Cold War and Hot Translation
A few months ago I went to see U Carmen eKhayelitsha, Mark Dornford May's thrilling transposition of Bizet's opera from Spain into the poor yet vibrant township near Cape Town and from French into the click marked beat of isiXhosa singing. Returning from the movie theater, my thoughts turned to the question of translatability. Is South African culture at this moment particularly ripe for transposing and adapting (Western) narratives, or do the preferential flows established by globalization make its own cultural products more readily translatable for an international audience eager to receive the post apartheid message of peace, reconciliation, and democracy? Is translation a more appropriate metaphor to represent post Cold War culture than the preceding paradigms, or does it equally apply to the apartheid timeframe? The following is a meditation on translation of cultural paradigms and ideas between the United States and South Africa. The model on which I build my argument is that of a world engaged in a continuous flow of cultural and economic exchange, fast paced at times (as today, with the intensified rhythms of globalization) slower at other times (as beneath the frozen political surfaces of the Cold War) But even then, with some trimming and adjustments, cultural texts, political ideas, or just slogans were still being translated from one geopolitical entity to another. Since the end of apartheid, the South African economy opened to the world market and the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) moved away from their traditional socialist, Eastern European affiliations and closer to the only one remaining superpower on the world scene: the United States. There is a lot of emphasis today on cultural exchange, and South Africa borrows