Cultural difference in translation: The translationality of postcolonial literature

Abstract

The article investigates the work of cultural difference in language in the context of translation, specifically as an effect of translation processes within postcolonial literature, and its role in reinforcing postcolonial literature as the world literature in English. Delineating the space of postcolonial literature as that of primary translation, the article looks into how cultural difference travels in interlingual translation of postcolonial literature from English to Polish. In postcolonial literature, cultural difference, which functions as a specific element of otherness/foreignness in the text, reveals the ethical dimension of translation, because it uncovers the presence of other, prior or side-tracked originals making up the text of postcolonial literature. Cultural difference is, thus, the substance of postcolonial literature and nothing less than translation in progress. It is the process of negotiation between the original form/language and a new form in another language, which is the language of the (former) empire. Basic features of postcolonial literature: resistance (Boehmer 2013: 307), counter-discourse (Ashcroft et al. 2000), imitation, mimicry and sly civility (Bhabha, 1994), abrogation and appropriation of the language of the empire (Ashcroft et al. 1989), the triumphant overcoming of peripherality in the “empire writes back” phenomenon (Rushdie 1982), and, last but not least, the marketing of the margins (Huggan 2001) and cultural brokering between peripheries and world capital (Appiah 1991) are also translational practices both in the cultural and linguistic sense. The article proposes to study interlingual translation of postcolonial literature in connection with its paradoxical status of a monolingual (English-dominated) literature, in which cultural difference works as a spectral presence of other languages. In this difficult negotiation between multilingualism and monolingualism, postcolonial literature enacts key problems of translation studies.