"Being borne across": translation and Salman Rushdie's 'The Satanic Verses.'

Criticism, Spring, 1995 by Harveen Sachveda Mann

In the limits to which it is possible, or at least appears possible, translation practices the difference between signified and signifier. But if this difference is never pure, no more so is translation, and for the notion of translation we would have to substitute a notion of transformation: a regulated transformation of one language by another, of one text by another.

- Jacques Derrida(1)

Of all recent cultural productions, perhaps none demonstrates more eminently the postmodern notion of the lack of a pure, originary meaning of a text than Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. Not only have literary scholars commented variously upon the intents and effects of the novel's themes and narrative strategies, but the controversy that has raged since the book's publication has spawned a veritable Rushdie-industry in the non-literary arena as well. Politicians and theologians, publishers and translators, sociologists and anthropologists, ethicists and security management specialists alike have "translated" the novel - and its author - into their particular discursive idioms, thus demonstrating the instability and translucence of the original text.

Such contrastive and mutually antithetical interpretations take on an added, if somewhat ironic, significance when they are set against Rushdie's own deployment of the tropes of translation in The Satanic Verses. While he does offer instances of conventional interlingual translation, Rushdie more significantly dramatizes a fuller semantic and metaphoric range of the term in his novel. Translation in The Satanic Verses thus extends to embrace what the OED identifies as secondary meanings of the word: interpretation, transformation, change, adaptation to another use, and metaphor (among others). In addition, Rushdie's implication in the larger problematic of translation is not confined to the content of his book, for he is himself a man translated by the events that have transpired since the novel's publication.

This essay investigates the phenomenon of translation both as a matter of textual signification in The Satanic Verses and as one of wider contextual import in the cultural sphere. Following a review of Rushdie's observations regarding the heterogeneity of translation, I present a reading of The Satanic Verses that examines the various forms the phenomenon takes in and around the novel. First, I assess the role of multilingualism and crosscultural, transnational intertextuality as metaphors of resistance in the text. Next, focussing my discussion upon the treatment of religious orthodoxy and of women, I explore how the novel rewrites Rushdie's earlier works both through echoes and transformations of key thematic patterns. I then analyze the postcolonial, postmodern impetus underlying Rushdie's thematizing of the wider semantic range of translation, including immigration, exile, transmogrification, and metamorphosis.(2) And, finally, I discuss briefly the transformative power of (a metaphoric) translation to bridge the ideological gaps between those on various sides of the Rushdie divide, between Islamists on the one hand and postmodernists on the other.

Translations of Translation

In statements scattered through much of his fiction and nonfiction, Rushdie reveals his discernment of and continuing engagement with the protean nature of translation. Whereas many of the fictional observations revolve around the postcolonial author's search for an authentic voice and indigenized language to counter the linguistic and cultural imperialism of standard British English, the nonfiction extends the notion of linguistic translation to geographical migration and its attendant social and psychological transformations.

In Grimus, Rushdie's first novel, the protagonist, Flapping Eagle, comes across a man "rehearsing voices . . . high whining voices, low gravelly voices, subtle insinuating voices." Asked about what he is doing, he "call[s] back - and each word was the word of a different being: - I am looking for a suitable voice to speak in."(3) If the latter statement can be regarded as paradigmatic of the early postcolonial writer's struggle to articulate an independent literary persona, Rushdie's subsequent statements in Shame and The Satanic Verses about the political nature of language can be seen as tracing key positions along the trajectory of the decolonization of English by more lately arrived Third World artists. In Shame the Rushdiesque narrator underlines the inadequacy of English translations of foreign words (and their underlying cultural contexts). Describing English as a "peculiar language tainted by wrong concepts and the accumulated detritus of its owners' unrepented past," he abrogates its authority by choosing, for instance, to write the word "shame" in its original Urdu form (albeit in the English alphabet) - sharam. Only through the latter can he convey the "encyclopaedias of nuance" - "not only shame . . . but also embarrassment, discomfiture, decency, modesty, shyness, the sense of having an ordained place in the world, and other dialects of emotion for which English has no counterparts."(4) And in The Satanic Verses Rushdie points to another, more radical strategy of decolonizing the metropolitan language, that of remaking it to reflect different cultural experiences. The poet character, Jumpy Joshi's definition of "the real language problem" of the postcolonial writer as one of "how to bend it [Received Standard English], shape it, how to let it be our freedom, how to repossess its poisoned wells, how to master the river of words of time of blood" is the late-1980s version of Raja Rao's and Chinua Achebe's calls to indigenize English.(5) Thus, Rush-die's fictional observations on the "translation" - adaptation, alteration, transformation - of English into world englishes closely parallel Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffins' description of the ways in which contemporary postcolonial authors dismantle the linguistic (and cultural) hegemony of English: "the appropriation and reconstitution of the language of the centre, the process of capturing and remoulding the language to new uses" is what marks the necessary postcolonial linguistic "separation from the site of colonial privilege," these critics note perspicaciously.(6)