In the last section of my article, “Betraying Empire”, I raised the question of seeking alternatives to the long tradition of logocentric translation that has accompanied the expansion of the West. I stressed the importance of seeking sites where, like empire itself, translation fails to yield to the commands for meaning. Instead, it turns against the intentions of those who seek to control it for imperial purposes. The five responses take up this call and provide a series of extraordinarily insightful rejoinders to my article. They draw attention to both the differences and the affiliations between their work and mine. In doing so, they broaden the historical and geographical scope for understanding the workings of imperial translation while alerting us to the highly contingent meanings of “empire”. They also demonstrate the volatile effects of translative acts in various historical contexts. They do so by drawing from specific examples and places both within and outside of the “West” to show how language and politics are conjoined to produce relations of power that are always shifting and unstable.
Tarek Shamma and Harish Trivedi point out the obvious limits of my article: the fact that it discusses translation practices only in the so-called modern Western empires, which is a blip in world historical terms when set alongside the extensive empires of Asia and the Middle East. Comparatively speaking, the non-Western empires of the Abassids and other Islamic caliphates (including the Ottomans) as well as those of India and China saw the importance of translation for understanding and governing those under them. But just as their imperial projects did not entail the subordination or elimination of entire peoples, but rather the cultivation of their allegiance, translation played different roles. As Shamma points out, an “Arabic universalism” emerged whereby philosophy, science and ethics came to be apprehended in that language among the diversity of Islamicized peoples. At the same time, Islamic humanism emerged precisely through the process of translating aspects of Islam into local languages and cultural practices. Rather than conquest, there was much accommodation and exchange. The authority of Arabic and Islam were always contingent on their local siting.
This localization of universalizing knowledge by way of translation is also the process that Harish Trivedi describes in his response. Focusing especially on Chinese pilgrims’ efforts to translate Buddhist texts, and the spread of Sanskritic knowledge to Southeast Asia, Trivedi reminds us that “trans-Asian” imperial formations varied widely. In most cases they were generated from the periphery, rather than enforced from a metropolitan center. Chinese pilgrims trekked to and from India to acquire and then translate manuscripts as acts of devotion. Local rulers welcomed the coming of Hindu-Buddhist knowledge in Southeast Asia precisely for the sociopolitical and economic advantages it would give them. The translation of this knowledge, similarly, was carried out by local scribes under the patronage of rulers who began to style themselves as Hindu-Buddhist kings. Similarly, they sought to replicate the sacred sites of India in their own realms, translating the natural landscape into mimetic equivalents of mystical and power-laden realms in Sanskrit texts. In these contexts, translation as the literal localization of the original leads to conversion, but not necessarily to conquest. Both Shamma and Trivedi thus remind us of this crucial point: that in this pre-capitalist “pan-Asian” context, translation works to de-couple conversion from conquest rather than, as with the West, to enforce their connection.
That translation is the handmaiden of power is something well known in postcolonial circles. It's not surprising, then, that Luise von Flotow is not surprised, pointing out that my contentions are no big news. This gives me great relief – no need to reinvent the wheel, then. But outside of postcolonial circles, especially among the day-to-day practices of interpreters in various contexts, such news has yet to make a real impact. With von Flotow's and the other two responses by Antonia Carcelén-Estrada and Patricia Palmer, we are back to the history of West. The logocentrism that resides within imperial translation is never settled, as von Flotow deftly points out. The intentions behind translation can always be waylaid to produce unintended effects. Her examples include the gay and feminist uses of language that rely on wordplay and satire. These also include playful “riffs on the sounds of the source text … allowing [for] the expression [of] the as yet unwritten”. In this way, we can see how the “multifarious nature of translated linguistic productions percolat[e] below the surfaces of visible empire”.
It is the unsaid as well as the barely said, or said otherwise, that Antonia Carcelén-Estrada's response foregrounds. In the context of the Quechua response to the Spanish command to translate, she draws our attention to the “somber and (un)signified noise” that produces a recurring “crisis of meaning”. The cry of the unsignified, resounding on the borderlands, is that which ambushes the coherence of colonial authority. Her three examples – the apologetics of Garcilaso Inca de la Vega, the graphic and textual dissimulations of Guamán Poma de Ayala, and the quiet, gestural testimony of a contemporary Aymara woman, Reyna Maraz, in her murder trial in 2009 and sentencing in 2014 – point to the “unsayable” or what we might think of as the untranslatable element in all translative acts. This is not to say that the untranslatable is beyond reach and outside of communication. Rather, there is something about the original that remains other, resisting the reductive violence of imperial translation. It is thus held back, put in reserve as a resource for producing other kinds of translation practices – what Carcelén-Estrada sums up as the “unrecognized noise” that is unable to get across languages, yet insists upon being heard.
In Patricia Palmer's contribution, we come face to face, or ear to ear, with this “unrecognized noise” – the very sounds of resistance in the long history of Irish responses to English imperialism. The English conquest of Ireland was no less than the “translation of a hibernophone country into an anglophone one”. Palmer quotes a poignant passage from nationalist Thomas Davis who says that wars, famine and dispossession left the Irish “adrift among the accidents of translation”. The Spanish sought to co-opt and conserve native vernaculars in order to deploy them in the conversion of their native speakers. By contrast, English planters wanted nothing less than the destruction of Gaelic, just as across the Atlantic and the Pacific they would seek to destroy native peoples. For the English, to “Anglicanize” was also to “anglicize”, forcing the Irish to speak the colonizer's tongue. We are now quite a distance from the sort of Arabic universalism, Islamic humanism and Southeast Asian mimetic and localizing practices we saw in Shamma's and Trivedi's articles. As Palmer points out, translation was nothing less than an act of war, as the English used the English language as an instrument of conquest. But as one might expect, such linguistic violence invariably called forth “discreet acts of resistance” on the part of Irish interpreters who became known for their “readiness to spike their masters’ messages”. Palmer's examples include Thomas Shelton's translation of that most un-logocentric of novels, Don Quixote, and Richard Stanihurst's syntactically subversive rendering of Virgil. From Beckett to Joyce, much of Irish literature is steeped in a sort of anti-colonial linguistic experimentation, translating within English while displacing its imperial hold.
Taken together, these responses show how the relationship between translation and empire is always fraught and never secure. From a world historical perspective, translation can, as Shamma and Trivedi have argued, expose the difference between conversion and conquest and so provide a necessary corrective to Western assertions of their inevitable convergence. Von Flotow, Carcelén-Estrada and Palmer chart the varied ways by which translative acts can bring forth new social formations resistant to colonial rule. Translators in these cases play a highly ambivalent, often subversive, role in bringing across, but also stranding and overturning imperial meanings. Indeed, working with the examples they provide, we can see how translation is nothing less than a kind of war. It pits languages and their users against one another. It entails not only the exchange of meaning, but also tactics of evasion and confrontation, deflecting intentions and loosening the grip of epistemic authority. In doing so, translation lets loose the play of words beyond imperial control, underwriting the emergence of other expressive possibilities.
These five responses thus demonstrate how a comparative approach to translation practices can be used to provincialize overarching claims over the right to rule meaning. In so doing, they allow the “unsaid” and “unsayable” to break through and address us once again in “multifarious” forms. Thanks to the articles by Shamma, Trivedi, von Flotow, Carcelén-Estrada and Palmer, we can begin to see and hear the many ways that translation, in all its aporetic power, truly betrays – in all senses of that word – the logocentric pull of empire.
Note on contributor
Vicente L. Rafael is a professor at the University of Washington. He has written several works on the politics of translation in the Spanish and US-occupied Philippines as well as on the uses of translation in the US “war on terror”. His latest book, Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language Amid Wars of Translation, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.