“In-between” a rock and a “third space”? On the trouble with ambivalent metaphors of translation

ABSTRACT

Homi Bhabha's The Location of Culture (1994) made waves in translation studies. His theories of hybridity, third space and the in-between have been consistently present in the literature ever since. For scholars concerned with the ethics of translation vis-à-vis the cultural other, Bhabha's metaphors give expression to the notion of “writing back” to neocolonial hegemonies. Despite their allure, what has not been addressed is the extent to which their success is threatened by the agency of the translator as a writer. Where the power to write is exercised not by the other but by the translator on their behalf, resistance to hegemony is an ideal that can only be ventriloquized. Through the framework of translation practice, this article examines Bhabha's metaphor of hybridity and signals the methodological risks of imbricating his ideas uncritically within resistant translation discourse.

KEYWORDS:

• Bhabha
• translation
• hybridity
• hermeneutics
• resistance
• representation

Note on contributor

Sarah Maitland is a lecturer in translation studies at University of Hull, UK. She is the author of various articles on cultural translation, hermeneutics and the role of translation in the humanities. As a professional theatre translator she has written for the Theatre Royal Bath, the Unicorn and New Diorama theatres.

Notes

1. See Papastergiadis (2005) and Pieterse (2006).

2. Extended studies of third space are provided by Batchelor (2006) and Wolf (2000, 2008) and on the in-between by Tymoczko (2003) and Bennett (2012).

3. In line with the code of ethics of the Society of Authors (2014), the translator I envisage is commissioned to produce a translation for reception by an identified audience that speaks the native language of the translator. I therefore do not address other forms such as collaborative or self-translation in which authors may be actively involved in the writing of a translation or those in which translators may translate into non-native languages. My emphasis is on translation across a distance: linguistically, from the source language; spatially, from the place of its author; and temporally, from the moment of production and reception. Although they may spend significant portions of their life in cultural contexts other than their own, translators here must, in Johnston's (2012, 46) words, “engineer” something from somewhere or sometime else, making it tangible for audiences in the here and now. This article concerns the interpretative leaps this task requires.

4. The so-called “world music” model of “organic” hybridity where cultural practices change naturally over time (Bakhtin 1981, 360; Pieterse 2009, 87).

5. It should be noted that different terms are used in other languages and not all are negative. For Vicente Riva Palacio (1832–96), the mestizo descendants of European settlers and indigenous inhabitants were the race of the future, an idea now associated with Jose Vasconcelos's “cosmic race”. Likewise, Gilberto Freyre (1900–87) believed that the descendants of European settlers and African slaves would lead to a superior Brazilian race. For further discussion, see Burke (2009).

6. These glosses are for demonstration purposes and do not represent the published translation.