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

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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.