ABSTRACT
As I wonder how I am qualifi ed to contribute to the theme of translation, a couple of factors come up. I am a translator myself. I translate contemporary Tamil fi ction into English, and I have also been guilty of translating my Tamil poems into English. As a translator, I both squirm in pleasure and revel in agony in that place of the ‘between’ that compels the translator to realise her simultaneous love of two languages as a monogamous commitment to ‘pure language’. The other factor has to do with my gratitude for the sheer fact that translated texts are allowed to enjoy academic legitimacy; and here I am thinking of the ongoing debate in graduate departments of literature in the United States about how to enforce the ‘foreign language requirement’, and whether to allow doctoral students to work on the basis of translated texts. But for the reality of translations, Walter Benjamin (1968a) and Jacques Derrida (1998) would be foreign ‘babel’ to my ‘other’ ears. God knows how ‘pure’ sounds and means in German, or for that matter, ‘differance’ in French! Add to this the further confusion that though Tamil is my mother tongue and English my so-called second language, affi liatively speaking, English is as intimately, expressively and amorously mine as is Tamil. As Derrida put it so elegantly: ‘We only ever speak one language. We never speak just one language’ (1998: 7). The monolingualism of the Other is but thematic variation of the multilingualism within the self. There can neither be complete and exhaustive multilingualism nor a pure language secure in its omniscient inclusiveness of the many. To speak is to resonate as echo both within and without, in search of an absent original.
