Imperial Babel: Translation, Exoticism, and the Long Nineteenth Century

by Padma Rangarajan

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823263615
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	09/15/2014
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Padma Rangarajan is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

Imperial Babel brings the exciting field of translation studies to bear on the literature of the British Empire in India during the long nineteenth century, roughly from Sir William Jones and Edmund Burke to Max Müller and Rudyard Kipling. Too often critics of English-language literature about India ignore the enormous fact that all such writing emerged from an imperial world that was profoundly polyglot. Rangarajan's admirable work will thus be of great use and interest to scholars and students of Romantic and Victorian cultures of empire along with readers interested in translation and translation theory.——Daniel E. White, University of Toronto

A formidable scholarly achievement. The study answers a pronounced need in a number of intersecting fields—Literary Studies, Postcolonial Theory, South Asian Studies, Translation Studies—to understand the complex cross-cultural negotiations taking place between Britain and the Indian colony in the 19th century.——Christi A. Merrill, University of Michigan

From the Publisher

A formidable scholarly achievement. The study answers a pronounced need in a number of intersecting fields—Literary Studies, Postcolonial Theory, South Asian Studies, Translation Studies—to understand the complex cross-cultural negotiations taking place between Britain and the Indian colony in the 19th century.

University of Michigan - Christi A. Merrill

Imperial Babel brings the exciting field of translation studies to bear on the literature of the British Empire in India during the long nineteenth century, roughly from Sir William Jones and Edmund Burke to Max Müller and Rudyard Kipling. Too often critics of English-language literature about India ignore the enormous fact that all such writing emerged from an imperial world that was profoundly polyglot. Rangarajan's admirable work will thus be of great use and interest to scholars and students of Romantic and Victorian cultures of empire along with readers interested in translation and translation theory.

University of Toronto - Daniel E. White