문화번역’과 포스트식민 이주서사: 자메이카 킨케이드의 『루시』

Abstract

The idea of ‘cultural translation’ was most significantly presented by the Indian cultural theorist Homi Bhabha in a chapter called “How newness enters the world: Postmodern space, postcolonial times and the trials of cultural translation” in The Location of Culture (1994). ‘Cultural translation,’ articulated through his challenging but rewarding discussion of the examples of cultural translation found in the fictional works of Joseph Conrad, Salman Rushdie, and Derek Walcott, focuses on the cultural process itself rather than on the linguistic texts or translated products. As the movements of people crossing borders cause cultural translation, the intermediary position of the migrants, the cultural hybridity and cross-cultural movement that characterizes that position, and the problematic nature of the cultural borders crossed by all cultural translators are significant points of discussion in Bhabha’s ‘cultural translation.’However, despite Bhabha’s influential idea of ‘cultural translation,’ what should be noted is that there have been other interesting ‘cultural translation’ discourses. In anthropology and ethnography, where the term ‘cultural translation’ was earlier coined, ethnographers understood their job as translating or even re-constructing primitive cultures into Western languages for Western readers. In Translation Studies, Cultural Studies, and Postcolonial Studies, the translation of linguistic texts has become the axis around which cultural politics and cultural phenomena in general might be discussed, including the cultural effects of translations, unequal power relations between languages and cultures, and colonial and postcolonial cultural politics. With different definitions and functions of cultural translation in mind, the paper reads Jamaica Kincaid’s postcolonial immigrant narrative as a cultural translation. As a postcolonial immigrant crossing national and cultural borders, Kincaid's heroine Lucy finds herself as one of “translated men,” a term by Salman Rushdie. Resisting the negatively ‘translated’ identity imposed on her leads her to the process of constantly translating and retranslating cultural versions provided by the metropolis, which regards everything of the West as civilized and superior and that of the non-West as un-civilized and inferior. Such cross-cultural translations and retranslations reveal the problematics of the boundary between the civilized west and the primitive Caribbean, and allows Lucy the distance necessary to reevaluate her post/colonial history as well as metropolitan reality. The last episode, in which her names are blurred with her shameful tears, signifies the fact that her self-invention and cultural translation will be an on-going process.