ottoman Turkish’ and ‘Ottoman culture’ includes and sub- sumes Persian (and later Urdu) culture, just as Persian (and Urdu) culture includes and subsumes Ottoman. (And itis important to suggest, without elabo- ration, that this reciprocity does not appear to extend to Arabic literature, which is subsumed in the Perso-Ottoman-Urdu universe of discourse but does not include it or participate in it). (Andrews 2002: 33)” Thus we can conceptualize Ottoman interculture as a literary and cultural sys- tem in itself, where Ottoman translators received and processed Persian and Arabic sources. In view of the arguments offered by Andrews, we can conceive of Ottoman poet-translators as operating in Toury’s “in between cultures” (or in Bhabha’s “cul- ture’s in-between”), producing works, creative or substitutive, that conformed to norms of hybridization they negotiated in the intercultural space in which, we as- sume, they were situated. From this perspective the concept of Ottoman interculture-as-a-system could also serve as an excellent context for the study of literary-critical encyclopedic biographies of Ottoman poets, generally written by poets who had important things to say about translation and translators in their criti- cal evaluations (cf. Toska 2002: 64-65)" and whose views reflected changing perceptions of translation practices. 8. Conclusion In the preceding pages I have outlined a conceptual framework based on a problematization of Ottoman literary translation practices in terms of terceme and ® This explanation brings greater clarity and precision to the view expressed by Zehra Toska in the following statement: “Although each reflects its own particular linguistic and cultural charac- teristics, it would not be wrong to claim that Arabic, Persian and Turkish literatures form, in @ network of relationships, a common cultural system based on Islam” (2002; 72) ® Harun Tolasa (1983: 322), in his study of three pioneering Ottoman critic-biographers of the sixteenth century, states that they were careful to indicate not only the language (Arabic, Persian or Turkish) in which the poet had chosen to write, but also if it was “original” or “translated” Although their remarks were generally brief, the biographers took noticeable care to point this, ‘out. Tolasa comments that his three critic biographer “do not essentially object to translating. On the contrary, they offer appreciative remarks on successful interventions and additions to the content of the work, and on the personal stylistic features of the translator. However, they also expose, or severely criticize those who pretended or professed to be original, but were detected to have produced transtations, imitations or examples of theft” (ibid.).140 Crosscultural Transgressions nazire in an intercultural systemic context. From the general research perspective, the arguments leading up to and centring on interculturality are intended to call for a broader critical outlook on the diverse practices of poet-translators, from the lit- eral/substitutive to creative forms such as parallel and competitive poetry, subsumed in this paper under the concept of nazire/imitatio. The distinction drawn by Walter Andrews between creative and substitutive translation is taken not as a binary op- position between nazire and terceme but as indicating a spectrum of Ottoman literary translational activities. The conceptual framework is suggested to help define the field of inquiry as much as to question established approaches to Ottoman transla- tions. The arguments for the problematization of terceme and nazire call for special attention to these concepts in scholarly discourse, be it in Turkish or English. An understanding of their cultural specificity, and their revival as functional terms to be used in the modern scholarly discourse on literary translation history, will bring conceptual and terminological clarity to research. Examination of terceme and nazire practice necessarily involves the study of poet-translators and their strategies deriving from their linguistic, literary and cul- tural interaction with Persian and/or Arabic source texts (assumed or clearly identified) and their authors, as well as with the work of previous and contemporary Ottoman poet-translators; such interaction can involve both rivalry and deference. In this context, the concept of Ottoman interculture as a tri-cultural (Turkish, Per- sian, Arabic) site for the activity of poet-translators and their work gains major importance. A critical ability to observe the implications of the notion of an Otto- man interculture continuing well into the twentieth century can be effective in decentring the established nationalist paradigm of research in literary history. Intertextuality and linguistic hybridization can be examined more objectively in the framework of an Ottoman interculture that is conceived as gradually gaining sys- temic autonomy. The framework can accommodate not only canonical poets and their translational work on Persian and Arabic sources but also non-canonical ones who may be assumed to have translated from Perso-Ottoman into popular Turkish. Seeking and finding answers to such questions as what linguistic and literary strategies poet-translators used, how they responded to the work of other poets, Ottoman or Persian, how their works were described, evaluated and interpreted by the literary biographers (cf. Toska 2002: 64-65) will no doubt illuminate how trans- lation in its many forms was practised at specific times over many centuries. Close inspection and description will reveal to what extent the basic distinction between substitutive and creative translation can be useful in interpreting the translational aspects of individual works, and in observing changes in the concept of terceme (for example, hinted at by the literary biographers) in the course of time. The find- ings would serve as reminder that the practice and notion of terceme should not be regarded as unchanging over several hundred years, not even in a single century. Though certain generalizations about (e.g. linguistic) differences between, say, early and later translations may sometimes be useful, they blind us to undercurrents ofPaker: Translation as Terceme and Nazire 141 cultural change. The systemic aspect of Ottoman interculture is important in reminding us of change. Studied in the context of an interculture that evolved into a system with centre-periphery relations which could not have remained static for long, terceme and nazire will be seen to answer more questions than we as researchers have so far put into words.* References Andrews, Walter G. (1985) Poetry’s Voice, Society's Song, Ottoman Lyric Poetry, Seattle & London: University of Washington Press. (1997) ‘Ottoman Lyrics: Introductory Essay’, in Waller G. Andrews, Najaat Black, Mehmet Kalpakli (ed. & trans.) Ottoman Lyric Poetry. An Anthology, Austin: Uni- versity of Texas Press, 3-23. — (2002) ‘Starting Over Again: Some Suggestions for Rethinking Ottoman Divan Po- etry in the Context of Translation and Transmission’, in Paker (2002:15-40). Apak, Fundagtil (1999) Giilistan’ m “Gemideki Kéle” Hikayesi: Terciimelerdeki Bag- laclar (The tale of “The slave on the boat” in Giilistan: conjunctions in the translations), unpublished M.A. thesis, Bogazigi University, Istanbul. Berk, Ozlem (1999) Translation and Westernisation in Turkey (from the 1840s to the 1980s), unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Centre for British and Comparative Cultural Stud- ies, University of Warwick. Bhabha, Homi K. (1996) ‘Culture, In-Between’, in Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay (eds) Questions of Cultural Identity, Sage Publications, 53-60. Bloom, Harold (1983) Kabbalah and Criticism, New York: Continuum. Gelebioglu, Amil (1999) Tiirk Edebiyatmda Mesnevi — XV. yiizyila kadar (The Mesnevi in Turkish Literature ~ to the fifteenth century), Istanbul: Kitabevi. Dilgin, Cem (1991) Mes’ud bin Ahmed, Sitheyl ii Nev-bahar, dnceleme-Metin-Sdzluk, (Critical edition of Mes'ud bin Ahmed’ Siihey! ii Nev-bahar) Ankara: Atatiirk Kiiltiir Merkezi Yaysnlart. = (1993) ‘Mantuku't-Tayr'in Manzum Gevirileri Uzerine Bir Karstlastirma’ (A com- parison of the verse translations of Mantiku't-Tayr), Fakiilte Dergisi Says 369, Ankara: ‘Ankara Universitesi, Dil ve Tarih-Cografya Fakiiltesi. Diriker, Ebru (1997) ‘Mehmed Fuad Képriili: Tarih Boyunca Ceviri ve Ceviri Eserlere bir Bakis" (Mehmed Fuad Képrili’s views on translation and translated literature), in Hasan Anamur (ed) Hommage a Hasan Ali Yiicel / Anma Kitabi, istanbul: Yildi Teknik Universitesi, 89-98. Drory, Rina (1994) ‘Al-Harizi’s Maqamat: A Tricultural Literary Product?” in Roger Ellis and Ruth Evans (eds) The Medieval Translator 4, Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 66-85. 2 All translations in this paper are my own except where indicated otherwise. My thanks to Zehra Toska and Cem Dilgin for their help with the translation of quotations from Nergisi and Hoca Mesud.142 Crosscultural Transgressions Hermans, Theo (1995) ‘Toury's Empiricism Version One’, The Translator 1(2): 215-23. Holbrook, Victoria R. (1994), The Unreadable Shores of Love, Turkish Modernity and Mystic Romance, Austin: University of Texas Press (2002) Concealed Facts, Translation and the Turkish Literary Past’, in Paker (2002:77-107). Kafadar, Cemal (1995) Between Two Worlds, The Construction of the Ottoman State, Berkeley & Los Angeles & London: University of California Press. Kayaoglu, Taceddin (1998) Tiirkiye’de Terciime Mitesseseleri (Translation Institutions in Turkey), Istanbul: Kitabevi. Kopriilii, Mehmed Fuad (1966) Edebiyat Arast irmalart (Studies in Literature) Vols. I- I, istanbul: Otiiken: oom (1993) Tiirk Edebiyat inda ik Mutasavveflar (The first mystics in Turkish literature) Ankara: Diyanet Isleri Baskanligi. (first published 1934). Lefevere, André (1990) ‘Translation: Its Genealogy in the West’, in Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefevere (eds) Translation, History and Culture, London & New York: Cassell, 14-28. Levend, Agah Sirri (1984) Tiirk Edebiyats Tarihi (History of Turkish literature) Vol.L (Introduction), Ankara: Turk Tarih Kurumu (first published 1971). Ozkan, Mustafa (1993) Mahmud b, Kadi-i Manyas, Giilistan Terctimesi (Critical edi- tion of Mahmud b. Kadi-i Manyas’ translation of Giilistan) Ankara: Turk Dil Kurumu Yayinlart. Paker, Saliha (2002) (ed) Translations: (re)shaping of literature and culture, Istanbul: Bogazici University Press. ~ and Zehra Toska (1997) ‘A Call for descriptive Translation Studies on the Turkish Tradition of Rewrites’, in Mary Snell-Hornby, Zuzana Jettmarova and Klaus Kaindl (eds) Translation as Intercultural Communication, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 79-88. Pratt, Mary Louise (1992) Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, London & New York: Routledge. Pym, Anthony (1998) Method in Translation History, Manchester: St. Jerome. ----- (2000) Negotiating the Frontier. Translators and Intercultures in Hispanic His- tory, Manchester: St.Jerome. Rorty, Richard (1989) Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge, Cambridge Uni- versity Press. Susam-Sarajeva, Sebnem (2002) Translation and Travelling Theory. The Role of Trans- lation in the Migration of Literary Theories Across Culture and Power Differentials, Doctoral thesis in Comparative Literature, University College London. Tahir-Giirgaglar, Sehnaz (2001) The Politics and Poetics of Translation in Turkey: 1923- 1960, Doctoral thesis in Translation Studies, Bogazici University, Istanbul. Timurtas, Faruk K. (1980) Seyhi ve Hiisrev ii Sirin, Inceleme — Metin (Critical edition of Seyhi’s Hiisrev i $irin), istanbul: istanbul Universitesi Yayinlart No.2670. Tolasa, Harun (1983) Sehi, Latifi, Astk Celebi Tezkirelerine gére 16.yy'da Edebiyat Arastirma ve Elesirisi I, (Literary enquiry and criticism in the 16" century accord- ing to the critical biographies of Sehi, Latifi and Agik Celebi), izmir: Ege Universitesi Edebiyat Faktiltesi Yayinlan No.4 Toska, Zehra (2002) ‘Evaluative Approaches to Translated Ottoman Turkish LiteraturePaker: Translation as Terceme and Nazire 143 in Future Research’, in Paker (2002:58-76). =: and Kuran-Burgoglu, Nedret (1996) ‘Ferideddin-i Attar’tn Mantiku’t-Tayr inn 14., 16.,17., 20. Yiizyullarda Yapumis Tiirkge Yeniden Yazumlarv’ (14th, 16th, 17th and 20th century rewrites of Ferideddin-i Attar’s Mantiku’t Tayr), Journal of Turk- ish Studies= Tiirkliik Bilgisi Aragtirmalar?: Abdillbaki Gélpinarlt Hatura Saytst 20(2), 251-65. Toury, Gideon (1995) Descriptive Translation Studies and beyond, Amsterdam & Phila- delphia: John Benjamins,Power and Ideology in Translation Research in Twentieth-Century China An Analysis of Three Seminal Works MARTHA P. Y. CHEUNG. Abstract: The essay ix concerned with assertions of difference and resistance to dominant ideology in translation research. It argues that the emphasis on historicization and contextualization that has characterized recent work in translation history, can be applied to the relation between translation studies and prevailing sociopolitical and ideological structures. I consider three twentieth-century Chinese essays on Chinese translation history. Hu Shi's ‘The Translated Literature of Buddhism’ (Parts 1 and 2) of 1928 championed translations into the vernacular at a time when neither translations nor literature in the vernacular (baihua) formed part of the canon. Qian Zhongshu’s ‘The Translations of Lin Shu’ (1964), with its emphasis on Lin Shu's creativity as a translator, challenged the prescriptive insistence on accuracy which was the orthodoxy of the day. Luo Xinzhang's ‘A System of its Own — Our Country's Translation Theories’ (1983) emphasizes the uniqueness of the Chinese translation tradition and is thus an exercise in identity construction, but an identity markedly different from that propagated by the state at the time. In all these cases it is the agency of the translation researcher as a political subject which is at stake. * A friend of mine recently said to me, “Ideology is a totalizing fiction”. She is right. Whether we like it or not, whether we are aware of it or not, ideology acts on us all the time — as norms, constraints, regulations, prohibitions, dogmas or orthodoxies. Its aim is to exert power over the individual through the fashioning of a particular mind set, Subservience is what it seeks, or, short of that, identification, conformity, or compliance.’ In this sense, ideology is totalizing. But resistance is possible. And resistance can adopt a multiplicity of forms — dissent, intervention, disruption, sub- version, opposition, revolution, and even compliance. In this sense, ideology is a totalizing fiction. There really is no way to determine exactly how ideology will * This is the revised and expanded version of a paper first presented at the international confer- ence on “Research Models in Translation Studies” held at Manchester in April 2000. Tam grateful to the Hong Kong Baptist University for providing me with a Faculty Research Grant (FRG/97- 98/11-49) to conduct research on this topic. I am also grateful to Professor Jane Lai, Dr. Stuart Christie and Dr. Tan Zaixi for their comments and suggestions. ' For an illuminating treatment of ideology as a concept the theorizing of which requires a multidisciplinary framework combining the insights of cognitive science, sociology and discourse analysis, see Teun A. Van Dijk (1998).Cheung: Power and Ideology in Translation Research 145 work on the individual. I find this indeterminacy fascinating, for it affirms the pos- sibility of difference. It affirms my belief in the individual as capable of thought and critique, and thus also of choice and action. In this paper, I shall study how asser- tion of difference and resistance to the dominant ideology is achieved in one particular area of human endeavour — translation research. In the last few decades, translation research has in fact been practising assertion of difference and resistance to dominant ideology. The ideology of subservience, which for decades (mis)placed translation within the confines of disciplines such as linguistics and comparative literature, and which (mis)led translators into believing that fidelity to the source text exists in the commonsense scheme of things and is natural and unproblematic, has been contested from different angles. In his pro- grammatic essay, “The Name and Nature of Translation Studies’ of 1972, James Holmes argued eloquently for the study of translation as an academic discipline in its own right. His initiative received a boost from scholars of the polysystem school, whose research into the roles played by translated literature in the target culture in different historical periods provided strong support for the legitimacy of the disci- pline’s claim for independence (Even-Zohar 1978). Scholars of the influential ‘manipulation school’ focused research efforts on revealing how, instead of being faithful copies of the original, “all translation implies a degree of manipulation of the source text for a certain purpose” (Hermans 1985: 11), a purpose which, more often than not, is linked to the operation of ideology, patronage and poetics (Lefevere 1992). Others, such as Lawrence Venuti, have argued that translations done in a fluent and transparent style are ideologically suspect because what is involved in the process is the repression of difference (Venuti 1995, 1998). Assertion of differ- ence and resistance to dominant ideology is also the purpose behind translation research that theorizes how translation, in different historical periods and in differ- ent cultures, has been pressed into the service of different ideologies such as imperialism (Cheyfitz 1991), colonialism (Niranjana 1992) and gender inequality (Simon 1996; Flotow 1997). A similar agenda lies behind translation research that studies translations for their power of mediation, subversion and opposition to domi- nant ideology (Tymoczko 1999; Bassnett and Trivedi 1999). Significantly, no such attention has been directed to translation research itself, even though Peter Fawcett has queried the hidden ideology of those who write about ideology and translation (Fawcett 1998: 106-7). But as I hope to show in this paper, translation studies, as a discipline, can be substantially enriched by the inclusion of translation research into its purview of study. Moreover, existing methodologies and approaches, in particular, the emphasis on historicization and contextualization, can be fruitfully applied to the investigation of the relationship between the ideol- ogy of difference and translation research. Such an investigation can be conducted on the translation research carried out in any country and at any historical period. I shall focus on three pieces of work pub- lished in China in the twentieth-century:146 Crosscultural Transgressions * “Fojiao de Fanyi Wenxue” (Shangjuan, Xiajuan) {The translated literature of Buddhism (Parts 1 & 2)], by Hu Shi (in Hu Shi 1928); * “Lin Shu de Fanyi” [The translations of Lin Shu], by Qian Zhongshu (1964); and © “Woguo Zichengtixi de Fanyi Lilun” (A system of its own — our country’s translation theories], by Luo Xinzhang (1983). The reasons are twofold. First, China in the twentieth century underwent a series of cataclysmic ideological upheavals. It thus provides fertile ground for observing how ideological battles are fought ~ in translation research as much as in other discur- sive practices and other human activities. Second, being an academic in Hong Kong in the post-1997 era, it is important I avail myself of strategies of resistance and of assertion of difference rather than rely on the guarantee of ‘one country two sys- tems’ provided by China upon Hong Kong's return to Chinese sovereignty.? The strategies practised by translator scholars in China therefore impressed me with a special sense of relevance. These two factors notwithstanding, | hope that the study carried out in this paper will carry a validity that goes beyond the Chinese context. For the paper aims to bring to light the importance of two issues for translation studies in general ~ the ideology of translation research and the translation (i.e. the carrying across) of ideology in translation research.? 1. Hu Shi, ‘The Translated Literature of Buddhism’ (Parts 1 & 2) (1928) Hu Shi (1891-1962) was a scholar, educator, writer, critic, translator, theorist and thinker.‘ He was credited with having launched the ‘xinwenxue yundong’ [New ? Hong Kong, a British colony since 1842, was returned in 1997 to China, a communist country. To allay the fears of Hong Kong people, China gave Hong Kong the guarantee that for fifly years, Hong Kong would remain a capitalist society and its inhabitants would continue to enjoy the freedoms and the way of life they had been used to under the British rule. Hence the term ‘one country, two systems’. * The inspiration for these two expressions is drawn from the expressions used by Basil Hatim and Ian Mason in their discussion of ideology and discourse ~ “the ideology of translating” and “the translation of ideology” (Hatim and Mason 1997: 145, 146). * Because Hu had great influence on the intellectuals and writers of his time, first in China, then in Taiwan as well as abroad ~ as can be attested by the thirty-five honorary doctorates he re- ceived in his life time (Yi 1987:104) — and because of his anti-Communist stance, the story of his life is a sharply contested site for biographers of different ideological and political convictions. For a short biographical account of Hu, see “Hu Shi” (1968). For a biography that strives, with varying degrees of success, to give a portrait of Hu that is relatively free from the prejudices of Communist politics, see Yi (1987). Jerome B. Grieder’s Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance: Liberalism in the Chinese Revolution, 1917-1937 (1970) shows a different ideological slant. It belongs to the category of intellectual biography and the study it offers, of “the ideas of Hu and of his efforts to shape China’s intellectual response to the modern world”, is implicitlyCheung: Power and Ideology in Translation Research 147 Literary Movement] in China in 1917. This was a movement aimed at bringing about a literary revolution in China as part of an overall effort to modernize the nation, and Hu’s article ‘Wenxue Gailiang Chuyi’ [Tentative suggestions for liter- ary reform] (1917)? was the catalyst of this movement and its earliest manifesto. The work I shall focus on — ‘The Translated Literature of Buddhism’ (Parts 1 & 2) - featured as two chapters in Hu’s 1928 publication, Baihua Wenxue Shi [A History of Baihua [vernacular] Literature] — a book based on a series of lectures the Mini try of Education commissioned Hu to give in 1921. These lectures enjoyed great impact since Hu had become an influential literary figure after 1917 and many writ- ers had responded to his call to reform literature by writing in the vernacular. ‘The Translated Literature of Buddhism’ (Parts 1& 2) was not part of the original set of lectures but written for inclusion in A History of Baihua [vernacular] Literature.’ The two chapters provide ample illustration of how translation research can be used as a weapon for ideological resistance. Hu’s moves in ‘The Translated Literature of Buddhism’ (Parts | & 2) deserve careful study. He presented the translations of Buddhist sutras as literary works and analyzed them in terms of form and style, generic features, tropes, rhetoric and other composition techniques. In particular, he stressed the literary appeal of these translations and their impact on art and literature in China. Some of the fables con- tained in the translations were the “most beautiful fables in world literature” and had “considerable influence” on Chinese literature (Hu 1928/1998: 239). The sutra anti-communist in stance (ix). There are also autobiographical accounts. See, for example, Sishi Zishu {A Self-account at Forty] (Hu 1939/1993). See also Hu Shi Koushu Zizhuan (Dr. Hu Shi's Personal Reminiscences] (1983), or the English original, preserved in typescript in the archive of the Oral History Project, Columbia University. 5 The article was first published in China’s leading journal of radical opinions, Xin Qingnian [New Youth] in January 1917, see Hu (1917/1991). A partial English translation of this article was published in de Barry (1960; 820-4). © In the “Introduction” Hu wrote for A History of Baihua [vernacular] Literature (1928/1998: 141-8), Hu told the remarkable history of its publication. He revised the lectures every time he delivered them after 1921 and had plans for a more thorough revision, but he had not been able (o find the time to do it. Then in 1927, when he was in Japan, he learned from his family that these lectures had been put together as a book and published, with a long introduction written by his friend, Li Shaoxi. He further learnt that the publishing house was run by Li's students and that they had published only 1000 copies of the book, primarily to provide reference material for students attending classes on the history of Chinese literature. Embarrassed that some of the views expressed in these lectures were “immature” (1928/1998: 144), and encouraged by the discovery of historical documents and new materials that supported the interpretation of literary tory he presented in his lectures, Hu allowed himself no more delay in revising his lectures. He also prepared ‘The translated literature of Buddhism’ (Parts 1 & 2) for inclusion in this re- vised version. A comparison of Guoyu Wenxue Shi [A history of Guoyu [national language] literature] (title of the 1927 version prepared by Li) and A History of Baihua [vernacular] Lit- erature (title of the 1928 version prepared by Hu himself) shows that Hu at first had not included translation for consideration in his mapping of literary history.148 Crosscultural Transgressions Vimalakirtinirdesah was “half novel half play” (1928/1998: 238) and told a com- pelling story that fascinated generations of Chinese writers and painters, who cither used episodes from this story as subject matter for the mural paintings in temples, or made allusions to this story in their own literary works. Many Buddhist texts, rich in supernatural elements and descriptions strung together by a freewheeling imagina- tion, had a “truly liberating effect” on the Chinese mind. Its influence was perceptible in popular Chinese literary works such as Xi You Ji [Journey to the West] and Feng Shen Zhuan [Creation of the Gods] (1928/1998: 251). Buddhacarita [Acts of the Buddha), the crowning achievement of the Buddhist poet Asvaghosa, was trans- lated into Chinese by the monk Dharmaraksha in 420 CE and, with a total of about 46,000 characters in unthymed verse, was the first long poem in Chinese literature at the time (1928/1998: 246). These new forms and genres, imported into China through the translations, contributed to the evolution and development of litera- ture in China. The juxtaposition of prose and verse, a characteristic style in Indian oral literature and Buddhist sutras, was a legacy with an “unexpected influence” (1928/1998: 241): the same style was used in zanci—a type of performance whereby stories are told (usually in various southern dialects) to the accompaniment of stringed instruments. Not only did Hu present translations of Buddhist works as literature, he placed them in the baihua [vernacular] tradition of literary writing in China, which he claimed had a history that could be traced back to the earliest times. To Hu Shi, the special strength of the translations of Buddhist sutras lay in their vernacular fla- vour, their closeness to the way people talked and spoke. Citing the comments made by Buddhist monks over the centuries, Hu argued that the translations which en- Joyed acclaim and could stand the test of time were all characterized by a simplicity of style and a plainness of language that made them accessible to ordinary people, These translations did not fit into mainstream literary writing, which was at the time steeped in a rigid and highly adorned formalism. The translations, by their sheer number, acquired a place of their own and became a new type of literature (1928/ 1998: 252). The respect and dignity enjoyed by religious texts raised the status of this type of vernacular literature, and of vernacular literature as a whole. Although these translations had no immediate impact on home literature, not even when Bud- dhism was at the height of its popularity (300-500 CE) in China, Hu argued that they were like seeds which germinated and came to fruition in subsequent centuries (1928/1998; 253). As illustrations of his argument, he pointed to Buddhist temples and Zen monasteries as important “birthplaces” of vernacular poetry and vernacular writings (1928/1998: 252). Taking works of translation not in isolation but as a constituent part of one’s home literature, focussing discussion on how translations interact with, and impact on, the literary developments of one’s home country — this is an approach advo- cated by theorists of the polysystem school. It should be noted, however, that Hu Shi carried out his research in the 1920s. Moreover, although Hu Shi did hisCheung: Power and Ideology in Translation Research 149 doctoral studies in philosophy at Columbia University, he did not situate his discus- sion of the translations of Buddhist sutras within the discourse of philosophy or religion, or of intellectual history, but within that of literary history — the history of baihua literature, to be exact. There is little doubt that Hu was engaged in a reconfiguration of literary tradi- tion and a systematic act of subversion. He was pursuing an ideological rebellion through the assertion of difference. Literature that for centuries had been regarded by the literati as canonical (i.e. literature done in classical Chinese and governed by a strict and elevated formalism — a reflection of the rigid power structure of feudal- istic China) was dethroned. A different kind of literature, baihua literature, was accordingly privileged. The term baihua is usually translated as ‘the vernacular’ and used to refer to the vernacular. But Hu, in the introduction to A History of Baihua Literature, attributes three meanings to this term. (1) The character bai, in collocation with the character nian [read aloud], refers to the spoken parts of a Chinese opera and baihua [hua (meaning ‘language’ )] therefore means ‘the spoken language’ , or the vernacular. (2) The character bai takes on the meaning of another character it collocates with — ging [clear] — and baihua accordingly means language that is unadorned. (3) Bai also collocates with the character ming [light] and baihua can also mean language that is easy to understand (1928/1998: 147). Within this broad construction of the term baihua, Hu argued that baihua litera- ture was living literature, i.e. literature which had vitality and was the most creative and representative of its time.’ Moreover, he could point to the use of baihua in ancient classics of the highest literary status such as Shi Ji [Records of the Histori- ans] and Zuo Zhuan [Zuo’s Commentary}, in the folksongs and ballads composed in the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE), and in the “jueju* of the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE) (1928/1998: 147). In addition, he could point to the use of baihua in translations of Buddhist texts and discuss these translations as an integral part of the baihua tradition of literary writing. With this new way of charting literary tradi- tion, with this new emphasis on a living literature, Hu was able to make the radical claim that “the history of baihua literature lies at the very heart of the history of Chinese literature” (1928/1998: 146). Clearly, Hu was engaged in an elaborate manoeuvre at re-alignment of power. It was a manoeuvre involving complex moves such as the incorporation of religious translations into the domain of baihua literature, formation of a counter-canon, re-interpretation of literary tradition, and re-writing of literary history. What was Hu’s agenda? 7 It should be noted that the English title Hu himself used for A History of Baihua [vernacular] Literature is History of the Living Chinese Literature (Hu 1983: iii). The ideological signifi- cance of this rendering cannot be overemphasized. * Jueju is the name of a poetic form. It refers to a poem of four lines, each containing five or seven characters, with a strict tonal pattern and rhyme scheme.150 Crosscultural Transgressions Earlier on, I remarked that Hu was credited for being one of the instigators of the New Literary Movement in China. This movement was spearheaded by theories and manifestoes. Slogans calling for the use of baihua and for the production of literary works in baihua preceded the actual appearance of baihua works.? Even when the movement was in full swing, baihua literary works of quality were mea- gre in output"? and the movement was largely sustained through translations. Translations, however, were open to the charge of being subservient to the original source. The literary reform envisaged by Hu Shi and others was intended as part of a bigger and more ambitious programme of national revitalization of culture. If the New Literary Movement continued to be reliant on, or dominated by, translations, it would be vulnerable to the charge of being stagnant or parasitic. What good then would the translations do to literature? Would the dominance of translations not lead to the eventual erosion or even destruction of the identity of one’s home literature? What right did a literature heavily dependent on translations have to re- place traditional literature - the pride of a country with over a thousand years of glorious civilization? How could such a literature contribute to the national revitali- zation of culture? Obviously Hu’s challenge was not simply to promote the use of baihua for liter- ary writing by broadening the definition of baihua literature so that it could be shown to have had a long tradition in history. Such had been the strategy Hu used in his 1921 lectures but such a strategy provided justification for the movement at its tial stage only. The actual course of development taken by that movement, and the disproportion in output between baihua translations and baihua literary works (especially from 1917-25) made it possible for the skeptics to voice doubts concern- ing the sustainability of that long tradition. But if it could be proved that translation was a central component of that tradition, the picture would be different. Transla- tion would then acquire meaning as a cultural act with full ideological legitimacy in * Ina powerful and thought-provoking critique of the New Literary Movement, Wang Xiaoming, 4 Mainland critie, commented on “the main difference” between the birth of modern literature in China and that in Europe. In the case of China, theory preceded practice (Wang 1993; 171), theory shaped literary practice. The literary works thus produced were like products of a rational, pre-set programme — Wang was “tempted to say” (1993; 172). °” Hu’s own literary ocuvre is a case in point. While he was strong in academic and manifesto writing, he was weak in literary composition and his literary output was meagre, as he himself freely admitted (Yi 1987:180; Grieder 1970: 86). Lu Xun and Mao Dun, also leading figures of the New Literary Movement, had also commented on the “loneliness” of the baihua writers, especially during the first five years of the Movement (Mao 1935/1980: 4; Lu 1935/1980: 8) Even in as late as 1925, Xu Zhimo, a famous baihua poet, was moved by the success of the relaunching of Jia Yin [The Tiger], a weekly magazine in classical Chinese and the mouthpiece of critics of the New Literary Movement, to comment that The Tiger was doing much better, in sales figures at least, than other baihua magazines of a similar orientation in contents (Xu 1935/1980: 230-1).Cheung: Power and Ideology in Translation Research 151 history. Moreover, the vernacular used as the language of translation would also acquire ideological legitimacy. Consequently, the past would justify the present. The continual pursuit of translation would not pose a threat to the identity of the nation’s literature; rather, it would sow the seeds for future literary development. More importantly, such an evolutionary view of baihua literature would help to consolidate the new power structure resulting from the dethronement of traditional literature by the rise of the New Literary Movement. Hu had long declared that he wanted to bring about a Chinese Renaissance.'' As early as 1917 he had made the point that during the Renaissance in Europe, translation was used as means to raise the vernacular to the same status as Latin, the language of power, and to hone the vernacular for the production of national literature (1917/1991: 12). The situation of China in the early 1920s, however, was vastly different from that of Europe. Hu could not simply predict that translation could help to hone the vernacular for the production of national literature, especially since classical Chinese [wenyan wen] had also been used for translation and many of these translations were extremely popular. Hu would be obliged to provide an argumentative basis for his prediction. Hu’s need to find an argumentative basis for his prediction is the key to under- standing why ‘The Translated Literature of Buddhism’ (Parts 1 & 2) was not part of Hu’s 1921 set of lectures and only featured in the revised version of 1928. These two chapters were a strategic addition. Hu had used translation research for a pur- pose: the ideological empowerment of translation. With his reading of the behaviour of translated literature in the literary polysystem of China, and specifically of the central role played by the translations of Buddhist sutras in the development of baihua literature in China, Hu sought to provide justification for his conviction that sooner or later translation would accomplish its mission — expansion of literary horizons, cultivation of the mind, and, ultimately, cultural revitalization and literary regeneration. His was an elaborate attempt at legitimization through historicization. 2. Qian Zhongshu, ‘The Translations of Lin Shu’ (1964) Qian Zhongshu (1910-98) was a writer, an essayist, and a man of great learning - at once an acknowledged master in the study of Chinese classics as well as an 1 “Renaissance” was initially translated in China as “xin chao” [new trends] or “xin sichao” [new trends of thought]. What Hu meant by “Chinese Renaissance” was spelt out in his essay, “Xinsichao de Viyi” [The meanings of xin sichao] (Hu 1919/1953). Hu had also given a number of lectures, in English, on this topic. See Hu (1926/1995) and Hu (1934). The reason — largely ideological — as to why Hu preferred to describe what he wanted to bring about in China with the term “Chinese Renaissance” rather than other descriptions current at the time such as “xin wenhua yundong” [New Culture Movement], “wenxwe geming” (Literary Revolution] was explained in “Zhongguo Wenyifuxing de Sizhong yiyi” [Chinese Renaissance: four dimensions of signifi- cance] (Hu 1983: 175-6)(By Crosscultural Transgressions accomplished scholar in Western literature.'? ‘The Translations of Lin Shu’,'* one of the most important essays on translation to have appeared in twentieth-century China, provides another illustration of how ideological resistance can be achieved through the deployment of translation research. The very title of Qian’s work alerts one to the need to think ideologically about translation research. Lin Shu (1852-1924) was a monolingual who had to rely heavily upon his collaborators in his work of translation. And yet he turned out to be a prolific and highly influential translator of Western literary works into Chinese. His translations were enormously popular in his day. During the last two decades of his life, however, Lin was severely attacked for his conservative politics (i.e. his loyalty to the Qing dynasty), his stubborn defence of classical Chinese against the cam- paign to promote the use of baihua [the vernacular] in writing, and his mistake-ridden translations. After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the orthodox view was that Lin had contributed substantially to the introduction of west- er literary works to the Chinese populace, but he was lax in his selection of texts to be translated, and in his later years, he lacked seriousness in his attitude and his translations were slipshod.'* Why did Qian Zhongshu research the translations of Lin Shu when such a con- sensus had already been established? The question becomes more urgent when the political context is taken into consideration. The 1950s were a time of great politi- cal upheaval. The influence of Marxism and Leninism was paramount. Mao Zedong’s views on the need for art and literature to serve social and political functions rather than abide by the principle of art for art’s sake or that of self-expression, delivered " Tt should be noted that for decades, Qian’s fictional achievements remained unacknowledged by critics on the Mainland, largely because Qian did not place literature at the service of social and political causes, In fact, Qian’s talents as a fiction writer were “discovered” by a Chinese living in the States, Professor C.T. Hsia, who rated Qian’s novel, Weicheng [Fortress Besieged}, first published in 1946, as “perhaps” moder China’s “greatest novel” in his authoritative A History of Modern Chinese Fiction 19}7-1957 (1961: 441). It was not until 1979, when Qian’s monumental four-volume work, Guan Zhui Bian [Limited Views: Essays on Ideas and Letters] was published that critics on the Mainland began to pay serious attention to his achievements and Qian became a canonized figure. For a detailed biographical account of Qian in Chinese, see Kong (1992). For a summary account in English, see “Translators’ preface”, Fortress Besieged (Kelly and Mao 1979). “The translations of Lin Shu” was first published in Wenxue Yanjiu Jikan [Anthology of Liter- ary Studies], Vol. 1, in 1964. George Kao has translated a large part of this article into English, entitled “Lin Ch’in-nan Revisited” (Ch’in-nan, or Qinnan — according to the Pinyin system used in this article — is the courtesy name of Lin Shu) (Qian 1975). Iam using the 1964 version rather than later versions (slightly revised by Qian) for discussion because of the importance of reading the text in the historical, political and ideological context of the time. * This was the assessment of Lin Shu given by Mao Dun in the Report he presented, in his capacity as the Minister of Culture, at the National Conference on Literary Translation held in August 1954 (Mao 1954/1984: 2).Cheung: Power and Ideology in Translation Research 153 at Talks at the Yenan Forum on Art and Literature'’ in 1942, had hardened into dogma. In 1954, Yu Pingbo, Qian’s colleague at the Institute of Chinese Literature, the Academy of Social Sciences, was openly criticized for not employing the Marx- ist view of literary criticism in his analysis of Dream of the Red Chamber, a famous Chinese classic, and for having fallen prey to the idealism of the capitalist class (Mao 1979: xv). The Anti-Rightist Struggle (a counter-attack against the bourgeois Rightists) commenced in 1957 (Kong 1992: 16), and Qian’s father was branded a Rightist in 1957. A year later, Qian himself was severely criticized for a work he edited, Song Shi Xuan Zhu [An Annotated Selection of Song Poetry] (1958), and was saved from the fate of his father only by the intervention of influential figures in the central government (Kong 1992: 162). With this context in mind, let us now look at ‘The Translations of Lin Shu’. Qian begins by dipping into etymology. Citing the authority of Xu Shen, the Han dynasty philologist, Qian states that the character yi [translate] has etymological connections and semantic associations with the characters you [entice, mislead, lead], mei {mediate, match-make] e [errors, misrepresentations] and hua (transform) (Qian 1964: 1). Then, he uses these characters to thematize his views on the functions of translation, the pitfalls that are hard to avoid, and the highest state to which transla- tion aspires. He starts with the character hua (‘transform’ in a total sense), which for him represents the highest standard to be reached by literary translation (ibid.). A literary work in one language could be said to have been “transformed” into a literary work in another language if no trace was left of the strain and awkwardness caused by the differences between the two languages, and if the flavour and feel of the original was fully preserved. Such a translation would then be said to have reached “huajing” — the highest, the most natural, and most marvelous state, transformation in a total sense. Such a translation would not read like a translation, for the original would not read like a translation in the first place. He notes that in seventeenth- century Europe, George Savile, First Marquess of Halifax, had advanced a similar notion of translation with the metaphor of the “transmigration of the soul” (ibid.). ‘The outer form of the text has been replaced, the body is different, but the spirit, the inner charm, remains the same. Qian, however, admits that this state of transformation is not easy to attain (1964: 2). In his view, errors and misrepresentations (¢) are inevitable, due to all sorts of reasons. There are, however, different types of “mistakes”. Some may well be deliberate liberties the translator takes with the source text. In the case of Lin Shu’s translations, the “errors” could be divided into two types — those due to Lin’s own carelessness and those which, upon careful analysis, would be seen as addi- tions, compensations and embellishments (1964: 6-9). The “errors” of the second type were Lin’s own “contributions” to the text he was translating because they 'S This is the title of the English translation of these talks published by the Foreign Languages Press in 1956154 Crosscultural Transgressions added colour, verve, drama and humour to the translation (1964:8), making it as good as, if not better than, the original. Strictly speaking, these interventions should not be encouraged in works of translation, yet they often have provided inspiration for anyone interested in rhetoric and the art of composition. Qian even says that a translator who is also a writer, or fancies himself as one, could hardly resist the urge to act as the original author's “best friend and severest critic” when he comes across passages which in his view are weak and need improvement (1964: 10). Further- more, Qian argues that the history of translation (especially its early stages) of any country shows that Lin Shu was in good company. Translation history also abounds with examples of translators whose command of the target language was superior to the author’s command of the source language!” — as was Lin Shu when compared with a writer like Rider Haggard (1964: 25). In Qian’s view, because the transformation brought about by the act of transla- tion is not always thorough and complete but can take many different forms, the appeal of translation also takes different forms. When transformation is complete and total, the reader will find the translation so enticing (you) he will fall in love with the original. The translation will then have brought about a “literary romance” between nations. In terms of cultural exchange, the translation will then have func- tioned like a match-maker (mei). When transformation is incomplete and partial, some readers will realize that the translation is misleading (you) and their curiosity to know what the original is really like will lead them (you) to learn the foreign language so that they can read the original for themselves (1964: 3). It seems quite clear that Qian’s article is as much about Lin Shu’s translations as it is about Qian’s own view of translation. Qian was actually using his research on Lin and on the history of translation in the countries in the west to provide examples to illustrate his own view of translation. It is a view of translation that is realistic rather than prescriptive, for Qian shows no insistence on translation being what it should ideally be (transformation in a total sense), and simply accepts translation for what it is in reality ~ misrepresentation, distortion, disguised composition of a parasitic nature, or enhanced performance. It is a view of translation that enter- tains the possibility of translation as transgression, as re-writing and as betrayal ~ n’s. '* In a footnote, Qian cited Sir Thomas North and John Florio (discussed in F. O. Matthies Translation: An Elizabethan Art) as examples of free prose translation, As for examples from poetry translation, Qian cited the two classic translations of the Homeric epics by Alexander Pope and Vincenzo Monti as something in between translation and creative poetry-writing (1964: 10). He also mentioned Edward FitzGerald’s The Rubdiyat of Omar Khayyam, which was popu- Jar in China at one time. "Qian gave the following examples: Walter Horatio Pater's preference for Charles Baudelaire's French translation of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories to Poe’s own work in English, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's alleged preference for Gérard de Nerval's French translation of his Faust to his own work, and Walt Whitman's admission that F. Freiligeath’s German translation of his Leaves of Grass could well be better than the English original (1964: 25).Cheung: Power and Ideology in Translation Research = reference is made to the Italian saying traduttore, traditore (1964: 2). It is a view that embraces translation in all its contradictions and paradoxes: translation leads as well as misleads: it can be “worse” or “better” than the original but it is seldom what people think it should be (i.e. as good as the original); translation should not read like a translation. The implicit point is that the subservience of the translator, and the concomitant notion of faithfulness, are not absolute or axiomatic. The trans- lator can betray, excel, manipulate the source, play with it, display traces of his own creativity, be highly visible, and can receive praise for it. Lest it should be said that Lin Shu’s case is an aberration, Qian takes a broad sweep of translation history and cites examples of translations produced in the west that had been praised for being better than the original. While Qian is still critical of the mistakes made by Lin Shu, he shows genuine appreciation of Lin’s more inspired treatment of the source text and he does not disguise his envy in talking about the “bold abandon” with which Lin Shu translated Dickens (1964: 10). Read in isolation, Qian’s view of translation may be fascinating because of the dazzling use he makes of the play of signifiers to convey his arguments, and be- cause of his impressive display of scholarship. Qian’s view of translation may be fascinating, too, because he embodies radical and provocative ideas — translation as transgression, for example. But because Qian privileges “huajing” (transfor- mation in a total sense) and upholds it as the highest standard for literary translation, because he remains source-text oriented in his evaluation of Lin Shu’s transla- tions and in his evaluative stance as a whole, the radical energy of these ideas is contained, if not dissipated. The ideas may even be thought of as clever rather than radical. However, when ‘The Translations of Lin Shu’ is measured against the discourse about translation at the time and when the historical political context is taken into consideration, a different scenario emerges. In the 1960s, discourse about transla- tion, under the “direct leadership of the Party”, was dominated by the notion of faithfulness advocated by Lu Xun, an extremely influential leftist writer, especially since Mao Zedong had spoken openly in favour of Lu Xun’s strategy of rigid trans- lation and personally championed the importance of “accuracy” in translation (Chen 1992: 383). Qian’s remarks concerning the mistakes of translation, however dis- criminating and judicious, would likely be construed as militating against the orthodoxy of accuracy. In particular, Qian’s view of translation as betrayal, though expressed in terms of disapproval, would be construed as militating against the ide- ology of loyalty, upon which the notion of faithfulness was founded as the first principle of translation. Such a position would be dangerous, loyalty being crucial to the maintenance of the democratic dictatorship of the Communist Party. The 1960s discourse about translation also attributed to translation certain social and political functions. Qian’s article on Lin Shu made no mention of them. Instead Qian talked blithely about how translations could play the role of matchmaker, bring about a literary romance between nations and entice people156 Crosscultural Transgressions to learn foreign languages. This was deviant thinking and would make him vulner- able to attack. Qian cannot have been unaware of the dangers to which he was exposing him- self, And because the stakes were so high, his attempt to present a view of translation that deviated from the dominant view without seeking to overthrow it, must be taken as a stubborn, if also foolhardy assertion of positionality. In any case, his was a daring plea for the acceptance of differences, whether they were political, ideologi- cal or simply academic. Qian’s translation research, therefore, was deeply inscribed with the power politics of the time. Indeed the full significance of Qian’s translation research will only emerge when his article is interpreted not simply as a self- contained, disinterested and innocent disquisition on translation but as an act of political engagement. However compliant he might have seemed on the surface, Qian was in fact using translation research for the purpose of staging a quiet protest against orthodoxy and dogmatism. The attempt was heavily camouflaged, carefully veiled, hidden behind ambivalences, and therefore compromised. But it is a force- ful testimony of the individual as a thinking agent. It shows that even compliance can be a form of resistance. 3. Luo Xinzhang, ‘A System of its Own — Our Country’s Translation Theories’ (1983) Luo Xinzhang (1936-) is a distinguished translator of French literature into Chinese and a highly respected translation scholar in China." ‘A System of its Own — Our Country's Translation Theories’ (literal translation of “Woguo Zichengtixi de Fanyi Lilun’”) was first published in 1983 in Fanyi Tongxun [Translators’ Notes]. Launched on 15 February 1980, this was the first journal on the Mainland to be devoted spe- cially to translation (Wu 1980; Chen 1992: 464) and hence the primary national forum for discussion and debate on translation issues. Luo’s choice of this journal — a locus of disciplinary power — for the publication of his article therefore deserves attention. Equally significant is the fact that in 1984 Luo used this same piece of work as the introductory essay of Fanyi Lunji [An Anthology of on Transla- tion], which he edited and compiled. Being the most comprehensive collection of essays on translation at the time, and the first one of its kind to include essays on the translation of Buddhist texts, this anthology had great impact when it first appeared and remains an authoritative collection today. In addition to these two contextual points, the very title of Luo’s article also bursts with ideological significance. In fact, of the three pieces of work studied in this paper, Luo’s is the most explicit in terms of ideology where the title is con- cerned: ‘A System of its Own — Our Country’s Translation Theories’. Here, “Our “* For further biographical information on Luo, see “Luo Xinzhang” (1988) and Wu (1997).Cheung: Power and Ideology in Translation Research 4157 country” is read as a rallying call. ‘A System of its Own’ is an assertion of unique- ness and of distinct tradition. What Luo does in his essay is to signpost the development of Chinese translation theory with key conceptual terms and present Chinese discussions about translation, selected from different historical periods, in a way that stresses conscious inheritance, relatedness, consolidation and elabora- tion so that the whole would emerge as a perceptible system of its own. According to Luo, this “system” is composed of four major strands: * “Follow the source” [anben]. This was the dictum left to posterity by the Buddhist monk Dao An (314-85 CE) and upheld by many translators of the Buddhist sutras. According to Luo, while there had been arguments about the validity of this dictum, the authority of the source was firmly established during this first major wave of translation activities in China, which lasted throughout the first ten centuries of the Christian era, Subsequent Chinese theories on translation, especially those that constitute the other major strands of the system (discussed below), can also be traced, through verbal echoes and conceptual reverberations, to this notion of “anben”. In Luo’s scheme of things, therefore, “anben” becomes the source for Chinese theories on trans- lation (Luo 1983/1984: 19). « “Aim at faithfulness” [giuxin]. Xin [faithfulness], da [comprehensibility] and ya [elegance] are the “three major difficulties” of translation discussed by Yan Fu in his preface to his translation of T. H. Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics (1898)."" According to Luo, for much of the twentieth century on the Mainland, xin, da, ya formed the main conceptual grid for theorizations about translation. Luo further explains that xin, da, ya gain paradigmatic impor- tance because these notions are especially useful for assessing translations, and criteria for evaluation lie at the very “heart” of translation theory (1983/ 1984: 5). In the fifty years after the appearance of Yan's preface, discussions about criteria for translation criticism have all been predicated upon this para digm. There have been attempts to redefine these terms and to discuss their order of importance; there have also been attempts to challenge their valid- ity. But there has not been any alternative paradigm strong enough to overthrow it (1983/1984: 10). And “the sole explanation” for the position of supremacy enjoyed by this paradigm (1983/1984: 9), according to Luo, is that xin, da, ya can, to a certain extent, sum up succinctly the main features of translation and bring out a certain regulative pattern that lies behind trans- lation” (ibid.). With a note of pride, Luo remarks that “even in other countries, it is probably not often that a standard set for translation in the last years of the nineteenth century can, eighty years later, still retain its vitality and is "°C, Y. Hsu’s English translation of this preface, entitled “General Remarks on Translation”, was published in 1973. See Yan (1973).158 Crosscultural Transgressions still readily used as a criteria for evaluation” (1983/1984: 16). Yan Fu’s theory therefore “deserves a place” in the “world history of translation theory” (ibid.). In Luo’s panoramic view of Chinese translation theories over the centuries, Yan Fu’s three notions are also important because they form a direct link with the thoughts on translation left by the translators of Buddhist sutras. Citing the exegetical work on ancient texts carried out by Qian Zhongshu, Luo points to Qian’s observation that xin, da, ya already feature as concepts of translation in “Fa Ju Jing Xu” {Preface to the Dharmapada] (224 CE), generally considered to be the first piece of writing in China addressing prob- lems of translation (1983/1984: 2). In addition, Luo cites the authority of Lu Xun’s research on Yan Fu to make the point that Yan, in preparing himself for his work of translation, had studied the translations of Buddhist sutras for reference and ideas (1983/1984: 6). Yan himself actually makes no reference to the prefaces of Buddhist sutras in the preface he wrote for his translation of Evolution and Ethics. Instead Yan uses quotations from Confucius and The Book of Changes to show that xin, da, ya are not idiosyncratic values of his own but have a long and illustrious history, being values much stressed in classical writing. Whilst Luo admits there is no direct evidence to show Yan had “inherited” the notions of xin, da, ya from the translators of Buddhist sutras, he nevertheless invests Yan's xin, da, ya with historical and genea- logical significance. He presents Yan’s essay as the summation of what had been produced earlier in theoretical discussions about translation of Bud- dhist sutras as well as a programmatic preparation for subsequent theorizations about translation (1983/1984: 6). The equally valid point that Yan Fu may have drawn inspiration from the three general laws of transla- tion proposed by Alexander Fraser Tytler (1747-1814) was not mentioned, even though Luo included in his anthology the essay by Wu Lifu, who made this assertion (1983/1984: 461). When Luo mentions Tytler in his intro- ductory essay, it is to point out that Tytler’s work was introduced into China in the 1920s and that Tytler’s three general laws, although similar to Yan's xin, da, ya, did not catch on (1983/1984: 15-16).” ‘Qian Zhongshu de Yiyitan” [Qian Zhongshu’s art of translation), an article published in 1990, Luo revealed that Qian had written to tell him that Yan Fu’s three notions, “xin”, “da”, “ya” were derived from Tytler’s Essay on the Principles of Translation (1791) and that Qian had even given him the source for this piece of information (1990/1996: 147). Luo did not mention the exact date of Qian’s letter. He simply said he received it four years after the publication of Qian’s Limited views: Essays on Ideas and Letters. The first edition of this work (in four volumes) was published between August to October in 1979. *A System of its Own ~ Our Country's Translation Theories’ was first published in Translators’ Notes in 15 July 1983 and 15 August 1983. This same essay features as the introduction of An Anthology of Essays on Translation, which was published in May 1984. These dates suggest that Qian might have sent the letter to Luo afier having read Luo’s essay in 1983. It should be noted, therefore, that Luo n this point until 1990, when he brought up the question of the genesis of da”, for discussion again in “Qian Zhongshu’s art of translation”. has remained sile of Yan Fu’s ‘xin’Cheung: Power and Ideology in Translation Research 159 * “Likeness in spirit” [shensi]. It was Fu Lei (1908-66) who, in 1951, argued for the importance of achieving “likeness in spirit”:2' “Speaking of effects, trans- lation should be like copying a painting. The aim is not to produce likeness in form but likeness in spirit” (quoted in Luo 1983/1984: 10, my translation). The importance of transmitting the spirit [chuanshen], first propounded by the painter Gu Kaizhi (ca. 348-409) as a principle for doing portraits, had grown into a key concept in traditional aesthetics, and Fu Lei had transposed it into a trans- lation principle (1983/1984: 15). In so doing, Fu Lei elevated translation to the status of art and set for translation an aim higher than that of the mere transmis- sion of ideas (1983/1984:13). (“Ideas transmitted” [dazhi] was how Yan Fu labelled his translation of Huxley’s work.) In the “system” delineated by Luo, “likeness in spirit” is an important signpost, an indication of the “progress” made by half a century of critical thinking about Yan Fu’s three notions (1983/ 1984: 13). The pattern of such thinking, according to Luo, is one of increasing discrimination and depth. During the initial period, the three notions were em- braced as the golden rules of translation. Then the validity of ya [elegance] as a principle of translation was questioned. After that, the relationship between xin [faithfulness] and da [comprehensibility] was looked at dialectically, and xin emerged as primary, da and ya as secondary. A further deepening of such think- ing resulted in the conclusion that absolute faithfulness is only an ideal, and translation can, at best, attain “likeness” to the original (1983/1984: 9) — “like- ness in spirit”, to be exact. ¢ “State of total transformation” [huajing]. As discussed in the previous sec- tion, this credo was put forth by Qian Zhongshu in 1964 as the highest standard attainable in literary translation. In Luo’s argument, when compared to “like- ness in spirit”, the “state of total transformation” marks “yet another step forward” and reaches “an even deeper level” in terms of the demand it makes on the translator and the degree of difficulty involved (1983/1984: 14). Even though total and complete transformation is an unattainable ideal, the setting of such a standard has the effect of encouraging the pursuit of excellence in literary translation. It is clear that Luo, in his mapping of the tradition of Chinese theoretical thinking about translation, has employed a number of strategies. They include locating of the Even then, he chose to present this question as a yet unresolved case in the history of Chinese translation (1990/1996: 147). Such a presentation is significant since Luo, in his writings, has, shown great respect for Qian and has seldom, if ever, cast doubts on Qian's research findings. In fact, it was the authority of Qian’s work that Luo relied on most frequently in “A system of its ‘own — our country’s translation theories”. 2! Fu Lei was a highly acclaimed translator of French literature into Chinese and the mentor of Luo Xinzhang, He first reflected on “likeness in spirit” as the effect to be aimed at in translation in his preface to his second rendition of Honoré de Balzac’s Le Pere Goriot [Gao Lao Tou Chongyiben xu].160 Crosscultural Transgression source, unveiling of the close relation between translation poetics and the poetics of classical writing and of art, forging of genealogical links, and plotting of develop- ments to a course marked by progress. Locating of the source of Chinese translation theories in the words of Dao An rather than those of Zhi Qian (a non-Chinese monk who had also commented on the importance of “following the source”) allows Luo to preserve, as it were, the “purity” of the Chinese tradition.” Depicting Chinese translation theories as offshoots from the discourse on literary composition, paint- ing and other cultural pursuits enables him to press his point that the Chinese tradition is separate and independent from other traditions of translation theory. The empha- sis on relatedness through the tracing of genealogical links — even if they pertain more to ghostly resemblance, dormant memories, verbal echoes and conceptual re- verberations rather than solid empirical proof — allows Luo to highlight the continuity and internal coherence of this long tradition. The careful charting of progress ena- bles Luo to conclude that “we” have inherited a rich legacy of translation theories and that the way forward is to “carefully work out the interrelations between these theories” (1983/1984: 5) and build up “a system with unique characteristics of our own” (1983/1984: 19), Such a remark is at once a call for action and Luo’s attempt to seek validation for what he has done with his translation research. Luo’s essay is an attempt at identity construction. It should be noted, however, that it is an identity distinctly different from that envisaged by the propaganda ma- chine of the state in the early 1980s, as the essay is remarkably free from party rhetoric and jargon. A further look at the background reveals that Luo’s attempt at identity construction and the manipulation strategies he employs for his mapping of translation tradition are really the effort of an intellectual responding to the situa- tion of his time — a situation best described with Yeats’ lines “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold”. The early 1980s was a traumatic time for the intellectuals. In the immediate aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, there was a prevailing sense of devastation and of spiritual bankruptcy. With the policy of ‘opening up’ and eco- nomic reform, there was a sudden influx of new ideas, new values, new ventures, new excitements, new temptations and new threats. Luo’s essay attempted to in- voke a new cohesive force. He located this force in tradition, heritage and culture. He was using translation research for the ideological invention of a new spiritual order. Hence his emphasis on building “a system of our own” ® Zhi Qian, a native of Yueshi who lived in the third century of the Christian era, had discussed the pros and cons of following the source as the supreme principle of translation in the Preface to the Dharmapada in 224 C.E., more than one hundred and fifty years before Dao An commented on the same topic (Chen 1992: 15). Luo has also included Zhi Qian’s Preface to the Dharmapada in An Anthology of Essays on Translation (Zhi 24/1984). His privileging of Dao An's words is therefore deliberate.Cheung: Power and Ideology in Translation Research 161 4. Conclusion As can be seen from this discussion, translation research can be used by individual researchers for ideological purposes different from those endorsed by the dominant ideology and as a way of intervening in the power politics and/or cultural politics of the time. Although not many people today have to conduct research in situations as starkly ideological as those just analyzed, there is no cause for complacency. Our entry into the age of the information superhighway, which renders the boundaries of nation and culture superfluous to the travel of ideas and ideologies alike, makes the prospect of the totalizing power of ideology more daunting than ever. But such a prospect also means that more and more individuals will confront competing ide- ologies and will be forced to recognize this as a fact of their consciousness. It is of crucial importance, therefore, that we know how assertion of difference and resist- ance to dominant ideology can be achieved — not as an end in itself, but as a means of self-empowerment, of ensuring that we remain thinking subjects capable of en- gaging critically with competing ideologies. Whilst I am not advocating that translation research should be explicitly ideo- logical, and whilst I am aware that the cases studied in this paper are too few in number to support generalizations, 1 am encouraged by the findings to call for the transgression of a boundary — the boundary between the object-level and meta-level of translation studies. Rather than keeping translation research — in its usual form of discourse about translation — to the meta-level, translation research could well be taken as a legitimate object of study. This will focus attention on what Theo Hermans as recently as 1999 considered to be “a problem” with descriptive translation stud- ies, pointing out that debates about the untenability of a disinterested, value-free point of view in research and discourse about translation had “hardly begun” (Hermans 1999: 146). Debates will begin, or will be rendered unnecessary, when there is serious engagement with the two issues which this paper, itself steeped in ideology, attempts to bring to light - the ideology of translation research and the translation (carrying across) of ideology in translation research. References (1968) ‘Hu Shi’, in Howard L. Boorman (ed) Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, New York: Columbia University Press, Vol. II, 167-74. (1988) ‘Luo Xinzhang’, in Lin Hui (ed) Zhongguo Fanyijia Cidian (Dictionary of Chi- nese Translators], Beijing: China Translation and Publishing Corporation, 420-1. Baker, Mona (ed) (1998) Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, London & New York: Routledge. 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(1970) Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance: Liberalism in the Chinese Revolution, 1917-1937, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hatim, Basil and lan Mason (1997) The Translator as Communicator, London & New York: Routledge. Hermans, Theo (1985) ‘Introduction. Translation Studies and a New Paradigm’, in T. Hermans (ed) The Manipulation of Literature, Studies in Literary Translation, Lon- don & Sydney: Croom Helm, 7-15. = (1999) Translation in Systems. Descriptive and Systemic Approaches Explained, Manchester: St Jerome. Holmes, James S. (1988) ‘The Name and Nature of Translation Studies’ [1972}, in Trans- lated! Papers on Literary Translation and Translation Studies (ed. R. van den Broeck), Amsterdam: Rodopi, 67-80. Hsia, C. T. (1961) A History of Modern Chinese Fiction 1917-1957, New Haven & London: Yale University Press. 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(1939/1993) Sishi Zishu [A Self-account at Forty], Beijing: Zhongguo Wenlian Chubanshe. — (1983) Hu Shi Koushu Zizhuan (Dr. Hu Shi’s Personal Reminiscences] (Interviews, compiled, edited and translated, with a translator’s preface, by Tang Degang), Taipei: Zhuanji Wenxue Chubanshe. Kelly, Jeanne and Nathan K. Mao (1979) ‘Translators’ preface’, in Qian Zhongshu For-Cheung: Power and Ideology in Translation Research 163 tress Besieged, trans. Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao, Bloomington/London: Indi- ana University Press, xi. Kong, Qingmao (1992) Qian Zhongshu Zhuan (Biography of Qian Zhongshu}, Nanjing: Jiangsu Wenyi. Lefevere, André (1992) Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame, London & New York: Routledge. Lu, Xun (1935/1980) ‘Introduction’, in Zhao Jiabi (ed), Vol. 4, 1-17. Luo, Xinzhang (1983/1984) ‘Woguo Zichengtixi de Fanyi Lilun’ [A system of its own — our country’s translation theories], in Luo Xinzhang (ed), 1-19. ---+- (ed) (1984) Fanyi Lunji [An Anthology of Essays on Translation], Beijing: Com- mercial Press. — (1990/1996) ‘Qian Zhongshu de Yiyitan’ [Qian Zhongshu’s art of translation}, in Fan Xulun and Li Hongyan (eds) Ch'ien Chung-shu Survey 1996, Beijing: Social Sciences Documents Publishing House, 144-68. Mao, Dun (1935/1980) ‘Introduction’, in Zhao Jiabi (ed), Vol. 3, 1-32. = (1954/1984) ‘Wei Fazhan Wenxue Fanyi Shiye he Tigao Fanyi Zhiliang er Fendou” [Let us work hard for the development of literary translation and for the improve- ment of quality and increase in output], in Translators’ Notes, Editorial Department (ed), 1-16. Mao, Nathan K. (1979) ‘Introduction’, in Qian Zhongshu Fortress Besieged, trans. Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao, Bloomington/London: Indiana University Press, xiii-xxix, Mao, Zedong (1956) Talks at the Yenan Forum on Art and Literature, trans. Editorial Department of Foreign Languages Press, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. Niranjana, Tejaswini (1992) Siting Translation. History, Post-Structuralism and the Colonial Context, Berkeley: University of California Press. Ou-yang, Zhesheng (ed) (1998) Hu Shi Wenji (Collected Works of Hu Shi], Beijing: Peking University Press Qian, Zhongshu (1964) ‘Lin Shu de Fanyi’ [The Translations of Lin Shu}, in Wenxue Yanjiu Jikan [Anthology of Literary Studies], Vol. 1, Renmin Wenxue Chubanshe, 267-295. | (1975) ‘Lin Ch’in-nan Revisited’, trans. George Kao, Renditions 5 (Autumn 1975): 8-21. Simon, Sherry (1996) Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Trans- mission, London & New York: Routledge. Translators’ Notes, Editorial Department (ed) Fanyi Yanjiu Lunwenji: 1949-1983 [Se- lected Papers in Translation Studies: 1949-1983], Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. Tymoczko, Maria (1999) Translation in a Postcolonial Context. Early Irish Literature in English Translation, Manchester: St Jerome. van Dijk, Teun A. (1998) Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach, London: Sage Publi- cations Ltd. Venuti, Lawrence (1995) The Translator's Invisibility. A History of Translation, Lon- don & New York: Routledge. — (1998) The Scandals of Translation: Towards an ethics of difference, London & New York: Routledge.164 Crosscultural Transgressions Wang, Xiaoming (1993) ‘Yifen Zazhi he Yige “Shetuan” — Lun “Wusi” Wenxue chuantong’ [A magazine and an ‘organization’ — on the ‘May Fourth’ literary tradi- tion], in Chen Guogiu (ed) Zhongguo Wenxueshi de Xingsi [Reflections on Chinese Literary History], Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 149-85. Wu, Lianghuan (1980) ‘Letter to the Editors’, Fanyi Tongxun [Translators’ Notes] 1980(2): 25. Wu, Ming (1997) ‘Luo Xinzhang’, in Lin Huangtian (ed) Zhongguo Fanyi Cidian (A Companion for Chinese Translators], Wuhan: Hubei Jiaoyu Chubanshe, 452. Xu, Zhimo (1935/1980) ‘Shoujiu yu “Wan” Jiu’ [Abiding by tradition and flirting with tradition], in Zhao Jiabi (ed), Vol. 2, 227-33. Yan, Fu (1973) ‘General Remarks on Translation’, trans. C. Y. Hsu, Renditions 1 (Au- tumn 1973): 4-6. Yi, Zhuxian (1987) Hu Shi Zhuan (Biography of Hu Shi], Hubei: Renmin Chubanshe. Zhao, Jiabi (ed) Zhongguo Xinwenxue Daxi [Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature], 10 Vols., Shanghai: Liangyou Tushu Gongsi. Zhi, Qian (24/1984) ‘Fa Ju Jing Xu’ [Preface to the Dharmapada], in Luo Xinzhang (ed), 22.Tlaloc Roars Native America, the West and Literary Translation GORDON BROTHERSTON Abstract: The confrontation with native American texts challenges received models of translation studies. Western translators who approach native texts are faced with questions not just of radically different language structures, but of little-known or even deliberately obscured literary traditions. These in turn may involve processes of transcription not just from oral enactments and performance but from prior systems of visual language of which western philosophy has shown painfully limited understanding. The order of difference is well exemplified by the Mesoamerican screenfold books, which use a system of representation called tlacuiloli in Nahuatl, Non- phonetic, tlacuilolli may register sound-concepts when required; highly flexible, it may conform by turns to a narrative, an icon or map, or a mathematical table. Integrating into one holistic statement what for us are the separate concepts of letter, picture and arithmetic, it flouts received western notions of writing and literature. Reading and translating these and comparable American texts involves a radical re-think of what otherwise would seem to be the most solid and reliable of western categories, « philosophical adventure which in its turn may reveal new constants and suggest new models for translation studies. On the eve of America’s quincentenary, five hundred years on from the conquest/ encounter/invasion initiated by Columbus, UNESCO thought to promote fuller un- derstanding of that continent’s original inhabitants by publishing a piece on Mexico in the Courier. Written in Spanish, it is the work of the eminent authority Miguel Le6n-Portilla, and deals with the idea of Mexico’s deeper culture, of the long and rich histories of its peoples, a history knowable in part thanks to native records that go back for millennia. So that it would be absurd to think that somehow Mexican history began only after Columbus and Cortés. Alongside Le6n-Portilla’s piece is an accompanying English version; in it, certain key terms are modified — memoria for example, which in Spanish can mean either memory or memoir-like document. But the main argument remains palpably the same. How curious, then, to discover that this apparently well-intentioned attempt by UNESCO to promote cultural understanding of the native New World should have fallen foul of one of today’s better-known commentators on translation. Basing him- self on a prior workmanlike analysis by lan Mason (1994), Lawrence Venuti went off in a direction of his own, to find the English translation of the Mexican piece lamentable, highlighting it in the opening pages of his recent The Scandals of Trans- lation (1998). This is not the place to go into the detail of Venuti’s objections or to166 Crosscultural Transgressions quibble with his understanding of Mexican Spanish. What matters here is the so- ciolinguistic premise on which Venuti’s comments rest. For, establishing a clear binary between the invasive and the resident cultures of Mexico in terms of writ- ten and oral, Venuti chides the English-speaking translator for insidiously favouring the former at the expense of the latter, for doing down “the pre-Columbian Mexi- cans whose oral culture is represented as inferior, especially as a reporting of the past” (1998:3). This sort of reading, of how non-oral western imperialism has intruded on America, will of course be familiar enough. It is there already in Montaigne’s Es- says, in his declared sympathy for the denizen of “a New World so infantine that he has yet to learn his ABC” (Brotherston 1992: 41).' Via Rousseau and de Saussure, it came massively to underpin Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, with its in- tense and exclusive focus on what is claimed to be oral America; I refer to the four copious volumes of Lévi-Strauss’s Mythologiques (1967-74). In all, such a reading rightly alerts us to the role of the alphabet itself as a weapon in the histori cal spread of imperialism. Yet what it ignores is Derrida’s deconstruction of all that, his careful demonstra- tion of how ‘script’ may be encoded in the most various modes and media, ultimately including speech itself, much fraying the supposedly clean edge between written and oral. For Derrida (1967) and the poststructuralists, appealing so unqualifiedly to the written-oral binary must of itself be suspect, indicative of a certain ‘phonocentrism’ that in practice may prove ideologically even more sinister than the propagation of an alphabet. In our own domain of translation, to judge from the announced focus of work that has appeared over the last decades, it would appear that such a phonocentrism is quite the norm. Where, o where, may we find close examinations of the immensely rich question of script and translation ~ from the history of transcriptions between various writing systems to the kind of concern with visible language typified by, say, Apollinaire’s Calligrammes or Concrete Poetry (Herrick 1975; Campos 1975). When the Assises de la traduction littéraire decided boldy to introduce an Atelier décriture in 1996, it turned out to be entirely drawn to the differences between spoken and written French, with no concern, to date, for the issue of visible lan- guage as such (Volkovitch 1997). At any event, in the present case of Mexico's native cultures, Lawrence Venuti’s critique of the UNESCO translation must seem at best misplaced. The very phrases "The question of orality and America is explored at length in this source (chapter 2), as are details of native American texts that are otherwise unspecified below. The present piece owes much to approaches developed in the Department of Literature, University of Essex, in teaching the M.A. course “Theory and Practice of Literary Translation’ (1965- }, among whose more in- fluential products was counted André Lefevere. I should also like to thank Ian Mason and Theo Hermans for their help.Brotherston: Native America, the West and Literary Translation 167 he quotes as “badly translated” into English carry over from the Spanish a serics of direct references to the wealth of Mexico's written past - to the corpus of native inscriptions and histories. Yet he somehow fails to notice what the quotes actually say, so strong for him is the written/oral binary For in planetary history, Mexico or Mesoamerica was unquestionably one of the lands of books, amoxtli in Nahuatl, uoh in Maya, the paginated texts of skin and paper commonly known as ‘codices’ (Marcus 1992; Boone and Mignolo 1994; Brotherston 1995). Long before the European invasion, consciousness of being lit- erate was integral to local experience. Miguel Leén-Portilla enjoys repeating the story of how a sixteenthth-century Nicaraguan, at the east end of Mesoamerica, came upon a Spaniard reading a volume and with surprise and delight said: “Ah, so you too have books”. In rejecting the Franciscan mission sent to convert them in 1524, the Aztec priests appealed to the fact that scripture in itself was not necessar- ily grounds for single authority, since they had their own sacred books (Le6n-Portilla 1986; 1989). Writing in Nahuatl a century later, the historian Chimalpahin drew on this same tradition when attempting to correlate the early Christian story with the Aztec calendar — for example Vespasian’s razing of Jerusalem in the year 70 CE or 1 Rabbit (Brotherston 2000: 244). The authors of the Mexicanus Codex chose the moment of the Gregorian Reform of 1582 — which endeavoured somewhat belat- edly to make good the strikingly inept calendrics of Rome — to embark on a comprehensive comparison between the imported and local chronological systems, at the same time as critically assessing — ever within Mexican iconic script - the Aristotelean model of the four ‘elements’. Cumulatively, the sheer number of such cases cannot but raise the question: ‘In 1492, who entered whos history?’. This brings me to my first main point: in the general story of relations be- tween the west and what Eric Wolf called the “people without history” (1984), between Europe and its others, the kind of model that came to prominence out of concern with subsequent French and British penetration of Africa — the origi- nal tiers monde or Third World — may be not so much inappropriate as actually misleading when applied to native America. Commonwealth norms can be shown, for example, to be getting in the way of Jack Goody’s insight when he comes to talk about literacy in traditional societies such as the Maya (“It is not clear who ever was literate in that language”, 1968: 6). Again, though the line of vision is reversed, much of the Goody approach effectively survives in Gordon Collier's, Us/Them. Translation, Transcription and Identity in Post-Colonial Literary Cultures (1992), insofar as the ‘transcribing’ referred to proves in practice al- ways to be from spoken sources (Caribbean, Native American) to the imported Roman alphabet. This, aside from the yet larger and more urgent question of exactly what ‘post-colonial’ can be expected to mean in a world in fact more thoroughly dominated by empire than it ever has been. In a context usefully established by Tejaswini Niranjana (1992), Delisle and Woodsworth (1995), Bassnett and Trivedi (1999) and others, this point has been well made, with168 Crosscultural Transgressions specific reference to Native America, by the Brazilian Else Vieira (‘New Regis- ters for Translation in Latin America’, 1998), and Frances Karttunen (1994). In other words, in the case of Native America, translation really can and should be had ‘both ways’, within Bourdieu’s understanding (1988) of literary ‘field’. For while the west undoubtedly has taken and takes as it chooses, through the roaming acquisitiveness of a conquistador or a modern compiler of anthologies, there is the other side to the story, of constant native response. Salient examples include the Quechua reworking of Faust, according to the norms and logic inherent in the Inca quipu recording system; Cinderella adapted to the month calendar of the Mapuche in the Southern Cone, and to the Navajo philosophy of domestication and turkey breeding; the Aztec Aesop and the Aztec Calderén; and the Maya versions of the Arabian Nights (Brotherston 1992: 311-40). In native America, translation was as well conceptualized in theory as it was widespread in practice, long before Columbus arrived, notably at the courts of Tenochtitlan and Cuzco. Going back to the inscrip- tions of the Classic Maya, we find such suggestive statements as the parallel texts, in Maya hieroglyphs and Mexican iconic script, engraved in eighth-century Copan In the ‘writing culture’ debate, James Clifford (1988) has pointed out the prob- lem of interference, of how what are commonly referred to as ethnographic texts will always somehow be distorted by the premises and agendas of the (western) observer or compiler. In these terms, texts composed in the visible languages and scripts of the New World serve by contrast as a direct window. Considered in their own right and duly correlated — as in practice they very rarely have been -, these American texts constitute an invaluable authority, of major theoretical interest to the student of translation. With Mesoamerica, reliant as it was on a script functionally comparable with that of invading Europe, it is possible and desirable to think rather in terms of equiva- lent systems, and to be constantly on guard against that easy western assumption of intellectual superiority, not just now, which is bad enough, but projected back into the past, which is absurd yet far too often the norm. In the sixteenth century, when compiling his encyclopaedic Historia de las cosas de Nueva Espaiia, the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagtin adopted the format of the parallel text, Nahuatl to the left and Spanish translation to the right. It is not hard to see how much the latter in fact reduces and traduces the former, but what is more notewor- thy is how seldom such reduction has been understood to correspond not so much to the deliberate strategy of demeaning the native as to the sheer intellectual limi- tation of Renaissance Europe, certainly of Counter-Reformation Spain, in such basic matters as agronomy (most of the world’s best food was genetically devel- oped millenia ago in the American tropics), astronomy (the Maya calendar had an unrivalled capacity to integrate celestial and terrestrial rhythms), the evolution of the human species (the story of which is told in the Popol vuh, three centuries before Darwin), the age of the earth's rock formation (put at millions of years in the codices), and so on.Brotherston: Native America, the West and Literary Translation 169 To see what sense there might be in this approach, I now turn to two specific examples, each a page from a pre-Cortesian book, to see how each has been and might possibly be translated. Alll this, of course, in the context suggested so far, and with a view to seeing what happens to the norms and categories we most often take for granted in translation, even in what would otherwise be considered to be the radical reworking of a text. Salient here are deictics, the articulation of time and space, and the whole question of proper names, of people and places. Each of the two pages uses the kind of iconic script known as tlacuilolli in Nahuatl, which is closely related to the phonetic scripts developed early in Mesoamerica by speakers of Zapotec, Maya and other languages (Nowotny 1961). Going against what is normally understood to be the necessary ‘progress’ towards phonetic script, tlacuilolli is not bound to the sounds of any single Mesoamerican language, being in principle legible in all. In given contexts, tlacuilolli may however appeal to pho- netics. It also may make semantic use of colour, a dimension lost in the pages quoted here, whose original colour has had to be reduced to black and white (for colour reproductions see Brotherston 1992, plates 4 and 16a). Both pages are from screenfold books of skin, read from right to left, and repre- sent the two known genres to which those books belong (Figures J and 2 below). The first, from Vindobonensis (p.21; p.32, corrected pagination), exemplifies the genre of annals, for which the Nahuatl term is xiuhtlapoualli. In this genre, the reading sequence always moves forward through time, guided by a succession of year dates, The second page is the penultimate in Laud (p.45, corrected pagination), cone of the few surviving books of the kind known as ‘ritual’, or ‘dream’ books; here by contrast the reading sequence proceeds within self-contained thematic chapters, and from one chapter to the next. Now housed in Vienna (hence its name), Vindobonensis records, on its obverse, annals which cover the longest span extant in the genre, formally several millennia. In the broader process of transcription and translation of the codices, the annals genre has been more favoured than any other, thanks basically to the fact that its reading sequence, moving forward from date to date, corresponds so closely in prin- ciple to that of Old World annals. In this way, native-script texts from all over Mexico became the antecedent of a whole corpus of histories in native languages as well as Spanish and Latin. ‘The Vienna text tells the longer history of an area in south-central Mexico cen- tred on the town Tepexic, now in the Estado de Puebla. It has been the subject of many commentaries (Jansen 1992), which from the start alert us to the immense amount of information contained in the text and to the difficulty of rendering it into prose narrative. Recent editions of these and closely related annals by the Nether- lands scholar Martin Jansen include both a diagram of each page, and a translation into Mixtec, the language supposedly spoken by the authors. Like other Meso- american languages still spoken today, Mixtec has the advantage of being able to render directly calendrical and other technical terms constantly used in the original170 Crosscultural Transgressions for which it is often hard to find equivalents in European speech. An example is the seventeenth of the Twenty Signs, Ollin in Nahuatl (visible to the left of Tlaloc’s forward-thrusting hand in Figure 2), which means at one and the same time rubber (unknown in Europe before Columbus), earthquake, and the movement of a celes- tial body through the sky. The main event reported on the Vindobonensis page illustrated is a New Fire ceremony (see Figure 1). Reading in boustrophedon from lower right on the previ- ous page (p.31), preparations are made for a fire-drilling to be conducted by a character named Five Lizard under the auspices of Two Dog (middle of right mar- gin). The smoke and flame from the new fire issue in volutes that can also denote speech. The date (just to the left of the fire drill) is the year 5 House, day 5 Snake (probably sometime early in the ninth century CE), the year being marked by an “A’-shaped solar ray (centre-right, below the base of the mountain). The place is the ‘split-mountain’ Tepexic and nearby towns (middle register), grouped in three pairs of toponyms that have characteristic ‘mountain’ profiles (tepet! in Nahuatl) found already in inscriptions from the first millennium BCE. Reading from the right, Tepexic itself is paired with the chequerboard place Tliltepexic; next comes Huchuetlan, the twin towns of the ‘old ones’, male and female; finally, come the places of the gourd and the maguey plant. The motifs of the first and last of the three pairs are reflected in the row of houses or palaces depicted above. For its part, the cipher three numbers the stones of hearth and home. A highly political statement, the New Fire ceremony entails the delivery of com- modity tribute — the previous page shows such items as chocolate, maize dough and elaborate textiles -, as well as labour tribute, specified in the construction of pyra- mids and temples (lower left), for which material was quarried and brought in from other places (note the human feet conveying the block of multicoloured stone at lower left). At the same time, calendrical adjustments are made, to ensure a precise measurement of the year, as with a stretched rope (middle of lower margin). This is the baldest statement of action, that avoids most of the significant detail. Such detail is encoded in features like the toponyms. For example, the seven disks inset into Tepexic’s mountain recall a specific history, that of the Chichimecs who, having emerged from Seven Caves (the seven disks) far to the northwest two centu- ries previously, were then having a powerful local impact in the Tepexic area. Intimating the seven orifices of the head, the caves are coloured red as if inset into the skin of the mountain. At the same time, in the geological register of the codices that is also visible in the multicoloured strata of the quarried stone, red may indicate tezontli, a kind of volcanic rock. The hand gestures, clothing, insignia and, above all, calendrical names of the characters involved, carry a similar semantic load. The names Dog and Wind belong to the same set of Twenty Signs as those that name the year and day of the event (House and Snake). Each carries a complex set of associations which may then be further claborated in the course of any one text, associations so strong betweenBrotherston: Native America, the West and Literary Translation it Figure 1: New Fire at Tepexic, Vienna Codex p. 32 [21] (Brotherston 1995: 81)172 Crosscultural Transgressions themselves that they may occlude or elude those Cartesian obsessions with indi- vidual identity that have played so major a role in western understandings of narrative. The Two Dog seen here reappears over large spans of time, yet differently attired on each occasion, differences that a western translator would presumably feel obliged to endow with essence, or at least correlate with a succession of people who hap- pened to have the same ‘proper’ names. Paginated like European books, Mesoamerican screenfolds may additionally be opened out over part of or all their length. This enables comparisons to be made simultaneously between two or more passages of a narrative, in a fashion impossi- ble in a spine-bound European volume. The Tepexic text was written with such flexibility in mind, much of the meaning conveyed on any one page depending on its structural and other relationship to other like pages. This New Fire scene is very much a case in point, since it is the second in ten such ceremonies reported over the narrative as a whole, and the first of five (within the ten) to be given a precise geographical location. Only by looking simultaneously at these other fire-drillings, especially the four others that are also located by toponyms, can we fully appreciate the specificity of this one. The five geographical locations shown, at New Fire ceremonies 2 (this one), 4, 6,9 and 10, are registered as here by conjoint toponyms, with particular place-signs rising from a common mountain profile; and all in principle are locatable on today’s maps. Directionality, to east, south, north and west, is indicated by the detail of the place-signs (e.g. a rising sun in the east), and the amount of page height they oc- cupy, being low in the south (also the underworld Mictlan) and high in the north (also the home of the rain deity Tlaloc). As such the sequence adheres to the paradigm of the quatrefoil map of tribute quarters, defined already in Olmec cul- ture, which appears as such in the dream books and, along with the New Fire ceremony, is the subject of a theme chapter. The first of the five conjoint toponyms, that of Tepexic at the metropolitan centre, is seen to precede and dominate the succeeding four by the fact that it is unique in having a raised base. The other four, in the quarters, all rest on the lower edge of the page. To be at all adequate, any prose narrative translation of these annals would somehow have to find a means of signalling this precedence from the start, since, on the page, local preeminence appears to have been a, if not the, major concern of the authors of these Tepexic-centred annals. Like other screenfold annals, this Tepexic text is thoroughly concerned with the passage of time and the material history of a particular place. Yet the very elements through which this story is told of themselves are allowed to induce a logic of their own. This is true of the complex lexicon of attire, gesture, toponymy and, above all, the calendar. For example, the cycle to which the New Fire year 5 House belongs s of fifty-two years, and this is also the total of the number of pages in the screenfold text. Similarly, the Sign within the set of twenty which denotes the char- acter Two Dog is the tenth, and this is the number of times a character with thatBrotherston: Native America, the West and Literary Translation pk, calendar name appears over the text as a whole. In other words, while remaining diachronic, such history acquires a ritualized and poetic feel that demands attention in its own right. Many of the concepts relating to the limits of transcription and translation that emerge when we consider the Tepexic page reappear, much intensified, in the page from Laud (see Figure 2). Named after Charles I’s archbishop, Laud is one of five Mexican books first accessioned to the Bodleian Library of Oxford University (an- other of them, screenfold Mixtec annals like Vindobonensis, actually bears Thomas Bodley’s name). As a ‘ritual’ or ‘dream’ text, it is highly sophisticated in its layout of chapters and in the way it organizes its argument. In general, per page and chap- ter, this genre is semantically yet denser, and constantly appeals to a principle of multiple reading or significance. The page quoted is the first of a pair, devoted to the powers of rain and sun, which rounds off the text, at the end of the reverse side of the screenfold (pp.45-6). Chronologically they allude not just to yearly weather cycles but, at a far deeper time level, to the pair of catastrophes, Flood and Eclipse, that punctuate the Ameri- can story of creation and world ages. Kneeling between the waters above and the waters below (the horizontal bands at top and bottom), the Rain deity Tlaloc en- deavours to bring them together: under his influence, and to amphibian delight, clouds pour down and the water surface froths up. He holds a sinuous sceptre in his right hand and, in his left, a flaming axe in which copper streaks are intercalated with a blue steel then known only in meteorites. The axe blade with its volutes may be double-read as the tongue of the head into which it is inset. Tlaloc’s emblem colour, blue, is celebrated in several subtly distinguished hues. The jade blue of the caiman below is confirmed by the round jade sign inset into its body. Tlaloc’s powers in this role are spelled out through the Twenty Signs that are disposed around his body (Brotherston 1979: 102-3). The first of them is the Caiman (Sign 1), which as a very ancient vertebrate conventionally signifies the earth: here, it is not beneath Tlaloc’s foot, but somehow hangs beside it (it seems to extend from Tlaloc’s forward-thrusting foot), as if floating like the caiman in the water below. The second Sign is Wind (Sign 2), shown as the open jaws of the mask worn by such figures as Eecatl and Quetzalcoatl; here, it is trapped before Tlaloc’s nose, as in the sultry prelude to a storm. The third Sign is House (Sign 3), scen in profile and placed up in the clouds (top band, left of centre) where Tlaloc belongs. And so on. In comparable icons of other deities, for example the war-like Tezcatlipoca (Borgia codex p.17), the same Twenty Signs are differently disposed so as to produce other definitions. There, the Caiman earth trembles directly beneath Tezcatlipoca’s foot; Wind indicates the speed of the thought and power streaming behind him; and his body shields the House of the community. Clues to the meanings that the sets of Signs construct, with respect to the ‘identity’ of these and yet other gods, can be found in the Nahuatl manuscript known as the Twenty Sacred Hymns, comprising songs once sung in their honour. Fearing their demonic power, the Franciscan friar174 Crosscultural Transgressions Figure 2: Tlaloc, Laud Codex p. 45 (Brotherston 1995; 135)Brotherston: Native America, the West and Literary Translation 175 Sahagtn who collected and transcribed them, left them in Nahuatl, untranslated, in an appendix to Book 2 of his Historia. In Tlaloc’s attire, three of the Twenty Signs disposed around him are replicated in much magnified form. Snake (Sign 5, below his lower knee) also heads the long sinuous sceptre he holds in his right hand, and in that position represents the light- ning he hurls from the sky. Specifying as roaring thunder the sound that issues from his mouth in two volutes, Jaguar (Sign 14) reappears as his huge headdress. Rain (Sign 19, to the right of the house in the clouds) is also his mask, goggle-eyed and long-toothed, his literal persona, The scribes in Tepepulco who worked with Sahagin on the first version of his Historia defined Tlaloc through just these three concepts: quiaui, tlatlatzinia, tlauitequi (he rains, he thunders, he strikes [with lightning] (Sahagiin 1997:121). The point of formally replicating the three corresponding Signs here in Laud becomes clearer when we refer to the Twenty Sacred Hymns manuscript, where, as the maker of rain (quiawhtl), Tlaloc is further referred to as ocelo-coatl, which in Nahuatl literally means ‘jaguar-snake’. In other words, the phenomenon of rain is announced by lightning (snake lightning) and thunder (jaguar roar). Finally, be- cause each of the Twenty Signs always carries an inherent number value, this definition of Tlaloc in image (Laud) and word (Sacred Hymn) involves not just phenomenology but numeracy. For, according to the kabbala-like logic of ilacuilolli, rain (Sign 19) may likewise be the arithmetical result and sum of thunder (Jaguar, Sign 14) and lightning (Snake, Sign 5). Pages like this one bring out the degree to which ‘deities’ in the codices are deliberately constructed from precise and limited sets of elements and factors. Shown here as rain-maker and paired with the sun (on the following page), Tlaloc is one of the Thirteen Heroes who regulate agriculture, amongst other activities. In other con- texts, he is cast as the ninth of the nine Night Lords (Youallitecutin) who supervise human gestation and birth; the aqueous element is still there (in the amniotic wa- ters), yet the function and to this extent the identity is not the same. In yet other contexts Tlaloc may actually switch sex. Hence, in the corpus of the dream books, we are far from classical European notions of a pantheon of gods, each with its own ontology and autonomy; and we are still further from absolute distinctions between good and bad. It is more a ques- tion of alliances and oppositions that shift according to situation and purpose. The maize plant shown with Tlaloc (bottom right) may depend on his thunder and rain but can also be easily destroyed by an excess of it, by a weakness in Sun or Wind. ‘The theme chapter in the dream books devoted to maize planting shows such a plant drowning in Tlaloc’s flood, arms thrust up as if in human supplication. From a translator’ s point of view, this situation may at first pose huge problems of adjustment and demand, at times, quite new ways of thinking. Yet once the sys- tem and its mechanisms are entered to some degree, then the process of translation176 Crosscultural Transgressions may actually become more feasible, even into a European language, precisely be- cause of native resistance to notions of quiddity and essence. In the general history of script, lacuilolli has most often been ignored or dis- missed as mere ‘picture writing’. Even this brief look at pages written in it must be enough to indicate how much information and argument may in fact be embed- ded in single images and sets of images. ‘Picture’ it may be, but one which appeals intricately to formal mechanisms of sign and figure sets, and to numerical and symbolic logic. In this sense, the term ‘picture writing’ may here be ransomed from the implicit charge of being unsophisticated or underdeveloped. So that the genius of tlacuilolli may rather be understood to reside precisely in the ingenuity with which is defines and disposes non-phonetic images on the page. In Book 6 of his Historia, Sahagén shows how conscious and elaborate these procedures can be, by recording exam- ples of ‘riddle’ language which reflects the multiple meanings of tlacuilolli images. One such we saw above: the axe blade that is also a tongue. In the line that stretches from the Middle East to Greece and Rome, script was progressively neutralized and reified. In the corresponding ‘field’ of literature (to use Bourdieu’s term), the order of formal vigour inberent in tlacuilolli has perhaps for this reason excited little theoretical interest, and has certainly escaped the pur- view of semiotics and Saussurean linguistics alike, with respect to image and word. The nearest available corollary would sooner be in the work of certain twentieth- century poet-critics who have confronted those officious ‘scientific’ accounts of language that insist on separating metaphor from norm. With stupendous insight, Ezra Pound perceived how Western discourse could be renewed and enlivened through reference to the non-phonetic logic of scripts like Chinese (Pound 1969; Oseki-Dépré 1999). The Brazilian Haroldo de Campos has worked along similar lines in creating and discussing Concrete Poetry (1975). In the case of the pages from Mesoamerican books quoted here, translations into English can by these means acquire the lift of poetry and in so doing gain rather than lose in accuracy. The Tepexic page might suggest phrases like: raised before their quatrefoil, the capital towns of Tepexic stand pre-eminent; © the drill-block utters the New Fire of hearth and home; © the year spans its length in taut cord. Besides the play with jaguar roar and snake lightning, the Laud page encodes such possible readings as: * curling as steam and featherdown rain gushes from clouds; ¢ the tongue of the meteoric axe pronounces meteorology; © the jade-blue caiman bathes in azure water.Brotherston: Native America, the West and Literary Translation 177 Taking our cue from Le6n-Portilla’s piece on the cumulative history of America, we have suggested that that continent’s recorded experience is often obscured by an effortless assumption of cultural superiority on the part of the West. In part, that assumption is rooted in the all-pervasive written/oral binary, one which could use- fully be deconstructed, more than it apparently has been, in the particular field of translation studies. Considering the tradition of books native to Mexico or Mesoamerica can lead to further insights of a theoretical as well as a cultural order, given the properties of the tlacuilolli script in which they are written. These include the construction of identity — the proper names of people and places — through trans- ferable component elements, and the definition of meaning through such factors as colour, disposition on the page, and playing with created expectation. No less important are concepts inherent in the codices which have nor been even touched on here, for the obvious reason of space. For there is the whole question of layout, and the rigorous interplay between designs in profile (like these pages) and those in plan (like the quatrefoil map, for instance); and the strongly reflexive ten- dency of tlacuilolli, which will, for example, depict the act of writing itself, on a deerskin page that is painted on the deerskin page of the actual book. Having its roots in inscriptions that date back well into the first millennium BCE, this script continuously adapted itself to new historical circumstances, including the European invasion. From the translation point of view, the corpus of post-Cortesian texts written in facuilolli, which number over four hundred, are remarkable for the way they incorporate and adapt to local norms. After 1519, horseshoes imprint roads previously marked only by the human foot; on being introduced into the economy in 1536, copper coinage is quoted according to the existing exchange rates of cloth and cacao; the steel of invading weapons is rendered in a hard metallic blue previ- ously reserved for Tlaloc’s meteorite axe. And so on, Even the strange phonetics of proper names are caught as needed: Gallegos becomes house (calli) and bean (e-tl), and Cortés quite aptly is snake (coatl); and in the Tlatelolco Annals, ‘Peru’ is in geniously translated by a hybrid glyph consisting of a Spanish dog (perro) and a Nahuatl rubber ball (o/lin). At the same time, in terms of cultural geography, these Mesoamerican texts stand as a central reference for much of the continent. The genre of annals represented by the Tepexic page stretches far north, successively modified, to the Year and Winter Counts of the Pima, the Kiowa and the Sioux. The quatrefoil map on which the Tepexic tribute system was based recurs more or less verbatim in the dry-painting tradition of Anasazi. Looking in the other direction, the close integration of writing with numeracy can likewise be found in the quipu script of the Inca, while the imagery of tropical America as a whole ceaselessly surfaces on the codex page, not least in the thunder that is the jaguar’s roar.178 Crosscultural Transgressions References Bassnett, Susan and Harish Trivedi (eds) (1999) Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, London & New York: Routledge. Boone, E. and W. Mignolo (1994) Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes, Dutham: Duke University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (1996) The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, Cambridge: Polity. Brotherston, Gordon (1979) Image of the New World: The American Continent Por- trayed in Native Texts, London: Thames & Hudson. - (1992) Book of the Fourth World: Reading the Native Americas through their Lit- erature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. - (1995) Painted Books from Mexico, London: British Museum Press. - (2000) ‘Indigenous Intelligence in Spain’s American Colony’, Forum for Modern Language Studies xxxvi: 241-253 Campos, Haroldo de (1975) A arte no horizonte do provével, Sao Paulo: Perspectiva, 3rd ed. Clifford, James (1988) The Predicament of Culture: 20th-Century Ethnography, Lit- erature and Art, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press. Collier, Gordon (1992) Us/Them: Translation, Transcription and Identity in Post- Colonial Literary Culture, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Delisle, Jean and Judith Woodsworth (eds) (1995) Translators Through History, Am- sterdam: John Benjamins. Derrida, Jacques (1967) De la Grammatologie, Paris: Minuit. Goody, Jack (1968) Literacy in Traditional Societies, Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press. Herrick, E. M. (1975) ‘A Taxonomy of Alphabets and Scripts’, Visible Language 8: Jansen, Martin (1992) Origen e historia de los reyes mixtecos [Vienna Codex], Mex‘ FCE. Karttunen, Frances (1994) Between Worlds: Interpreters, Guides and Survivors, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Le6n-Portilla, Miguel (1986) Coloquios y Doctrina Cristiana, Mexico: UNAM - (1989) ‘Have we really Translated the Mesoamerican “Ancient Word”?", in Swann (ed), 313-338. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1967-74) Mythologiques, 4 vols. Paris: Plon. Marcus, J. (1992) Mesoamerican Writing Systems: Propaganda, History and Myth in Four Ancient Civilizations, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mason, lan (1994) ‘Discourse, Ideology and Translation’, in R. de Beaugrande, A. Shunaq and M. H. Heliel (eds) Language, Discourse and Translation in the West and Mid- dle East, Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamns, 23-34. Niranjana, Tejaswini (1992) Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism and the Colonial Context, Berkeley: University of California Press. Nowotny, K. A. (1961) Tlacuilolli: Die mexikanischen Bilderhandschrifien, Stil und Inhalt, Berlin: Gebr. Mann. }-32. O%Brotherston: Native America, the West and Literary Translation 179 Oseki-Dépré, I. (1999) Théories et pratiques de la traduction littéraire, Paris: Colin Pound, Ezra (ed) (1969) Fenollosa. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry [1936], San Francisco: City Lights. Sahagiin, Bernardino de (1997) Primeros memoriales, ed. by T. Sullivan, H.B.Nicholson, A.L.O. Anderson, C.E, Dibble, E. Quifiones K., W. Ruwet, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Swann, B. (ed) (1992) On the Translation of Native American Literatures, Washington: Smithsonian Institution, Venuti, Lawrence (1998) The Scandals of Translation. Towards an Ethics of Differ- ence, London: Routledge. Vieira, Else (1998) ‘New Registers for Translation in Latin America’, in P. Bush and K. Malmkjaer (eds) Rimbaud’s Rainbow. Literary Translation in Higher Education, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 171-95. Volkovitch, M. (1997) ‘Atelier d’écriture’, Assises de la traduction littéraire XIV. Wolf, E. (1984) Europe and the People without History, Berkeley & Los Angeles: Uni- versity of California Press.Culture as Translation — and Beyond Ethnographic Models of Representation in Translation Studies MICHAELA WOLF Abstract: In ethnographies as well as in translation in the traditional sense of the word, the cultural Other is not verbalized directly but indirectly, filtered and arranged through the consciousness of the ethnographer or translator. The recognition of the problematic connection between the textualization and conceptualization of culture has provoked a ‘crisis of representation’ in literary studies, historiography and ethnography. Recent ethnographic approaches have tried to transcend binary oppositions like that between observer and observed, and focus instead on a view of culture marked by pluralism, L argue that cultural representation through translation can obtain significant impulses from cultural studies. The paper discusses some of these approaches to translation, assesses their relation to other approaches dealing with cultural representation as well as current translation studies, and explores the applicability of such models in the study of translation. The discussion shows that this heuristically oriented translation model yields insight into power relations between the cultures involved and helps to identify interrelations between various cultural levels. 1. Introduction Concepts of alterity as originally conceived in cultural studies can be seen as consti- tutive for translation studies once we view translation as a linguistic and cultural practice which in fact produces the ‘Other’. The notion of the cultural Other, which includes the c of the translatability of cultures, has only recently been exten- sively dealt with in translation studies. It will be good to remember, however, that since in Western societies the “acceptance of difference has become a foremost ethical claim” (Assmann 1996: 99), “the transvaluation of values that is commonly associated with postmodernism [...] is characterized by the fundamentalization of plurality” (ibid.). Thus the Other, as one of the central values of postmodern cul- ture, is in danger of being mystified as another fundamentalism and may be labelled a ‘uniformitarian’ tool (see Budick 1996: 2). This might be one of the reasons why the concept was questioned in other disciplines, such as ethnography or literary studies, before its consideration was regarded as leading to a valuable approach in translation. Ever since the rise of deconstructionist thinking, any sort of textual criti- cism based on binary oppositions has been confronted with the accusation of ideological bias. In addition, the creation of stable boundaries between Self andWolf: Culture as Translation — and Beyond 181 Other implies the essentialization of cultural difference. Approaches like Kristeva’s ‘strangers to ourselves’ (Etrangers & nous-mémes, Kristeva 1988) embody this cri- sis and help to transcend the dichotomy by focusing on the phenomenon of estrangement as a psychoanalytic category through which Otherness is explored within the Self. This exploration implies that the Self is not a self-contained, authored whole, but the product of reflections, absorptions and transformations. The concept of intertextuality is intrinsic to this approach and, in the context of translation, can be interpreted as the result of the transaction between cultures which are already marked by pluralism. Against this background the question arises as to what methodology could cope with the problem of dichotomies in the context of Self and Other. Once we admit that binary oppositions can never be totally abandoned (take, for example, the di- chotomy male/female), one option could be a more accurate focus on the functional mechanisms of antithetical images. A lively discussion about this issue has been going on in ethnography during the last few years. In ethnographies as well as in translation in the traditional sense of the word, the cultural Other is not verbalized directly but only indirectly, and filtered and arranged through the ethnographer’ s or the translator’s consciousness. For a long time, the connection between ‘conceptu- alizing’ culture and ‘textualizing’ it was taken for granted and seen as unproblematic. This provoked the so-called ‘crisis of representation’ in such disciplines as literary studies, historiography and ethnography. The ‘writing culture’ debate (Clifford and Marcus 1986), which followed the rise of the ‘culture as text’ concept as developed in interpretive anthropology, attempted to view ethnographic represen- tation not as the reconstruction of some pre-existing reality, but as a literary construct. Such a view of cultural representation helps to focus on the aspects of process and production of translation.' Cultural representation through translation can obtain important impulses from ethnographic insights. In the following pages I will discuss various ethnographic approaches to translation and establish their relations to other approaches dealing with cultural representation as well as current translation studies. In addition, I will explore the applicability of ethnographic models in translation studies. The discus- sion will show that this heuristically oriented translation model yields insight into power relations between cultures and helps to identify the interrelations between various cultural levels in an intercultural context. The approach stands for a view which tries to transcend the analysis of specific cultural items (ic. the lexical level) and is geared instead to an analysis that operates on the level of discourse and social context. ' This concept can be traced also in New Historicist criticism, where both the historicity of texts and the textuality of history are emphasized; see Montrose (1986).182 Crosscultural Transgressions Ethnographic approaches in translation studies If translating between cultures, in ethnography as well as in translation, means intercultural interaction, it is of paramount importance to identify the agencies that are active behind this interaction, in historical as well as in contemporary contexts. Back in the 1950s Godfrey Lienhardt depicted the task of anthropology as one of translation: The problem of describing to others how members of a remote tribe think then begins to appear largely as one of translation, of making the coherence primitive thought has in the language it really lives in, as clear as possible in our own, (Lienhardt 1954:97, quoted in Asad 1986: 142) Lienhardt’s use of the term “translation” here refers not only to the question of language, but primarily to “modes of thought” in a translational context and across power relations, In Talal Asad’s list of anthropological statements on translation another scholar worth citing is Edmund Leach, who claimed in the early 1970s that “for practical purposes a tolerably satisfactory translation is always possible” and that “social anthropologists are engaged in establishing a methodology for the trans- lation of cultural language” (Leach quoted in Asad 1986: 142). The engagement with the question of translation, which already goes beyond a metaphoric view of the transfer between cultures, is obvious enough here, although its methodological claims seem somewhat over-optimistic. It must be equally obvious, however, that the concept of translation as used by anthropologists like Lienhardt, Leach and oth- ers (see Asad 1986:142ff) amounts, in Tejaswini Niranjana’s words, to “the desire to construct the primitive world, to represent it and to speak on its behalf’ (Niranjana 1992: 70; her emphasis). Niranjana’s footnote highlighting parallels with Edward Said’s Orientalism (ibid.) points to the lack of awareness among these anthropolo- gists regarding the asymmetrical power relations between the cultures involved. The metaphor of the ‘translation of culture’ suggests that in principle it is actu- ally possible to translate cultures. This claim is problematic not only because it presupposes the existence of stable cultural units which can be transferred between an ‘original’ and a ‘target’ culture, but also because in the final analysis such a translation turns out to be an ethnocentric operation. Ethnographers (viz. transla- tors) cannot help using the categories of their own language and culture to represent what they observe (viz. to translate the foreign text). As this is a problem that can- not be fully resolved, Clifford Geertz has suggested that ethnography cannot be equated with the ‘translation of cultures’, since this would mean the transfer of a foreign culture into analogue concepts. That, in turn, runs counter to the anthropo- logical endeavour to understand and describe foreign cultures from the perspective of its members (Geertz 1997: 290). Do we find ourselves in a cul-de-sac here? As far as the overlap between ethnography and translation is concerned, it seems worth pointing out that, as first readers of the other culture, translators andWolf: Culture as Translation ~ and Beyond 183 ethnographers have to represent the Other in a primary process (Valero-Garcés 1995: 556). Both can be called interpreters of the ‘culture’ in question. While the ethnog- rapher interprets experiences, notes and observations, the translator interprets a pre-given text. For their translations, both have at their disposal a wide range of answers or solutions to their respective interpretations, in their own language. The ethnographer engages in ‘participant observation’ and direct communication, and is thus confronted with cultural expectations. Here the process of translation is two- fold. In a first step, the ethnographer has to interpret the social discourse of his or her informants. In a second step this interpretation is systematized and textualized for the benefit of the target audience in the ‘First World’ and their expectations. In order to represent his or her observations in the target language and culture, the ethnographer has to comply with the (Western) academic discourse strategies of the intended audience. The ethnographer produces a new text to be integrated into the (Western) target cultural repertoire (Wolf 1997a). The translator, on the other hand, is typically faced with a pre-existing written text, which she or he transposes in a complex process for her or his target audience. The question whether the translator, too, creates a new text through translation has been widely discussed also in postmodern approaches to translation (see, for exam- ple, Wolf 1997b) and is necessarily linked with that of the production of meaning. It should be stressed in this context that ethnography as well as translation are inevita- bly positioned between systems of meaning which are marked by power relations. “Translating between cultures’ consequently means that ‘other’ meanings are trans- ferred to cultural practices which are themselves embedded in and shaped by institutions and traditions, i.e. by history. In Niranjana’s view, general translation studies have so far failed to make a constructive contribution to a postcolonial his- tory of translation precisely because they have been too preoccupied with the notion of “pure meaning” (Niranjana 1992: 55). As Kate Sturge has reminded us, Niranjana’s work claims to “look precisely at the (unequal) relationship between source- language and target-language culture and the ways in which practices of representation reinforce or subvert these relationships” (Sturge 1997: 23-24). When we realize, in addition, that translation as well as ethnographic writing means that the Other’s voice is always filtered through the translator's or the ethnographer’ consciousness, it is not hard to see that the translational and ethnographic represen- tation of the Other is bound to be seen as highly problematic. The traditional view of translation and ethnography as attempts to integrate the Other in an objectifying way is no longer tenable; in fact, each representation can be seen as an act of politi- cal oppression (Tyler 1993: 288). 2 Tyler goes even further: “Because the text can eliminate neither ambiguity nor the subjectivity of its authors and readers, it is bound to be misread, so much so that we might conclude [...] that the meaning of the text is the sum of its misreadings” (Tyler 1986: 135). The metaphor of trans- lation is also criticized by Hans Peter Duerr, who views ethnographic translation as a processI84 Crosscultural Transgressions Among the first attempts to tackle this ‘crisis of representation’ was the so-called ‘writing culture’ debate initiated in 1986 by James Clifford and George E, Marcus, who proposed to view cultural representations as literary constructs. At the end of the 1970s some influential anthropologists, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mary Douglas and Clifford Geertz among them, showed a keen interest in literary theory and practice. The ‘literary turn’ in ethnography, which also became popular in historiography (White 1978), revealed that literary forms like metaphor, figuration or narrative affect the ways in which cultural phenomena are registered. As a result, ethnographic texts could not avoid expressive tropes, figures and allegories: “Power and history work through [the ethnographic texts], in ways their authors cannot fully control” (Clifford 1986: 7). Seeing cthnographies as fictions therefore suggests the partiality of cultural and historical truths.’ It also transcends the self-image of the ethnogra- pher who casts himself not only as the translator but also as the chronicler of and spokesman for the culture observed (see Malinowski 1979: 25 and passim). The crisis of representation as conceived by scholars like Clifford and Marcus (1986) or Edward Said (1989) goes to the heart of the problem of the textual objectivation of the Other as it is still practised by some ethnographers and ulti- mately also by translators in the traditional sense of the word. The observation that “{t]o talk about others means talking about oneself” (Berg and Fuchs 1993: 11, my translation, MW) may serve as a reminder that the construction of the Other implies the simultaneous construction of the Self, thus stressing the relational character of both Self and Other. These relations are asymmetrical by their very nature. As Michael Werner argues, symmetrical relations between cultures and societies are never possible, for they would presume the existence of homologous “developments” of cultures. The comparison of cultures and societies is always faced with asym- metrical constellations which “elude uniform tools of description” (Werner 1997: 89, my translation, MW). Given the asymmetrical character of relations between cultures, the cultural ap- propriation of the Other is caught up in political and economic dependencies recognizable mainly in present-day postcolonial realities. Edward Said’s doubts about some terms related to this postcolonial situation such as ‘representation’ or ‘anthro- pology’ speak a clear language in that these terms are affected by limitations and pressures which spring from their being “embedded in settings that no amount of ideological violence can dismiss” (Said 1989: 212). “Anthropological representa- tions” bear as much on the representer’s world as on who or what is represented. The terms therefore vacillate between various possibilities of meaning according to the perspectives under which they are considered; they cannot be assigned essential during which the Other is usurped and appropriated by the target culture and therefore neu- alized (Duerr 1985: 152). > Not entirely without reason, Vincent Crapanzano portrays cthnographers as “tricksters” (1986: 52ff).Wolf: Culture as Translation — and Beyond 185 or fixed significations. As a consequence, Said observes,“there is also some (justi- fied) fear that today’s anthropologists can no longer go to the post-colonial field with quite the same ease as in former times” (ibid.: 209). The point applies with equal force to translators in the postcolonial context, where sensitivity to political or ideological implications is badly needed. In contemporary ethnography the act of writing itself, the actual production of the text, is no longer assumed to be a marginal activity but, in Clifford’s words, one that is “central to what anthropologists do both in the field and thereafter” (1986: 2). The fact that it has only recently been portrayed and seriously discussed reflects, for Clifford, “the persistence of an ideology claiming transparency of representation and immediacy of experience” (ibid.). In ethnography as well as in translation stud~ ies that ideology has largely crumbled. Meanings are no longer perceived as being roughly the same across different cultures, but as something to be represented in codes and symbols linked to the translator’s and the ethnographer’s subjectivity and background, Jn translation studies this altered outlook has shed new light on the issue of the translator's invisibility and raised questions about the translator's au- thority (Sturge 1997; 34). Translation is no longer understood exclusively in terms of transfer between a cultural ‘Self? and an ‘Other’, but also — and cyen primarily — in terms of its regulative effect, as for instance in the case of the deployment of translation in the context of colonial domination. 3. The implications of ‘cultural’ approaches in translation studies In translation studies, the repercussions of the anthropological ‘writing culture’ de- bate, which have been explored mainly by Doris Bachmann-Medick (see e.g Bachmann-Medick 1997), can be considered to form part of the cluster of develop- ments subsumed under the ‘cultural turn’ (Bassnett and Lefevere 1990, 1998), even though to my knowledge they have never been explicitly brought under this label. Towards the end of the 1980s, translation studies began to take issues of context, history and convention into consideration, and the emphasis in the reflection on translation shifted from matters of language and linguistics to matters of culture. Of course, culture had repeatedly received attention in the study of translation, from as early as Eugene Nida’s work on Bible translation (beginning with Nida 1945), but most of these approaches were still informed by an ethnocentrically biased anthropology. Following the discipline’s opening up to the broader cul- tural contexts of translation, the notion of cultural pluralism as understood especially in gender-based and postcolonial translation studies (see e.g. Simon 1996) finally paved the way to a process-oriented and dynamic concept of culture informing the reflection on translation.186 Crosscultural Transgressions The ‘cultural turn’ has shown us, among other things, that culture is best con- ceived, not as a stable unit, but as a dynamic process which implies difference and incompleteness. As translators and translation researchers we are becoming in- creasingly aware that translation is not only a matter of transfer ‘between cultures’ but that it is also a place where cultures merge and create new spaces. In the context of the interaction between asymmetrical cultures translation does not confirm bor- ders and inscribe the dichotomy of centre versus periphery; rather, it identifies ‘pluricentres’ where cultural differences are constantly being negotiated. In such a view, cultures themselves do not appear as “original lifeworlds” but as translations in the sense that they are already the results of translation activities (Bachmann-Medick 1997: 14). The concept of ‘culture as translation’ thus projects culture as the site of interaction of the components of translational processes and as the space where translation is conceived as the reciprocal interpenetration of Self and Other. When this perspective is adopted it becomes clear that postcolonial communities such as the ‘mixed cultures’ and syncretic societies of Latin America are dependent on trans- lation not only in terms of texts but also in terms of intracultural traditions, cultural practices and conventions. How can these considerations benefit our insight into the interrelations between the cultures involved in translation? What is their impact on translation research models? And who are the agents and agencies behind the cultural representation performed through translation? In the following paragraphs these questions will be discussed on the basis of the hypothesis that the notion of cultural pluricentres rep- resents a paradigmatic turn in the discussion of the translatability of cultures. 4. The ‘in-between’ The function of translation is paramount in the context of a view of cultural pluricentres which seeks to deconstruct the idea of stable cultures bridged with the help of cultural mediators such as translators or ethnographers. The shift away from ethnocentric modes of cultural interpretation in terms of the patterns of perception and behaviour prevalent in the ethnographer’s or translator's own culture, and to- wards a concept of culture which emphasizes the symbolic articulation of social discourses. necessarily implies a writing practice which questions the production of knowledge of the Other. Some models of representation which focus on a so- called ‘in-between space’ highlight this change of paradigm. Fifty years ago Margaret Mead already argued in favour of an anthropological representation that would “ Social discourse is understood here as “everything which is and can be said, written and shown ina given society at a given moment, which can be narrated and discussed, according to a vari- able set of norms” (Robyns 1992: 214).Wolf: Culture as Translation — and Beyond 187 emerge from a space located somewhere between her own observations and the subsequent statement thereof, and the reader's consideration: I should like to be able to interpose between my statement and the reader’s consideration of that statement a pause, a realization not of what authorita- tive right I have to make the statement I make, but instead of how it was arrived at, of what the anthropological process is. (Mead 1974: 53f) The encounter between, on the one hand, the culture being observed and to be rep- resented through the anthropologist’ s textualization, and, on the other, the (academic) reader’s reception of that textualized representation, is perceived by Mead as a means of reflecting the process of cultural representation at the very point where the per- spectives of the observer and the observed merge, thus transcending the dichotomy of the agents involved (see also Wolf 2000: 136). In her introduction to the collection Between Languages and Cultures (1995) Anuradha Dingwaney goes several steps further. In the context of postcolonial trans- lation she defines the ‘between’ as “that space from within which the (colonized) native deliberately (mis)translates the colonial script, alienating and undermining its authority”, proceeding from an “awareness of the ‘other's’ agency and own forms of subjectivity, which ‘returns’ the ‘other’ to a history from which she or he was violently wrenched” (Dingwaney 1995: 9). In viewing the in-between space as a fertile and at the same time disquieting space where the dynamic interaction of at least two cultures takes place, Dingwaney’s approach not only represents another important contribution to the concept of cultural pluricentres mentioned above, but also reveals another feature peculiar to ‘translation between cultures’: it uncovers the relations of power inherent in any process of translation. The consideration of the implications of power in the translational process have become an essential part of most ‘cultural turn’ approaches. The asymmetrical rela- tions between cultures intimate that power is constantly operating in any transfer process between cultures, be it in social, political or economic power manifesta- tions. If we see power in line with Michel Foucault as a means of control, subjection and repression which in modem societies comes to surface as a network of prac- tices internalized by human beings as part of the socialization process and which becomes particularly vital in the interaction with other people (Foucault 1975: 43), then the various kinds of power relations at work in the process of translation are all too clear. Power actually operates at different levels, in the performance of translation, i.e. in all agencies responsible for translational production, as well as in the function of translation in the cultures involved. What in addition is relevant here is its epistemological contribution to the dis- cussion. In the colonial context, power relations are particularly visible: the discourses of Western institutions, for instance, are perpetuated in the discourses of societies of the ‘Third World’ and thus perpetuate colonial structures (see188 Crosscultural Transgressions Niranjana 1992: 3). Equally, it can hardly be denied that today’s economic and communicational globalization brings about both a displacement of the Other and the levelling out of cultural differences. In situations like these the role of translation is crucial. Translation can be interpreted as a strategy to consolidate the cultural Other, a process which implies not only the fixation of prevailing ideolo- gies and of cultural filters but also the blocking of any autonomous dynamics of cultural representation. This phenomenon can be observed, for instance, at different levels of the production of translations, from the selection of texts to be translated to the modes of distribution, all marked by power relations, including the transla- tion strategies adopted. This brings us to another point which seems central to the discus the agents involved in the process of translation, i.e. individuals and/or institutions located in different cultural contexts. Of particular interest are the power relations inherent in the production and reception of translation which are explicitly reflected in the agents’ activities. In such a context, several questions arise. Who is responsi- ble for the selection of the text to be translated? Who is responsible for their publication? Who selects the translator? What are the relations between these fac- tors and the corresponding factors in the so-called source culture? What are the criteria for ‘marking’ the translated text, for instance the inclusion of a book in a certain series or the addition of a paratext to the translation? These brief considerations of some sociological aspects of translation seem to have diverted us from our initial discussion of ethnographic approaches in transla- tion studies. However, if we take a closer look at the processes sketched above, we realize that power relations inherent in the encounter of cultures mark not only the control over modes of representation, but they also affect the interaction between the different agents. In other words, by focussing on the different agencies involved in the translation process we have already moved towards the attempt to transcend the one-way transfer model between a source and a target culture or ‘text’. In the next step we will try to move beyond this by highlighting the potential of the space between the different agencies. n: the role of 5. Interference from the Third Space The in-between space as the site of the encounter between different cultures be- comes particularly relevant in the context of postcolonialism and migration. For Homi Bhabha, cultures are never unitary in themselves, nor simply dualistic as in the relation between Self and Other. Rather, there is a Third Space, which can be reduced neither to the Self nor to the Other, neither to the ‘original’ nor to the ‘target text’. In this hybrid view of culture, translation is not only seen as a crucial activity, but, according to Bhabha, the Third Space is the potential location and starting-point for (postcolonial) translation strategies:Wolf: Culture as Translation — and Beyond 189 It is that Third Space, though unrepresentable in itself, which constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew. (Bhabha 1994: 37) When exploring this Third Space, polarity can be avoided and the Self can be experienced as the Other (Bhabha 1994: 39), thus foregrounding communication forms such as translation and stressing its pluricentric character. As a consequence, negotiation is required to debate the differences in culture and identity. This ne- gotiation — the “only means for fostering the translatability of cultures” (Ziegler 1999: 18) — has been interpreted as a synonym for translation, inasmuch as the effort to translate demands the negotiation of cultural contradictions and misapprehen- sions (see Bachmann-Medick 1997: 15ff). Of course, the Third Space, the locus where this negotiation alias translation takes place, should not be thought of as a space where we can witness the harmonious encounter of cultures to be translated or the limitless productivity and abundance of inventive inspirations (Bachmann- Medick 1999: 525), Nevertheless, the concept makes it possible to view translational activity as an interactive process, a meeting ground where conflicts are acted out and margins of collaboration explored. In a closer translational con- text, negotiation in the Third Space can be seen as the place where translators as cultural mediators and other agents involved in the translation process discuss and arrange a translation for its reception, including all imaginable means such as reviews, critiques or anthologies. A research model which takes on board the various aspects discussed so far in this paper will be based on the assumption that culture is not only to be seen as a dynamic process which suggests difference and incompleteness, but also and pri- marily as a point of convergence where translation is envisioned as the reciprocal interpenetration of Self and Other. In this view of culture as the locus of translation, any sort of cultural transfer, including ethnographic processes, can be conceived as translation between cultures. As such, any translational process is constitutive of any form of cultural transfer. An argument in favour of this assumption is the fact that translation is never a one-dimensional transfer — gua importation, for instance — but rather a multi-layered process of action and communication taking place within com- plex cultural and social networks. Under such conditions, several factors can be taken into account within the con- cept of cultural transfer seen as translation between already hybrid cultures. Each of these factors is again embedded in processes which are regarded as translation pro- cesses. First, the criteria for the selection of texts to be translated have to be considered: what degree of legitimization is attributed to the cultural product that is translation, and what are the results of operations regarding (e.g. literary) sanc- tions? The motivation for the acceptance of cultural goods as translations is closely190 Crosscultural Transgressions related with selection and can be conceived as a reaction to the insight that cultures have structural gaps which translations then go on to fill (see also Toury 1995: 70ff and passim). Another important factor is norms, which are effective in each single phase of the translation process. Norms determine the selection as well as the char- acter of the transfer; they presuppose an institutionalization process and thus determine the mechanisms for the acceptance of cultural products; and they deter- mine the criteria governing the process of identity formation through translation as well as the nature of the relations between the cultures involved.‘ Consequently, norms affect all sorts of decision processes as agents negotiate these various fac- tors. It is of paramount importance however to recognize that all these agents, whether individuals or institutions, can be thought of as operating at cultural bor- derlines and as symbolically acting, as mentioned above, in a Third Space where conflicts arising from cultural difference and the different social discourses in- volved in these conflicts are negotiated. Seen as a potential form of intercultural and social interaction, this Space constitutes a heuristic means to visualize trans- fer processes and the inherent changes of context that come with them, as well as the relational conditions underlying these transfers. The adoption of a Third Space based on the concept of ‘culture as translation’ can thus bring important insights into the evolvement of the translation process. When Susan Bassnett calls for “more investigation of the acculturation process that takes place between cultures” and for “greater investigation of what Venuti has called ‘the ethnocentric violence of translation’” (Bassnett 1998: 138), we realize that a huge step has been taken in the ontological discussion of how ‘translation between cultures’ can be dealt with. If translation is more than a transfer between linguistic systems and is viewed instead as the “representation of representations” (Bachmann-Medick 1997: 7) in that the representation of cultures itself is based on translation, the dynamics underlying this concept of translation give way to a re- search model of ‘cultural translation’ which tries to escape from the essentialist bias. This approach not only yields insight into the power relations between the cultures involved and their respective agents, it also sharpens the eye for cultural pluralism, not least through the inclusion of interdisciplinary discussions. Finally, it meets the requirements of emerging pluricentric societies and hybrid identities, where translators are called upon to be aware of their ambiguous situation between politi- cal processes fostering uniformity — witness ‘globalization’ — and the need for transcultural flexibility. As a result, translation is challenged to contribute to a (criti- cal) reconciliation and at the same time a recognition of cultural difference in a world where the very act of translation has become a constitutive feature. * Within this rather rough sketch of a research model the concept of norms cannot be dealt with in detail. For further reading see especially Toury (1998) and Hermans (1999: 72-90).Wolf: Culture as Translation — and Beyond 191 References Asad, Talal (1986) ‘The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropol- ogy’, in Clifford and Marcus (eds), 141-64. 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Duerr, Hans Peter (1985) Traumzeit. Uber die Grenze zwischen Wildnis und Zivilisation, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Foucault, Michel (1975) Surveiller et punir. La naissance de la prison, Paris: Gallimard. Geertz, Clifford (1997) ‘Aus der Perspektive des Eingeborenen’. Zum Problem des ethnologischen Verstehens’ , in Geertz, Clifford: Dichte Beschreibung. Beitriige zum Verstehen kultureller Systeme, iibersetzt von Brigitte Luchesi und Rolf Bindemann, Frankfur/M.: Suhrkamp, 289-309. Hermans, Theo (1999) Translation in Systems. Descriptive and Systemic Approaches Explained, Manchester: St. Jerome. Kristeva, Julia (1988) Etrangers d nous-mémes, Paris: Fayard. Strangers to Ourselves, translated by Leon Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Malinowski, Bronislaw (1979) Argonauten des westlichen Pazifik. 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(1989) ‘Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors*, Critical Inquiry 15: 205-25 Simon, Sherry (1996) Gender in Translation, Cultural Identity and the Politics of Trans- mission, London & New York: Routledge. Sturge, Kate (1997) ‘Translation Strategies in Ethnography’, The Translator 3(1): 21-38. Toury, Gideon (1995) Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond, Amsterdam & Phila- delphia: Benjamins. — (1998) ‘A Handful of Paragraphs on ‘Translation’ and ‘Norms"’, in C. Schaffner (ed) Translation and Norms, Clevedon etc.: Multilingual Matters, 9-31. Tyler, Stephen (1986) ‘Post-Modern Ethnography: From Document of the Occult to Occult Document’, in Clifford and Marcus (eds), 122-40. = (1993) ‘Zum, “Be-/Abschreiben” als “Sprechen fir". Ein Kommentar’, tibersetzt von Ulrike Bischoff, in Berg and Fuchs (eds), 288-296. Valero-Garcés, Carmen (1995) ‘Modes of Translating Culture: Ethnography and Trans- lation’, Meta XL: 556-63. Werner, Michael (1997) ‘Dissymmetrien und symmetrische Modellbildungen in der Forschung zum Kulturtransfer’, in H.-J. Liisebrink and R. Reichardt (eds) Kulturtransfer im Epochenumbruck. Frankreich-Deutschland 1770-1815, Leipzig: Leipziger Universititsverlag, 87-101. White, Hayden (1978) Tropics of Discourse, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wolf, Michaela (1997a) ‘Translation as a Process of Power: Aspects of Cultural An- thropology in Translation’, in M. Snell-Hornby, Z. Jettmarové and K. Kaindl (eds) Translation as intercultural communication: selected papers from the EST Congress, Prague 1995, Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins, 123-33 — (ed) (1997) Uberseizungswissenschaft in Brasilien. Beitrdige zum Status von , Origi- nal’ und , Ubersetzung’, Tibingen: Stauffenburg. ----- (2000)'The Third Space in Postcolonial Representation’, in S. Simon and P. St- Pierre (eds) Changing the Terms: Translating in the Postcolonial Era, Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 127-45. Ziegler, Heide (1999) “Introduction. The Translatability of Cultures’, in Stuttgart Seminar in Cultural Studies: The Translatability of Cultures. Proceedings of the Fifth Stuttgart Seminar in Cultural Studies 03.08,-14.08.1998, Stuttgart & Weimar: Metzler, 7-19.A ‘Multilingual’ and ‘International’ Translation Studies? SEBNEM SUSAM-SARAJEVA Abstract: The paper questions certain import/export relations between the centre and the periphery of translation studies, It focuses on the common expectation about the role of researchers based in the periphery as providers of ‘raw materials’ in the form of translated texts, paratexts, translational behaviour and histories of translation. It contends that if theory continues to be seen as something that is supplied by the centre and consumed by the periphery, then the theories offered by the centre cannot be truly challenged just by testing them out on data provided by the periphery. The paper asks whether we should prolong the illusion that we are all offering equal contributions to a common goal, the progress of translation studies as a scholarly discipline. Would we not benefit from reflecting more critically ‘on our own working methods and our relationship to the theories, models, tools and materials we use and develop? This essay started its life as a paper presented at the ‘Research Models in Transla- tion Studies’ conference held in Manchester in April 2000. One of the aims and objectives put forward for this conference was to see “how Western models fare when faced with non-Western modes of thought and expression”. Accordingly, among the suggested topics for papers was “Western research models and non- Western cultures”. The juxtaposition or confrontation implied in this conference blurb also brings to mind the prevalent import/export pattern found within many contemporary disciplines, including translation studies, as well as a certain rela- tionship of power which is often too much taken for granted and hence rather unspoken of. It is, in fact, rather difficult to work with the terms ‘Western’ and ‘non-West- em’, Any adjective describing its subject as a negation, as a ‘non-x’, is derived from the vantage point of the ‘x’. With the term ‘non-Western’, the majority of the world is being defined as a totality of ‘non-x’, although this majority does not de- fine itself in opposition to the ‘West’ necessarily or exclusively. Being ‘non-Western’ has apparently become the only common denominator behind otherwise vastly dif- ferent languages and cultures, spreading from Japan to India, from the Middle East to China, from Russia to Africa. “It is merely in the night of our ignorance that all alien shapes take on the same hue”, says Perry Anderson (in his Lineages of the Absolutist State, quoted in Spivak 1999: 89). On the other hand, the same dichotomy renders ‘the West’ more homogeneous than it actually is (Cronin 1995; 85-6). It does not take into account the different positions of Irish, Dutch, Slovak or Finnish194 Crosscultural Transgressions languages and cultures, to name but a few. These terms are also not helpful for the researcher who works on contemporary data, where borders are very much blurred and tracing ‘influences’ is often beyond one’s grasp. Nevertheless, one should be able to talk about the power differentials found within the discipline, and if these two terms are rather deceptive, others can be introduced. In my paper, I will use the rather more abstract dichotomy of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, except for a few occasions. The singular form used should not mislead the reader. There is not one centre in translation studies, neither is there a monolithic periphery. In any case, there is no way of measuring centrality or peripherality. Yet, in order to be able to discuss certain topics, one needs to start with certain terms, despite all the unease that goes with them. As we shall see be- low, the terms ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ have the advantage of avoiding monolithic constructions such as those suggested by the ‘Western/non-Western’ dichotomy, since they allow the construction of a centre/periphery opposition also within both the periphery and the centre. 1. Centre-periphery relations within translation studies The centre and periphery of translation studies do not exactly correspond to those of the world’s geopolitical situation today. As a consequence of the subject matter of the discipline, they are rather language-bound. Having a native proficiency in one or more of the dominant languages (English, French, German, and nowadays occasionally Spanish), choosing one’s research material from these languages and/ or publishing one’s research in them are frequently key factors in making one’s voice heard. Working on and/or writing in ‘exotic’ languages, on the other hand, seems to indicate a rather peripheral position, and those who do so have to fight their way through in order to achieve international acknowledgement. The socio- economic power of the country of origin or residence often comes secondary to the might of the language the researcher writes in and works on. There may also be central figures within peripheries, and peripheral figures in central locations. Certain scholars working in rather less famous countries can still be considered central thanks to their mother tongues or the dominant languages they write in. However, once a scholar based in a socio-economically powerful coun- try starts working on data obtained from ‘less common’ languages, s/he might soon start feeling rather peripheral. Nevertheless the actual physical location of the re- searcher remains as a determining factor, since the issue of research outlet is closely related to this physical location. Institutional aspects and patronage play a major role in the dissemination of knowledge among the members of a scholarly commu- nity. Where one publishes one’s work, in which journals or books (local/international, local but well-known or easily accessible, etc.) and with which publishing houses, is a crucial factor, as is one’s proximity to central research institutions.Susam-Sarajeva: A ‘Multilingual’ and ‘International’ Translation Studies? 195 If the points I have made so far merely sound like ‘common sense’ or ‘common knowledge’, it is still worth being reminded of them, since one frequently hears the claim that the centre could be anywhere that produces interesting and useful hy- pothe: models and theories. Such an approach underestimates the canonization process that goes with linguistic, cultural and economic imperialism. 2. Universality One of the main characteristics of the centre is its actual will to act as the centre, and often claim universality or all-inclusiveness. Since its development stage in the 1970s and 1980s, translation studies was envisaged as such a comprehensive discipline. In his much-quoted article ‘The Name and Nature of Translation Stud- ies’ (1972) James Holmes presented “the ultimate goal of the translation theorist” as being “to develop a full, inclusive theory accommodating so many elements that it can serve to explain and predict all phenomena falling within the terrain of translating and translation, to the exclusion of all phenomena falling outside it” (1988: 73). “Partial translation theories” were then seen as “little more than pro- legomena to such a general translation theory” (ibid.). This will to exhaustiveness leads to the present increasing efforts to define rules and laws accounting for translational phenomena as diverse as possible. Calls for joint endeavours towards a coherent set of concepts and models, which can be applied across the board to all possible text types written in all possible languages at any time in human his- tory are not infrequent. ‘Admirable though these ventures can be, they risk certain drawbacks. As has often been argued, models and tools originating from the centre and created ini- tially by using central data, do not necessarily prove useful when they are taken out of their contexts and put to use on peripheral data (see for instance Dharwadker 1999: 125-30, 134-5; Cronin 1998: 147), Examples are not hard to find. It has been pointed out that central thinking on translation is based on a monolingual perspec- tive and therefore cannot account for multilingual situations such as those in India (Devy 1999: 185; Viswanatha and Simon 1999: 164). Central translation theories ‘owe too much to studies on Bible translation and many of the presuppositions of the latter do not work for non-Christian cultures, since different religions and meta- physics have different influences on the production and reception of translation (for a brief comparison of Western and Indian metaphysics and their impact on the un- derstanding of translation, see Devy 1999), As for the work of individual scholars from the centre, Lawrence Venuti’s views on the relationship between fluency and imperialism, for instance, have frequently been criticized as inapplicable outside the Anglo-American context (e.g. Tymoczko 2000: 39 and other references pro- vided there; Paloposki and Oittinen 2000). In short, there can be a thin line between the usefulness of imported theories, tools and models, and their limiting or inappro- priate nature for the material at hand.196 Crosscultural Transgressions 3. Testing out This drawback is precisely the reason why many of today’s prominent models and hypotheses, quite rightly and in an entirely scientific vein, ask for being tested out on material derived from diverse cultures and languages, so that their scholarly rel- evance and efficiency can be assessed. In fact, one of the underlying motives behind the will to comprehensiveness or exhaustiveness mentioned above was a similar concern to establish a scientific discipline. It was argued that theories and generali- zations, in order to deserve the title, should be applicable to any arbitrary case, and if a theory “cannot stand up to such a test, it must be modified and reworked” (Tymoczko 1999b: 32). Accordingly, theories based and applied only on a limited number of texts, genres, periods, languages or systems, representing — as had been the case in the past — mostly modern, Western, written and/or high cultures would simply not be valid (ibid.). When a theory could not be fully generalized in this way, “its domain must be clearly stated [...]” (Tymoczko 1999b: 33). It was necessary, therefore, to increase the variety of material available for scru- tiny, and peripheral systems were the obvious sources. Attention was drawn to translational phenomena in ‘less common’ languages and cultures (see, e.g. Bassnett 1993; Cronin 1998; Lefevere 1998). On the other hand, scholars from the periphery had already started using central models and theories in their own research on in- digenous data, such as translated texts, paratexts, translational behaviour and translation history, and their publications in dominant languages consequently en- hanced ‘international’ translation studies. As a result, we hear glad tidings today that the discipline is expanding its horizons. However, this expansion has an eerie resemblance to the enthusiastic “information-retrieval approach to ‘Third World’ [...] literature” which Gayatri Spivak talks about (1999: 114, 118). There is a preva- lent mechanism today in which central models and theories are expected to feed on periphery cultures and the data they offer. Those who can do this testing-out are of course those who have the proficiency in peripheral languages, and who choose to work on them — hence, according to our definition given above, they are the periphery researchers. The generally expected course of action from these researchers is to apply theories supplied by the centre to peripheral ‘raw material’, with the twin objectives of elucidating local translation practices and testing the strength and comprehensiveness of the imported theories. The new generation of researchers from the periphery often start their career by absorbing whatever has been written on translation in and by the centre. If any original contribution is expected from them, it can only follow the wholesale inter- nalization of central translation theories as the only conceivable and legitimate provider of models in contemporary translation studies. Consequently any transfor- mation of the dominant paradigms can come only from within, from the application of the particular models on peripheral traditions. The tools, models and theoriesSusam-Sarajeva: A ‘Multilingual’ and ‘International’ Translation Studies? 197 intended to be at the service of these researchers thus shift to a position of authorita- tive overseers. This is a widespread pattern, of course, and not confined to translation studies only. It is usually taken to be just a part of the standard ‘initiation and socialization process into an academic community’. It is no wonder that ‘testing out’ is the type of research most strongly advocated for postgraduate degrees (see ¢.g. Phillips and Pugh 1995: 49). This type of research tries “to find the limits of previously pro- posed generalizations” and therefore, it provides “an established framework” and an environment which gives “some degree of protection by the established nature of much of the ideas, arguments, [...] etc.” (Phillips and Pugh 1995: 51). In their popular handbook on postgraduate research, which made two revised editions and eleven reprints in less than a decade, Phillips and Pugh warn the newcomers: Of course, you will have to make your original contribution — merely repli- cating what others have done is not adequate. So, for example, you will have to use a methodology on a new topic where it has not been applied before and therefore make manifest its strengths in giving new knowledge and theo- retical insights. Or you will have to apply two competing theories to a new situation to see which is more powerful, or design a crucial experiment to produce evidence to choose between them. As a result you may produce your own innovative variant of the methodology or theory. [...] Testing out is the basic ongoing professional task of academic research, and doctoral work done well in this framework is much more likely to be useful and thus publishable and quotable. (Phillips and Pugh 1995: 51) ‘The keywords here are obviously ‘useful’, ‘publishable’ and ‘quotable’, but one more thing is worth noting: ‘testing out’ is presented as “the basic ongoing profes- sional task” of all academic research, not just of the postgraduate type. The contribution expected from the researcher is, then, to consolidate, criticize and/or reshape existing and well-known models, tools and theories, since only they will provide the ‘established framework’ and the ‘protection’ necessary for successful research, Through the itinerary that leads from background theory via the ‘literature survey’ to the ‘present state of the art” with which each and every researcher should ideally be familiar, the discipline’s self-generating and self-perpetuating mecha- nism is set in motion. 4. What about the other knowledges, then? Models from dominant systems are “to be imitated and reproduced” by weaker sys- tems if the latter wish to be part of the global community, says Talal Asad (1986: 158). Quite often, knowledge of these models becomes “a precondition for the pro- duction of more knowledge” (ibid.). In cases where the flow of knowledge is198 Crosscultural Transgressions predominantly one-directional, the likelihood of a platform for discussion, mutual criticism, exchange and dialogue is small. It becomes a question of who produces the “desired knowledge” (ibid.), who is the “owner and guardian” of this desired knowledge (Arrojo 1999: 143) and who makes use of it.! What matters at this point is no longer the intrinsic quality — relevancy, efficiency or usefulness — of the mod- els, tools or theories exported by the centre, but rather the authority and power which accompany this process. ‘Self-colonization’, as Lydia H. Liu terms it (1995: 236), is the state a large part of the world finds itself in today. The result is the widespread and mostly voluntary effort to mime the dominant powers, to mould the indigenous discourses on the model of imported knowledge, with the ultimate goal of being incorporated into the ‘modern’ world (Phillipson 1993: 65): If the Center always provides the teachers and the definition of what is wor- thy of being taught (from the gospels of Christianity to the gospels of Technology and Science), and the Periphery always provides the learners, then there is a pattern of imperialism [...| a pattern of scientific teams from the Center who go to Periphery nations to collect data (raw material) in the form of deposits, sediments, flora, fauna, archaeological findings, attitudes, opinions, behavioral patterns, and so on for data processing, data analysis, and theory formation (like industrial processing in general). This takes place in the Center universities (factories), in order to send the finished product, a journal, a book (manufactured goods) back for consumption in the center of the Periphery, first having created a demand for it through demonstration effect, training in the Center country, and some degree of low-level partici- pation in the data-collection team. This parallel is not a joke, it is a structure. (Johan Galtung, The True Worlds. A Transnational Perspective, quoted in Phillipson 1993: 57) These days one can hardly carry out research without using central models and theories. These models and theories have attained the aura of ‘universality’, since through abstraction and generalization they leave the local and particular behind and strive to be value-free, culture-free, context-free and neutral. A good case in point is mathematics. However, just how much mathematics as we know it today is constructed by people from certain cultures, and not from others, how other alterna- tives were suppressed and gradually came to be forgotten, can be seen in the work ' This largely unilateral import/ export relationship does not necessarily imply passivity on the part of the periphery. Translation theory, for instance, is not and cannot be exempt from the common fortunes of ‘travelling theory’ in general (see, e.g. Said 1983; Miller 1996). As happens in almost any other process of transfer and transportation, imported models and theories are transformed, altered or appropriated at and by their destinations. It is important, therefore, “to avoid reductionism by recognizing that what happens in the Periphery is not irrevocably deter- mined by the Centre” (Phillipson 1993:63)Susam-Sarajeva: A ‘Multilingual’ and ‘International’ Translation Studies? 199 of scholars who deal with what they call ‘ethno-mathematics’. Alan J. Bishop refers to studies on different counting systems in the world — some 600 in Papua New Guinea alone, where more than 700 languages are spoken — utilising means other than the decimal system or even numbers (1997: 72). There are also various con- ceptions of geometry, and not all of them have the “‘atomistic’ and object-oriented ideas of points, lines, planes and solids” (ibid.), features taken for granted in West- ern mathematics and taught all around the world. Bishop notes that today ‘ethno-mathematics’ is demonstrating how Western mathematics has contributed to the colonization process under the guise of ‘universality’. ‘Then, what happens to the previous or alternative knowledges — a plural form, by the way, which does not have currency in English — produced about translation in and by the periphery? By the time researchers of periphery-origin have matured in their training, they start regarding traditional (‘old’) concepts of and thinking about translation and translating found in their own cultures as ‘inferior’, ‘useless’, ‘simplistic’ or ‘irrelevant’ , and put them aside in favour of translation theory in its ‘modern’ and ‘Western’ sense. They usually consider the theorising in their own languages and cultures not so much as resources which might feed into their current work but as historical case studies to be placed under the scrutiny of the dominant models. These researchers are ‘educated away’ from their own culture and society. Even if their point of departure and initial goal were to understand and explain translational — and maybe, therefore, social and cultural — phenomena in their own systems of origin, the more they work with central models and tools, the more they are meant to work for them. This seems inevitable, because, as I have pointed out above, it runs deep into the accreditation process. Any ‘useful’, ‘publishable’, and ‘quotable’ work, including the present one, should refer to established — read: central — frameworks. 5. Consequences T would now like to focus briefly on some of the consequences of these asymmetric relations between centre and periphery as reflected in our research on translation. Before I do so, I need to make a brief detour to Maria Tymoczko’s Translation in a Postcolonial Context (1999b). Tymoczko emphasizes that translation, which is tra- ditionally seen as standing in a metaphoric relation to a source text, also possesses significant metonymic aspects: “for the receiving audience the translation metonymically constructs a source text, a literary tradition, a culture, and a people, by picking parts, aspects, and attributes that will stand for wholes” (1999b: 57). In Tymoczko’s view, these metonymic aspects of translation, combined with André Lefevere’s notion of translation as ‘rewriting’, create a major problem in the trans- lation of non-canonical or marginalized literatures (1999; 47). Whereas in a marginalized culture a text constitutes for the original audience a retelling or200 Crosscultural Transgressions rewriting of pre-existing material, when that text is translated it is neither a retelling nor a rewriting for the receiving audience. The translator then “is in the paradoxical position of ‘telling a new story’ to the receptor audience [...] and the more remote the source culture and literature, the more radically new the story will be for the receiving audience” (ibid.). Periphery researchers writing up their research in dominant languages and for an ‘international’ audience are all ‘translators’. They translate their material — mostly from their own culture of origin — into the dominant paradigms and discourses of contemporary translation studies. In order to justify their findings, they need to contextualize the translations they talk about, and the more unknown this context is for the ‘international’ audience, the ‘newer’ the stories they tell. Researchers of periphery-origin cannot afford to leave certain historical, literary, social or political information implicit in their work, as they cannot assume such a vast erudition on the part of their audience - even though a similarly vast erudition on central prac- tices and traditions of translation is often expected on their part. Therefore, research on peripheral systems is often full of background information, which would not be necessary to anything like the same extent for research on central systems. In an earlier essay, Tymoczko referred to a similar phenomenon in post-colonial writing as ‘frontloading’ (1999a: 29). In academic writing, too, I would say, most of the time and energy of periphery researchers necessarily goes to such ‘frontloading’. Paradoxically, in a way similar to interlingual literary translation and post- colonial writing, periphery researchers also have to simplify their material. Tymoczko observes that the greater the distance between an author’s or translator's source culture and the receiving culture for which the work in question is intended, the greater will be the impetus to simplify. This is because in attempting to cover the cultural divide the peripheral author/translator will feel the need to be highly selec- tive, picking only certain aspects “to convey and to emphasize, particularly if the intended audience includes as a significant component international or dominant- culture readers” (1999a: 23-4), Periphery researchers, then, always translate and make their material more ac- cessible to the “international or dominant-culture readers” within translation studies. In fact, they actually have to translate their ‘raw material’ into the dominant lan- guages they are writing in, as in the translation of quotations, concepts, arguments, examples, book titles, etc, Periphery researchers often do not write in their mother tongues, sometimes not even if they do research in their home countries. Both in central and in peripheral institutions the criteria for being accepted into the ‘mod- ern’ world of translation studies and into academia are very similar. Researchers often need to achieve international recognition first even to be employed back home. This means, in practice, that they have to write in the dominant languages. The research material of translation studies is necessarily polyglot, but the knowl- edge about this material is more and more produced and stored solely in English, French or German (cf. Ahmad 1992: 245-52). Especially the present status ofSusam-Sarajeva: A ‘Multilingual’ and ‘International’ Translation Studies? 201 English as the authoritative lingua franca of the academic world creates reader ex- pectations of ‘international’ or ‘universal’ theory. Those who carry out their research in ‘less common’ languages often do not benefit from the means of communication which the discipline itself is focusing on: texts on translation research are not among the priorities of translators who are looking for means to earn their living, and trans- lation scholars themselves hardly translate cach other’s work. This often leads to the isolation of peripheral theorizing, as in the case, for example, of East European and Russian theories of translation (see, e.g. Jénis 2000; Zlateva 2000; see also Perspectives 5:1, 1997)2 6. Non-Western = Peripheral = Postcolonial? Andrew Chesterman lists the aims of empirical research as follows:* (a) to provide new material/ ‘facts’/ corpora/ case studies, i.e. new data on which existing hypoth- eses can be tested; (6) to apply and test an existing hypothesis, “in order to justify it better or to criticize it”; (c) to propose a new idea, conceptual tool or hypothesis which “offers a better way of describing or explaining existing data”; (d) to propose a new research methodology or tool, i.e. “a new way of testing [or generating] a hypothesis”; and (e) “to propose a new theory, or a better formalization of an exist- ing one” (Chesterman 2000: 11). I would argue that, due to the constraints discussed above and in the current situation in translation studies, the periphery researcher is usually expected to deal with the first two of these aims of empirical research. The last three can be less frequently taken up by periphery researchers working within the dominant paradigms of translation studies. This does not at all mean that new conceptual tools, methodologies or theories are not being suggested by the periphery. On the contrary, there is at the present time a great deal happening in the periphery as regards translation theorizing. How- ever, as soon as these works are published under the auspices of international institutions, they tend to be seen as belonging to a ‘postcolonial’ framework, and to be classified under the heading of ‘postcolonial theories of translation’, which itself occupies an as yet marginal position within the discipline as a whole.‘ In some cases this is in part duc to the research interests of the periphery researchers them- selves. After all, when they do write about translation, their work becomes bound up with the asymmetries between their languages and cultures and those of the 2 Although in “The Future of Translation Theory: A Handful of Theses’ (1978) Holmes had already noted the urgency of accessing work on translation theory in the Soviet Union (1988: 102), the two decades since have witnessed slow progress in this respect. > Although empirical research is certainly not the only type of research undertaken by translation scholars, it is the one which is particularly emphasized here because of the discipline’s efforts to prove its scholarly status. 4 Vinay Dharwadker’s (1998) article on A.K. Ramanujan’s theory and practice of translation is a case in point.202 Crosscultural Transgressions centre, However, this categorization may also be due to a certain expectation that in today’s translation studies novelty or subversiveness can only belong to postcolonialism precisely because of its still rather marginal position within the discipline, compared to its ~ maybe already waning — centrality in other fields of research, such as literary theory. What exactly qualifies an approach or a piece of research in translation studies as ‘postcolonial’? Is political commitment or orientation the most obvious crite- rion? The references used? Certain keywords? Or are the determining factors the identity of the researcher, such as his/her country of origin or adoption, mother tongue or first language (but nor the language in which the research is being writ- ten), and/or the origin of the material being studied? Defining “what constitutes postcolonial theory's methodology and its ‘object of study’” has been a difficult task in general for literary and cultural critics (Mongia 1996: 2). In translation studies, too, the various practices and approaches of the periphery are too quickly subsumed under the term ‘postcolonial’. Similarly, what constitutes a ‘non-West- ern’ approach in translation? Is it again to do with the identity of the researcher, even if the researcher is mainly using central models on peripheral data? Or is this an umbrella title to be tagged to any topic related to peripheral languages and cultures? One should be careful in making these distinctions and, most importantly, one should keep in mind that those periphery researchers who could be heard after all - at least, to an extent — are those who write in dominant languages, and preferably, who manage to be published by well-known publishers: as in the case of the present writer in this particular paper in this particular book. Others who write mainly in their own languages and in their home countries are bound to be heard only by their local audience, however important and useful their work might have been for the rest of the world. This point deserves reiteration, since, as Gayatri Spivak observes, the “diasporic [often] stands in for the native informant” (1999: 169):*> -] Works in often indifferent English translation or works written in Eng- lish or the European languages in the recently decolonized areas of the globe or written by people of so-called ethnic origin in First World space ‘In her book Spivak’s aim is to “track the figure of the Native Informant” through philosophy, literature, history, and culture (1999: ix). However, this tracking first shows up “a colonial sub- ject detaching itself from the Native Informant”, and then “a certain postcolonial subject [...] recoding the colonial subject and appropriating the Native Informant’s position” (ibid.). Spivak notes that the “native informant [is} a figure who, in ethnography, can only provide data, to be interpreted by the knowing subject for reading” (1999: 49). For the purposes of my arguments, I am of course appropriating Spivak’s concept of the ‘Native Informant’. As she rightly points out, those who ate fortunate enough to be writing, doing research, publishing, etc. belong to the centre of their countries of origin and therefore are not ‘Native Informants’ proper. However, I found the analogy worth pursuing.Susam-Sarajeva: A ‘Multilingual’ and ‘International’ Translation Studies? 203 are beginning to constitute something called “Third World literature’ Within this area of tertiary education in literature, the upwardly mobile exmarginal, justifiably searching for validation, can help commodify marginality. (Spivak 1999: 170)* In similarly confused fashion, the term ‘postcolonial’ is being used rather too fuzzily within translation studies today. As Maria Tymoczko rightly points out, there is a misconception of postcoloniality as an ontological category rather than “a complex set of circumstances responding to specific historical conditions associated with the European age of discovery, expansion and imperialism” (2000: 32). Since postcolonial theory is “currently onc of the few viable theoretical approaches that addresses directly the geopolitical shifts and problems of power that dominated the twentieth century” and is also “one of the few discourses pertaining to power that has sustained itself since Marxism has fallen out of favour and been widely aban- doned in academic circles” (ibid.), it seems like the only option left if one wish discuss matters of power. However, Tymoczko believes that the field of translation studies [...] is best served by setting issues of power in their specific spatio-temporal contexts, paying attention to differ- ences as well as similarities. [...] Thus, it is important to distinguish struggles pertaining to power relevant to those who have been colonized per se from struggles pertinent to others suffering oppression for other reasons, just as within postcolonial studies it is important to differentiate the specific mani- festations of colonialism experienced by the several peoples who have been colonized. In order to do so, however, it will be helpful to have a more ar- ticulated theorization of power as it pertains to translation. (2000: 32-3) Such an “articulated theorization of power” could certainly be instrumental when it comes to examining the power relations found within the discipline itself. 7. Conclusion I believe that, while one can and must regard the expansion of translation studies to non-canonical and non-European material as a major step forward, drawing atten- tion to such material is not enough for the establishment of a truly ‘international’ and ‘multilingual’ translation studies. Even more important is to learn about the thinking of the periphery about translational practices, and not only for the pur- poses of comparing it to the dominant theories and finding it lacking. Neither is it © Spivak ironically notes: “[...} the privileged inhabitant of neo-colonial space is often bestowed a subject-position as geo-political other by the dominant radical. (One is most struck by this when planning or attending international conferences)” (1999: 339).204 Crosscultural Transgressions sufficient to present the experiences of peripheral systems as valuable sources for the solutions of problems encountered within dominant ones, and therefore, as worth their attention.’ This does not necessarily mean that we should struggle for a more ‘democratic’ distribution of scholarly models and influences. Translation studies is one of the disciplines which has at least the potential for more interaction and tolerance be- tween cultures, less ethnocentric views and more open scholarship. Furthermore, since it is still a relatively young discipline, it might as yet have the flexibility be- fore becoming ossified in terms of the sources supplying it with tools, theories and data. If we think it is important to move out of the structure described by Johan Galtung above, periphery researchers have to take some time off from data- collection and concentrate on what is being done and what has been done in the peripheral languages and cultures in terms of translation theory. If theory continues to be seen as something that will always be supplied by the centre and consumed by the periphery, then the translation theories offered by the centre cannot be truly challenged just by testing them out on data provided by the periphery. Such a shift of attitudes would require a reconsideration on everybody's part of what ‘theory’ means and what it is comprised of. Theorizing, if not ‘theory’, can be found in many different forms and contexts. One can theorize without the “Western forms of abstract logic”, avoiding “decisive statements” and not even attempting to produce a monolithic and “wholesale” theory (Christian 1996). Theory is under- standing and explanation, and not only “something there and established” (Gillham 2000: 12). Theorizing on translation is not something ‘new’ to the periphery, where translations have been carried out for centuries, and not without accompanying com- mentaries and other metatexts. Such theorizing does not claim to explain translation universally, of course. An undertaking of this sort is usually not its concern. Neither 7 For example, Michael Cronin observes: “It is important to stress the relational dynamic of minority languages if only to underline the significance of minority languages to translation theory and practice, This significance is related to three factors. Firstly, languages and political circum- stances change. The majority status of a language is determined by political, economic and cultural forces that are rarely static and therefore all languages are potentially minority languages. It follows that the historical experience of a minority language can offer useful insights into the translation fate of majority languages should contexts change” (1995: 87-88). Elsewhere he ar- gues: “The issue of translation and minority languages is not a peripheral concer for beleaguered fans of exotic peoples gabbling in incomprehensible tongues but the single, most important issue in translation studies today. The hegemony of English in the fastest-growing area of technologi- cal development [telecommunications] means that all other languages become, in this context, ‘minority languages. [...] Major languages have much to learn from minority languages. As vo- cabulary, syntax and cultural memory come under pressure from English, dominant languages are simply experiencing what minority languages have been experiencing for many centuries, and it would be instructive for the former to study the responses of the latter to assimilationist translation pressures. This, in turn, places an onus on translation scholars in minority languages to become more visible in translation studies debates” (1998: 151).Susam-Sarajeva: A ‘Multilingual’ and ‘International’ Translation Studies? 205 does it necessarily claim coherence or applicability, which could have made it a suitable candidate to be placed in university curricula worldwide, for instance. Yet this does not mean that such theorizing would be devoid of significant insights. What is aimed for would not be an ‘all-inclusive theory’ but maybe a different understanding of ‘theory’, a different way of thinking which would not easily as- sume the position of an overseer. Let me end by returning to the audience issue. Today, self-positioning and the question of one’s intended audience are often presented as major issues in different fields of research. Literary critics have started questioning who it is they write their criticism for. Who is a postcolonial writer writing for? For the colonizer, for the colonized or for an international audience? For whom does a translator translate? And who are we, as translation researchers, doing our research for? Should we prolong the sustained illusion that, in our pursuit of ‘pure wisdom and knowledge’, we are all offering equal contributions to a common goal, the progress of transla- tion studies as a (scholarly) discipline? 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Zlateva, Palma (2000) ‘A Wheel We Have Been Reinventing’ [review of Anton Popovié's Tlpo6semer xy oxectBennoro mepeno o, The Translator 6(1): 109-15.Susam-Sarajeva: A ‘Multilingual’ and ‘International’ Translation Studies? 207 Acknowledgements: This paper, although it started off as an individual self-interrogation, isin its, present form the end-result of a collective discussion. 1 would like to thank Kaisa Koskinen, Alexandra Lianeri, Theo Hermans, Elsie Chan, Morphia Mali, Outi Paloposki, Andrew Chesterman and Kristina Taivalkoski, who all read the drafts and offered invaluable feedback and insights. The arguments presented here have also benefited from comments provided by the delegates of the ‘Research Models in Translation Studies’ conference (Manchester, April 2000), including Michael Cronin, José Lambert, Saliha Paker, Gideon Toury and Maria Tymoczko, and by the participants of the Graduate Seminar held at Bogazigi University, Istanbul, 18 May 2000, icluding Isin Bengi, Cemal Demircioglu, Ebru Diriker, Arzu Eker and Sehnaz. Tahir.Notes on Contributors Derek Boothman lives in Forli and teaches at the Scuola Superiore di Lingue Moderne per Interpreti ¢ Traduttori of the University of Bologna. He publishes in both Italian and English. His research is centred on Antonio Gramsci’s writings in the context of political and cultural theory. Gordon Brotherston is a Research Professor in the Department of Literature at the University of Essex, a Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University and a Senior Fellow of the Humanities Center at Stanford Uni- versity. His long-standing research interest lies with the indigenous cultures of the ‘Americas, about which he has published extensively. He is the author of Latin Ameri- can Poetry: Origins and Presence (1975), Image of the New world (1979), Book of the Fourth World (1992), Painted Books from Mexico (1995) and other titles. Elsie Chan teaches translation at the City University of Hong Kong and is prepar- ing a doctoral dissertation at the University of Warwick. She has also worked as a government translation officer. Her research interests concern comparisons between Western and Chinese translation theories. She has published articles on translation studies in Hong Kong and China, and on Buddhist scriptures in Chinese translation. Martha Cheung is Professor of Translation and Associate Director of the Centre for Translation at Hong Kong Baptist University. Her translations into English in- clude fiction by Han Shaogong, Liu Sola, Zhu Tianxin, Lai Shéng-ch’uan and the work of Hong Kong poets P.K. Leung, Tsia Yim Pui and Choi Ka Ping. She is the editor of Hong Kong Collage: Contemporary Stories and Writing (1998) and, with Jane C.C. Lai, of An Oxford Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Drama (1997). She is conducting research on the history of translation in Hong Kong and compil- ing an anthology, in English translation, of Chinese translation theories from the earliest times to 1911. Edoardo Crisafulli works as Cultural Officer at the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Rome. Having studied in Urbino, Birmingham and at University College Dublin, he went on to lecture in Italian at Dublin and subsequently at King Abdul Aziz University (Jeddah) and the University of Manchester before taking up his present post. His PhD dissertation concerned English translations of Dante’s Di- vine Comedy, on which he has since published in several journals. Jean-Mare Gouanvie is a Professor in the Department of French Studies at Concordia University in Montréal, where he teaches on translation theory and the methodology of translation studies. In 1987 he founded the journal TTR/Etudes surNotes on Contributors 209 le texte et ses transformations, which he edited until 1997. He is the author of Sociologie de la traduction (1999). His current research is informed by Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural theories and concerns the French translations of modern Ameri- can writers immediately after the Second World War. Theo Hermans is Professor of Dutch and Comparative Literature at University College London. In 1985 he edited the collections The Manipulation of Literature and Second Hand. His most recent book is Translation in Systems (1999). His re- search has been geared mostly to the history and theory of translation. Jeremy Munday studied and taught at the University of Bradford and now lectures in Spanish Studies at the University of Surrey. He recently published Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Applications (2001). Among his translations is The Picador Book of Latin American Short Stories (1998). His research interests include translation theory, systemic functional linguistics, corpus linguistics and literary studies. Saliha Paker took her BA and PhD in English and Classics at Istanbul University. She has taught and researched in various places, among them London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies. An Honorary Research Fellow at the Cen- tre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham since 1992, she was appointed Professor of Translation Studies in the Department of Translation and Interpreting at Istanbul's Bogazigi University in 1995, and continues to teach there. Her latest translation (with Mel Kenne) is Latife Tekin’s Dear Shameless Death (2001). Sebnem Susam-Sarajeva has worked as a translator of literary and technical texts, as a research assistant at the University of Bogazici, Istanbul, and the University of Helsinki, and as an MA tutor at the University of Middlesex, London. She is cur- rently writing up her doctoral thesis in Comparative Literature at University College London and is also involved with University of Helsinki’; MonAKO Multilingual Communications Programme. Sehnaz Tahir-Giirgaglar teaches translation and interpreting at Bogazigi Univer- sity in Istanbul, where she is also writing up her doctoral thesis. Her research interests cover translation and interpreting history, and the relation between popular culture, ideology and translation. She is a free-lance translator and a conference interpreter. Maria Tymoczko is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Mas- sachusetts, Amherst. She has published extensively on medieval literature, as well as on Irish writing in English, including the works of James Joyce. Her translations of early Irish literature appeared in Two Death Tales from the Ulster Cycle (1981).210 Crosscultural Transgressions Her most recent full-length critical study is the prize-winning Translation in a Post- Colonial Context: Early Irish Literature in English Translation (1999). Her current work focuses on the ideology of translation. Michaela Wolf, who wrote her MA on tanslation studies and her PhD on Ro- mance literature, is Assistant Professor in the Department of Translation at the University of Graz. She edited the collection Ubersetzungswissenschaft in Brasilien (1997) and, with Nadia Grbic, Text — Kultur — Kommunikation. Translation als Forschungsaufgabe (1997). Her research focusses on translation history, cultural and postcolonial aspects of translation, and feminist translation.Index Achard, Marcel 97 Aesop 168 Ahmad, Aijaz 200, 205 Ainslie, D. 118 Al-Harizi 137, 141 Anamur, Hasan 141 Anderson, A.J.O. 179 Anderson, Perry 193 Andrews, Walter 122, 125, 126, 129 131, 134-7, 138, 139, 140, 141 Apak, Fundagiil 134, 141 Apollinaire, Guillaume 166 Aristotle 10 Arrojo, Rosemary 198, 205 Asad, Talal 182, 191, 197, 205 Ashcroft, Bill 206 Assmann, Aleida 180, 191 Asvaghosa 148, Attar 124, 130, 134 Bachmann-Medick, Doris 185, 186, 189, 190, 191 Baker, Mona 26-7, 32, 34, 37, 40-1, 42, 79, 80, 84, 91, 161 Balzac, Honoré de 100, 159 Barry, William Theodore de 147, 162 Bassnett, Susan 25, 26-7, 42, 74, 102, 142, 145, 161, 1676, 178, 185, 190, 191, 196, 205-6, 207 Baudelaire, Charles 154 Bay, André 101 Beaugrande, Robert de 178 Bengi, Isin 205 Benjamin, Walter 46, 60, 135 Berg, Eberhard 184, 191, 192 Berk, Ozlem 121, 141 Berman, Antoine 97, 101, 102 Bhabha, Homi 7, 14, 137, 138, 141, 188-9, 191 Bindemann, Rolf 191 Bischoff, Ulrike 192 Bishop, Alan 199, 206 Black, Najaat 141 Bloom, Harold 135, 141 Blum-Kulka, Shoshana 87, 91-2 Bobbio, Norberto 108, 118 Bodley, Thomas 173 Boelhower, W.Q. 118 Bogeng Demirel, Emine 48, 60 Bonetti, P. 118 Boone, E. 167, 178 Boorman, Howard 161 Boothman, Derek 4-5, 107, 109, 118 Bourdieu, Pierre 4, 92-5, 99, 100, 102, 176, 178 Broeck, Raymond van den 102, 162 Brotherston, Gordon 6, 166, 167, 168, 169, 173, 178 Brown, M. 92 Bruzzese, R. 119 Budick, Sanford 180, 191, 206 Bukharin, Nikolai Ivanovich 116 Burnett, W.R. 97 Bush, Peter 179 Butterfield, Herbert 116, 118 Calderén de la Barea, Pedro 168 Caldwell, Erskine 97 Calvin, Jean 10 Calzolaio, V. 118 Cameron, Deborah 30-1, 36, 42 Campos, Haroldo de 166, 176, 178 Caponigri, A. Robert 108, 118 Carmeta, Nelsy 86 Carr, H. Wildon 111, 118 Castiglione, S.J. 108, 118 Castro, Fidel 81, 89 Gelebi, Asik 125, 142 Gelebi, Taci-zade Cafer 125 Gelebioglu, Amil 131, 141 Chan, Elsie 3, 205 Chandler, Raymond 97 Chang, Nam Fung 62, 63, 73 Chapdelaine, Annick 98, 102212 Charles 1, 173 Chase, James Hadley 97 Chau, Simon 63, 73 Chen, Guogiu 164 Chen, Fukang 73, 155, 156, 160, 162 Chesterman, Andrew 27, 201, 205, 206 Cheung, Martha 6 Chevalley, Marguerite 101 Cheyfitz, Eric 145, 162 Cheyney, Peter 97 Chimalpahin 167 Christian, Barbara 204, 206 Christie, Stuart 144 Chu, Chi Yu 63, 66, 73 Cixous, Héléne 205 Classe, Olive 42 Clifford, James 168, 178, 181, 184, 185, 191, 192, 205 Coindreau, Maurice-Edgar 92, 96-8, 102 Collier, Gordon 167, 178 Columbus, Christopher 165, 168, 170 Conan Doyle, Arthur 54, 60 Confucius 64, 65, 158 Copernicus, Nicolaus 9 Cortés, Hernén 165, 177 Cospito, G. 110, 118 Cowie, Moira 74 Crapanzano, Vincent 184, 191 Crisafulli, Edoardo 2-3, 4, 33, 36 37, 39, 42 Croce, Benedetto 4, 103, 106-15, 118, 119 Cronin, Michael 193, 195, 196, 204, 205, 206 Cuscito, N. 119 Dante Alighieri 33, 38, 40 Dao’an (Dao An) 62, 157, 160 Darbelnet, Jean 77, 82, 92 Darwin, Charles 168 Dede, Fedai 134 Delabastita, Dirk 32, 35, 42 Delisle, Jean 167, 178 Demircioglu, Cemal 205 Derrida, Jacques 166, 178 Devy. Ganesh 195, 206 Dharmaraksha 148 Dharwadker, Vinay 195, 201, 206 Crosscultural Transgressions D'hulst, Lieven 61 Dibble, C.E. 179 Dickens, Charles 155 Dijk, Teun A. van 144, 163 Dilgin, Cem 133, 134, 141 Dingwaney, Anuradha 25, 187, 191 Diriker, Ebru 130, 141, 205 Dos Passos, John 96, 101 Douglas, Mary 184 Drake, Stillman 24 Drory, Rina 137, 141 Duerr, Hans Peter 183-4, 191 Duhamel, Marcel 92, 96, 97-8, 102 Einaudi, Luigi 105 Eker, Arzu 205 Ellis, Roger 141 Emre, Yunus 129 Engels, Friedrich 105, 118 Evans, Ruth 141 Even-Zohar, Itamar 3, 27, 61, 64-5, 68, 73, 74, 132, 145, 162 Fan, Xulun 163 Faulkner, William 96-7, 98, 102 Fawcett, Peter 145, 162 Fenollosa, Ernest 179 Ferideddin-i Attar 143 Feuerbach, Ludwig 109 Fitzgerald, Scott 101 Florio, John 154 Flotow, Luise von 145, 162 Foucault, Michel 187, 191 Francioni, G. 104, 118 Francis, Gill 42 Freiligrath, Ferdinand 154 ae. Fuchs, M. 184, 191, 192 Galileo, Galilei 9-10, 11, 24 Gallardo san Salvador, Natividad 206 Galli Adams, Martha 119 Gallimard, Gaston 93, 97, 101 Galtung, Johan 198, 204 Gambier, Yves 206Index Garefa Marquez, Gabriel 4, 76, 81-3, 86, 89, 91, 92 Gay, Paul du 141 Geertz, Clifford 182, 184, 191 Genette, Gérard 3, 44-7, 49, 52, 56, 57, 58, 60 Gensini, Stefano 114, 118 Gentzler, Edwin 35, 42 Gillham, Bill 204, 206 Godel, Kurt 22 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 154 Goldmann, Lucien 116, 118 Gonzalez, Elidn 81-2, 86-7, 91 Gonzélez, Juan Miguel 81 Goody, Jack 167, 178 Gore, Al 90 Gorlée, Dinda 23, 24 Gorp, Hendrik van 77 Gouanvic, Jean-Marc 4, 97, 102 Gramsci, Antonio 4-5, 103-117, 118 Grieder, Jerome B. 146, 150, 162 Griffiths, Gareth 206 Gu, Kaizhi 159 Giilgehri 124, 130, 133 Haack, Susan 32, 42 Haggard, Rider 154 Hall, Stuart 141 Halliday, M.A.K. 3, 76, 78-9, 81, 86, 92, 109, 118 Hammett, Dashiell 97 Harvey, Keith 39, 42 Hatim, Basil 79, 92, 146, 162 Heidegger, Martin 116 Heisenberg, Werner 22 Heliel, M.H. 178 Hermans, Theo 8, 15, 16, 22, 24, 26-7, 29, 30, 32, 35, 39, 41, 42, 60, 61, 73, 77-8, 92, 94, 102, 127-8, 142, 145, 161, 162, 166, 190, 191, 205 Herrick, E.M. 166, 178 Hilleret, René 98 Hoare, Q. 118 Holbrook, Victoria 126, 129, 131-2, 134, 142 Holmes, James $ 1, 8, 28-9, 34, 42, 77, 92, 102, 145, 162, 195, 201, 206 213 House, Juliane 77, 91-2 Hsia, C.T. 152, 162 Hsu, C.Y. 64, 74, 157, 164 Hu Shi 66, 73, 144, 146-51, 161, 162, 164 Huxley, Thomas 62, 64, 68, 69, 71, 157, 159 indnii, ismet 52, 60 Iser, Wolfgang 191, 206 Jackson, Kenneth David 25 Jakobson, Roman 105, 118 Janis, Marja 201, 206 Jansen, Martin 169, 178 Janssen, Zacharias 9 Jenks, Edward 62 Jettmarova, Zuzana 142, 192 Jevons, W.F. 62 Jones, S. 83, 92 Joseph, John E. 42 Kadi-i Manyas, Mahmud b. 142 Kafadar, Cemal 122, 142 Kaindl, Klaus 142, 192 Kalpakli, Mehmet 141 Kang, Youwei 72 Kao, George 152, 163 Karasan, Mehmet 60 Karttunen, Frances 168, 178 Kayaoglu, Taceddin 121, 142 Kelly, Jeanne 152, 162-3 Kemal, Sarica 133 Khayyam, Omar 154 Komissarov, Vilén N. 206 Kong, Qingmao 152, 153, 163 K6priilii, Mehmed Fuad 129-30, 141, 142 Koskinen, Kaisa 205 Kovala, Urpo 47, 60 Kramer, Fritz 192 Kristeva, Julia 181, 191 Kuhn, Thomas 16, 22, 24, 103, 104, 109, 112, 114, 115, 118 Kumarajiva 72 Kuran-Burgoglu, Nedret 134, 143 Kutb 124 Laginer, Zarife 49, 60 Laclau, Emesto 117, 119214 Lai, Jane 144 Lakatos, Imre 119 Lambert, José 27, 32, 42, 61, 74,77, 92, 205 Latifi 120-1, 126, 142 Laud, William 169, 173 Leach, Edmund 182 Lefevere, André 3, 5, 25, 26-7, 35, 37, 42, 45, 60,74, 94, 102, 127, 142, 145, 163, 166, 185, 191, 196, 199, 206 LeGn-Portilla, Miguel 165, 167, 177, 178 Leuven-Zwart, Kitty van 3-4, 42, 77, 92 Levend, Agah Sirri 123, 124-7, 128, 129, 130, 133, 134, 142 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 105, 166, 178, 184 Lewin, Jane 60 Lexis, Wilhelm 105 Li, Hongyan 163 Li, Hongzhang 69 Li, Shaoxi 147 Lianeri, Alxandra 205 Liang, Qichao 65, 66, 67, 74 Lienhardt, Godfrey 182 Lin, Hui 161 Lin, Shu 72, 74, 144, 146, 152-6 Lippershey, Hans 9 Lispector, Clarice 205 Liu, Ching-chib 74 Liu, Lydia 198, 206 Luchesi, Brigitte 191 Lukacs, Georg 116 Luhmann, Niklas 10 Lu, Xun 150, 155, 158, 163 Luo, Xinzhang 62, 74, 144, 146, 156-60, 161, 163, 164 Lisebrink, HJ. 192 Luther, Martin 10 Ma, Zuyi 74 Machiavelli, Niccold 106, 110 Maier, Carol 25, 191 Malartic, Yves 101 Malinowski, Bronislaw 184, 191 Malli, Morphia 205 Malmkjaer, Kirsten 179 Mann, Thomas 49, 60 Crosscultural Transgressions Mansfield, Steven R. 104 Manyas, Kadi-i 133 Mao, Dun 150, 152, 163 Mao, Nathan K. 152, 153, 162-3 Mao, Zedong 152, 155, 163 Marcus, George E. 181, 184, 191, 192, 205 Marcus, J. 167, 178 Martin, J.R. 109, 118 Marzani, Carl 104, 116, 118 Marx, Karl 105, 108, 109, 110, 112, 113, eee Mason, Ian 79, 92, 146, 162, 165, 166, 178 Matejka, Ladislav 119 Matthiessen, F.O. 154 Mead, Margaret 186-7, 192 Medici, R. 118 Mehmed Kadizade 134 Meredith, CM. 118 Mes’ud bin Ahmed 141 Mesud, Hoca 133, 141 Mill, John Stuart 62 Miller, Hillis J. 198, 206 Milroy, J. 30-1, 42 Mignolo, Walter 167, 178 Mongia, Padmini 202, 206 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de 166 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de 62 Monti, Vincenzo 154 Montrose, Louis 181, 192 Mouffe, Chantal 117, 119 Munday, Jeremy 2, 3-4, 80, 83, 92 Mure, G.R.G. 111, 119 Musgrave, A. 119 Naaijkens, Ton 42 Nergisi 126, 131, 141 Nerval, Gérard de 154 Nevai 124 Nice, Richard 102 Nicholson, H.B. 179 Nida, Eugene 185, 192 Niranjana, Tejaswini 46, 60, 145, 163, 167, 178, 182, 183, 188, 192 Niu, Yangshang 74, 75Index Nizami 124 Nord, Christiane 77, 92 Norris, Christopher 28, 42 North, Thomas 154 Nowell Smith, G. 188 Nowotny, K.A. 169, 178 O'Grady, Standish 19 Oittinen, Riita 195, 206 Olohan, Maeve 1, 8 Orsini, Gian N.G. 111, 119 Oseki-Dépré, I. 176, 179 Ou-yang, Zhesheng 162 Ozkan, Mustafa 133, 142 Paker, Saliha 5-6, 127, 141, 142, 205 Paloposki, Outi 195, 205, 206 Pamuk, Orhan 46 Pasa, Ahmed 121 Pasa, Asik 133 Pascal, Blaise 10 Passerini, Luisa 103, 119 Pater, Walter Horatio 154 Peirce, Charles Sanders 23 Phillips, Estelle M. 197, 206 Phillipson, Robert 198, 206 Plato 13 Poe, Edgar Allan 154 Ponzio, A. 115, 119 Pope, Alexander 154 Popovié, Anton 207 Pound, Ezra 176, 179 Pratt, Mary Louise 137, 142 Preti, Giulio 27, 42 Prévert, Jacques 97 Pugh, D.S. 197, 206 Putnam, Hilary 115, 119 Pym, Anthony 15, 17, 20, 23, 24, 26-7, 32, 35, 43, 58, 60, 137-8, 142 Qian, Zhongshu 62, 72, 74, 144, 146, 151- 6, 158, 159, 162-3 Quine, Willard Van Orman 14, 104, 114 Quifiones, E. 179 Ramanujan, A.K. 201, 206 Rava, Adolfo 113, 119 215 Recchia Luciani, FR. 119 Reichardt, R. 192 Rémon, Maurice 101 Riazanskaya, S.W. 119 Ricardo, David 113 Rimbaud, Arthur 179 Roberts, D.D. 111, 119 Roberts, Thomas J. 57, 60 Robles, Pepe 96 Robyns, Clem 186, 192 Roll, E. 105, 119 Romagnuaolo, Maria Rosaria 106, 119 Rorty, Richard 138, 142 Rossi-Landi, Ferruccio 115, 119 Roudiez, Leon 191 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 166 Rumi, Mevlana Celaleddin-i 131, 132 Ruwet, W. 179 Sadi 124, 134 Sahagtin, Bernardino de 168, 175, 179 Sahinbas, Irfan 49, 60 Said, Edward 182, 184-5, 192, 198, 206 Sanguineti, Eduardo 118 Saussure, Ferdinand de 166 Savile, George 153 Schaffner, Christina 192 Schwarz, Benjamin 63, 74 Scott, M. 80, 92 Sengupta, Mahasweta 18, 24 Seyf-i Serayi 124 Seyhi 125, 142 Seyhoglu 133 Shakespeare, William 33 Shen, Suru 62, 63, 74 Shunag, A. 178 Shuttleworth, Mark 74 Simeoni, Daniel 94, 102 Simon, Sherry 145, 163, 185, 192, 195, 207 Simpson, P. 92 Sinclair, J.M. 80, 92 Smith, Adam 62 Snell-Hornby, Mary 142, 192 Somers, Harold 42 Sorel, Julien 112 Sparrow, P. 92216 Spencer, Herbert 62, 69 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 193, 196, 202-3, 207 Springsteen, Bruce 82 Srikantaiah, B.M. 207 ierre, Paul 192 Stein, Gertrude 96 Steinbeck, John 97, 102 Stevenson, Robert Louis 49, 60 Stoker, Bram 60 Sturge, Kate 183, 185, 192 Sullivan, T. 179 Sun, Hongni 74, 75 Susam-Sarajeva, Sebnem 5, 7, 121, 142 Swann, Brian 179 Swift, Jonathan 10, 49, 60 Tahir-Giirgaglar, Sehnaz 3, 121, 122, 123, 127, 142, 205 Taivalkoski, Kristina 205 Talu, Erciiment Ekrem 49 Tan Zaixi 144 Tang Degang 162 Tanguy, Yves 97 Taylor, C. 79, 92 Taylor, Talbot 30-1, 43 Tiffin, Helen 206 Timurtas, Faruk K., 125, 142 Titunik, LR. 119 Tognini Bonelli, Elena 42 Tolasa, Harun 121, 139, 142 Toska, Zebra 121, 125,127, 130, 131, 134, 139, 140, 141, 142-3 Toury, Gideon 3, 15, 17, 25, 26-7, 28-30, 31, 32, 33, 34-5, 37, 38, 40, 43, 45, 46, 60, 74, 76-8, 91, 92, 127, 130, 137-8, 142, 143, 190, 192, 205 Trivedi, Harish 74, 145, 161, 167, 178, 205-6, 207 Tyler, Stephen 183, 192 Tymoczko, Maria 2, 3, 5, 20, 23, 25, 145, 163, 195, 196, 199-200, 203, 205, 207 Tytler, Alexander Fraser 158 Vailati, Giovanni 105 Valero-Garcés, Carmen 183, 192 Crosscultural Transgressions Varoglu, Hamdi 49 Venuti, Lawrence 26-7, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37,43, 72, 74, 101, 102, 145, 163, 165- 6, 179, 190, 195 Vieira, Else 168, 179 Vinay, Jean-Paul 77, 82, 92 Viswanatha, Vanamala 195, 207 Volkovitch, M. 166, 179 VoloSinov, V.N. 115, 119 Voltaire 11 Wacquand, L.J.D. 102 Wang, Dongfeng 63, 74 Wang, Xiaoming 150, 164 Wang, Zuoliang 74 Werner, Michael 184, 192 West, C.ornel 116-7, 119 White, Hayden 184, 192 Whitfield, Raoul 97 Whitman, Walt 154 Whorf, Benjamin Lee 13 Wolf, Eric 167, 179 Wolf, Michaela 6-7, 183, 187, 192 Wong, Wang Chi 63, 70, 74 Woodsworth, Judith 167, 178 ‘Wu (Emperor) 70 Wu, Lianghuan 156, 164 Wu, Lifu 158 Wu, Ming 156, 164 Wu, Rulin 68, 70 Xu, Shen 153 Xu, Zhimo 150, 164 Yan, Fu 3, 61-73, 74, 157-8, 159, 164 Yang, Li 162 Yeats, William Butler 160 Yi, Zhuxian 146, 150, 164 Yilmaz, Hiilya 48, 60 ‘Yu, Pingbo 153 Yiicel, Hasan Ali 48, 52, 60, 141 Yurdatap, Selami Munir 57, 60 Zaifi 134 Zhao, Jiabi 163, 164Index Zhi, Qian 160, 164 Zhou, Zhiping 162 Ziegler, Heide 189, 192 Zlateva, Palma 201, 207 Zohn, Harry 60 ried