The Politics of Translation- Spivak

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Is an Indian scholar, postcolonial theorist and a

prominent feminist critic of the 20th and 21st centuries. She is best known for her
essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" and her translation of and introduction to
Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology. “The Politics of Translation” is an essay from
her collection Outside in the Teaching Machine published in 1993.

Spivak considers translation as an important approach in pursuing the larger

feminist agenda of achieving women's `solidarity'. The essay brings together
feminist, postcolonialist and poststructuralist approaches of translation- feminist as
she talks about the women translator, postcolonial as she talks about the translation
of ‘Third World’ literature into English and post-structural as she places the agent
within a three-tiered notion of language - rhetoric, logic and silence.

At the beginning of the essay, Spivak makes clear the connection of

language with cultural identity. She argues that translation is not merely a
linguistic activity. It is not just the technical superimposition from one language to
the other. Rather it is a cultural act. In the section ‘Translation as reading’, Spivak
sees translation as a vital political act in which the self engages with reading a text.
The translated text thus becomes a new text altogether. She states that “Translation
is the most intimate act of reading. I surrender to the text when I translate.”she
means that translation should be more of an erotic process than of an ethical
process. There will be a surrender happening between the text and the translator.

She emphasizes the significance of the ‘rhetoricity of language’ while doing

translation. Logic allows us to jump from word to word by means of clearly
indicated connections. Rhetoric must work in the silence between and around
words in order to see what works and how much. There is a general tendency in
translation to play safe by siding with logic over rhetorical inferences. In doing so,
one loses vital clues hidden in the source text. To decipher these hidden
metaphors, the translator should facilitate a love between the original and its
shadow (the translation), “a love that permits fraying, holds the agency of the
translator and the demands of her imagined or actual audience at bay”

Spivak gives an example of Mahasweta Devi’s popular text “Sthanadayani”

to prove her point. The text was originally written in Bengali. Two translations
were made to the same text namely: “Breast Giver” and “The Wet Nurse". She
indicates that the first translation talks about power, strength, soundness; whereas
the second translation is rather discouraging because it fails to carry the rhetoricity
of the source text. She also gives the example of Nivedita, an Irish woman, who
has translated a song of Kali. It failed due to the lack of cultural aspects of the
source language.

Politics of translation is primarily oriented to the language of power and

hegemony. She talks about how English as a language undermines many other
languages of the ex-colonizers’ countries. She openly challenges the western
feminist movements dominated by the English language. The feminists of the
European countries often expect translation to be in their English language. They
do not take the effort to learn the other languages. Thus she questions the
preoccupied notion of the Eurocentric feminism and the domination of English
language in postcolonial literature and society. Such translation, in Spivak’s view,
is ‘translatese’, which eliminates the identity of politically less powerful
individuals and cultures.

In the section “Translation in general”, she gives examples of “cultural

translation” in which the rhetoric of a particular culture plays the greatest role. She
takes example from Tony Morison’s The Beloved focusing on the impossibility of
translating certain deep rooted cultural context if they rely only on the technical
knowledge of language. Spivak sees translation as an act of understanding the self
and others, as it gives women access to work on various languages and cultures of
the world. Feminists of the hegemonic countries of the world should learn the
mother tongue of the third world countries to show the real sense of women
solidarity.

In the last part “Reading as translation”, she attempts to answer the question
of the sublime and how the readers are transplanted into the possibilities of various
realities.