Translation as a Transformative Act of Resistance: A Postcolonial Exploration of the Western Metaphysics of Guilt

Abstract

The act of translation is almost coeval with human existence.It is among those very few activities that date back to Babel, even if not to the Garden of Eden. There is an omnipresence of translationalilty in all human communicative activities. Unfortunately, for a long time, the dominant Western discourses of translation have assumed the act of translation merely as an unavoidable/unexpected post-Babel crisis. Translational activities have often been seriously undermined and charged with various guilts especially in the Western discursive practices. This Western metaphysics of guilt has conceived the act of translation as a secondary/inferior activity and the translator as no more than a betrayer to the ’original’. But by the advent of postcolonial translation theories, there is a paradigm shift in the conceptualization of translational activities. Nowadays the ’original‘ is no longer exclusively seen as de facto superior to the translation.Translation is now seen as an autonomous free-standing creative work of the first order: not at all a secondary activity rather an activity which is primarily genuine and creative. This paper explores various postcolonial theories of and approaches to translation against the backdrop of Western metaphysics of guilt and attempts to establish the act of translation as a transformative act of resistance. Postcolonial approaches suggest ways to unsettle the unapologetic control and domination of the Western metaphysics of guilt surrounding the translational discourse. These approaches offer us with a significant site for invoking numerous questions involving serious issues like representation, power and historicity.