Cold War and Hot Translation

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Notes

¹ U-Carmen eKhayelitsha. Directed by Mark Dornford-May. Cape Town, South Africa: Dimpho Di Kopane, 2005.

² In this essay I refer equally to the literal understanding of translation as the conveyance of a text from one language into another, and to the noun's secondary meaning of the movement of an object, artifact, or cultural text from one place to another. From this secondary meaning I derive my understanding of cultural translation as an operation that always results in a slightly imperfect fit of the same text within a different context. For a discussion of the challenges inherent to “translating Marxism,” see Young, Postcolonialism, 167–69, and Popescu, “Translations.”

³ Barnard, “Oprah's Paton.”

⁴ The campaign led by ANC representatives in exile was naturally a key factor in raising the international awareness about the political prisoners on Robben Island.

⁵ In a comprehensive evaluation of the themes of Border War literature, Gary Baines discusses conventional military history texts, memoirs of soldier-authors, left-leaning academic writing critical of the Angolan war, as well as grensliteratuur (Baines, “South Africa's Vietnam?”).

⁶ See Behr, “South Africa Living in the Fault Lines.” Mark Behr acknowledged the ambivalent appeal (both fascination and loathing) these “masculanist [sic!] codes” held for him as a teenager. Their ideological efficiency was proven by his recruitment as a police informer during his student years at the University of Stellenbosch. After three years he brought his position to the attention of ANC representatives in Lusaka and renounced supporting the apartheid state. His novel The Smell of Apples is informed by the desire to reveal the comprehensive grip of this ideology.

⁷ Aside from the war in Angola, where the Cold War turned into a hot proxy conflict, some of the most important political actors of the 1980s in the United States (the Reagan administration) and in Britain (Margaret Thatcher's government) were “disposed to share in some measure Botha's contention that the black nationalists in his country were violent radicals being manipulated by Moscow” (Sparks, The Mind of South Africa, 348–49).

⁸ Gordimer, “Living in the Interregnum,” 263.

⁹ Ibid., 281.

¹⁰ Khrushchev's so-called “Secret Speech” (which was actually intentionally publicized in the Western world) was delivered in February 1956. While it signaled the leader's intention to do away with Stalinist abuses, the same year the Soviet troops intervened to quell the Hungarian uprising. A decade later, in 1968, the short Prague Spring ended with the arrival of Soviet tanks, indicating that the USSR had no intention to tolerate attempts at implementing “communism with a human face.”

¹¹ Gordimer, “Living in the Interregnum,” 263.

¹² Ibid., 263.

¹³ Ibid., 280–81.

¹⁴ Bauman, “Living Without an Alternative.”

¹⁵ Ibid., 281; 284.

¹⁶ Gordimer, My Son's Story.

¹⁷ Sparks, Beyond the Miracle, 170.

¹⁸ This cultural paranoia is humorously represented in Mark Behr's novel, The Smell of Apples.

¹⁹ South African Communist Party, “The Road to South African Freedom.”

²⁰ Describing her ambivalence towards the position of a young black comrade who lauded the freedom of speech enjoyed by Soviet writers, Gordimer explains why South African anti-apartheid forces were not willing to criticize communist excesses: “I don't take the microphone and tell the young man: there is not a contrast to be drawn between the Soviet Union's treatment of writers and that of South Africa, there is a close analogy—South Africa bans and silences writers just as the Soviet Union does, although we do not have resident censors in South African publishing houses and dissident writers are not sent to mental hospitals. I am silent. I am silent because, in the debates of the interregnum, any criticism of the communist system is understood as a defense of the capitalist system which has brought forth the pact of capitalism and racism that is apartheid, with its treason trials to match Stalin's trials, its detentions of dissidents to match Soviet detentions, its banishment and brutal uprooting of communities and individual lives to match, if not surpass, the gulag. Repression in South Africa has been and is being lived through; repression elsewhere is an account in a newspaper, book, or film” (Gordimer, “Living in the Interregnum,” 280).

²¹ William Pietz (Pietz, “The ‘Postcolonialism’ of Cold War Discourse”), Larry Wolff (Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe), and Timothy Brennan (Brennan, “The Cuts of Language”) are among the very few scholars to have noticed that the East/West split characteristic of the age of empires was not dismantled after World War II but transformed into the communist/capitalist dichotomy characteristic of the Cold War days. Thus Brennan argues that “Soviet and Euro-American cultures of position are today overlaid upon more well known imaginative geographies that were first developed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial discourses, and they extend to affiliative networks that were neither Soviet nor Euro-American” (Ibid., 39–40).

²² Bhabha's approach has been criticized by numerous scholars, most notably Benita Parry: “what he offers us is the World according to the Word” (Parry, “Signs of Our Times,” 9). Bhabha's focus on the discoursive aspects of colonial domination left little or no room for an analysis of economic and political domination (Bhabha, The Location of Culture).