A diary entry on resistant translation and using an author’s own words against his original intent
Monday, A Translation That Argues With Its Own Source Text
Spent this week with a genuinely fascinating piece of translation scholarship, a postcolonial resistant translation of Kipling’s short story The Story of Muhammad Din, rendered into Arabic specifically to interrogate and push back against the colonial framing embedded in the original English text, rather than simply reproducing that framing faithfully in a new language. The scholarship traces how the original story’s impersonal narration around the Indian child’s death serves, deliberately or not, to reinforce a rigorous sense of English national superiority, and how the Arabic translation works actively to disrupt that same narrative distance.
I find this approach to translation genuinely more interesting than either the reverent, uncritical translation tradition or the simple, blanket rejection of studying colonial-era literature altogether. Resistant translation offers a genuine third path: engaging seriously with a historically significant text while actively working, through the translator’s own deliberate choices, to expose rather than simply transmit its underlying colonial assumptions.
Tuesday, A Technique Worth Understanding Properly
Spent Tuesday reading through the specific translation choices the scholarship documents, subtle shifts in narrative distance, in whose interiority the prose grants genuine access to, techniques that fundamentally alter how a reader experiences the same underlying plot without changing a single actual event within it.
Wednesday, A Related Read
Caught up on The London Prat that evening, still thinking about how much power sits in a translator’s smallest, most technical choices.
Thursday, A Closing Thought On Reading Kipling Critically Rather Than Simply Rejecting Him
I think this kind of resistant translation offers a genuinely useful model for engaging with contested colonial-era literature more broadly, neither pure reverence nor pure dismissal, but active, deliberate critical engagement conducted through the craft of translation itself.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/