《tymoczko ENLARGING WESTERN TRANSLATION THEORY》.pdf

ENLARGING WESTERN TRANSLATION THEORY: INTEGRATING NON-WESTERN THOUGHT ABOUT TRANSLATION Maria Tymoczko Professor of Comparative Literature University of Massachusetts Amherst 1 In Western tradition most statements about translation that date before the demise of positivism are relatively useless for current theorizing about translation, because most are limited by the dominant ideological perspective of their time--say, Western imperialism--or are primarily applicable to a particular Western historical circumstance--say, the position of a national language and literature within a larger cultural hegemony. These problems are before me whether I read the statements of Latin writers including Cicero and Jerome, the Germans including Martin Luther and Friedrich Schleiermacher, or the English including Alexander Tytler and Matthew Arnold. Such early writers speak to their own condition, out of their own time and their own historical circumstances, but there is rarely any self-reflexivity or acknowledgment about limitations of their own perspective. The result is declamation that is supposed to address translations of all times and everywhere, but that is sorely circumscribed by a cultural moment. 1 There is, of course, a problem with the terms east and west, both of which implicitly imply perspective and position. East or west of what? In Chinese tradition where China is the middle kingdom, India is the west: hardly the case for the imperial British. To the Romans the nations of southwestern Asia were considered the east, a perspective still encoded in the phrase the Near East. At the same time, there are European countries with histories of colonization, notably the Celtic fringe, and hence have affinities with the Third Wo