Between Archive and Afterlife: Translationality, desire, and |xam orature in South African letters

在后种族隔离的南非文学和更广泛的文化政治的背景下，翻译已经成为与权力、身份和意义创造问题有关的关键斗争场所(见Botha 2020)。尽管存在争议，但一个关键的想法是翻译为社会文化变革和认识论去殖民化服务的潜力或可能性。这种发展的一个具体迭代是翻译业(参见Van Vuuren 2016)，它是围绕|XAM口述的Bleek和Lloyd档案中的文本而创建的，|XAM是一个已经灭绝的南非“第一民族”，他们的文学遗产受到各种形式的转变和谈判。尽管档案在翻译中有着重要的基础--|XAM语言已经死亡，因此只能通过英文翻译才能听到--但在处理这种不稳定的文本存在形式的含义方面做得很少(然而，包括我在内的许多研究人员都注意到了这种中断，见Staphorst 2021)。随着这种关于翻译的论述--以及Bleek和Lloyd翻译业作为翻译的具体表现--在过去30年里发展起来的同时，作为一个领域的翻译研究中也越来越多地出现了“不可译性”的问题，即翻译的可能性(见Apter 2013)。翻译不再是一种解决方案，也不是一种与他者相遇的场所，而是权力的差异、声音的操控和翻译失败的可能性在最近的学术中被强调。正是在这种广泛的话语和翻译发展的背景下，在Bleek和Lloyd档案馆周围的文学行业，以及档案文本不稳定的英文文本存在的背景下，我建议在我的论文中研究三个主要问题：1.面对对翻译局限性的认识，翻译的愿望如何表达？2.翻译失败本身在多大程度上是一种生成性的文学实践？3.翻译文本-文本“跨越]两种语言，同时突出，表现出什么洞察力以及翻译行为的问题化“(Hassan 2006：754)，并因此形成了”在内部窝藏他者的混合选择“(Hassan 2016：1436)--提供了相对于塑造超越自我-他者二元的主导理解的叙事的能力。由于“翻译”的概念在人文科学中尤其漏洞百出，并随后产生了影响，对这些问题的调查和回答可以被“翻译”到许多其他领域和学科，包括文化哲学、社会语言学和批评理论--特别是关于在面对复杂性时通过转换接受的、霸权的和受限的身份进行思考的问题。此外，这项研究的见解可能对博物馆馆长、出版商和创意作家有意义--特别是对那些从事边缘语言、文学和文化工作的人。

In the context of post-apartheid South African literature specifically and cultural politics more broadly, translation has become a key site of struggle in relation to questions of power, identity, and meaning-making (see Botha 2020). And although contested, a key idea is the potential, or possibilities, that translation offers in service of socio-cultural change and epistemic decolonisation. A specific iteration of this development is the translation industry (see Van Vuuren 2016) that has been created around texts from the Bleek and Lloyd archive of |xam orature, with the |xam, an extinct South African 'First People', and their literary heritage subject to various forms of transformation and negotiation. Despite the archive's essential grounding within translation - with the |xam language being dead, and therefore only hearable through English translation - very little has been done to grapple with the implications of this precarious form of textual existence (many researchers, myself included, have, however, noted this hiatus, see Staphorst 2021). At the same time as this discourse on translation - and the Bleek and Lloyd translation industry as concrete manifestation thereof - has developed over the past three decades, the question of 'untranslatability', of the very possibility of translation, has been gaining traction within translation studies as a field (see Apter 2013). Rather than viewing translation as a solution and utopic site for meeting the 'other', the power differentials, manipulation of voice, and possibility for translational failure has been accented in recent scholarship. It is against the backdrop of this broad discourse and development of translation, the literary industry around the Bleek and Lloyd archive, and the precarious English textual existence of the archival texts that I propose to investigate three main questions in my thesis: 1. How does the desire for translation find expression in the face of the knowledge of translation's limits? 2. To what extent is translational failure itself a generative literary practice? 3. What insight does translational texts - texts "straddle[ing] two languages, at once foregrounding, performing, and problematizing the act of translation" (Hassan 2006: 754) and which consequently shape "hybrid sel[ves] that harbor the other within" (Hassan 2016: 1436) - offer relative to the capacity to shape narratives that transcend dominant understandings of the self-other binary. With the concept of 'translation' being particularly porous and subsequently generative across the humanities, the investigation and answers to these questions could be 'translated' to many other fields and disciplines, including cultural philosophy, sociolinguistics, and critical theory - particularly in relation to thinking through the questions of the transformation of received, hegemonic, and bounded identities in the face of complexity. Further, the insights of this study could be meaningful to museum curators, publishers, and creative writers - particularly for those who work on and in marginal languages, literatures, and cultures.