Postcolonial Strategy

Michael Cronin points to another way in which translation can be thought of as resistance, especially in postcolonial contexts. These are the “ways in which originals can be manipulated, invented, or substituted, or the status of the original subverted in order to frustrate the intelligence-gathering activities of the Imperial Agent” (35). Cronin observes that this contradicts the basic desire for equivalence that you see in many translation studies discourses where translation is seen as a bridge between two different cultures.Cronin’s concept, on the other hand, is hostile to the idea of an original and a translational other. He uses Irish literature to exemplify his argument. 19th century Irish verse that was translated into English is one such example. Most of the verse that was translated, like Charles Henry Wilson’s Poems Translated from the Irish Language into the English and My Dark Rosaleen did not have Irish originals. James Clarence Mangan’s famous poem My Dark Rosaleen was the translation of a prose translation of an Irish poem. The originals in these cases were either missing or manipulated. As Cronin points out, the target language reader did not have access to the original in these cases. Mangan’s translation, for instance, was clearly a political act that appeared when the Great Famine of Ireland was at its peak. The poem became a symbol of Irish resistance to British imperialism. The mediated nature of the original did not take away from the strength of the translation; on the contrary, the unknown nature of the original was more terrifying for the colonizers. Cronin observes: “The peripheral threat to the centre comes then not from unmediated access to the original but from obliquity, indirectness, a complicated relationship with origin” (36). The problem for the target language reader (which was also the colonizer in this case) was the uncertain nature of the original.

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