THE POLITICS OF TRANSLATION – Spivak

(Summary)

The seminal essay, “The politics of translation” brings together feminist, postcolonialist

and poststructuralist approaches. Through various examples Spivak highlights the tensions

between different approaches and calls for surrender of self by the translator to the text. As

translation itself is a reading, and one of the best ways to get around the confines of own’s

identity is to work with someone else’s. She further relates this act with a language that belongs

to many others, “this after all is one of the seductions of translating”. She further explains that

the task of the feminist translator is to consider language as a clue to the workings of the
gendered agency.

As a translator, Spivak is fully aware of the challenges one faces while translating;

therefore, she understands why one tends to play safe by siding with logic over rhetorical

inferences, but she explains that in doing so, one loses vital clues hidden in the source text. To

decipher these metaphors which get lost in between source to translated text, she calls for

development of love and affinity to the text by the translators. Thus, the task of the translator

is to facilitate this love between the original and its shadow, a love that permits faying, holds
the agency of the translator and the demands of her imagined or audience at bay.

Spivak is concerned with the politics of translation from a non-European woman’s text,

as too often the translator fails to engage with, or care insufficiently for, the rhetoricity of the

original. While trying to portray something meaningful, translator ends up creating a space

outside language. This is most eerily staged (and challenged) in the effort to communicate with

the ‘other’. Absolute alterity or otherness is thus differed-deferred into another self who
resembles us, however minimally, and with whom we can communicate.
 Based on the ideas proposed by post-structuralists like Derrida, Spivak wants to

deconstruct the preconceived thought processes that she sums up in terms of three-tiered notion

of language, logic, rhetoric, silence: here she proposes a different kind of effort for translation

in terms of synonym, syntax and local colour. She justifies Derrida when he points out the

difficulties between French and English, and agrees to speak in English—" I must speak in a

language that is not my own because that will be more just"—I want to claim the right to the
same dignified complaint for a woman's text in Arabic or Vietnamese”.

Perhaps, this idea helps her to challenge the English language- dominated feminist

movements, which, through the law of majority, not only silences the minority language

feminists within western world, but the same concept is imposed upon in other poor countries

of Asia or Arab world: “In the act of wholesale translation into English there can be a betrayal
of the democratic ideal into the law of the strongest”.

Spivak speaks out against Western feminists who expect feminist writing from outside

Europe to be translated into the language of power, English. Such translation, in Spivak's view,

is often expressed in 'translationese', which eliminates the identity of politically less powerful

individuals and cultures. She suggests that feminists from the hegemonic countries should show

real solidarity with women in postcolonial contexts by learning the language in which those
women speak and write.

She also says that one's first responsibility in understanding solidarity is to learn other
women's mother tongue rather than consider solidarity something taken for granted. Spivak

also shows a kind of anxiety for the ‘Third World' illiterate women. The first task of the feminist

is to learn their language rather than impose someone's notion of solidarity and feminism on

them: “There are countless languages in which women all over the world have grown up

learning and have been female or feminist, and still the languages we keep learning the most

are the powerful European ones, sometimes the powerful Asian ones, least often the chief
African ones.”
 Translation for Spivak is an act of understanding the other as well as the self. For her it

has a political dimension, as it is a strategy that can be consciously employed. She uses the

feminine adjectives like submission, intimacy and understanding for theorizing translation.
Thus theorizing translation itself receives a feminist slant.

In Spivak's opinion, the 'politics of translation' currently gives prominence to English

and the other 'hegemonic' languages of the ex-colonizers. Translations into these languages

from Bengali too often fail to translate the difference of the Bengali view because the translator,
albeit with good intentions, over-assimilates it to make it accessible to the Western readers.

Spivak's work is indicative of how cultural studies, and especially post-colonialism, has

over the past decade focused on issues of translation, the transnational and colonization and

translation has been manipulated to disseminate an ideologically motivated image of

postcolonial countries.

Thus we notice that Spivak has dismantled the pre-conceived notion of feminisms as

well as thoughts revolving around post-colonial literature and society through English. Her

approach appears to be quite harsh for the feminist writers but certainly it helps feminist writers

to understand the rhetoric of language and culture, and women of post-colonial countries will

be able to speak more freely and share their inner problems in a more open way if they learn

their language. This will also increase historical, social-cultural, ideological and political

understanding of the society about which the western feminists have been showing solidarity
from outer periphery through hegemonic English psyche.

Spivak is supported in parallel by feminist theorists who have spoken against male-

driven depiction of translations and of women. Such orientations have been linked to colonial

thought processes where colony is considered as translational copy whose suppressed identity

has been overwritten by the colonizer. Translation's role in disseminating such ideological
images has led Bassnett and Trivedi (1999: 5) to refer to the 'shameful history of translation'.

(In Detail)
 Laurence Venuti, in his introduction to a section in The Translation Studies Reader,
comments thus:

The essay by Gayatri Spivak (1992) included below constitutes a feminist

intervention into postcolonial translation issues. But it is also a working translator’s
manifesto, a record of the complex intentions that motivated her versions of the
Bengali fiction writer Mahasweta Devi. Spivak outlines a poststructuralist conception
of language use, where, following Derrida and de Man, “rhetoric” continually
subverts meanings constructed by “logic” and “grammar,” a subversion that is also
social in effect, “a relationship between social logic, social reasonableness and the
disruptiveness of figuration in social practice.” Spivak argues that translators of Third
World literatures need this linguistic model because “without a sense of the rhetoricity
of language, a species of neocolonialist construction of the non-western scene is
afoot.” She criticizes western translation strategies that render Third World literatures
“into a sort of with-it translatese,” immediately accessible, enacting a realistic
representation of those literatures, but devoid of the linguistic, cultural, and
geopolitical differences that mark them. She advocates literalism, an “in-between
discourse,” that disrupts the effect of “social realism” in translation and gives the
reader “a tough sense of the specific terrain of the original.”Spivak is aware of the
contingency of cultural political agendas, whether couched in theoretical statements
like her essay or in translation strategies. Different social situations can change the
political valence of a translation. The metropolitan feminist, she observes, “translates
a too quickly shared feminist notion of accessibility,” when the fact is that a
politically laden term like “gendering” can’t be easily translated into Bengali. The
ideologically motivated translator of Third World writing must be mindful that “what
seems resistant in the space of English may be reactionary in the space of the original
language.”

Spivak begins by saying that “it is not bodies of meaning that are transferred in
translation,” and that “the task of the feminist translator is to consider language as a clue to
the workings of gendered agency1.” Later, in the section ‘Translation as Reading’ she opines
that “the rhetorical nature of every language disrupts its logical systematicity.” Rhetoric’ vs.
‘logic’ is part of the post-structuralist tripartite model of ‘rhetoric-logic-silence’, where

1
“Gendered” in the parlance of theory does not mean biological gender, but social constructs related to gender.
“Agency” means individual volition or action.
‘rhetoric’ is the raw power of the original text’s language, and ‘logic’ stands for the conscious
(and therefore political) interventions of the translator As Venuti says above, “’rhetoric’
continually subverts meanings constructed by ‘logic’ and ‘grammar’”. It is the duty of the
translator to surrender herself before the ‘rhetoric’ of the original, to become an ‘intimate’
reader:

I must resist both the solemnity of chaste Victorian poetic prose and the
forced simplicity of “plain English”, that have imposed themselves as the
norm… Translation is the most intimate act of reading. I surrender to the text when
I translate ...

The task of the translator is to promote this intimacy between the “original” and the
“shadow”, to facilitate maximum free play of “rhetoricity,” and to keep the “agency” of the
translator under strict control. According to Spivak

The jagged relationship between rhetoric and logic, condition and effect
of knowing, is a relationship by which a world is made for the agent, so that the
agent can act in an ethical way, a political way, a day-to-day way; so that the agent
can be alive, in a human way, in the world. Unless one can at least construct a model
of this for the other language, there is no real translation.

One example she gives to prove this are the two translations of Mahasweta
Devi’s story, ‘Stanadayini’: Spivak translated it as ‘The Breast Giver’, while another
translator puts it as ‘The Wet Nurse’. The latter, ignoring the rhetoric of the original,
merely reflects the logic of the translator:

The theme of treating the breast as organ of labour-power-as-commodity

and the breast as metonymic part-object standing in for other-as-object—the
way in which the story plays with Marx and Freud on the occasion of the
woman’s body—is lost even before you enter the story.

She defends her choice of English as the medium of translation by saying that

It is more just to give access to the largest number of feminists. Therefore

these texts must be made to speak English.... It is merely the easiest way
 of being “democratic” with minorities. In the act of wholesale
translation into English there can be a betrayal of the democratic ideal into
the law of the strongest.

Continuing with the requirements of a good translator, Spivak says that “it
would be a practical help if one’s relationship with the language being translated was
such that sometimes one preferred to speak in it about intimate things.” Lack of
intimacy with the translated language can lead one into committing serious errors of
judgement, as she illustrates with regard to Sudhir Kakar’s interpretation of the discursive
roles played by Vivekananda and Ram Proshad in the context of national resistance to the
colonial regime. Both used the goddess Kali to express themselves, and Spivak sees it as
“as a choice of the cultural female sphere rather than the colonial male sphere.” Owing to
his lack of intimacy with the originals in Bengali, Kakar comes out with comments that are
clearly misdirected. He could not properly understand (i) the historically significant turn
from Nationalism to the Mother, (ii) the translation of the culture of imperialism by the
colonial subject, and (iii) how it is expressed in the gendering of the poet’s voice.
Next, she gives two actual examples of translation, referring to the goddess Kali:
one from Bengali to English done by herself, and the second from Bengali to French by a
European woman, for which Spivak has provided an equitable English version. The first is
an example of translation that respects the rhetoricity of the original, the second is
controlled by logic. According to Spivak, “rhetoric points at the possibility of randomness,
of contingency as such, dissemination, the falling apart of language, the possibility that
things might not always be semiotically organized”.

The translator must be strictly bilingual, to be effective in the post-colonial

scenario: it is not enough that she speaks one and ‘understands’ another. Another
requirement is that she must possess the ability to discriminate between good and bad
writing, resistant and conformist writing, in her native language. According to Spivak “the
person who is translating must have a tough sense of the specific terrain of the original,
so that she can fight the racist assumption that all Third World women’s writing is
good ... I remain interested in writers who are against the current, against the mainstream. I
remain convinced that the interesting literary text might be precisely the text where
you do not learn what the majority view [is]”.
It is her opinion that the international status of a language is very important in
 understanding the politics of translation. For example if she translates from a European
language to Bengali, it is sure be scrutinized critically by knowledgeable Bengalis, but if
the translation is into French or English, people may take the translation for granted.
She also discusses the question of making a translation ‘accessible’. Usually
accessibility is measured in terms of communicability, ease of reading etc. For example,
take the concerns of feminisms. There is a view that all women basically share the same
problems, and that feminism can be used as an umbrella to promote solidarity among
women. About this Spivak says:
Rather than imagining that women automatically have something identifiable in
common, why not say, humbly and practically, my first obligation in understanding
solidarity is to learn her mother tongue. You will see immediately what the
differences are ... In other words, if you are interested in talking about the other,
and/or in making a claim to be the other, it is crucial to learn other languages ...
There are countless languages in which women all over the world have grown
up and been female or feminist, and yet the languages we keep on learning by rote
are the powerful European ones, sometimes the powerful Asian ones, least often the
chief African ones”.
Learning other languages has its own advantages: For example it helps us to
understand the term ‘woman’ better. It will also help in evaluating ‘our’ position – and see it
inscribed by privileging of social class (eg. difference between an illiterate woman and a
literary theorist like Spivak). As she says, “tracking commonality through responsible
translation can lead us into areas of difference and different differentiations.”
She then speaks of her indebtedness to Foucault, especially for the pouvoir-savoir
(power-knowledge?) paradigm. She explains that “on the most mundane level, pouvoir-savoir
is the shared skill which allows us to make (common) sense of things.” She says how she
gave a feminist dimension to this by critiquing mother-daughter relationship in ‘private’
linguistic communities (eg. African slave languages). Commenting on Toni Morrison’s
Beloved in this context, she points out the ‘withholding’ in the speech of the mother. In a
violent scene between mother and daughter, the mother slaps her daughter for taking the
mother’s language for granted, driving home the point that language cannot be easily passed
on; it needs sacrifice. In the case of the daughter, she cannot speak that language unless she
also becomes a slave (branded with hot iron) like her mother. According to Spivak, “the
lesson is the (im)possibility of translation in the general sense. Rhetoric points at absolute
contingency, not the sequentiality of time ... This is what she means by “ the obligation of the
translator to be able to juggle the rhetorical silences in the two languages”.
Concluding the essay, she cites some comments by Wilson Harris, the author of The
Guyana Quartet. Harris opines that award-winning translations all go the same way – the
pursuit of translation as the transfer of ‘substance’ or ‘meaning’; one hardly comes across a
translator who has the courage to “juggle the rhetorical silences”. Spivak exhorts us “to attend
to the rhetoric which points to the limits of translation, in the creole’s, the slave-daughter’s,
the Carib’s use of “English,” and “learn the lesson of translation from these brilliant
inside/outsiders and translate it into the situation of other languages”.