Tejaswini Niranjana, retranslation, and the problem of foreignism

Abstract

The article examines the "positive" or "utopian" response to the postcolonial condition developed by Tejaswini Niranjana in Siting Translation: her attempt to harness translation in the service of decolonilization. It traces a postcolonial myth moving from precoloniality through the recent colonial past and current postcoloniality to an imagined future state of decolonization in order to contrast nationalist versions of that myth, with their emphasis on the purity of the precolonial and decolonized states, to postcolonialist versions, which insist that all four states are mixed. Niranjana draws on Walter Benjamin’s "The Task of the Translator" in order to explore the ways in which translating, like rereading/rewriting history, involves a "citing" or "quoting" of words from one context to another, allowing translation to be used by colonizers for purposes of colonial subjugation but also by postcolonial subjects for purposes of decolonization. Finally, the article contrasts Niranjana’s Benjaminian sense of literalism as the best decolonizing translational mode with the variety of approaches explored by Vicente Rafael in Contracting Colonialism