ABSTRACT

The dialogue Caliban enters when he appropriates Prospero’s language and writes his own books means that he communicates with an audience who would otherwise not understand him. But he communicates on his own terms, for Caliban’s books reveal something profound about dialogue – true dialogue can only occur when the difference of the other is recognised. The language with which Caliban enters into dialogue is transformed, and so to some extent is the reader. For the ‘dialogue in difference’ that characterises post-colonial writing necessarily produces a different reader – a translated reader, just as it produces a translated/translating writer.