Spivak's Politics of Translation

Spivak commences her essay 'Politics of Translation' thus

The idea for this title comes from the British sociologist Michele Barrett's feeling that the politics of translation takes on a massive life of its own if you see language as the process of meaning-construction.

Some language is meaningful in some contexts and at some periods of time. It ceases to be so as as modes of life change or technology develops. Language, by itself, is not the 'process of meaning construction'.  Purely linguistic innovation does not give rise to anything meaningful, though stupid people may claim that it does. Thus Joyce's 'Finnegan's Wake' didn't really cause any meaningful change though people like Lacan may have claimed to have discovered some novel type of therapy by pondering its pages. The word 'quark' is mentioned by Joyce. But the meaning of that word, as used by Physicists, has nothing to do with his work.
A better translation of Joyce into Spanish won't help Spanish physicists.  Indeed, translation simply isn't particularly important. The day may come when it is done solely by machines. Designing those machines, however, involves genuine meaning-construction. New concepts are discovered in the process. These are meaningful- but only for a time and in a particular context.
The 'politics of translation' has no 'life of its own'. It isn't important.

 In my view, language may be one of many elements that allow us to make sense of things, of ourselves. I am thinking, of course, of gestures, pauses, but also of chance, of the subindividual force-fields of being which click into place in different situations, swerve from the straight or true line of language-in-thought. Making sense of ourselves is what produces identity. If one feels that the production of identity as self-meaning, not just meaning, is as pluralized as a drop of water under a microscope, one is not always satisfied, outside of the ethicopolitical arena as such, with "generating" thoughts on one's own. (Assuming identity as origin may be unsatisfactory in the ethicopolitical arena as well, but consideration of that now would take us too far afield.)

To say something may matter is not a view. The statement is too vague. Similarly, there is no coherent thought- but rather a mere jumble of associations- in linking 'gestures, pauses, chance, subindividual force fields of being' and so forth.

Making sense of ourselves does not produce identity. Rachel Dolezal may have made sense of herself as an African American woman. But she was no such thing and has had to resile from that identity. Rohit Vemula may have made sense of himself as actually a Dalit.  The Law did not permit him to assert this identity and thus, for example, get elected to a reserved seat.

A drop of water is still a drop water even under a microscope. It is not 'pluralised'. There is no 'ethicopolitical arena'. Politics exists. Ethics exist. The ethico-political does not. Origin is not the same thing as identity. Only fools assume otherwise.

I have argued in Chapter Six that one of the ways of resisting capitalist multiculturalism's invitation to selfidentity and compete is to give the name of "woman" to the unimaginable other.

Why have you argued such an obviously foolish thing? Every self possesses self-identity. Capitalist multiculturalism can't make a profit by invite you to be content with what you already have. Naming something unimaginable is pointless because nobody can have any notion of what that name connotes. 'Woman' is not unimaginable at all. Lesbians and heterosexual men spend a lot of their time imagining woman- preferably not wearing too many clothes.

The same sort of impulse is at work here in a rather more tractable form. For one of the ways to get around the confines of one's "identity" as one produces expository prose is to work at someone else's title, as one works with a language that belongs to many others.

A translator isn't 'getting around the confines of her 'identity' by doing her job. Reading some one else's work may help one rise above oneself. Translating, however, continually points one towards one's own deficiencies.

This, after all, is one of the seductions of translating. It is a simple miming of the responsibility to the trace of the other in the self.

Nonsense! Translating isn't seductive. It is hard work. Bad translations, perhaps, are a 'simple miming'. But they are irresponsible for that very reason.

Responding, therefore, to Barrett with that freeing sense of responsibility, I can agree that it is not bodies of meaning that are transferred in translation.

Feeling it one's responsibility to attend to what the other is actually saying is 'freeing' in the sense that one is overcoming one's egotistical tendency to just hear whatever we want to hear. Is Spivak actually doing anything of the sort here? Barrett says every text has a preferred or dominant reading and this relates to purely aesthetic effects. Transferring that body with similar aesthetic effects is fidelity in translation.  Barrett says- “cultural politics, and feminist art, are important precisely because we are not helpless victims of oppressive ideology. We take some responsibility for the cultural meaning of gender and it is up to us all to change it.”
Is Spivak really hearing what Barrett is saying? Is she showing 'responsibility to the trace of the other in the self.'?

And from the ground of that agreement I want to consider the role played by language for the agent, the person who acts, even though intention is not fully present to itself. The task of the feminist translator is to consider language as a clue to the workings of gendered agency. The writer is written by her language, of course. But the writing of the writer writes agency in a way that might be different from that of the British woman/citizen within the history of British feminism, focused on the task of freeing herself from Britain's imperial past, its often racist present, as well as its "made in Britain" history of male domination.

Barrett hasn't written anything because she is being written by an English which has been poisoned by the 'epistemic violence' done by the 'Permanent Settlement' to Spivak's own Bengal.

She gives us this translation of a poem by Ramprasad Sen-
 Mind, why footloose from Mother?
 Mind mine, think power, for freedom's dower,
bind bower with love-rope
 In time, mind, you minded not your blasted lot.
 And Mother, daughter-like, bound up house-fence to dupe her dense and devoted fellow.
 Oh you'll see at death how much Mum loves you
A couple minutes' tears, and lashings of water, cowdung-pure.

This raises the question- was Sen bad at Bengali? Was he ignorant of its grammar? In reading his poetry, do Bengalis say 'ah! the fellow was unlettered. He used inappropriate words like 'footloose' and 'dower'. He thinks a 'bower' can be bound with 'love-rope'.

In Hindu India, cow-dung is considered a purifying agent. In English, it is shit. 'Cowdung pure' does not mean 'very pure', it means 'shitty'.

If there is any politics, as opposed shit, in Spivak's translation, that politics justifies the 'Permanent Settlement'. Clearly Bengalis were and are a shitty people who can't even speak their own language properly.

Spivak must know the story of the 'radiant girl' who appeared to Sen and assisted him when, along with his daughter who left shortly after, he was mending a fence. After finishing the task she vanished and thus Sen came to know she was a manifestation of the Goddess.
This story is not well known outside Bengal. Why does Spivak not give some clue in her translation as to this miraculous occurrence? What she has written is garbled nonsense.  Perhaps, Spivak can't tell us that girls mended fences just as well as men fended fences in eighteenth century rural Bengal. There was no 'gendered agency' at all in the literary language- at least when it came to religious poetry.

By contrast, the French translation she quotes is perfectly intelligible-

 Pourquoi as-tu, mon ame, delaisse les pieds de Ma ? O esprit, medite Shokti, tu obtiendras la delivrance. Attache-les ces pieds saints avec la corde de la devotion. Au bon moment tu n'as rien vu, c'est bien la ton malheur. Pour se jouer de son fidele, Elle m'est apparue Sous la forme de ma fille et m'a aide a reparer ma cloture. C'est a la mort que tu comprendras l'amour de Ma. Ici, on versera quelques larmes, puis on purifiera le lieu.

though it gets a couple of details wrong- the Goddess did not take the form of Sen's daughter but came to him after the latter had left. This detail is important. Clearly young women in Bengal didn't just help their dad's. They sometimes helped a stranger- an older man in this case- out of pure goodwill. The poet does not think it strange that a beautiful girl who is passing by helps him mend his fence. Why? Females had the same agency as males at least when it came to helping out an old man attending to domestic chores.

Spivak prefaces her translation of Sen, thus-

And here too the example of an intimate translation that goes respectfully "wrong" can be offered. The French wife of a Bengali artist translated some of Ram Proshad Sen's songs in the twenties to accompany her husband's paintings based on the songs. Her translations are marred by the pervasive orientalism ready at hand. Compare two passages, both translating the "same" Bengali. I have at least tried, if failed, to catch the unrelenting mockery of self and Kali in the original:

Sen does not 'mock' Kali. He adores her as the Godhead. Where is the 'orientalism' in the French version? It is Spivak's version which features 'cowdung' and 'bowers'. Shakti is not 'Power' as 'Freedom's dower'. That is a Nietzchean sentiment worthy of an Iqbal. It has no place in eighteenth century Bengali devotional poetry. Why is Spivak so bad at translating Bengali? The answer is that she has been writing very bad English for a very long time.

To decide whether you are prepared enough to start translating, then, it might help if you have graduated into speaking, by choice or preference, of intimate matters in the language of the original.

This simply isn't true. William Weaver is an outstanding translator. 'The Name of the Rose' is better than its Italian original. But Weaver wasn't using Italian for any intimate purpose. His friendships were with eminent savants and writers. Spivak can  certainly speak of intimate matters in Bengali- yet her translations from that language are horrible.

I have worked my way back to my earlier point: I cannot see why the publishers' convenience or classroom convenience or time convenience for people who do not have the time to learn should organize the construction of the rest of the world for Western feminism.

 Neither publishers nor academics 'construct the rest of the world' for anybody- even 'Western feminists'.

Five years ago, berated as unsisterly, I would think, "Well, you know one ought to be a bit more giving etc.," but then I asked myself again, "What am I giving, or giving up? To whom am I giving by assuring that you don't have to work that hard, just come and get it? What am I trying to promote?" People would say, you who have succeeded should not pretend to be a marginal. But surely by demanding higher standards of translation, I am not marginalizing myself or the language of the original? I have learned through translating Devi how this three-part structure works differently from English in my native language. And here another historical irony has become personally apparent to me. In the old days, it was most important for a colonial or postcolonial student of English to be as "indistinguishable" as possible from the native speaker of English. I think it is necessary for people in the third world translation trade now to accept that the wheel has come around, that the genuinely bilingual postcolonial now has a bit of an advantage. But she does not have a real advantage as a translator if she is not strictly bilingual, if she merely speaks her native language. Her own native space is, after all, also class organized. And that organization still often carries the traces of access to imperialism, often relates inversely to access to the vernacular as a public language. So here the requirement for intimacy brings a recognition of the public sphere as well. If we were thinking of translating Marianne Moore or Emily Dickinson, the standard for the translator could not be "anyone who can conduct a conversation in the language of the original (in this case English)."

A good translation may be produced by a person who has little knowledge of the source language. What matters is that they write the target language well. Pound knew no Japanese or Chinese- yet some of his translations are very good. Why? At that point in his life, he was still writing good English. A good Hindi poet can translate Dickinson into good Hindi verse. I can't because I write terrible Hindi verse. The Hindi poet may not be able to hold a conversation in English but even a worthless fellow like me can help him to produce a good Hindi poem which is faithful to the original.

Good English doesn't matter much now. Good mathematics does. A paper written in vile English with valid Statistical results will get a lot of citations. A beautifully written paper lacking the same won't make it through peer review.

When applied to a third world language, the position is inherently ethnocentric. And then to present these translations to our unprepared students so that they can learn about women writing!

Students who take rubbish Comp Lit courses don't matter. You aren't changing the world by getting them to read some worthless shite.

In my view, the translator from a third world language should be sufficiently in touch with what is going on in literary production in that language to be capable of distinguishing between good and bad writing by women, resistant and conformist writing by women. She must be able to confront the idea that what seems resistant in the space of English may be reactionary in the space of the original language. Farida Akhter has argued that, in Bangladesh, the real work of the women's movement and of feminism is being undermined by talk of "gendering," mostly deployed by the women's development wings of transnational nongovernment organizations, in conjunction with some local academic feminist theorists. One of her intuitions was that "gendering" could not be translated into Bengali. "Gendering" is an awkward new word in English as well. Akhter is profoundly involved in international feminism. And her base is third world. I could not translate "gender" into the U.S. feminist context for her. This misfiring of translation, between a superlative reader of the social text such as Akhter, and a careful translator like myself, speaking as friends, has added to my sense of the task of the translator. Good and bad is a flexible standard, like all standards.

Farida Akhter, who is trying to help genuine farmers and weavers and so on in Bangladesh, is rightly critical of 'Gender and Development' bullshit as just leading to pointless paper-work to secure funding. Her own work was quoted under the older rubric of 'Women in Development' which people thought sexist coz it used the word 'Women'.

Here another lesson of poststructuralism helps: these decisions of standards are made anyway. It is the attempt to justify them adequately that polices. That is why disciplinary preparation in school requires that you write examinations to prove these standards. Publishing houses routinely engage in materialist confusion of those standards. The translator must be able to fight that metropolitan materialism with a special kind of specialist's knowledge, not mere philosophical convictions. In other words, 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 am often approached by women who would like to put Devi in with just Indian women writers. I am troubled by this, because "Indian women" is not a feminist category. 

Wow! I was wrong about Spivak. She really has been fighting racism all these years. She has finally proved that 'all third world women's writing' is... not good. Indeed, even third world men's writing is pure cowdung. That's all right because she herself is a 'Europeanist'.