Beyond the Nation
Looking to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the essays in this section examine the role of translation in an increasingly interwoven, globalizing world. Here, translations become exemplary “traveling texts,” capable of highlighting the complex interactions between still vital nationalisms on the one hand, and growing local and international cultures on the other. Four of these essays explore colonial and postcolonial issues in texts from francophone Africa, India, South Africa, and Latin America, while the fifth and final essay takes its literary example from the war-torn Balkans. As each “thick description” suggests, though in very different ways, translations today demand an educated reader to evaluate their aesthetic and political implications.
Françoise Lionnet’s opening essay, “Translating Grief,” foregrounds “the ambiguous powers of language and education in the postcolonial world.” Her reading of Maryse Condé’s novel Heremakhonon, and her comparison of it with Teresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée, work through a theoretically rich paradox in translation. For if the terms “grief” and the etymologically related “grievance” evoke different reactions to loss, their linguistic and psychological connections make them important to consider together: “what might it mean to grieve in the face of losses that are so easy to attribute to another’s perceived failures,” as Veronica in Condé’s novel does? And what might it mean, asks the Korean American narrator of Dictée, to suffer loss and to grieve, as a colonial subject for whom there can never be just one nation? Lionnet astutely reminds us that these are questions to consider not only as we read these particularly eloquent texts, but also as we look to the binary oppositions and conflicts that confront us as educators and readers in our contemporary, post–9/11 world.
Gauri Viswanathan takes her texts from an earlier, and equally poignant, historical moment, when an anticolonial nationalism clashed with internationalism in post–World War I India and Ireland. What, she asks, were the motives of cultural and literary translators such as James Cousins, “the Irish poet in India,” and the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, who advocated internationalism at this troubled time? “Were they simply continuing colonial rule in a different form? Or were they crafting a worldview that sought an ideal meeting point as much between philosophy and politics as between a narrow, provincial nationalism and rank colonialism?” Through her historically and politically informed analysis of Cousins’s failed attempt to construct a spiritual internationalism (an attempt that stumbled on its racialized foundations), Viswanathan deftly reveals the “acute difficulties [he] faced in developing an aesthetics that could accommodate politics without being subordinated to it.” Perhaps, she suggests, such difficulty helps explain why today’s internationalism is measured in economic rather than spiritual terms.
A keen awareness of the ongoing shuttle between local and global, national and transnational also characterizes Vilashini Cooppan’s engagement with the very different writing of the new South Africa. Tracing language, theme, and political issues in J. M. Coetzee’s 1986 Foe, Achmat Dangor’s 1997 Kafka’s Curse, and Coetzee’s 1998 Disgrace, she notes, “to write South Africa in the texts considered here, it also becomes necessary to write the world.” Not that such a feat of literary and cultural/political metamorphosis is easily performed or always recognized. But the clear resistance of these texts to unitary structures in time and space contributes to a new sense of national identity, “ ‘something struggling to be born,’ that might be the transnational nation.” As Cooppan shrewdly leads the reader into the nation by traversing it, she reminds us that comparative literature and postcolonial studies do their best work when they “choose to trouble that particular trajectory that places nation first and globe after.”
Yet the international critical contexts into which texts are now translated and received can certainly cause problems. Sylvia Molloy notes, for instance, the tendency in the United States to use terms such as “postcoloniality,” and “magic realism” as shorthand for Latin American literature as a whole, homogenizing whole ranges of texts while eliminating others that do not fit these preconceived categories. “This is a postcolonialism that, formulated ‘over here’ (by this I mean the U.S. academy), signifies one thing, while ‘over there’ (in Latin America, itself a site of multiple enunciations), it signifies something quite different; or, better said, signifies many different things.” Similarly, magic realism is “a mode among many other modes of literary figuration in Latin America.” If “postcolonial studies should afford a way of teasing apart differences instead of erasing them,” Molloy also persuasively argues for a truly transnational discussion engaging scholars from the United States with scholars from specific Latin American settings, and for greater awareness of local modes of production, theorization, and reception. Though there may be no quick fix, Molloy calls attention to these important issues “in the hopes of generating a more thoughtful debate on Latin America from within the U.S. academy.”
Focusing on Milorad Pavic’s 1984 Dictionary of the Khazars, David Damrosch also grapples with troubling contrasts in local and global readings. Pavic’s widely acclaimed novel takes translation as its explicit theme. But its own literary border-crossing highlights its political—and ethical—complexity. Though the novel is commonly read in translation as a “tour de force” of postmodern “world literature,” Damrosch reminds us that it is interpreted locally as a fierce defense of Serbian nationalism. Indeed, “what the double life of Dictionary of the Khazars demonstrates is the major difference between a work’s life in a national context as opposed to a global context.” Damrosch suggests that we take Pavic’s nationalist agenda seriously, and “confront the ethical choices that the novel is pressing us to make.” But it is up to the reader to decide what use to make of such contextual understanding. Perhaps the best strategy is to cultivate a “detached engagement,” aware of the local and the global contexts in which this, and any work of “world literature,” must be read. In this brilliant encounter of texts and contexts, originals and translations, the reader becomes an educated site of freedom and ethical responsibility, where local and global meet and can sometimes decide to settle their differences.