Towards an Intercivilizational Turn: Naoki Sakai's cofigurative regimes of translation and the problem of Eurocentrism

ABSTRACT

The rather inflamed debate over Eurocentrism in Translation Studies over the past few years seems to be pointing to a new Turn in TS, following on the Cultural Turn of the 1990s and the Sociological Turn of the 2000s: an Intercivilizational Turn, focused no longer on “centers” of “civilization” but the interstices and relationships between civilizations. Orientalism has long been one such intercivilizational relationship; Occidentalism has more recently been emerging as a rival to that. The article seeks to show that much of what we take to be most innovative in both the “Eurocentric”/“Orientalist” and the “Occidentalist” approaches to TS has emerged out of the influence of Chinese thought on Western thinkers.

KEYWORDS:

• Eurocentrism
• civilizational spells
• Orientalism
• Occidentalism
• cofiguration

Note on contributor

Douglas Robinson is dean of the Arts Faculty and chair professor of English at Hong Kong Baptist University. A freelance translator of literary and non-literary texts from Finnish to English since 1975, he is the author of numerous books and articles on translation, rhetoric, language and literature.

Notes

1. I'm alluding here to Bakhtin (1929/1984), who distinguishes among (1) “direct, unmediated discourse directed exclusively toward its referential object, as an expression of the speaker's ultimate semantic authority” (199: the apparently single-voiced speech of a character); (2) objectified discourse (the speech of a character who is intended to sound like [1]); and (3) double-voiced discourse, which Bakhtin analyzes into three subcategories. See Robinson (2003, 112–113) for a revised tabulation of these categories, according to which covert multiple voicing with a hierarchy imposed occurs where “the speaker gives the impression of speaking with only a single voice, either his or her own or someone else's” (Bakhtin's [1] “direct unmediated” and [2] “objectified” types). I'm suggesting that Chesterman's reporting of his opponents’ views falls into covert multiple voicing with a hierarchy imposed, with Chesterman attempting to “give … the impression of speaking with only a single voice”, namely someone else's, but actually double-voicing it such that the objectified discourse is subtly shaded with the tonalities of disagreement.

2. Emerson and Thoreau read Daoist classics in Guillaume Pauthier's French translations and Ruist classics in Marshman (1809) and Collie (1828), both of which books Emerson had in his library and Thoreau found there upon first staying in the house in 1841. Inspired by these works, Emerson published a selection (translated by Thoreau from Pauthier) of “Sayings of Confucius” in the 1843 Dial, and Thoreau quoted extensively from Mengzi in Walden (see Christy 1963; Cheng 2000, 219n1).

3. That hybridization would include the borrowing of terms from, say, colonized India into other British colonies, like “amah” and “shroff”, or into English usage in the UK, like “kebab” and “pundit”; or borrowings from Hong Kong Cantonese into standard colloquial English, including humorous literal translations like “long time no see” (from 好久不見 hou gau bat gin) and “no can do” (from 不可以 bat ho ji), or calques like “chop chop!” (from 速速 cuk cuk) and “gung-ho” (from 工合 gun hap).

4. Several of these “extra-TS” texts have been assimilated through anthologization – Asad (1986) and Pratt (2002) in Baker (2009, 2.223–247 and 2.3–14); Spivak (1993) and Appiah (1993) in Venuti ([2000] 2012, 312–343) – but tend to remain somehow mentally “marked” by translation scholars as speaking from outside the door.