week 9

An Author Clariced to Know: the case of Hélène Cixous and Clarice Lispector

Hélène Cixous, chiefly regarded as a “pioneer of the reflection on sexual difference, author of powerful critical essays, and prolific writer of poetic fiction” (Fort 1997: 425), is one of the most significant names of the academic world. Cixous’s dramatic, literary and scholarly works –particularly the ones between 1990 and 2000– have either taken the colonized countries, such as Cambodia and India (e.g. The Terrible But Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia and Manna, for the Mandelstams for the Mandelas), or the Japanese and Chinese theatre traditions (i.e. Drums on the Dike) as a focal point. Seen from this perspective, Hélène Cixous can be considered as one of the most prominent scholars of the West who has brought the issues, traditions, and socio-cultural elements of the “unknown” to the notice of the (Western) world. Yet, Cixous was concerned with the “foreign” long before the 1990s. For instance, in the 1970s, the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector had been a source of inspiration for Cixous in terms of developing her own way of writing and thinking (Arrojo 1999: 144). Various scholarly projects undertaken by Hélène Cixous have been quite influential during the “canonization” of Clarice Lispector in the Western world.

When this brief glance at Hélène Cixous and her “relationship” with Clarice Lispector is taken into consideration within postcolonial context, the abovementioned broad introduction becomes merely the tip of an iceberg: Hélène Cixous, being the agent of the dominant culture and Clarice Lispector, being the “treasure” of the distant lands become the personas of a dramatic performance in which the notions of fidelity, love and emotions are seriously questioned. Taking this argument as a point of commencement, Rosemary Arrojo, discusses Hélène Cixous’s “textual affair” with Clarice Lispector from the perspective of postcolonial theories in her article entitled, “Interpretation as Possessive Love: Hélène Cixous, Clarice Lispector and the Ambivalence of Fidelity”.

By taking Jacques Lacan’s notion of “the subject presumed to know” –the person in whom one deems knowledge to exist, acquires the love of that individual– as a basis for her discussion, Arrojo offers a comprehensive analysis of Cixous’s approach to Lispector. According to Arrojo, in the (post)colonial situation, “the subaltern culture desires the knowledge which supposedly belongs to the dominant, the latter never doubts the legitimacy of its status as the owner and guardian of such knowledge. [C]onsequently, from such a perspective, the tragedy of the subaltern is precisely the blindness with which it devotes itself to this transferential love that only serves the interests of the dominant and feeds the illusion of ‘the subject presumed to know’, as it also legitimates the latter’s power to decide what is proper and what is not, what is desirable and what is not” (ibid.: 143).

As far as postcolonial translation theories are concerned, Hélène Cixous’s interpretation of Clarice Lispector –in a sense– suggests itself as a unique example. In the (post)colonial situation, “while choosing texts for rewriting, the dominant power appropriates only those texts that conform to the preexisting [sic] discursive parameters of its linguistic networks” (Sengupta 1995: 159). In the case of Cixous and Lispector, instead of a direct linguistic transfer, translation takes an obvious form of re-writing in the hands of authority and used in order to impose a certain attitude to a literary figure pertaining to a “foreign” culture (Arrojo 1999: 155, 159). Still, the case of Cixous and Lispector differs in one way from the general understanding of (post)colonial situation with respect to translation: whereas Lispector was “compatible” with Cixous’s way of thinking, therefore was conformed and even used as an aesthetic value by the French scholar’s in terms of developing her productivity, translation –precisely speaking, the translations of Lispector’s works– were strictly rejected by Hélène Cixous with the purpose of having the knowledge that she finds in Lispector merely for herself: The French scholar establishes a so-called “dialectical” relationship with the Brazilian writer in which Lispector’s value as a renowned literary figure becomes dependent to the point that her works conform to Cixous’s way of thinking (cf. ibid.:150).

The emphasis on the very adjective dialectical becomes quite interesting when one thinks of Cixous’s and Lispector’s situations. The dialectical relationship which Cixous assumes to have established with Lispector, actually lacks the essence –a logical dialogue between two individuals– of such a rational connection. As Rosemary Arrojo puts it, “in this truly asymmetrical dialogue, while Cixous practically does all the ‘talking’, Lispector is inevitably forced not only to be saying ‘the same thing everywhere’, as Cixous explicitly declares in an essay on Água Viva, but also to agree unconditionally with her powerful reader” (ibid.:153). Furthermore, Cixous under the guise of adopting a feminist strategy in terms of transforming Clarice Lispector’s name into a noun, adjective and a verb, explicitly appropriates Lispector to her own texts (cf. ibid.: 155). In this sense, Cixous’s interpretation of Lispector takes the form of “colonization”; Cixous’s approach to Lispector regarding the transformation of her name stems from the situation of Lispector. Lispector, being the representative of a peripheral culture can become the subject of this appropriation but as far as the distinguished literary figures of the twentieth century writing, say, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, are concerned Cixous’s approach differs (ibid.: 156).

The case of Hélène Cixous and Clarice Lispector suggests itself as a representative example of the arguments proposed by André Lefevere in his Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (1992). Within the framework proposes by Lefevere, Cixous achieves the position of a “professional” who is responsible for the aesthetics of a given society. However, Cixous, instead of writing for a given society, is writing texts for women, marginalized, and oppressed societies and in this sense differs from the position which one might bestow upon her within the theoretical framework of Lefevere. During the course of Hélène Cixous’s re-writing of Clarice Lispector, the French scholar herself becomes “‘the subject presumed to know’, particularly for those [her proponents] who are blindly devoted to her texts and who have transformed her into the author (and the authority) that she is today within the broad area of cultural studies” (Arrojo 1999: 155). Seen from this perspective, one can is see how the case of Hélène Cixous and Clarice Lispector can be discussed in detail within a broader (post)colonial systemic framework in the light of the arguments developed by Rosemary Arrojo.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arrojo, Rosemary, “Interpretation as Possessive Love: Hélène Cixous, Clarice Lispector and the Ambivalence of Fidelity”, in Bassnett, Susan and Trivedi, Harish (eds.), Post-Colonial Translation, London-New York: Routledge, 1999, pp. 141-161

Fort, Bernadette, “Theater, History, Ethics: An Interview with Hélène Cixous on The Perjured City, or the Awakening of the Furies”, in New Literary History vol. 28.3, The University of Virginia Press, USA, 1997, pp. 425-456

Lefevere, André, Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame, London and New York: Routledge, 1992

Sengupta, Mahasweta, “Translation as Manipulation: The Power of Images and Images of Power”, in Dingwaney, Anuradha and Maier, Carol, (eds.) Between Languages and Cultures: Translation and Cross-Cultural Texts. Pittsburgh and London: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995, pp. 159-173

week 8

The Notion of Translatio Imperi et Studii in Postcolonial Approaches to the Study and Practice of Translation

Language –as far as the relationship between a colonized country and its colonizer is taken into consideration– can be one of the most effective tools of the dominant community during the course of imposing power and authority upon the former inhabitants, later subservient people of the remote lands. Such a process inevitably brings the translation act undertaken by various ascendant forces of the world history during their colonization of the “distant”, “exotic” and “foreign” territories to the notice of a researcher who is concerned with the socio-cultural and linguistic dynamics of (post)colonialism. Even though main focus of the most of the postcolonial approaches developed within the academic world is the situation of the “East” against the “West”, the origins of dominating the “Other” date back to the times of Cicero and Horace. The process of re-shaping the “Other” through the eyes of the dominant power, in fact, is a process which was carried out within the Western civilization by the Western people.

In his remarkable book entitled Translation and Empire (1997) in which he traces the roots of the postcolonial translation theories and offers the analyses of some of the most weighty writings (i.e. Tejaswini Niranjana’s Siting Translation, Eric Cheyfitz’s The Poetics of Imperialism, and Vicente L. Rafael’s Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Cınversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule) related to translation within the postcolonial context, Douglas Robinson emphasizes the significance of the notion of translatio studii et imperii in postcolonial (translation) theories. Prior to his discussion of translatio studii et imperii, or in Robinson’s words, “the ancient theory that both knowledge and imperial control of the world tend to move in a westerly direction” (1997: 124), the scholar argues for the significance of dragomans in the Ancient Egyptian civilization and Herodotus of the Ancient Greek culture in the history of translation history and moreover, considers them as the people involved seriously with translation before the times of Cicero and Horace. Such an argument, indeed verifies the description which Robinson gives for translatio studii et imperii (cf. ibid: 46-49).

According to Robinson, the times of Cicero and Horace, were actually the periods of the world history in which the first postcolonial project was undertaken (ibid: 52). After the conquest of the Attic Islands, Roman writers, scholars, and philosophers, were in the position of building up a literary tradition of their own and the heritage laid ahead of them was the literary and scholarly works of the Ancient Greek Culture; the theoretical works of Aristotle, the tragedies of Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides along with the comedies of Aristophanes have all served one way or another for the Roman scholars during the course of developing a literary and an aesthetic tradition of their own. The ultimate goal of this very first postcolonial project undertaken by the Romans, in the words of Robinson was “to appropriate Greek culture, literature, philosophy, law and so on for Rome, and to do so in such a way as to establish the originality of the Romans – to sever the ties of indebtedness to the ‘greats’ of once-imperial Greece” (ibid.). As a consequence of this postcolonial project, Romans have developed their tradition but the success of this project was debatable. The tragedies, for instance, which were one of the most powerful literary achievements of the Ancient Greek Culture have fallen from grace and were replaced by the comedies in the Roman tradition.

The tradition of acculturation, appropriation or even naturalization the “foreign” stemming from the notion of translatio studii et imperii continued throughout the ages and became one of the most effective ways of “empire” during the course of re-constituting the “Other”. In a manner evoking the Roman tradition, Christian church had to “deal” with the pre-Christian beliefs of the Greeks and Romans, therefore the literary works of the authors, such as Homer, Plato, Ovid or Virgil were re-written in a fourfold process, that is to say, on the literal level, on the moral level, on the allegorical level and on the analogical level through the usage of the figurative hermeneutics (cf. ibid: 53), and as a matter of fact, became one of the ultimate ways of spreading Christianity in history.

In addition to the notion of translatio studii et imperii, another important point worth mentioning is “taking the original captive” metaphor. The idea behind this metaphor is “that the translator, rather than letting himself be ‘bound’ or chained by the original author through literal or ‘slavish’ or ‘servile’ translation, seizes the control of the text and its meaning, and thus of the original author and source culture, and enslaves them” (ibid: 55-56). “Taking the original captive” metaphor, which was coined by St. Jerome, became an image of translator-as-conqueror through the history, and in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries turned into an underpinning leitmotiv of the German Romantics understanding of translation which has a certain impact on the evolution of the contemporary translation theories.

As this brief glance at the notion of translatio studii et imperii and the metaphor of “taking the original captive” indicates, translation has close ties with the empire, hence the ascendant forces of the history. As far as the postcolonial approaches developed within the academic world are concerned, one can see how these two facts inherent in the translation act connotes the fact of violence in a given translation project. When the issue of violence is taken into consideration within a more contemporary context, one may infer how the situation briefly explained above is more or less the same. In a given translation, for example, from the language of the “Third World” –the cultures and languages regarded as the “Other” by the West– to the hegemonic languages of the Western world (i.e. English, French or German), the original texts become the subject of manipulation to a certain extent. Agents of the ascendant cultures, with their intended receptors in mind either by the employment of metaphors or metonymies can violate the aesthetic values of the source text/s and might re-shape the “Other” cultures according to their opinions (cf. Dingwaney 1995: 4-5 with Tymoczko 1999: 50). Under such circumstances, in which the dialectics of power constitute the bulk of a given translation process, the significance of cultural translation becomes crucial than ever.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dingwaney, Anuradha, “Introduction: Translating ‘Third World’ Cultures”, in Dingwaney, Anuradha and Maier, Carol, (eds.) Between Languages and Cultures: Translation and Cross-Cultural Texts. Pittsburgh and London: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995, pp. 3-14

Robinson, Douglas, Translation and Empire, Manchester: St. Jerome, UK, 1997

Tymoczko, Maria, Translation in a Postcolonial Context, Manchester: St. Jerome, UK, 1999