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Bakthin and Translatios PDF
Bakthin and Translatios PDF
Translation Studies
Bakhtin and
Translation Studies:
Theoretical Extensions
and Connotations
By
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Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix
INTRODUCTION:
WHY BAKHTIN?
This natural underestimation of its values has had the bad practical effect
of lowering the standard demanded and in some periods has almost
destroyed the art altogether. The corresponding misunderstanding of its
character has added to its degradation; neither its importance nor its
difficulty has been grasped. (in Bassnett 1980, 2)
Drawing from his experience of translating the Bible, Nida argues that a
perfect communication is not possible during translation. Nevertheless, a
closer approximation can be obtained if the translator is sensitive to the
latent structures of the languages.
When one analyzes an individual sentence apart from its context, the
traces of addressivity and the influence of the anticipated response,
dialogical echoes from others’ preceding utterances, faint traces of
Introduction: Why Bakhtin? 5
changes of speech subjects that have furrowed the utterance from within—
all these are lost, erased, because they are all foreign to the sentence as a
unit of language. (1994, 99)
Toury’s approach is significant for the shift in focus from the source-
culture to the target-culture it brought about. The emphasis on linguistic
features is now replaced by an emphasis on socio-cultural norms.
However, Toury’s conceptualisation suffers from certain drawbacks.
While it is acceptable that a translator should have a clear comprehension
of the norms that prevail in the target community, the question that arises
concerns the nature of such norms. Is it possible to determine a set of
norms as representing a particular community? Norms are never static—
when this is the case, how does translation take place across different
historical periods? Can we have a “translation policy,” as Toury assumes?
No raw data from the past have absolute intrinsic authority. Their meaning
is relational to the present and that relation is realized linguistically.
Memory is articulated as a function of the past tense of the verb (1975,
132).
The title can be read in various ways. Des means “some,” but it also means
“of the,” “from the,” or “about the.” Tours could be towers, twists, tricks,
tours, or tropes, as in a “turn” of phrase. Taken together des and tours have
the same sound as detour, the word for detour. To mark that economy in
language the title has not been changed. (1985, 206)
A translation would not seek to say this or that, to transport this or that
content, to communicate such a charge of meaning, but to remark the
affinity among languages, to exhibit its own possibility … In a mode that
is solely anticipatory, annunciatory, almost prophetic, translation renders
present an affinity that is never present in this presentation. (1985b, 186)
The above investigations elucidate certain key issues. The five approaches
considered here—traditional, formalist, structuralist (or objectivist), target-
oriented, and deconstructionist—have been among the most influential
theories that have illuminated the subtle nuances of translation. Though we
need to be cautious about constructing canons for translation theories, it is
difficult to undermine the profound impact these approaches have exerted.
As an exhaustive survey is not the purpose of the current study, the focus
here is on discussing what could be called the “major currents” in
translation theories. The central idea is to show the drawbacks and
constraints of these theories that necessitate the emergence of a new
perspective that would expand the present knowledge and account for
certain limitations of the previous approaches.
Let us now shift the focus towards an interpretation of the term “culture,”
which has attracted many interpretations in the field of literary criticism
and theory. The semantic multi-layeredness of the term makes it one of the
most difficult to define and interpret.4 To trace the trajectory of the term is
10 Chapter One
Though the term “culture” has been used to denote certain meanings, like
“a way of life,” “civilization,” “customs,” “refinement,” “sophistication,”
and “cultivation,” it was Matthew Arnold, in his Culture and Anarchy
(1882), who used the term in a critical sense for the first time. For Arnold,
culture refers to the whole set of ideas that elevate an individual from the
drawbacks of societal prejudices and allow the perfection of their being to
flourish. In what he terms “sweetness and light,” Arnold observes the true
strength and spirit of culture (1993, 12–35). Sweetness and light also
become vehicles for Arnold that carry a particular culture’s essence and
spirit to other cultures. In this sense, cultural encounters help to spread this
sweetness and light and illuminate each other’s dark corners. Interestingly,
Arnold prioritised culture over religion; religion, for Arnold, was merely a
supplement to the set of values that culture demonstrates.
we become more and more aware of the extent to which the baffling
problem of “culture” underlies the problems of the relation of every part of
the world to every other. When we concern ourselves with the relation of
the great nations to each other; the relation of the great to the small
nations; the relation of intermixed “communities,” as in India, to each
other; the relation of the parent nation to those originated as colonies; the
relation of the colonist to the native; the relation between people of such
areas as the West Indies, where compulsions and economic inducement
has brought together large numbers of different races: behind all these
perplexing questions, involving decisions to be made by many men every
day, there is the question of what culture is, and the question whether it is
anything that we can control or deliberately influence. (1962, 27)
Eliot’s observations throw light on the interaction of cultures that are not
similar to each other in any respect. The unevenness and the disorderliness
among cultures call for an interrogation of the factors responsible for their
Introduction: Why Bakhtin? 11
not result in merging and mixing. Each retains its own unity and open
totality, but they are mutually enriched” (1994b, 7). For Bakhtin, when
two cultures encounter each other they give rise to many questions that are
possible only in dialogic encounters. Such questions about their identities
would not arise had the two cultures not interacted. Cultures reveal
themselves completely only when they encounter each other. Dialogic
encounters help cultures to overcome their own “closedness” and “one-
sidedness.” They develop a creative understanding of each other and a
potential to know the other of their self. There is no unitary merging in
such an encounter, but there is a dialogical dispersion of their cultural
ingredients and mutual enhancement of their cultural subtleties.
Bakhtin’s ideas, which appear in his scattered writings from the 1920s
until his death in 1975, are elusive and abstruse. As Michael Holquist
writes in his “Dedication” in The Dialogic Imagination: “There is nothing
more fragile than the word, and Bakhtin’s was almost lost” (1994a, xi).
Bakhtin’s oeuvre demonstrates the absence of a systematic philosophy; it
lacks coherence and organisation. As he stays away from a “general
system” that exhibits a “closure,” his philosophy is anti-structuralist. For
Bakhtin, there is no “kernel” or “deep structure,” only unfinalizable
utterances with a “chain of meanings” that populate the world. At the same
time, it could be observed that throughout his writings there are many
14 Chapter One
In the third sense, the term “dialogue” is used by Bakhtin to refer to the
“unfinalizability” and “open-endedness” of the world. It is used to refer to
a pluralistic sense of truth that arises from an understanding of the world
as a non-monologic entity. On a philosophical plane, it is a consciousness
of the other, and through the other a consciousness of oneself. It is a
special interaction that interweaves relationships on the basis of mutual
reciprocation. In Bakhtin’s words:
Introduction: Why Bakhtin? 15
I cannot do without the other; I cannot become myself without the other; I
must find myself in the other, finding the other in me (in mutual reflection
and perception). Justification cannot be justification of oneself, confession
cannot be confession of oneself. I receive my name from the other, and
this name exists for the other (to name oneself is to engage in usurpation).
Self-love is equally impossible. (1984, 311)
Stated at the highest level of (quite hair-raising) abstraction, what can only
uneasily be called “Bakhtin’s philosophy” is a pragmatically oriented
theory of knowledge; more particularly, it is one of several modern
epistemologies that seek to grasp human behavior through the use humans
make of language. (1990, 15)
The task before the translator is to bridge the gap between the two
cultures/languages and make a meaningful dialogue possible. S/he is
troubled by certain inevitable questions: How does s/he translate without
mechanically imitating the source-text? What theoretical postulates help in
communicating the semantic density and stylistic modulations of the
source-text? How does s/he address the problems of generic specificities,
cultural markers, ideological dimensions, authorial intentions, and
linguistic diversity? The translator should have a theoretical framework
that would help her/him resolve these difficulties. S/he has to strike a
balance between interpreting, abstracting, communicating, and explaining
the subtleties of the source-language/culture to the target readers. In
George Steiner’s words:
Another concern of the present study is the focus on the notion of “cultural
encounter.” Culture exists in an interconnected network of cultures,
contesting and acclimatising itself to the changing sequence of events. As
Edward Said writes, “all cultures are involved in one another: none is
single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated,
and unmonolithic” (1993, xxix). Interactions, interdependence, and
disagreements arise when two or more cultures enter a contact zone, and
evoke a variety of interpretations.12 A hybridisation of values and practices
takes place in such cultural encounters that destabilise any institutionalisation
of discourses. A cultural encounter is a dialogic venture, characterised by
agreements and affiliations, and disagreements and disjunctions. It is a
unique and “unfinalizable” condition (in the Bakhtinian sense) that gives
rise to cross-cultural dialogues. An enquiry of cultural encounters from a
Bakhtinian viewpoint with examples from Indian literatures and cultural
situations will be the second major aim of the current study.
The focus of the present study is not merely on a conceptual analysis, but
also on an intermingling of theory and practice of translation, cultural
encounters and dialogism. The overall framework is Bakhtinian; that is, it
is a dialogic approach, and the main aim is to examine a Western
theoretical formulation through examples from the Indian literatures and
cultural situation. Dialogue as the basis for human interaction, and thereby
the basis for human existence, is a cogent argument relevant in every
cultural condition. The study in itself is an encounter between the West
and the East, and therefore dialogic from within.
For Bakhtin, the self attains an identity and self-sufficiency due to its
encounter with the other. Also, this identity is never complete but always
in the process of creation. The intersubjectivity of the self is directly
dependent on the categories of time and space in which the dialogic
interaction occurs; that is, the perception of the reality outside always
occurs in unique moments of time/space. Translation occurs in particular
time and space categories and hence is the product of a unique moment.
Translation, in this sense, is always a process engaged in the task of
making something new out of the numerous dialogues already available.
The translator creates relations and sustains them to accomplish
translation. Her/his self is the result of a “co-being”; it exists due to its
sharedness.15 Therefore, translation becomes the product of a selfhood that
bases itself on sharedness, making it a dialogic activity.
Since the study of cultural encounters forms a part of the larger rubric
called “cultural studies,” the problematisations that cultural encounters
present have mostly been examined from a perspective that emphasises the
interplay of the power struggle in cultures. Political implications have
been foregrounded and the vested interests that govern the
institutionalisation of cultural practices have been highlighted. In their
essay “Cultural Studies: An Introduction,” Cary Nelson, Paula A.
Treichler, and Lawrence Grossberg write:
In cultural studies, the politics of the analysis and the politics of the
intellectual work are inseparable. Analysis depends on intellectual work;
for cultural studies, theory is a crucial part of that work. Yet intellectual