THE BLIND JOZEF PRONEK AND THE DEAD SOULS: THE ETHICS OF TRANSLATION AND THE SUBJECT OF CULTURAL DIFFERENCE OR HOW TO NEGOTIATE/DEMUR „CULTURALLY“ Cover Image

Slijepi Jozef Pronek i mrtve duše: etika prevođenja i subjekt kulturne razlike ili kako "kulturno" pre/(pri)govarati
THE BLIND JOZEF PRONEK AND THE DEAD SOULS: THE ETHICS OF TRANSLATION AND THE SUBJECT OF CULTURAL DIFFERENCE OR HOW TO NEGOTIATE/DEMUR „CULTURALLY“

Author(s): Mirela Berbić
Subject(s): Literary Texts
Published by: Filozofski fakultet Univerziteta u Tuzli
Keywords: the ethics of translation; the subject of cultural difference; border subjects; places of untranslatability

Summary/Abstract: The issue of border subjects is paralleled by the issue of cultural translation as a process which understands a relationship with differences, pointing at the fact that they do not necessarily have to lead to assimilation but also affirm and demand to accept non-identicality. Beside the fact that Jozef Pronek is revealed as a sub alter subject who cannot speak, the community which ostracises him is autistic; being self-enamoured it closes itself and does not (want to!) hear the other. However, the marginal perspective of Jozef Pronek did not merely articulate „the happy place of the margin“ by subverting the (if not equally legitimate, then at least obstructing the codified) meta-story from the inside, the dominant discourse of the Other, but it also revealed that even silenced, the marginalised speak through the body, which becomes the textualised place of speech, certainly representing the self. Apart from the body, by asking questions to the Other, Pronek provokes from the inside the collective one of the American culture, which is represented in homogenizing autocratic (!?) infatuation in superlatives. Thus cultural difference is firstly understood as an attempt to rearticulate the acquired sum of knowledge by a society, a nation, which in the words of Bhabha, from the perspective of the indicating position of the minority withstands the totalisation and thus affirms the polyphony inside the narration.

  • Issue Year: 2011
  • Issue No: 08
  • Page Range: 161-175
  • Page Count: 15
  • Language: Bosnian