Translation traces in the archive: unfixing documents, destabilising evidence

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on a challenge faced by a collaborative research team working on autobiographical accounts in South Asian languages. Although several documents stated they were translations, both source and target texts were not preserved in each case. How could could we engage constructively with the implied presence of the source texts in the face of their material absence? This meant developing a new set of questions on translation and its relationship with the archive. Drawing on Foucault’s critique of ‘the archive’ and his argument for an ‘archaeological’ engagement with archives, we examine how to study what we term ‘translation traces’ in the documents: bilingual texts, translated extracts, fragments, and evidence of repeated relay translations. We ask further, what role translation, invisibilized as it is, plays in the documentation of lives. The archive can be conceptualised as a ‘contact zone’ where languages, texts, and collective memory intersect through translation. We suggest that archives from the past inevitably shape our study and understanding of material presence and function of translation in specific historical periods. Finally, we argue that highlighting the role of translation opens up new ways of conceptualising and working with historical archives.

KEYWORDS:

• Translation and history
• translation and memory
• translation and archives
• conversion accounts
• South Asia
• missionary archives
• Christianity
• Foucault
• Tamil
• German

Acknowledgments

We thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) for funding the research project on translation and conversion accounts which provided the time and opportunity to investigate several archives and their materials. We thank project co-investigators Milind Wakankar and John Zavos for ongoing discussions on the archives and project advisor, A. R. Venkatachalapathy, for his expertise on nineteenth-century Tamil manuscripts. Our gratitude to Special Collections archivists at Cadbury Research Library, Birmingham University and the archive at the Franckesche Stiftungen, Halle (Germany). We express our immense gratitude to all those who have commented on earlier drafts of this article: two anonymous peer reviewers; friends, Rochelle Pinto and Sharada Nair; and colleagues at the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for South Asian Studies for their critical comments. All have offered insightful comments that have helped sharpen the focus of the article; all failings, however, are entirely our own responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The project entitled, ‘Conversion, Translation and the Language of Autobiography’ (http://www.ctla.llc.ed.ac.uk/) was funded by the AHRC as part of their Translating Cultures theme.

2. We use the term colonial South Asia to refer to the territories (and materials produced in these territories) that were governed by the British colonial administration. This term includes territories, such as Jaffna, that lie in the modern-day Republic of Sri Lanka and therefore outside the current political boundary of India. When referring to publications and contexts after 1947, we use current names of independent countries, that is, India or Sri Lanka.

3. We use this term as a broad category to refer collectively to all the archives set up by European and North American Protestant Christian missionary societies from the eighteenth century onwards rather than to the archives of individual societies as many of the attitudes to translation discussed in this article are common to these archives. We are aware that a study of Catholic archives, of which the Vatican’s would be principal, may yield entirely different results. However, this requires much further in-depth comparative study which is beyond the scope of this article.

4. See for example the work of mission historians represented in edited volumes such as Frykenberg (2003) and Frykenberg and Brown (2002).

5. Nevertheless, at a popular level, some of the book-length and established conversion accounts did circulate within the South Asian Christian community. Reprints, new translations and editions continue to be sold at Christian bookstores across the country. These are, however, just a handful of accounts compared to what can be found in the missionary archives.

6. For a detailed discussion of shifts in meaning and emphases in translation, see Israel (2018), Dandekar (2018) and Frenz (2018).

7. Archived in Special collections, Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham.

8. CMS/B/OMS/C 12 0206 Nos. 588, 589 and 590 (1868).

9. CMS/B/OMS/C I2 098 No. 87.

10. For example, there are three key missionaries associated with the development of the Tamil language alone – Constantin Beschi, Robert Caldwell and G. U. Pope – and at least one such missionary scholar dedicated their energies to studying each of the Indian languages.

11. A good example is of Baba Padmanji’s Marathi conversion account Arunodaya published in 1908 after the publication of its English translation, Once Hindu, Now Christian. The early life of Baba Padmanji. An Autobiography, in 1890.

12. Padmanji’s Once Hindu, Now Christian was published with the Scottish missionary J Murray Mitchell’s name on the title page as editor with no indication of translator’s name.

13. For a more detailed discussion, please see Israel (2018).

14. ‘Hüttemann’ is the correct spelling in the German text, which is how the author signed his diary of 1755 and how the name appears in all printed German texts. However, three spelling variations appear later in the text: Hüttemann, Hutteman, Huttiman. Further, there is one exception to the way Hüttemann signs his name: in his German letter to Francke, in which he tells the Pandaram story (dated 12 January 1764), he signs with ‘George Hutteman’.

15. Please note that the title includes both Tamil and English but not in exact translation.

16. In this text, Hüttemann is referred to as ‘Attiman’ [Tamil transliteration] and ‘Huttiman’ [Latin].

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) [AH/M003957/1].

Notes on contributors

Hephzibah Israel

Hephzibah Israel is Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies, University of Edinburgh. Her research interests include translation and religion, literary translation, literary practice and languages in South Asia. She has authored several articles in translation and South Asia and her monograph is entitled Religious Transactions in Colonial South India: Language, Translation and the Making of Protestant Identity (2011). She has guest edited a special issueon ‘Religion and Translation’ (2019) for the journal Religion (with Matthias Frenz) and a special section on Indian traditions of life writing on religious conversion (2018) for the journal South Asia (with John Zavos). She is series editor of the newly launched book series, Routledge Critical Studies in Religion and Translation.

Matthias Frenz

Matthias Frenz is an independent researcher with a strong interest in cultural encounters between Europe and South Asia. He particularly focuses on religious practice, literature and language. For his master's degree he studied Tamil, Hindi, Sanskrit and anthropology at the Universities of Heidelberg and Pondicherry. After receiving a doctorate in religious studies, he continued with his research; he published the book “Gottes-Mutter-Göttin” (2004) and over a dozen articles while working in academic management. He was the German language, literature and archival consultant to the project “Conversion, Translation, and the Language of Autobiography” conducted at the University of Edinburgh, advising on German Lutheran print and manuscripts relating to South India. He is currently the head of protocol of the City of Stuttgart.