9780823263646

9780823263615 (hardback)

"At the heart of every colonial encounter lies an act of translation. Once dismissed as a derivative process, the new cultural turn in translation studies has opened the field to dynamic considerations of the contexts that shape translations and that, in turn, reveal translation's truer function as a locus of power. In Imperial Babel, Padma Rangarajan explores translation's complex role in shaping literary and political relationships between India and Britain. Unlike other readings that cast colonial translation as primarily a tool for oppression, Rangarajan's argues that translation changed both colonizer and colonized and undermined colonial hegemony as much as it abetted it. Imperial Babel explores the diverse political and cultural consequences of a variety of texts, from eighteenth-century oriental tales to mystic poetry of the fin de siecle and from translation proper to its ethnological, mythographic, and religious variants. Searching for translation's trace enables a broader, more complex understanding of intellectual exchange in imperial culture as well as a more nuanced awareness of the dialectical relationship between colonial policy and nineteenth-century literature. Rangarajan argues that while bearing witness to the violence that underwrites translation in colonial spaces, we should also remain open to the irresolution of translation, its unfixed nature, and its ability to transform both languages in which it works"-- Provided by publisher.

"Imperial Babel: Translation, Colonialism, and the Long Nineteenth Century, examines the complex and largely ignored history of translation in the British Empire. Challenging common assumptions that the production of orientalist translations was inescapably coercive and unidirectional, Imperial Babel demonstrates the tenuous and often collaborative nature of imperial knowledge-production by studying the real translative policies of Empire, and the ways in which literary adaptors of translations and translators themselves resisted and reified imperial and cultural sovereignty"-- Provided by publisher.

UPCC book collections on Project MUSE.

Project MUSE - UPCC 2014 Complete.

Project MUSE - UPCC 2014 Literature.

Machine generated contents note:

Acknowledgements

Preface

Chapter One Translation and the "Formidable Art"

Radical Difference

Translation and the Postcolonial Predicament

Translation's Slant

Chapter Two Pseudotranslations: Exoticism and the Oriental Tale

The Heterotopic Space of Translation

Rethinking Exoticism

Vathek's Pleasures

Southey's Translative Failure

Translation's Fragments

Chapter Three Romantic Metanoia: Conversion and Cultural Translation in India

The Oriental Novel

Translating Evangelicalism

Linguistic Intermarriage

Spiritual Flirtation

Translative Impasse

Memorials

Chapter Four "Paths too long obscure": the Translations of Jones and Müller

Segmentary Lineage

Sir William Jones and the Hindoo Hymns

Max Müller and the Task of the Translator

Cultural Re-Gifting and Translative Heresy

Chapter Five Translation's Bastards: Mimicry and Linguistic Hybridity

Mistranslation and Pollution

Showing the Lions

Jumble in the Jungle

Baboo "Funkiness"

Epilogue: Slant Speech

Conclusion

Works Cited.

English literature > History and criticism > Theory, etc.

Indic literature > History and criticism > Theory, etc.

Translating and interpreting > Great Britain > History.

Translating and interpreting > India > History.