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