Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the differential receptions of ancient Greek tragedy across two distinct colonial populations in South Africa, exploring how the performative ambivalence in the Hellenistic imaginary opens up a practice of anti-memorial translation that resists Western epistemological hegemony.

Paper long abstract:

The history of colonial domination and resistance in South Africa during the past two centuries is one overdetermined by the violence of language, in and through translation. This paper will examine how the hegemonic force of ancient Greek classical tradition, itself a translation of antiquity that forms the imaginary core of Western civilization, was reinforced, resisted, and appropriated by two colonized populations, Afrikaner and native African, between and against their tripartite relation within Anglophone colonial rule. Drawing from Jacques Derrida's reading of The Task of the Translator and Tejaswini Niranjana's formulation of postcolonial translation as dislocation, this paper approaches classical Greek tragedy as a form of engaging with non-identity in the authority of language that is intensified when brought to bear in the context of the Benjaminian injunction to translate. Through an examination the role of Afrikaner Greek scholarship during the early years of Afrikaner independence as well as a reading of contemporary dramatic adaptations of Greek texts by Athol Fugard and Yael Faber, this paper will explore how South African performative engagement with the ambivalent hybridization at the root of this Western cultural imaginary counter-poses a paradoxical injunction to forgetting as a corollary to the repetition injunction of translation, opening up a practice of translation that resists logocentric Western epistemology.