In The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation from The Tempest to Tarzan, Eric Cheyfitz (1991) covers roughly the same historical ground as Frederick Rener, and with very much the same concern for the intertwined history of rhetoric and grammar—but with a politicized deconstructive twist that explodes past even Rita Copeland’s important methodological innovations. For example, both Rener and Cheyfitz deal at length with the Quintilianic tradition of rhetoric as ornamentation, but with radically different emphases. Rener is enamored of the traditional conception of rhetorical ornamentation as “extra,” as a secondary prettification that serves merely to make the bare truth more palatable. He does try at several points to insert a critical reminder that rhetoric is also persuasion (1989, 218, 257), but largely fails: he quickly moves from brief mentions of persuasion to references to enhancing the message, guaranteeing clarity and the reader’s comprehension, and the like. Cheyfitz sees rhetoric not only as persuasion but as always politically motivated, always an attempt to conquer, and quite rightly reads ornamentation as part of the same process: “within the classical and Renaissance tradition of rhetoric, ‘ornament’ does not suggest the superfluous or the exterior; rather, derived from the Latin verb orno, which means both ‘to provide with necessaries’ and ‘to embellish,’ it articulates that place where the interior and the exterior, the necessary and the contingent are inseparable” (1991, 93). Rhetorical ornamentation is, as Rener also notes, the clothing words wear (1991, 24–26); as Cheyfitz makes clear, however, in the history of Western rhetoric this clothing is defined in opposition to the clothing that “savages” do not wear. Writing for Charlemagne, for example, Alcuin in his Rhetoric describes an evolutionary process by which the “mute savage”—mute and savage because he does not speak eloquently, because he is a foreigner or a member of the European lower classes—is gradually “translated” or educated upwards by learning first “proper” speech, then eloquence; and he figures this progression eloquently (metaphorically) as one from naked savagery through utilitarian clothing to “the pinnacle of clothing as a sumptuous sign of social rank” (Cheyfitz, 120).
Cheyfitz is interested in translation as empire, as a cultural-political channel of imperialism—specifically of the European colonization of the New World in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He approaches translation studies from the “outside”—or what will appear to be the outside to those who take translation studies to be a branch of linguistics or comparative literary criticism concerned with structures of equivalence. His work is closer to the ethnographic or anthropological strain of translation studies, “in” the tradition, say, of Quine’s chapter on translation in Word and Object (1960), a rich lineage most often uneasily ignored by mainstream translation theorists—a lineage for which the primal scene is not the translator before the written text but the European anthropologist before an indigenous culture thematized as “primitive.” I say only “in” the tradition (and “outside” the mainstream) because Cheyfitz comes to ethnographic translation theory from recent poststructuralist subaltern studies that radically challenge the hegemonic assumptions of the ethnographer in the “primitive” culture, especially the assumption that the ethnographer is a politically disinterested scientist dedicated purely to the objective study of cultures. Cheyfitz is at pains to show how intimate translation (as the quintessential ethnographic act) has been with empire: how colonizers have employed ethnographic translation as a channel of domination.5
To be sure, Cheyfitz is less concerned with the ethnographic scene than someone like Tejaswini Niranjana, in her book Siting Translation— another important poststructuralist/postcolonial study of translation from this same period (1992) that I will not deal with here. Cheyfitz’s colleagues in English departments will see his book as far more concerned with political and cultural history than with literature; but next to Niranjana’s book, The Poetics of Imperialism is very much poetically, literarily inclined. Cheyfitz covers an immense amount of ground in a relatively short space, mainly by weaving his way through texts by and about Native Americans beginning with Montaigne “On Cannibals” and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and by and about people of African descent from Frederick Douglass’s autobiography through the Tarzan books to Frantz Fanon. Also woven into the fabric are rhetorics from Cicero to George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589) and various pertinent government documents.
Undeniably, Cheyfitz’s nomadic intertextual argumentation makes the book difficult to read; but I take it that the difficulty is deliberate, and instructive. Part of his point is that Western discourse colonizes precisely by imposing its own preconceived patterns on the other, by enclosing “places” (the “topics” of an argument) as “property” (or the “proper” way to make a case), and he clearly wants to avoid doing that in his own argumentation. Given the European derogation of “savages” as “scattered” and “wandering aimlessly,” he seems to be interested in transvaluing that wandering by imitating it in his path through his materials.
The contrast with Rener’s book, of course, couldn’t be clearer: where Rener locks his argument into a static hierarchical system marked with mathematical notation (2.2.1., 2.2.1.1., 2.2.1.2., etc.), Cheyfitz drifts nomadically through the large and vaguely marked off “places” indicated by his chapter titles: “Tarzan of the Apes: U.S. Foreign Policy in the Twentieth Century,” “The Foreign Policy of Metaphor,” “Translating Property,” “Translation, Transportation, Usurpation,” “The Frontier of Decorum,” “The Empire of Poetics,” and “Eloquent Cannibals.” In another sense, of course, Rener and Cheyfitz are doing the same thing: imitating in their discursive structure the socio-ideological configurations they idealize, Rener the classical “legal system” governing the eloquent use of language, Cheyfitz the colonized Native Americans.6
This is an oversimplification, of course—that Cheyfitz idealizes the colonized Native Americans. In his introduction he specifically disclaims any such intentions: “In line with this politics, I have not tried to understand Native Americans or blacks in this book. I do not believe in philanthropy, which presumes an understanding of the position of the other, but in social justice, which presumes nothing, but grounds itself in the politics of imagining kinship across the frontiers of race, gender, and class” (xiv). But of course it is impossible to presume nothing, least of all within such a heavily laden ideological construct as “social justice,” and Cheyfitz does seek to understand and place himself within the position of the other throughout the book: he contrasts “tributary and capitalist modes of production” with “the kin-ordered mode,” which he says is “relatively nonhierarchical, or egalitarian, and decentralized,” with “relatively ‘open and shifting boundaries’” (53–54). The implicit “understanding of the position of the other” here is of course that Europeans are bad and Native Americans good, a hierarchical reversal of the standard European position.
In Cheyfitz’s defense let me say that he is (usually) aware that he is doing this: that “lacking any direct knowledge of Native American languages I am forced in my description of kinship economies to use the process of translation that I am criticizing” (43). This is, in fact, the methodological abyss across which Cheyfitz has to stretch himself: in order to talk about translation as conquest, translation as empire, he has to have some sense of the “source-language text,” i.e., Native American cultures. As a white Westerner, however, that is what he can never have, precisely because Native American cultures have been silenced in and by translation; so he must rely on translations, must translate the colonized translata of Western imperialism as untranslated source-language texts. There is no moment at which he is methodologically “before translation”—and yet that is the moment he must inhabit in order to make his claims stick.
Partly, inevitably, he tries to inhabit it through repression: by simply “forgetting” his promise not to indulge in philanthropic idealizations of the other or “nostalgia for a mythic past of common land” (44). More important, he tries to make his case by sliding back and forth across the translational abyss, by working “in translation between cultures and between groups within our own culture” (xvi). Cheyfitz might be imagined, in fact, as sliding his way down a slope traversed by Western dualisms. At the top would be the dualism between a more conventional conception of translation—say, Rener’s—and his own: between translation as a technical problem governed by formal conventions (which he identifies as a repressive colonial mystification of power) and translation as a political problem that mires us in the inequities of cultural contact.
Once he has begun to break the repressive stranglehold colonial discourse has placed on the politics of translation, then, he faces another and more paralyzing dualism between self and other, European and Native American, civilized and savage, enclosed and scattered, domestic and foreign, normal and deviant, proper and metaphoric, written and oral, capitalist and kin-ordered. Here Cheyfitz slides between complicitous ([hypo] critical) negations of the first term and condescending (philanthropic) affirmations of the second term until he surrenders the desire to resolve the dualism and swears off any attempt to understand the position of the other, proposing instead to examine Western images (translations) of the other. Now he finds himself faced by positive and negative images, nostalgic and assimilative translations, voicings that articulate and voicings that silence, and slides between them by seeing both terms as interchangeable: all voicings of the other silence the other, but all silencings or repressions of the other’s voice contain negated (and therefore salvageable) traces of articulation.
This is the impasse to which Cheyfitz’s negative or ideological hermeneutic brings him,7 and Cheyfitz does not explicitly seek to escape it. But I sense in his book yet another sliding between binary poles that does begin, however unconsciously, to pose a positive or utopian hermeneutic: that between translation and nontranslation, between the appropriative attempt to articulate, to convey, to communicate something about the other, “to bring something home,” in George Steiner’s phrase (1975, 298), and the older, more mystical willingness to immerse oneself in a foreign culture without colonizing it, to stop translating and start listening, to open yourself up to the “mysteries” of an alien culture (immerse yourself in the Cibecue culture, as Keith Basso did) without necessarily trying to render what you learn into English, the tainted language of the colonizers. Cheyfitz, a white male American academic paid to articulate, feels himself haplessly pulled toward translation (and who among us doesn’t?), and thus, once he has demystified its politics, toward the invasive politics of empire; and his feeling of helplessness, his sense that he can do nothing but articulate just how trapped he feels, drives his negative hermeneutic. His positive hermeneutic would be to follow Gauguin to Tahiti or the Marquesas—or perhaps, since those island paradises have now been colonized for and by tourism, some other noplace or utopia still “untouched” by Western imperialism—and not come back, indeed not even write back: to assimilate himself into a non-Western culture with no design ever to “translate” it. For the Western academic, this prospect is almost too tempting and too terrifying even to ponder, and Cheyfitz will not allow himself to raise the possibility in his book; but it seems to me the inevitable terminus of his argument.