Response by Palmer to "Betraying Empire: Translation and the Ideology of Conquest"

For anyone familiar with the history of linguistic colonization in Ireland, Vicente Rafael’s assertion that “translation [is] a kind of conquest” seems uncontroversial. For Irish speakers, translatio imperii, English-style, entailed the wholesale translation of a hibernophone country into an anglophone one. A process set in motion by Tudor, Jacobean and Cromwellian plantations and culminating in the Great Famine (1845– 52) left the Irish, in the words of the nineteenth-century nationalist and translator, Thomas Davis, “adrift among the accidents of translation” (quoted in Lloyd 1982, 145). The real interest of Rafael’s move, therefore, lies in its implicit insistence that we use the past to interrogate and inform (perhaps even reform) the present; to go beyond retelling the old story and succumbing, as Rancière fears that cultural historians increasingly do, to “the infinite work of grieving” (2007, 17). With that in mind, we need to think not just about colonial translation, but about its afterlife and how its “radically reductive attitude towards language” (Rafael) continues to shape the present..