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WORKSHOP:
Comparative Cultural Studies 3
Culture, Autobiography, and TranslationChair: Carmen Maria Andras (Research Institute for the Social Sciences and the Humanities, Targu-Mures, Romania)
Translation and Potentiality
Bartoloni, Paolo (The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia)
Paolo Bartoloni argues in his paper, "Translation and Potentiality" that selfhood, subjectivity, language, and cultural values are indissolubly linked to the extent that, at least in Western culture, the notion of identity and belonging, of being at home, are strictly correlated with a homogeneity of linguistic and cultural values whose safety appear to be guaranteed by enclosing them, by sealing and protecting them from the influence of what lies outside. It is by constructing linguistic and cultural enclosures that the ideas of authenticity and inauthenticity, original and copy become possible, indeed accepted as natural and necessary. This framework has had a historical, political and social value, a necessity whose tenets continue to persist and hold sway even at a time when they appear to be undermined if not altogether outmoded by the process of globalization and international mobility. And yet, regardless of the paradigm shift and the attendant discourse of cross-fertilization and hybridization we still cling to the imperative of authenticity and originality, of purity based on a set of implicitly or explicitly protected linguistic and cultural values. Bartoloni is not in favor of globalizing identity as opposed to national identity, both of which in their own particular way could be defined as authentic. Rather, he is interested in opening up a series of challenges in order for a further zone to emerge in-between authenticity and inauthenticity. Translation might offer a cultural habitat, providing that one shifts the theoretical perspective to bring to the fore of the investigation not so much the final product but the process of translating, that is the middle ground, the in-betweenness where two distinct languages and cultures meet without superimposing one's own values onto the other. Thus, Bartoloni offers a conception of translation along the lines of interstitiality and potentiality by drawing on literary and philosophical preoccupations as well as postcolonial concerns.
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