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The other premise, implicit in the title (' Necessary and Impossible? Culture as Translation'), was that translation and culture are not distinct entities but one and the same, therefore the injunction of culture as translation. The premise of Spivak’s measured monologue was that translations are both necessary and impossible – while this may appear contradictory, to Spivak this is a conceivable fact of literature. To have Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the greatest literary theorists in the world, reflect on the art of translation is a delightful privilege, and this week, Delhi had it. It is therefore too well-known, particularly to colonial subjects, that translation is a political act.
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It is said that in India there have been two, not one, epochal projects of translation, both legitimised by rulers – the first by the Mughal rulers who commissioned translations of religious scripture like the Ramayana, Mahabharata, even the Panchatantra into Persian, and the second by colonial rulers who read the ‘classical’ too seriously and endeavoured to translate the Vedic corpus and the shastric literature into English for the establishment of Britannic rule.
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Few matters as trivial have a history as chequered as the project of translation.
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