ABSTRACT
The idea of translation is abundantly generative, but teaching translations to a monolingual audience can be a challenge. The protagonist of Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s Urdu short story “Toba Tek Singh” (1955)—perhaps the most frequently taught piece of Partition literature in a college classroom—is a madman who speaks gibberish. I alternate between giving students my own translation and convincing them that it is, indeed, just gibberish. Both gestures seem insufficient. How do we harness the angst and allure of translated texts in the classroom without deferring to the authority of the foreign-language-speaking instructor? How do we alert students to the status of certain texts as translation without inducing anxieties about linguistic incompetence and impossible comprehension? This chapter reflects on experiences of teaching translations in English literature courses and suggests strategies to present translation as a mode of literary inquiry. In the spirit of Trinh Minh-ha’s idea of “speaking nearby,” this chapter identifies ways to harness students’ anxiety about fidelity to arrest the imperative of a right answer and to illuminate the interpretive, affective and political charge of reading.
