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

在后种族隔离时期的南非文学和更广泛的文化政治背景下，翻译已成为与权力、身份和意义制造问题相关的关键斗争场所（见Botha 2020）。尽管存在争议，但一个关键的观点是，翻译在服务于社会文化变革和认知去殖民化方面具有潜力或可能性。这一发展的一个具体迭代是翻译行业（见Van Vuuren 2016），它是围绕|xam orature的Bleek和Lloyd档案中的文本创建的，|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化和谈判。尽管这些档案的基本基础是翻译——b|考试语言已经消亡，因此只能通过英语翻译来听到——但很少有人去努力解决这种不稳定的文本存在形式的含义（然而，许多研究人员，包括我自己，已经注意到这种中断，见Staphorst 2021）。在过去的三十年里，随着这种关于翻译的论述——以及作为其具体表现的Bleek和Lloyd翻译行业——的发展，“不可译性”问题，即翻译的可能性问题，在翻译研究中作为一个领域得到了越来越多的关注（见2013年4月）。与其将翻译视为满足“他者”的解决方案和乌托邦式的场所，权力差异、声音操纵和翻译失败的可能性在最近的学术研究中得到了强调。正是在这种广泛的话语和翻译发展的背景下，围绕着布里克和劳埃德档案的文学产业，以及档案文本的不稳定的英语文本存在，我打算在我的论文中调查三个主要问题：1。面对对翻译局限性的认识，翻译的欲望如何得到表达？2. 翻译失败本身在多大程度上是一种生成文学实践？3. 翻译文本——“跨越两种语言，同时突出、表现和质疑翻译行为”（Hassan 2006: 754），并因此塑造了“将他者置于其中的混合自我”（Hassan 2016: 1436）——相对于塑造超越对自我-他者二元二元的主流理解的叙事能力，提供了什么样的洞察力？由于“翻译”的概念是特别多孔的，随后在人文学科中产生，对这些问题的调查和答案可以“翻译”到许多其他领域和学科，包括文化哲学、社会语言学和批判理论——特别是在面对复杂性时，通过思考接受的、霸权的和有限的身份的转变问题。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.