Weltliteratur and the Figure of Author-Translator in The Adventures Of Hajji Baba

Abstract

This paper focuses on the problem of “translatability” and the encounter of English as the medium of exchange with Persian in James J. Morier’s The Adventures of Hajji Baba (1824) and its sequel (1828). It approaches the question of translatability from two vantage points: First, it considers how the economic assumption of “equivalences”, where words and referents enter a relationship of commensurability, paradoxically creates a pseudo-discourse to uphold the validity of the travelogue as an “authentic” account of the “Orient” and a commodity that once rendered in English can circulate the book on a worldwide scale. Second, it considers the split in the figure of the narrator, the author-translator who swings between the axes of “assimilation” and “foreignization.” The hybrid positioning of the narrator in the intertext of a travelogue that oscillates between fiction and translation ultimately undermines the hallmark desire of capital, i.e., a total transfer of meaning (value) via the voice of an authentic teller to the extent that a self-same identity can neither be imagined for the narrated (the Persian hero Hajji Baba) nor for the narrator (the English ventriloquist). The paper argues that the phantom of the non-existent original of Hajji Baba haunts the book and marks it as a colonial product, pointing to the unequal economy of signs. As such the aspirational approach of world literature works against its own grain: rather than creating an arena for exchange, it places English in an asymmetrical hegemonic position, which delineates the locus of center from the periphery and perpetuates the reproduction of an Anglocentric literary value at the extent of marginalization of other world languages and cultures.