As scholar, critic, translator Gayatri Spivak turns 80, an extract from an exhilarating 1998 speech

I am deeply honoured that the Sahitya Akademi have decided to acknowledge my efforts to translate the fiction of Mahasweta Devi. I want to begin by thanking Mahasweta Devi for writing such spectacular prose. I want to thank my parents, Pares Chandra Chakravorty and Sivani Chakravorty for bringing me up in a household that was acutely conscious of the riches of Bangla. My father was a doctor. But we children were always reminded that my father’s Bangla essay for his matriculation examination had been praised by Tagore himself.

And my mother? I could not possibly say enough about her on this particular occasion. Married at fourteen and with children coming at ages fifteen and twenty-three, this active and devoted wife and mother, delighted every instance with the sheer fact of being alive, studied in private and received her MA in Bengali literature from Calcutta University in 1937. She reads everything I write and never complains of the obscurity of my style….

Samik Bandyopadhyay introduced me to Mahasweta Devi in 1979. Initially, I was altogether overwhelmed by her. In 1981, I found myself in the curious position of being asked to write on deconstruction and on French feminism by two famous US journals,  Critical Inquiry and  Yale French Studies respectively. I cannot now remember why that position had then seemed to me absurd. At any rate, I proposed a translation of Mahasweta’s short story ‘Draupadi’ for  Critical Inquiry, with the required essay on deconstruction plotted through a reading of the story.

When I look back upon that essay now, I am struck by its innocence. I had been away from home for twenty years then. I had the courage to acknowledge that there was something predatory about the non-resident Indian’s obsession with India. Much has changed in my life since then, but that initial observation retains its truth. I should perhaps put it more tactfully today.

Why did I think translating Mahasweta would free me from being an expert on France in the US? I don’t know. But this instrumentality disappeared in the doing. I discovered again, as I had when I had translated Jacques Derrida’s  De la grammatologie ten years earlier, that translation was the most intimate act of reading. Not only did Mahasweta Devi not remain Gayatri Spivak’s way of freeing herself from France, but indeed the line between French and Bengali disappeared in the intimacy of translation.

The verbal text is jealous of its linguistic signature but impatient of national identity. Translation flourishes by virtue of that paradox. The line between French and Bengali disappeared for this translator in the intimacy of the act of translation. Mahasweta resonated, made a  dhvani (literally ‘resonance’), with Derrida, and vice versa. This has raised some ire, here and elsewhere.

‘Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak Living Translation’, published by Seagull Books this month.
| Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

This is not the occasion for discussing unhappy things. But let me crave your indulgence for a moment and cite a couple of sentences, withholding theory, that I wrote in a letter to my editor Anjum Katyal of Seagull Books, when I submitted to her the manuscript of my translation of ‘Murti’ and ‘Mohanpurer Rupkatha’ by Mahasweta Devi: [In these two stories] the aporias between gendering on the one hand (“feudal” – transitional and subaltern) and the ideology of national liberation (as tragedy and as farce) on the other, are also worth contemplating. But I am a little burnt by the resistance to theory of the new economically restructured reader who would prefer her NRI neat, not shaken up with the ice of global politics and local experience.

And so I let it rest. That hard sentence at the end reflects my hurt and chagrin at the throwaway remark about Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “sermonizing” offered by the reviewer, in  India Today, of  Imaginary Maps (Routledge, 1995), the very book that you have chosen to honour. I was hurt, of course. But I was chagrined because “sermonizing” was also the word used by Andrew Steer, then deputy director for the environment at the World Bank, in 1992, when I had suggested, at the European Parliament, that the World Bank re-examine its constant self-justificatory and fetishized use of the word people. 

…(M)y concern is for the constitution of the ethical subject – as life/ translator (Klein), narrow-sense/ translator, reader-as-translator (RAT). Why did I decide to gild Mahasweta’s lily? Shri Namwar Singh, professor of Hindi at Jawaharlal Nehru University, who presided over the occasion, will remember that instructors at the Department of Modern Indian Literatures at Delhi University had asked me in 1987 why, when Bangla had Bankim and Tagore, I had chosen to speak on ‘Shikar’, one of the stories included in  Imaginary Maps.

…My devotion to Mahasweta did not need national public recognition. To ignore the narrative of action or text as ethical instantiation is to forget the task of translation upon which being-human is predicated. Translation is to transfer from one to the other. In Bangla, as in most North Indian languages, it is  anu-vada — speaking after,  translatio as  imitatio. This relating to the other as the source of one’s utterance is the ethical as being-for. All great literature as all specifically good action — any definition would beg the question here — celebrates this. To acknowledge this is not to “sermonize,” one hopes.

Translation is thus not only necessary but unavoidable. And yet, as the text guards its secret, it is impossible. The ethical task is never quite performed. ‘Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha,’ one of the tales included in  Imaginary Maps, is the story of such an unavoidable impossibility. The Indian Aboriginal is kept apart or othered by the descendants of the old settlers, the ordinary “Indian”. In the face of the radically other, the prehistoric pterodactyl, the Aboriginal and the settler are historically human together. The pterodactyl cannot be translated. But the Aboriginal and the settler Indian translate one another in silence and in the ethical relation. This founding task of translation does not disappear by fetishizing the native language.

Sometimes I read and hear that the subaltern can speak in their native languages. I wish I could be as self-assured as the intellectual, literary critic and historian, who assert this in English. No speech is speech if it is not heard. It is this act of hearing-to-respond that may be called the imperative to translate. We often mistake this for helping people in trouble, or pressing people to pass good laws, even to insist on behalf of the other that the law be implemented. But the founding translation between people is a listening with care and patience, in the normality of the other, enough to notice that the other has already silently made that effort. This reveals the irreducible importance of idiom, which a standard language, however native, cannot annul.

And yet, in the interest of the primary education of the poorest, looking forward to the privative norms of democracy, a certain standard language must also be shared and practised. Here we attempt to annul the impossibility of translation, to deny provisionally Saussure’s warning that historical change in language is inherited. The toughest problem here is translation from idiom to standard, an unfashionable thing among the elite progressives, without which the abstract structures of democracy cannot be comprehended.

Paradoxically, here, idiomaticities must be attended to most carefully. I have recently discovered that there is no Bangla-to-Bangla dictionary for this level (the primary education of the poorest) and suitable to this task (translation from idiom to standard). The speaker of some form of standard Bengali cannot hear the self-motivated subaltern Bengali unless organized by politically correct editing, which is equivalent to succour from above. It is not possible for us to change the quality of rote learning in the lowest sectors of society. But with an easy-to-use same-language dictionary, a spirit of independence and verification in the service of rule-governed behaviour — essential ingredients for the daily maintenance of a democratic polity — can still be fostered.

The United Nations, and non-governmental organizations in general, often speak triumphantly of the establishment of numbers of schools. We hardly ever hear follow-up reports, and we do not, of course, know what happens in those classrooms every day. But a dictionary, translating from idiom to standard even as it resists the necessary impossibility of translation, travels everywhere. It is only thus that subalternity may painstakingly translate itself into a hegemony that can make use of and exceed all the succour and resistance that we can organize from above. I have no doubt about this at all….

Today as we speak to accept our awards for translating well from the twenty-one languages of India, I want to say, with particular emphasis, that what the largest part of the future electorate needs, in order to accede, in the longest run to democracy, rather than have their votes bought and sold, is practical, simple same-language dictionaries that will help translate idiom into standard, in all these languages. I hope the Akademi will move toward the satisfaction of this need.

For myself, I cannot help but translate what I love, yet I resist translation into English; I never teach anything whose original I cannot read and constantly modify printed translations, including my own. I think it is a bad idea to translate Gramsci and Kafka and Baudelaire into Indian languages from English. As a translator, then, I perform the contradiction, the counter-resistance, that is at the heart of love. And I thank you for rewarding what need not be rewarded, the pleasure of the text.

Excerpted from Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak Living Translation , published by Seagull Books this month.