Writing and Translating after the Empire

This essay aims at identifying some of the translation strategies colonisers adopted which would be later appropriated by the post-colonial subjects around the world. After showing how the Empire tried to translate the landscape, the culture, the language and, fundamentally, the identity of the colonised into English, constructing the colonised subjects as the inferior part of the dichotomy ‘I’/Subject vs ’Other’/Object, my paper moves on to demonstrate how the colonised subjects, even before obtaining political independence, exploited similar, if reversed, translation strategies as to retrieve that which colonisers attempted to obliterate and, by so doing, managed to subvert the master narrative. Throughout the essay, references are made to some of the founding texts of what we can loosely call post-colonial literature, in order to illustrate how these works challenge some of the fundamental tenets of Translation Studies in general, demonstrating not only that rather often communicative translation is in no way the most effective strategy, but also that, sometimes, translators have to accept the untranslatability of the Others and their culture in that, as Glissant states in his Introduction to *Une poétique du divers* (1996), it is not always necessary to understand Others, certainly it is not even advisable to re-connect them to our image, but it is sufficient to conceive and acknowledge their existence.