Harish Trivedi 6 American pop.

Nearly all Kureishis works are set in London or in the suburbia, and one of them, titled Sleep with Me (1999), has only white British characters.The only difficulty with such demonstrable Britishness of Kureishi is that in theliterary and cultural world of London in the 1970s, when Kureishi was beginning to comeinto his own as a writer, he was nevertheless slotted by commissioning editors for theatre andtelevision into the role of an Asian cultural translator. As he recounts,they required storiesabout the new [immigrant] British communities, by cultural translators, as it were, tointerpret one side to the other, and though Kureishi knew that as a non-migrant truebornBritisher he was not by upbringing and sensibility the sort of writer best-suited to this kindof work, he did it nevertheless because I just knew I was being paid to write (qted. inRanasinha 12). In this version, cultural translation is not so much the need of the migrant,as Bhabha makes it out to be, but rather more a requirement of the society and culture to which the migrant has travelled; it is a hegemonic Western demand and necessity.For an even more thoroughgoing and self-induced example of a cultural translator, we may look at Jhumpa Lahiri, whose first book of fiction, Interpreter of Maladies: Stories of Bengal, Boston and Beyond (1999), made her the first Indian-born writer to win the Pulitzerprize for fiction. She was born of Bengali parents in London, grew up in America, becamean American citizen at age 18, is by her own admission not really a bilingual though she would like to think she was, and has written fiction not only about Indians in America butalso some stories about Indian still living in India. In answer to the criticism that herknowledge of India as reflected in these stories is demonstrably erroneous and defective, shehas said, I am the first person to admit that my knowledge of India is limited, the way in which all translations are (Lahiri 118). This gratuitous trope is sustained and furtherhighlighted by her going on to say that her representation of India is in fact her translationof India (Lahiri 118). It soon transpires that not only is Lahiri as author a translator but soare the fictional personages she translates into existence: Almost all of my characters aretranslators, insofar as they must make sense of the foreign to survive (Lahiri 120). Thisechoes, probably unwittingly, the Benjaminian-Derridean sur-vivre , in the sense seized uponby Bhabha, just as Lahiris assertion that translation is not only a finite linguistic act but anongoing cultural one (Lahiri 120) reiterates Bhabhas central premise. And at the conclusionof this essay which Lahiri clearly means to serve as her manifesto and apologia, she declares: And whether I write as an American or an Indian, about things American orIndian or otherwise, one thing remains constant: I translate, therefore I am(Lahiri 120). And this from a writer who, like Kureishi, has never translated a word, and who admits that when one of her short stories was published in translation into Bengali, which is her parentsmother-tongue (even if it was not quite her own) and which was therefore the (other?)language of her childhood, she could not understand the translated version or as she herself put it, seeming to shift the responsibility from herself on to the translation, it provedinaccessible to me (Lahiri 120).If this is cultural translation, we perhaps need to worry about the very meaning of the word translation. One wonders why translation should be the word of choice in ac o l l o c a t i o n s u c h a s c u l t u r a l t r a n s l a t i o n i n t h i s n e w s e n s e w h e n p e r f e c t l y g o o d a n d theoretically sanctioned words for this new phenomenon, such as migrancy, exile or diasporaare already available and current. But given the usurpation that has taken place, it may betime for all good men and true, and of course women, who have ever practised literary translation, or even read translation with any awareness of it being translation, to unite andtake out a patent on the word translation, if it is not already too late to do so. Harish Trivedi 7S u c h a b u s e o r , i n t h e o r e t i c a l e u p h e m i s m , s u c h c a t a c h r e s t i c u s e , o f t h e t e r m translation is, as it happens, mirrored and magnified through a semantic explosion ordilution in popular, non-theoretical usage as well. Newspapers constantly speak of how t h r e a t s c o u l d t r a n s l a t e into action or popularity into votes; there is a book titled Translating L. A ., which apparently means no more than describing L.A., and Susan Bassnettherself has recently written that Edwin Gentzlers book Contemporary Translation Theories isnot only a critical survey but effectively also a translation, for the author transforms a wholerange of complex theoretical material into accessible language (in Gentzler vi). But it is of c o u r s e t h e s a m e l a n g u a g e , E n g l i s h , i n w h i c h s u c h t h e o r e t i c a l c o m p l e x i t y a n d s u c h accessibility both exist. Even when these are not instances of cultural translation in thesense expounded by Bhabha, these are still instances of a kind of translation which does notinvolve two texts, or even one text, and certainly not more than one language. These are stillexamples of what Bhabha, with his usual felicity, has in another context called non-substantive translation (in personal conversation). One could perhaps go a step further and, without any attempt at matching felicity, call it simply non-translation.In conclusion, one may suggest that there is an urgent need perhaps to protect andp r e s e r v e s o m e l i t t l e s p a c e i n t h i s postcolonial-postmodernist world, where newnessconstantly enters through cultural t r a n s l a t i o n , f o r s o m e o l d a n d o l d - f a s h i o n e d l i t e r a r y translation. For, if such bilingual bicultural ground is eroded away, we shall sooner thanlater end up with a wholly translated, monolingual, monocultural, monolithic world. Andthen those of us who are still bilingual, and who are still untranslated from our own nativeground to an alien shore, will nevertheless have been translated against our will and againstour grain. Further, translation itself

would have been untranslated or detranslated, for it would have come under erasure in a sense rather less deconstructive than Derridas butplainly more destructive. The postcolonial would have thoroughly colonized translation, fortranslation in the sense that we have known and cherished it, and the value it possessed as aninstrument of discovery and exchange, would have ceased to exist. Rather than help usencounter and experience other cultures, translation would have been assimilated in just onemonolingual global culture. All the recent talk of multiculturalism relates, it may be noted, not to the many different cultures located all over the world, but merely to expedient social management of as m a l l s a m p l e o f m i g r a n t s f r o m s o m e o f t h e s e c u l t u r e s w h o h a v e a c t u a l l y d i s l o c a t e d themselves and arrived in the First World, and who now must be melted down in that pot,or tossed in that salad, or fitted as an odd little piece into that mosaic. These stray littleflotsam and jetsam of world culture which have been washed up on their shores are quiteenough for the taste of the First World. Migrancy, often upper-class elite migrancy as forexample from India, has already provided the First World with as much newness as it needsand can cope with, and given it the illusion that this tiny fraction of the Third World hasalready made the First World the whole world, the only world there is. Those of us stilllocated on our own home turf and in our own cultures and speaking our own languages canno longer be seen or heard. All the politically correct talk of ecodiversity and biodiversity concerns a harmless and less problematic level of species below the human; there is nocorresponding desire that one can discern for cultural or linguistic diversity. Funds from allover the world are being poured in to preserve and propagate the Royal Bengal Tiger, forexample, which is declared to be an endangered species, but no such support is forthcomingfor the Indian languages, which seem to be equally endangered by the increasing decimationof world languages by the one all-devouring, multinational, global language, English. Itoccurs to me that no international agency might want to save the Royal Bengal Tiger if itactually roared in Bengali; there may be the little problem then of having to translate it into Harish Trivedi 8English first. In any case, the World Wildlife Fund is committed to saving only wild life,not cultured life.In this brave new dystopian world of cultural translation, translation ironically wouldhave been translated back to its literal, etymological meaning, of human migration. In early Christian use of the term, in fact, translation in the sense of being borne across took place when a dead person was bodily transported to the next world, or on a rare occasion when hisbody was transferred from one grave to another, as happened famously in the case of Thomasa Beckett, who was actually murdered and initially buried near the crypt of the Canterbury Cathedral but then, about 150 years later, when the trickle of pilgrims had swollen into amainstream, moved and buried again within the same cathedral in the grand new Trinity Chapel. In both these senses, of bodily removal to the next world or to the next grave, weare talking of someone who is truly dead and buried. The many indigenous languages of the world and the channel of exchange between them, translation, may seem headed for the samefate in the time of cultural translation: to be dead and buried.* WORKS CITEDBassnett, Susan. (1980) 2002. Translation Studies . London: Routledge.Bassnett, Susan. 1993. Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction . Oxford:Blackwell.Bassnett, Susan and Andre Lefevere. 1998. Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation . Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture . London: Routledge.Catford, J. C. 1965. A Linguistic Theory of Translation: An Essay in Applied Linguistics London: Oxford University Press.Gentzler, Edwin. (1993) 2001. Contemporary Translation Theories . Clevedon:Multilingual Matters.Lahiri, Jhumpa. 2000. My Intimate Alien. Outlook (New Delhi), special annualissue on Stree [Woman], pp. 116-20.Niranjana, Tejaswini. 1992. Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism and the Colonial Context . Berkeley: University of California Press.Ranasinha, Ruvani. 2001. Hanif Kureishi . (Writers and their Work series).London: Northcote House.Rushdie, Salman. 1991. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-91 .London: Granta Books.* Parts and versions of this essay were delivered at the universities of Iowa, Essex, Warwick a n d L o n d o n , a n d I a m g r a t e f u l t o m y a u d i e n c e s f o r m a n y h e l p f u l o b s e r v a t i o n s a n d suggestions.