1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910812642603321

Autore

Rangarajan Padma

Titolo

Imperial Babel : translation, exoticism, and the long nineteenth century / / Padma Rangarajan

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York : , : Fordham University Press, , 2014

©2014

ISBN

0-8232-6645-1

0-8232-6363-0

0-8232-6364-9

Edizione

[First edition.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (267 p.)

Classificazione

LIT006000LIT008020LAN009000

Disciplina

418/.020954

Soggetti

Translating and interpreting - India - History

Translating and interpreting - Great Britain - History

Indic literature - History and criticism - Theory, etc

English literature - History and criticism - Theory, etc

Imperialism in literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- contents -- preface -- acknowledgments -- chapter one. Translation’s Trace -- chapter two. Pseudotranslations: Exoticism and the Oriental Tale -- chapter three. Romantic Metanoia: Conversion and Cultural Translation in India -- chapter four. “Paths Too Long Obscure”: The Translations of Jones and Müller -- chapter five. Translation’s Bastards: Mimicry and Linguistic Hybridity -- Conclusion -- notes -- works cited -- index

Sommario/riassunto

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.