The Meeting Point of Postcolonial and Feminist Approaches in Translation Studies: An Overlook of Gayatri Spivak’s ‘The Politics of Translation’

Translation is the most intimate act of reading. I surrender to the text when I translate (1993; 180).

Gayatri Spivak is an accomplished Indian scholar who has concentrated her efforts in promoting the literature of third world countries women, and who believes that language is one of the essential tools in making their voices heard worldwide. In her paper 'The Politics of Translatio'n, she advocates for the use of a proper – understood as opposite to accessible - English as a target language, that would overcome the perpetuation of postcolonial stereotypes and misrepresentations.

The translator, seen as an ‘agent’, must have a sense of the rhetoricity of the language, and moreover, must understand the logic of the text and thus be able to construct a similar connection between them in ‘the shadow’ – that is, the translation - of the original (1993;181). Spivak believes that Western feminists fail to accomplish this thing and, by using a plain, ‘with-it translatese’ English(ibid.182), they project an imperialistic approach on the writings of the colonized, and therefore allow third world countries women to speak in English not through a sense of democracy but through what might be better expressed as a feeling of superiority.

Throughout the text, Spivak uses a series of concepts that define her way of understanding and performing translation, like ‘textile to weave in’ (when she speaks about the target text), ‘the translator’s love for the text’ as well as ‘a complete surrender’ (to describe the way to approach the source text), or ‘the exchange of language’ (to show that both the source and the target language must be seen on the same level, with no traces of superiority of one over the other). I would argue that this is yet another example of how one’s cultural background, personal character and affinities influence and shape their own perspective on translation approaches, for it is yet difficult to understand how one could objectively ‘surrender’ to the text ‘with love'.

The idea of ‘a complete surrender’ is, for Spivak, counter related with the notion of accessibility; in this sense, to be accessible is ‘to betray the text and to show rather dubious politics’ (1993; 191), or, to put it in other words, to deliberately ignore the connotations and the cultural implications that make the original text unique and representative for its contextual background. This is the underlying statement that she makes when she speaks about ‘making the literature of a woman in Palestine resemble something by a man in Taiwan’ (ibid.182). One must not forget, however, about the postcolonial and feminist intricacies ‘weaved’ in Spivak’s discourse. She mainly argues, as I’ve mentioned before, that Western feminists have an imperialistic attitude towards former colonized countries, an attitude – considered altruistic, but in fact discriminatory - which is embodied in their translation strategies of third world material, and which does not either represent or favor their writers. When thinking of the historical past of the colonized, it is very easy to invoke the stereotyped inference of the hegemony of England (and therefore English) over countries like India (and Bengali). Moreover, orientalistic approaches have perpetuated the misrepresentations of third world’s culture, and translators have reinforced, through the strategies used, the artificial and misunderstood image of the colonized, constructed by the Western world for its own purpose and understanding of the Orient. The latest postcolonial approaches in translation studies do attempt to change this perception and affirm the genuine value and validity of the literature of these countries, and Spivak is perhaps the most eager militant in this aspect; however, one must also wonder if her method of using an elitist and somewhat seclusive language – as a backlash to the ‘accessibility’ of Western translation strategies – is really the best choice to support her cause. We have to acknowledge the fact that English is the lingua franca of our century, whether we like it or not, and in the strive for reaching an audience as broad as possible, it is perhaps more productive to play the devil’s advocate role and to use this fact in our advantage. It would be interesting to see if Spivak would apply the same considerations when performing a translation from English into Bengali; she would nonetheless have the same strategies and approaches in mind, but would the rhetoricity of English or the linguistic and stylistic norms of Bengali prevale?


References:

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1993) ‘The Politics of Translation’, Outside in the Teaching Machine, New York: Routledge (p.179-200)