السبت، 4 ديسمبر 2010

Post -Colonial Translation & Post- Colonial Sentences

At first I couldn't imagine why a big name in printing industry , Routledge, did not notice , pay attention to and avoided the difference in the form and size of font in its publication  Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, edited by Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi, 1999.The introduction to the book, entitled Of Colonies, Cannibals and Vernaculars, is comprised of three parts. The first and third parts of this introduction have one and the same font form and size, while the second is written differently. After reading the introduction meticulously, I noticed that the change in font marks a change in style. As I am relatively aware of the style of Bassnett, I am fully assured that the change in font is made to mark Harish Trivvedi's "distinct" style: long sentences, sometimes very difficult to relate subjects and their verbs or connect ideas. In 1989, the acclaimed post-colonialist Homi Bhabha won the worst sentence contest awarded by the Philosophy and Literature Journal. The following sentence from Trivedi's introduction can be nominated for a worst sentence contest award:


In India, with its long history of oral composition and transmission, and the dominant early phase of bhakti or devotional poetry in all its modern languages in which the poet surrendered to  and sought to merge his individual identity with his divine subject, the distinction between different composers of poetry within the same tradition or between an original writer and a translator was never half as wide as it has been in the west .