Journal articles on the topic 'Sanskrit commentry'

AbstractThe Cāṇakyaṭīkā by Bhikṣu Prabhamati is a Sanskrit commentary on the Arthaśāstra (1st– 3rd century ce), the most celebrated Sanskrit text on governance. The Cāṇakyaṭīkā has not yet been fully studied nor translated into English. This paper presents the first English translation and analysis of the passages in which Prabhamati comments upon the activities of the “superintendent of the mint” (lakṣaṇādhyakṣa) and of the “examiner of coins” (rūpadarśaka). His exposition on Arthaśāstra 2.12.24–25 provides an interesting example of what can be defined as a “textual variation”; by means of commentarial techniques and literary devices the author stretches the structure of the root-text. On the basis of a broad analysis, this research demonstrates that the commentator quotes a passage on the coinage system from an unnamed source which, I shall argue, is the authoritative treatise on law Mānava Dharmaśāstra (2nd – 3rd century ce). This represents further evidence of the relationship between the Arthaśāstra and Manu's code. Finally, I shall suggest Bhikṣu Prabhamati's date and place of origin.

Abstract What makes a text a “commentary”? The question is naive enough to allow a complicated answer. In Sanskrit there is not a single word for “commentary”. The present study focuses on an exemplary case study, that of Veṅkaṭanātha’s commentary on the Seśvaramīmāṃsā, and concludes that Sanskrit philosophical commentaries share certain characteristics: 1. several given texts are their main interlocutors/they are mainly about a set of particular texts; 2. they belong to a genre in its own right and are not a minor specialisation for authors at the beginnings of their careers; 3. they are characterised by a varied but strong degree of textual reuse; 4. they are characterised by a shared interlanguage that their authors must have assumed was well known to their audiences; 5. they allow for a significant degree of innovation. The use of the plural in point No. 1 is discussed extensively within the paper.

This article is a full edition of five Tocharian B manuscripts kept in the Berezovsky sub-collection of the Serindia Collection of the IOM, RAS: two Sanskrit-Tocharian В Bilingual Udānavarga fragments (Uv. 1.26b1.34a, Uv. 4.23b4.34c); a Sanskrit-Tocharian В Bilingual Karmavācanā (Upasaṃpadā) fragment, one fragment of a jātaka and one fragment of a stotra previously erroneously identified as Udānastotra. The article contains a transliteration, transcription, tentative translation as well as a commentary on the text of the fragments.

Abstract The Tattvārthādhigamabhāṣya, which is an early commentary on the Tattvārthādhigama attributed to Umāsvāti, contains several passages in verse. The inclusion of these verses has not been studied before, even though they are relevant for the discussion of the relationship between the Tattvārthādhigama and the bhāṣya. This article provides an analysis and translation of these verses, including the introductory verses and the colophon that usually accompany this text. Although some scholars regard the bhāṣya as an auto-commentary, the outcomes of this analysis indicate that the bhāṣya was written by a different author. Further, this study shows that some of the verses in the bhāṣya are derived from other Jaina works in Sanskrit that are no longer extant. This suggests that the Tattvārthādhigama was not the only Jaina philosophical text in Sanskrit at the time of the final redaction of the bhāṣya.

Abstract The present article focuses on appositional metaphoric compounds karmadhāraya-rūpaka in Sanskrit. A first section addresses some problems of compound typology in Western works, where appositional compounds have often been identified as copulative dvandva. Following this general analysis there is a section on appositional compounds from the perspective of the classical Sanskrit grammar, in particular the Pāṇinian tradition where the metaphorical aspect has not been explored specifically. The final section deals with the contribution of Sanskrit treatises on poetics to the identification of metaphoric compounds and their differentiation from compound similes. The approach suggested in later texts on poetics seems to be based on syntactical criteria, the ambiguity of the double-head topic, i. e. candra-mukha, a moon-face being specified in the comment. According to this, an appositional compound should be analysed as a simile, if the comment refers to the actual part of the compound, i.e. the subject of the simile, or as a metaphor, if the comment refers to the standard of comparison, thus shifting the focus of the sentence from the actual to the imagined entity.

Śrīdhara Svāmī’s commentary on the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, called Bhāvārtha-dīpikā and composed sometime between the mid-fourteenth to the mid-fifteenth centuries, has exerted extraordinary influence on later Bhāgavata commentaries, and indeed, on Vaiṣṇava traditions more generally. This article raises a straightforward question: “Why Śrīdhara?” Focusing on the Caitanya Vaiṣṇava tradition, particularly Jīva Gosvāmī, for whom Śrīdhara is foundational, we ask, “What is it about Śrīdhara Svāmī’s commentary—both stylistically and theologically—that made it so useful to Caitanya Vaiṣṇavas and other Bhāgavata commentators?” This question, to the extent that it can be answered, has implications for our understanding of Śrīdhara’s theology as well as the development of the early Caitanya Vaiṣṇava tradition, but it can also lend insight into the reasons for Śridhara’s influence more generally in early modern India.

Sri Vaishnava Tradition has been considering both Sanskrit and Tamil as its two eyes and hence the scholars were refered as “Ubhaya vedantins” (Knowledgeable in both Tamil and Sanskrit). It is popular belief that Acharyas are very fluent in Vedas, Upanishads and the rest while not so much accustomed to Tamil literature. On the contrary the early Acharyas have excelled in their knowledge of Tamil literature and have used their Tamil vocabulary to enrich their commentaries for Divyaprabandams. From Acharya Ramanuja to present day heads of Vaishnava tradition have maintained that Divyaprabandams have to be revered as “Veda samyam” and often referred to them as “Tamil Marai” (Vedas in Tamil). This essay presents glimpses in to the commentary literature and the life style of Acharyas to throw light into the knowledge and service rendered by Acharyas for the Tamil language

The author researches the widely used practice of the so-called maha-mantra (the “great mantra”) while offering short prayers in the tradition of Gaudiya Vaishnavism, It is based on the Upanishads, such as Kali-santarana-Upanishad and Chaitanya-Upanishad. The author evaluates the existing original commentaries. As “classical” may be considered the interpretations those by Brahmayogin Ramachandrendra Sarasvati (XVIII century) and Suhotra Tapovanachari (1950–2007) on the Kali Sandarana Upanishad and those by Bhaktivinoda Thakura and Madhusudana dasa Babaji on the Chaitanya Upanishad. The article provides a translation of both texts from Sanskrit into Russian, supplied with comments and other explanations. The methodology used is based upon V. I. Rudoy concept regarding the polymorphic nature of Sanskrit textual culture.

A set of tables devoted to the sun and the moon, titled the Candrārkī (“Related to the moon and sun”), was compiled in Sanskrit by Indian astronomer Dinakara along with a short accompanying text, intended to give guidance on how to construct a calendar ( pañcāṅga) for any desired year and geographical circumstances. The epoch of this table-text is 9 April 1578. We present here an edition of the text, a literal translation, and detailed technical commentary.

The subject of the study is the polemics between the philosophical school of Jainism (the Digam­bara current) and Buddhism on ātman (spiritual subject, self) as it is given in the chapter “The Study of the Ātman, as it is set with the Digambars” of the section “Ātmaparīkshā” (lit. “The Study of the Ātman”) of “Tattvasaṃgraha” of Śāntarakṣita (8th century) with the commentary “Pañjikā” of his direct disciple Kamalaśīla (8th century). The article provides brief information about the authors of the text, on Jainism, its philosophical statements. The article is accompanied by the first transla­tion of the chapter from Sanskrit into Russian. The study is based on author’s own translation from Sanskrit, based on the publication of S.D. Shastri, as well as the only available translation of the text into English by G. Jha. The main conclusion is the assumption that the Buddhists in the text in ques­tion are trying to proceed from generally accepted logic, from the law of non-contradiction, while the Jains, obviously, are guided by other philosophical logic in which such a law does not apply.

In Ayurveda, the subject matter is told in the form of Sutras (Sanskrit verses). To make common people understand the hidden meaning of these verses our Acharyas especially the commentators have adopted application of Nyayas (Maxims) as one of the most relevant method. Chakrapani the famous commentator of Charaka Samhita has quoted various Maxims in his Ayurveda Dipika commentary. Keeping this in view, an attempt is made in the present study to trace out the various references of Nyayas mentioned in Charaka Samhita Sutra sthana.

AbstractThis article discusses the procreation of gods and sages in ancient India, which is contrasted to the ordinary way of procreation among human beings. It is sporadically mentioned in the classical Sanskrit literature, but more systematically in the commentary literature. The divine beings could dispense with sexual contact for bringing about their offspring and produce offspring by such acts as touching (śparsa), thinking (samkalpa), addressing (ullapana), smiling (upahasana), etc., some of which are also found in a list of the so-called dohadas of plants and trees for bringing about flowers (puspa).

Na๣īr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī (1201-1274) composed his Tadhkira at Marāgha in 1261 and altered it with his students and produced his “final version” at Baghdad in 1274. The Baghdad version with all its differences from the Marāgha version was published by Ragep [1993]. That the Tadhkira was considered important by astronomers writing in Arabic is amply attested to by the fact that Ragep [1993] can list fourteen commentaries and supercommentaries as well as refer to numerous other derivative texts.

AbstractIn Harivaṃśa chapter 83, Kṛṣṇa’s brother Baladeva changes the course of the river Yamunā, using his plough. This article reviews previous interpretations of Baladeva’s deed by André Couture and Lavanya Vemsani and develops in detail an interpretation briefly proposed by A. Whitney Sanford, whereby the deed is viewed, among many superimposed views, as at some level a sexual assault. This angle is explored in the article in various ways, with close reference to the Sanskrit text. The article includes discussion of the dialogue between Baladeva and the personified Yamunā, Baladeva’s connection to plough agriculture, the dynamic between Baladeva and Kṛṣṇa, and Vaiśaṃpāyana’s commentary on the events.

AbstractAn analysis of what the physical description of bodies tells us about the hypocritical characters of government officials, bawds, drunkards and dishonest gurus in Sanskrit satirical works. This paper presents selected portrayals of the physical female and male bodies from both satires and comic monologue plays. These satires make fun of hypocritical people in power, while the plays comment on life in the red light district. Bodies in these works are seen as mirrors and metaphors of the personalities and types who inhabit them, revealed both through their shape and their body language.

In general, readers, commentators, translators, and reviewers are bound to see shadows of themselves or of their own concerns in a poem. A poem is, in fact, a “patch” between desire and reality. Like a dream, a poem can be viewed as “reality encoded” (Skura 1981, 126). The issue is not what is actually on the page, what critic Harold Bloom calls the “manifest text” (Bloom 1987, 3). The poem is really what exists in that misty place between “writing” and “reading,” the “latent text,” the poem that lives in symbol or emblem. Though a poem certainly has a static life on a page, the actual events of reading, interpretation, and commentary are what give a poem a vital historical life. We are fortunate that over a millennium and a half of Sanskrit scholarship has yielded up to us actual records of historical moments of reading. And, since these recorded “moments” have become traditionally attached to various types of printed text, many of these commentaries have become as vital as the text itself. In some instances they have even superseded the text, as is true, I believe, in the case of Abhinavagupta's commentary on Ānandavardhana's Dhvanyāloka.

AbstractIn this article I edit and comment on the Hoernle manuscript IOL Toch 81 (H 149.292) with fragmentary texts in three languages, Sanskrit (6 lines) TocharianB (1 line) and Turkic (15 lines). The primary interest is in the Turkic text, which probably forms part of an upāsaka's vow. Its orthography, morphology and lexis, perceptibly different from standard Uighur, show features which point to high antiquity and perhaps to non-Uighur provenance. Some Buddhist terms seem to be deliberately designed on a Manichaean foil. Thus the Turkic part of the manuscript may date back to the second half of the ninth century, or, if non-Uighur, to an even earlier period.

The recent publication of the complete translation of the Yogasūtrabhāṣyavivaraṇa (also known as Pātañjalayogaśastrabhāṣyavivaraṇa and Bhagavatpadīya; henceforth abbreviated as Vivaraṇa) into English by Trevor Leggett is the latest contribution to the study of this intriguing and significant Sanskrit philosophical text. Prior to this publication (whose first two chapters were separately published already in 1981 and 1983 respectively) only a few excerpts thereof have been translated by Hajime Nakamura, into Japanese. It is a measure of the growing interest in the original text that it has attracted several astute preliminary studies, notably by P. Hacker, T. Vetter, W. Halbfass and A. Wezler in the West, and H. Nakamura in Japan.As it stands, the title of the printed English translation reads: ‘The complete commentary by Ṥaṅkara on the Yoga Sūtra-s-a full translation of the newly discovered text.’ This is regrettably likely to be misleading in more than one way.

The Nirantarapadavyākhyā by Jajjaṭa (or Jejjaṭa) is one of the earliest and,therefore, one of the most important commentaries on the Carakasaṃhitā. Thiscommentary is incomplete, but sufficient portions survive to allow a study ofthe earliest form of medical commentary in India. The extant portions of thiscommentary are large sections of the Cikitsāsthāna and part of the Kalpasthānaand Siddhisthāna. The text of Nirantarapadavyākhyā by Jajjaṭa has never beencritically edited. In this paper, we present a text-critical edition and translationof the Nirantarapadavyākhyā on the Carakasaṃhitā, Cikitsāsthāna Chapter 2,Quarter 1 (CaCi 2.1) based on several copies of a lost palm-leaf manuscriptin Malayalam script and the printed edition by Haridatta Śāstrin publishedin 1941. In order to follow the intellectual development of potency-therapy(vājīkaraṇa) in the Sanskrit medical literature, the remaining three extant majorcommentaries are also translated from the existing printed editions. These threecommentaries are Cakrapāṇidatta’s Āyurvedadīpikā in the eleventh century,Gaṅgādhara’s Jalpakalpataru in the mid-nineteenth century, and YogīndranāthSen’s Carakopaskāra in the early-twentieth century.

The paper presents a commented translation of the fragment Jāna-nirdeśa (The doctrine of knowledge) from the seventh part of the exegetic compendium Abhidharmakośabhāya ascribed to the eminent medieval Buddhist thinker Vasubandhu (4th5th centuries AD). The fragment can be used as a historical source for the study of evolution of the image of the Buddha in post-Canonical treatises where the real Śakyamuni was invested with the attributes of a transcendental object of religious cult. The text explicates the conceptual differences between the great compassion (mahākāruā), treated as the Buddhas attribute, and compassion (kāruā) as a characteristic trait of enlightened ascetics (śravakas and pratyekabuddhas) and explains the postulate of identity of all buddhas perfections (the perfection of religious merits and knowledge, the perfection of the Dharmic body, the perfection of serving all sentient beings). This is the first translation based on the Sanskrit edition by P. Pradhan (Pradhan 1967: 414416).

There are many primary sources that allow us to reconstruct Old Uighur medicine. This article considers those that demonstrate the following influences: folk medicine, Syriac medicine, Indian and Chinese medicine. The article includes general remarks on the Uighur translations of the Siddhasāra and its role in the history of Uighur medicine: the bilingual version, a list of the preserved parts of the monolingual Uighur version, medicinal plant names, and comments on general translation methods. The Uighur translation deviates considerably from the Sanskrit, but it exploits the medical knowledge it contains in interesting ways. A translation of such a medical compendium like the Siddhasāra was, nor is, an easy task. That we observe equivalents, substitutes and Turkic equivalents in the Uighur version is no wonder. Each of these has to be evaluated carefully. Much scholarly work has already been carried out by H. W. Bailey, R. Emmerick and D. Maue. In particular I would like to mention the contriburion of the first editor Reşid Rahmeti (Arat) [Rachmati] who read the texts first and translated them without knowledge of their real source. At that time he had already surmised that the model for the translation must have been a substantial work.

Following is a review оf the monograph published in 2019 by Yevgeniy G. Vyrshchikov ‘City — Village — Forest: The World of the Creators of the Pali Canon and Their Contemporaries’, which was published in 2019 by the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow (editors: V. V. Vertogradova and V. P. Androsov). This work is a cultural study of the so called Pali Canon, or Tipitaka — the early Buddhist Canon of the Theravada school. It is mainly devoted to ideas about space and related views on the structure of the world and society. To understand the cultural context of the existence of early Buddhist ideas about the world, other sources are also involved — Buddhist, Brahmanic and Hindu texts: Ceylon’s mahavamsa, Arthashastra, Ramayana, Chitrasutra, other Sanskrit texts and Ashoka’s epigraphic inscriptions. In addition, ancient sources are used, such as Strabo’s “Geography”, as well as medieval English ballads about Robin Hood. According to the author, the world of the Pali Canon is divided into three main units of space: The most sacred and pure is the forest — the place where shramans and other ascetics live. Its opposite is the city, which embodies all that is worldly, contrary to asceticism and opposed to it. They are separated by an intermediate area — the countryside (janapada). The monograph explores all three components of this world, analyzes the necessary terminology and conceptual apparatus. The review provides an overview of the main provisions of the monograph and makes some critical comments on its text.

The article deals with dhāraṇī texts included in the 108-volume Mongolian language Kangyur. A xylographic edition of the Mongolian Kangyur was delivered from expeditions to China by the Indian scientist Raghuvira, and subsequently used for reprint in the Śata-Piṭaka Series by Lokesh Chandra. A copy of this 108-volume serial publication was purchased through Buryat monasteries by the Kalmyk Gelong Tugmyud Gavji (O. M. Dordzhiev, 1887‒1980), and now constitutes a valuable part of the collection of old written sources at the Scientific Archive of Kalmyk Scientific Center (RAS). Analysis of tables of contents that precede each volume of the L. Chandra edition, and that of texts included show that dhāraṇī (Sanskrit dhāraṇī, Tib. Gzungs ‘spell’, Mong. tarni, toγtaγal ‘tarni, darani, magic formulas’) texts can be traced in a number of volumes and, respectively, in different sections, mainly in ones titled Dandr-a (‘Tantra’) and Eldeb (‘Collection of Sutras’). So, some volumes include single texts and others cluster them in single blocks (selections). The Dhāraṇī Titled ‘Heart-Essence [of the Holy One Possessing] Limitless Life and Knowledge’ is one such dhāraṇī text from Volume 23 transliterated and translated (with comments) in this work. Goals. The article examines available materials and provides an overview of dhāraṇī works within the Mongolian Kangyur, presents a translation of one notable dhāraṇī. Materials and Methods. The study gains comparative textual and structural insights into the Lokesh Chandra edition of the Kangyur and compares it to other editions, seeking to identify specific compositional features of various publications and reasons underlying the latter. Results and Conclusions. History of Mongolian Kangyur compilations – the compendium at large and its individual texts – is very complicated and requires further research.

Editor's note: Although the general policy of this journal is to publish only new research, an exception is being made in the present case, in order to publish a work of unusual value which has been inaccessible to most scholars for a century or more, and which has now been translated into English for the first time. In 1877, K. F. Holle published his Tabel van oud en nieuw-indische alphabetten, with the support of the Batavia Society of Arts and Letters (the Batavia of that period is the Jakarta of today); it was printed by C. Lang at Buitenzorg, Java. Hoik's "Table" is spread over 49 pages followed by four pages of appendices). In 81 rows, arranged in the Indic canonical order, it displays the symbols of 198 scripts, one per column, which are native to areas reaching from the Indian subcontinent to insular Southeast Asia. These are the writing systems of the Indic tradition that begins with the Brahmi script, used in the Buddhist inscriptions of the Emperor Asoka, in the 3rd century BCE. From that starting point, Holle's display moves forward in time and eastward from India, following the Brahmi-descended scripts through Tibet and Southeast Asia, then extending over the length of the Netherlands Indies, and finally ending with a sample from the Philippines. Neither before Hoik's time nor since has a comparable display been published, showing the multiple historical developments of a script over such an extension of time and space. For scholars interested in the myriad ways that scripts can change through history, Holle's "Table" is a unique source of data. It is reprinted here unchanged; readers will find that they need only know something of the Sanskrit phonological system in order to grasp the organization by rows, and a minimum of Dutch in order to understand the labeling of the columns. In 1882, Holle published a commentary on his "Table", with the added subtitle Bijdrage tot de palaeographie van Nederlandsch-Indie 'Contribution to the paleography of the Netherlands Indies'. This work, of just 20 pages, was again published by the Batavia Society of Arts and Letters; it was distributed by W. Bruining & Co., Batavia, and by M. Njhoff in The Hague. It is published here, preceding the "Table" proper, in an English translation by Carol Molony and Henk Pechler. A unified bibliographical listing, giving fuller citations than those provided by Holle, is a great desideratum; unfortunately, resources were not available for preparing such a listing. Also to be desired is a reconsideration and evaluation of Holle's materials in terms of scholarship since his time; I hope that the publication of this reprint will stimulate scholars to undertake such work. The editor is indebted to Elly Amade — a linguist, speaker of Dutch, and native of Indonesia —for help in preparing the translation for publication.

RESUMENEl artículo analiza las concepciones del espacio y del tiempo en el periodo védico tardío, utilizando como fuentes primarias el antiguo corpus de textos sánscritos conocido como upaniṣad. Para ello se estudian las diversas cosmogonías y las diferentes formas de legitimación de una gradual transformación del sacrificio público (dominante en la época védica temprana, caracterizada por las colecciones de himnos y una literatura de comentarios de carácter litúrgico) a la experiencia privada de la meditación y la especulación filosófica (característica de tradiciones ascéticas).PALABRAS CLAVECOSMOGONÍA, UPANIṣAD, ESPACIO, TIEMPOABSTRACTIn this article we analyse the conceptions of space and time in the later Vedic period, using as primary sources the old corpus of Sanskrit texts known as Upaniṣad. For this purpose we study the various cosmogonies and different forms of legitimation of a gradual transformation of the public sacrifice (dominant in early Vedic times, characterized by collections of hymns and a literature of comments of a liturgical nature) to the private meditation experience and philosophical speculation (characteristic of ascetic traditions).KEYWORDSCOSMOGONY, UPANIṣAD, SPACE, TIME

Abstract The Sanskrit Mahābhārata is considered to be a śāstra in Mādhva Vaiṣṇavism, and Madhva composed one of the earliest treatises dedicated to explaining the Mahābhārata’s deeper meaning. In doing so, he pays careful attention to the distinction between the righteous Pāṇḍavas and corrupt Kauravas—a distinction that exists in theory if not always in practice. How does Madhva demarcate the Kauravas and the Pāṇḍavas, and why does this matter for his own theology? Looking at two episodes that either blur or upend the demarcation of the Kauravas and Pāṇḍavas, the mace-battle between Bhīma and Duryodhana (9.60) and the Pāṇḍavas’ journey to heaven (17-18.3), this article shows how Madhva’s Mahābhāratatātparyanirṇaya explains key tenets of Madhva’s ontology and theology. When read carefully, each episode brings out important features of Madhva’s doctrine of devatātāratamya—the gradation of gods. Rather than simply understanding Madhva’s commentary as a theologisation or vedānticisation of the narrative, I argue that his exegesis itself develops and explains central doctrines of Dvaitavedānta, particularly tāratamya and aparokṣajñāna. Vedānticization, in this understanding then, is not simply bringing forth an interpretation of the narrative that fits one's prior philosophical commitments, but it is a process of constituting theology through the narrative.

From elephants to ABBA fans, silicon to hormone, the following discussion uses a new research method to look at printed text, motion pictures and a teenage rebel icon. If by ‘print’ we mean a mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium, then printing has been with us since before microdot security prints were painted onto cars, before voice prints, laser prints, network servers, record pressings, motion picture prints, photo prints, colour woodblock prints, before books, textile prints, and footprints. If we accept that higher mammals such as elephants have a learnt culture, then it is possible to extend a definition of printing beyond Homo sapiens. Poole reports that elephants mechanically trumpet reproductions of human car horns into the air surrounding their society. If nothing else, this cross-species, cross-cultural reproduction, this ‘ability to mimic’ is ‘another sign of their intelligence’. Observation of child development suggests that the first significant meaningful ‘impression’ made on the human mind is that of the face of the child’s nurturer – usually its mother. The baby’s mind forms an ‘impression’, a mental print, a reproducible memory data set, of the nurturer’s face, voice, smell, touch, etc. That face is itself a cultural construct: hair style, makeup, piercings, tattoos, ornaments, nutrition-influenced skin and smell, perfume, temperature and voice. A mentally reproducible pattern of a unique face is formed in the mind, and we use that pattern to distinguish ‘familiar and strange’ in our expanding social orbit. The social relations of patterned memory – of imprinting – determine the extent to which we explore our world (armed with research aids such as text print) or whether we turn to violence or self-harm (Bretherton). While our cultural artifacts (such as vellum maps or networked voice message servers) bravely extend our significant patterns into the social world and the traversed environment, it is useful to remember that such artifacts, including print, are themselves understood by our original pattern-reproduction and impression system – the human mind, developed in childhood. The ‘print’ is brought to mind differently in different discourses. For a reader, a ‘print’ is a book, a memo or a broadsheet, whether it is the Indian Buddhist Sanskrit texts ordered to be printed in 593 AD by the Chinese emperor Sui Wen-ti (Silk Road) or the US Defense Department memo authorizing lower ranks to torture the prisoners taken by the Bush administration (Sanchez, cited in ABC). Other fields see prints differently. For a musician, a ‘print’ may be the sheet music which spread classical and popular music around the world; it may be a ‘record’ (as in a ‘recording’ session), where sound is impressed to wax, vinyl, charged silicon particles, or the alloys (Smith, “Elpida”) of an mp3 file. For the fine artist, a ‘print’ may be any mechanically reproduced two-dimensional (or embossed) impression of a significant image in media from paper to metal, textile to ceramics. ‘Print’ embraces the Japanese Ukiyo-e colour prints of Utamaro, the company logos that wink from credit card holographs, the early photographs of Talbot, and the textured patterns printed into neolithic ceramics. Computer hardware engineers print computational circuits. Homicide detectives investigate both sweaty finger prints and the repeated, mechanical gaits of suspects, which are imprinted into the earthy medium of a crime scene. For film makers, the ‘print’ may refer to a photochemical polyester reproduction of a motion picture artifact (the reel of ‘celluloid’), or a DVD laser disc impression of the same film. Textualist discourse has borrowed the word ‘print’ to mean ‘text’, so ‘print’ may also refer to the text elements within the vision track of a motion picture: the film’s opening titles, or texts photographed inside the motion picture story such as the sword-cut ‘Z’ in Zorro (Niblo). Before the invention of writing, the main mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium was the humble footprint in the sand. The footprints of tribes – and neighbouring animals – cut tracks in the vegetation and the soil. Printed tracks led towards food, water, shelter, enemies and friends. Having learnt to pattern certain faces into their mental world, children grew older and were educated in the footprints of family and clan, enemies and food. The continuous impression of significant foot traffic in the medium of the earth produced the lines between significant nodes of prewriting and pre-wheeled cultures. These tracks were married to audio tracks, such as the song lines of the Australian Aborigines, or the ballads of tramping culture everywhere. A typical tramping song has the line, ‘There’s a track winding back to an old-fashion shack along the road to Gundagai,’ (O’Hagan), although this colonial-style song was actually written for radio and became an international hit on the airwaves, rather than the tramping trails. The printed tracks impressed by these cultural flows are highly contested and diverse, and their foot prints are woven into our very language. The names for printed tracks have entered our shared memory from the intersection of many cultures: ‘Track’ is a Germanic word entering English usage comparatively late (1470) and now used mainly in audio visual cultural reproduction, as in ‘soundtrack’. ‘Trek’ is a Dutch word for ‘track’ now used mainly by ecotourists and science fiction fans. ‘Learn’ is a Proto-Indo-European word: the verb ‘learn’ originally meant ‘to find a track’ back in the days when ‘learn’ had a noun form which meant ‘the sole of the foot’. ‘Tract’ and ‘trace’ are Latin words entering English print usage before 1374 and now used mainly in religious, and electronic surveillance, cultural reproduction. ‘Trench’ in 1386 was a French path cut through a forest. ‘Sagacity’ in English print in 1548 was originally the ability to track or hunt, in Proto-Indo-European cultures. ‘Career’ (in English before 1534) was the print made by chariots in ancient Rome. ‘Sleuth’ (1200) was a Norse noun for a track. ‘Investigation’ (1436) was Latin for studying a footprint (Harper). The arrival of symbolic writing scratched on caves, hearth stones, and trees (the original meaning of ‘book’ is tree), brought extremely limited text education close to home. Then, with baked clay tablets, incised boards, slate, bamboo, tortoise shell, cast metal, bark cloth, textiles, vellum, and – later – paper, a portability came to text that allowed any culture to venture away from known ‘foot’ paths with a reduction in the risk of becoming lost and perishing. So began the world of maps, memos, bills of sale, philosophic treatises and epic mythologies. Some of this was printed, such as the mechanical reproduction of coins, but the fine handwriting required of long, extended, portable texts could not be printed until the invention of paper in China about 2000 years ago. Compared to lithic architecture and genes, portable text is a fragile medium, and little survives from the millennia of its innovators. The printing of large non-text designs onto bark-paper and textiles began in neolithic times, but Sui Wen-ti’s imperial memo of 593 AD gives us the earliest written date for printed books, although we can assume they had been published for many years previously. The printed book was a combination of Indian philosophic thought, wood carving, ink chemistry and Chinese paper. The earliest surviving fragment of paper-print technology is ‘Mantras of the Dharani Sutra’, a Buddhist scripture written in the Sanskrit language of the Indian subcontinent, unearthed at an early Tang Dynasty site in Xian, China – making the fragment a veteran piece of printing, in the sense that Sanskrit books had been in print for at least a century by the early Tang Dynasty (Chinese Graphic Arts Net). At first, paper books were printed with page-size carved wooden boards. Five hundred years later, Pi Sheng (c.1041) baked individual reusable ceramic characters in a fire and invented the durable moveable type of modern printing (Silk Road 2000). Abandoning carved wooden tablets, the ‘digitizing’ of Chinese moveable type sped up the production of printed texts. In turn, Pi Sheng’s flexible, rapid, sustainable printing process expanded the political-cultural impact of the literati in Asian society. Digitized block text on paper produced a bureaucratic, literate elite so powerful in Asia that Louis XVI of France copied China’s print-based Confucian system of political authority for his own empire, and so began the rise of the examined public university systems, and the civil service systems, of most European states (Watson, Visions). By reason of its durability, its rapid mechanical reproduction, its culturally agreed signs, literate readership, revered authorship, shared ideology, and distributed portability, a ‘print’ can be a powerful cultural network which builds and expands empires. But print also attacks and destroys empires. A case in point is the Spanish conquest of Aztec America: The Aztecs had immense libraries of American literature on bark-cloth scrolls, a technology which predated paper. These libraries were wiped out by the invading Spanish, who carried a different book before them (Ewins). In the industrial age, the printing press and the gun were seen as the weapons of rebellions everywhere. In 1776, American rebels staffed their ‘Homeland Security’ units with paper makers, knowing that defeating the English would be based on printed and written documents (Hahn). Mao Zedong was a book librarian; Mao said political power came out of the barrel of a gun, but Mao himself came out of a library. With the spread of wireless networked servers, political ferment comes out of the barrel of the cell phone and the internet chat room these days. Witness the cell phone displays of a plane hitting a tower that appear immediately after 9/11 in the Middle East, or witness the show trials of a few US and UK lower ranks who published prints of their torturing activities onto the internet: only lower ranks who published prints were arrested or tried. The control of secure servers and satellites is the new press. These days, we live in a global library of burning books – ‘burning’ in the sense that ‘print’ is now a charged silicon medium (Smith, “Intel”) which is usually made readable by connecting the chip to nuclear reactors and petrochemically-fired power stations. World resources burn as we read our screens. Men, women, children burn too, as we watch our infotainment news in comfort while ‘their’ flickering dead faces are printed in our broadcast hearths. The print we watch is not the living; it is the voodoo of the living in the blackout behind the camera, engaging the blood sacrifice of the tormented and the unfortunate. Internet texts are also ‘on fire’ in the third sense of their fragility and instability as a medium: data bases regularly ‘print’ fail-safe copies in an attempt to postpone the inevitable mechanical, chemical and electrical failure that awaits all electronic media in time. Print defines a moral position for everyone. In reporting conflict, in deciding to go to press or censor, any ‘print’ cannot avoid an ethical context, starting with the fact that there is a difference in power between print maker, armed perpetrators, the weak, the peaceful, the publisher, and the viewer. So many human factors attend a text, video or voice ‘print’: its very existence as an aesthetic object, even before publication and reception, speaks of unbalanced, and therefore dynamic, power relationships. For example, Graham Greene departed unscathed from all the highly dangerous battlefields he entered as a novelist: Riot-torn Germany, London Blitz, Belgian Congo, Voodoo Haiti, Vietnam, Panama, Reagan’s Washington, and mafia Europe. His texts are peopled with the injustices of the less fortunate of the twentieth century, while he himself was a member of the fortunate (if not happy) elite, as is anyone today who has the luxury of time to read Greene’s works for pleasure. Ethically a member of London and Paris’ colonizers, Greene’s best writing still electrifies, perhaps partly because he was in the same line of fire as the victims he shared bread with. In fact, Greene hoped daily that he would escape from the dreadful conflicts he fictionalized via a body bag or an urn of ashes (see Sherry). In reading an author’s biography we have one window on the ethical dimensions of authority and print. If a print’s aesthetics are sometimes enduring, its ethical relationships are always mutable. Take the stylized logo of a running athlete: four limbs bent in a rotation of action. This dynamic icon has symbolized ‘good health’ in Hindu and Buddhist culture, from Madras to Tokyo, for thousands of years. The cross of bent limbs was borrowed for the militarized health programs of 1930s Germany, and, because of what was only a brief, recent, isolated yet monstrously horrific segment of its history in print, the bent-limbed swastika is now a vilified symbol in the West. The sign remains ‘impressed’ differently on traditional Eastern culture, and without the taint of Nazism. Dramatic prints are emotionally charged because, in depicting Homo sapiens in danger, or passionately in love, they elicit a hormonal reaction from the reader, the viewer, or the audience. The type of emotions triggered by a print vary across the whole gamut of human chemistry. A recent study of three genres of motion picture prints shows a marked differences in the hormonal responses of men compared to women when viewing a romance, an actioner, and a documentary (see Schultheiss, Wirth, and Stanton). Society is biochemically diverse in its engagement with printed culture, which raises questions about equality in the arts. Motion picture prints probably comprise around one third of internet traffic, in the form of stolen digitized movie files pirated across the globe via peer-to-peer file transfer networks (p2p), and burnt as DVD laser prints (BBC). There is also a US 40 billion dollar per annum legitimate commerce in DVD laser pressings (Grassl), which would suggest an US 80 billion per annum world total in legitimate laser disc print culture. The actively screen literate, or the ‘sliterati’ as I prefer to call them, research this world of motion picture prints via their peers, their internet information channels, their television programming, and their web forums. Most of this activity occurs outside the ambit of universities and schools. One large site of sliterate (screen literate) practice outside most schooling and official research is the net of online forums at imdb.com (International Movie Data Base). Imdb.com ‘prints’ about 25,000,000 top pages per month to client browsers. Hundreds of sliterati forums are located at imdb, including a forum for the Australian movie, Muriel’s Wedding (Hogan). Ten years after the release of Muriel’s Wedding, young people who are concerned with victimization and bullying still log on to http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/> and put their thoughts into print: I still feel so bad for Muriel in the beginning of the movie, when the girls ‘dump’ her, and how much the poor girl cried and cried! Those girls were such biartches…I love how they got their comeuppance! bunniesormaybemidgets’s comment is typical of the current discussion. Muriel’s Wedding was a very popular film in its first cinema edition in Australia and elsewhere. About 30% of the entire over-14 Australian population went to see this photochemical polyester print in the cinemas on its first release. A decade on, the distributors printed a DVD laser disc edition. The story concerns Muriel (played by Toni Collette), the unemployed daughter of a corrupt, ‘police state’ politician. Muriel is bullied by her peers and she withdraws into a fantasy world, deluding herself that a white wedding will rescue her from the torments of her blighted life. Through theft and deceit (the modus operandi of her father) Muriel escapes to the entertainment industry and finds a ‘wicked’ girlfriend mentor. From a rebellious position of stubborn independence, Muriel plays out her fantasy. She gets her white wedding, before seeing both her father and her new married life as hollow shams which have goaded her abandoned mother to suicide. Redefining her life as a ‘game’ and assuming responsibility for her independence, Muriel turns her back on the mainstream, image-conscious, female gang of her oppressed youth. Muriel leaves the story, having rekindled her friendship with her rebel mentor. My methodological approach to viewing the laser disc print was to first make a more accessible, coded record of the entire movie. I was able to code and record the print in real time, using a new metalanguage (Watson, “Eyes”). The advantage of Coding is that ‘thinks’ the same way as film making, it does not sidetrack the analyst into prose. The Code splits the movie print into Vision Action [vision graphic elements, including text] (sound) The Coding splits the vision track into normal action and graphic elements, such as text, so this Coding is an ideal method for extracting all the text elements of a film in real time. After playing the film once, I had four and a half tightly packed pages of the coded story, including all its text elements in square brackets. Being a unique, indexed hard copy, the Coded copy allowed me immediate access to any point of the Muriel’s Wedding saga without having to search the DVD laser print. How are ‘print’ elements used in Muriel’s Wedding? Firstly, a rose-coloured monoprint of Muriel Heslop’s smiling face stares enigmatically from the plastic surface of the DVD picture disc. The print is a still photo captured from her smile as she walked down the aisle of her white wedding. In this print, Toni Collette is the Mona Lisa of Australian culture, except that fans of Muriel’s Wedding know the meaning of that smile is a magical combination of the actor’s art: the smile is both the flush of dreams come true and the frightening self deception that will kill her mother. Inserting and playing the disc, the text-dominant menu appears, and the film commences with the text-dominant opening titles. Text and titles confer a legitimacy on a work, whether it is a trade mark of the laser print owners, or the household names of stars. Text titles confer status relationships on both the presenters of the cultural artifact and the viewer who has entered into a legal license agreement with the owners of the movie. A title makes us comfortable, because the mind always seeks to name the unfamiliar, and a set of text titles does that job for us so that we can navigate the ‘tracks’ and settle into our engagement with the unfamiliar. The apparent ‘truth’ and ‘stability’ of printed text calms our fears and beguiles our uncertainties. Muriel attends the white wedding of a school bully bride, wearing a leopard print dress she has stolen. Muriel’s spotted wild animal print contrasts with the pure white handmade dress of the bride. In Muriel’s leopard textile print, we have the wild, rebellious, impoverished, inappropriate intrusion into the social ritual and fantasy of her high-status tormentor. An off-duty store detective recognizes the printed dress and calls the police. The police are themselves distinguished by their blue-and-white checked prints and other mechanically reproduced impressions of cultural symbols: in steel, brass, embroidery, leather and plastics. Muriel is driven in the police car past the stenciled town sign (‘Welcome To Porpoise Spit’ heads a paragraph of small print). She is delivered to her father, a politician who presides over the policing of his town. In a state where the judiciary, police and executive are hijacked by the same tyrant, Muriel’s father, Bill, pays off the police constables with a carton of legal drugs (beer) and Muriel must face her father’s wrath, which he proceeds to transfer to his detested wife. Like his daughter, the father also wears a spotted brown print costume, but his is a batik print from neighbouring Indonesia (incidentally, in a nation that takes the political status of its batik prints very seriously). Bill demands that Muriel find the receipt for the leopard print dress she claims she has purchased. The legitimate ownership of the object is enmeshed with a printed receipt, the printed evidence of trade. The law (and the paramilitary power behind the law) are legitimized, or contested, by the presence or absence of printed text. Muriel hides in her bedroom, surround by poster prints of the pop group ABBA. Torn-out prints of other people’s weddings adorn her mirror. Her face is embossed with the clown-like primary colours of the marionette as she lifts a bouquet to her chin and stares into the real time ‘print’ of her mirror image. Bill takes the opportunity of a business meeting with Japanese investors to feed his entire family at ‘Charlie Chan’’s restaurant. Muriel’s middle sister sloppily wears her father’s state election tee shirt, printed with the text: ‘Vote 1, Bill Heslop. You can’t stop progress.’ The text sets up two ironic gags that are paid off on the dialogue track: “He lost,’ we are told. ‘Progress’ turns out to be funding the concreting of a beach. Bill berates his daughter Muriel: she has no chance of becoming a printer’s apprentice and she has failed a typing course. Her dysfunction in printed text has been covered up by Bill: he has bribed the typing teacher to issue a printed diploma to his daughter. In the gambling saloon of the club, under the arrays of mechanically repeated cultural symbols lit above the poker machines (‘A’ for ace, ‘Q’ for queen, etc.), Bill’s secret girlfriend Diedre risks giving Muriel a cosmetics job. Another text icon in lights announces the surf nightclub ‘Breakers’. Tania, the newly married queen bitch who has made Muriel’s teenage years a living hell, breaks up with her husband, deciding to cash in his negotiable text documents – his Bali honeymoon tickets – and go on an island holiday with her girlfriends instead. Text documents are the enduring site of agreements between people and also the site of mutations to those agreements. Tania dumps Muriel, who sobs and sobs. Sobs are a mechanical, percussive reproduction impressed on the sound track. Returning home, we discover that Muriel’s older brother has failed a printed test and been rejected for police recruitment. There is a high incidence of print illiteracy in the Heslop family. Mrs Heslop (Jeannie Drynan), for instance, regularly has trouble at the post office. Muriel sees a chance to escape the oppression of her family by tricking her mother into giving her a blank cheque. Here is the confluence of the legitimacy of a bank’s printed negotiable document with the risk and freedom of a blank space for rebel Muriel’s handwriting. Unable to type, her handwriting has the power to steal every cent of her father’s savings. She leaves home and spends the family’s savings at an island resort. On the island, the text print-challenged Muriel dances to a recording (sound print) of ABBA, her hand gestures emphasizing her bewigged face, which is made up in an impression of her pop idol. Her imitation of her goddesses – the ABBA women, her only hope in a real world of people who hate or avoid her – is accompanied by her goddesses’ voices singing: ‘the mystery book on the shelf is always repeating itself.’ Before jpeg and gif image downloads, we had postcard prints and snail mail. Muriel sends a postcard to her family, lying about her ‘success’ in the cosmetics business. The printed missal is clutched by her father Bill (Bill Hunter), who proclaims about his daughter, ‘you can’t type but you really impress me’. Meanwhile, on Hibiscus Island, Muriel lies under a moonlit palm tree with her newly found mentor, ‘bad girl’ Ronda (Rachel Griffiths). In this critical scene, where foolish Muriel opens her heart’s yearnings to a confidante she can finally trust, the director and DP have chosen to shoot a flat, high contrast blue filtered image. The visual result is very much like the semiabstract Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints by Utamaro. This Japanese printing style informed the rise of European modern painting (Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, etc., were all important collectors and students of Ukiyo-e prints). The above print and text elements in Muriel’s Wedding take us 27 minutes into her story, as recorded on a single page of real-time handwritten Coding. Although not discussed here, the Coding recorded the complete film – a total of 106 minutes of text elements and main graphic elements – as four pages of Code. Referring to this Coding some weeks after it was made, I looked up the final code on page four: taxi [food of the sea] bq. Translation: a shop sign whizzes past in the film’s background, as Muriel and Ronda leave Porpoise Spit in a taxi. Over their heads the text ‘Food Of The Sea’ flashes. We are reminded that Muriel and Ronda are mermaids, fantastic creatures sprung from the brow of author PJ Hogan, and illuminated even today in the pantheon of women’s coming-of-age art works. That the movie is relevant ten years on is evidenced by the current usage of the Muriel’s Wedding online forum, an intersection of wider discussions by sliterate women on imdb.com who, like Muriel, are observers (and in some cases victims) of horrific pressure from ambitious female gangs and bullies. Text is always a minor element in a motion picture (unless it is a subtitled foreign film) and text usually whizzes by subliminally while viewing a film. By Coding the work for [text], all the text nuances made by the film makers come to light. While I have viewed Muriel’s Wedding on many occasions, it has only been in Coding it specifically for text that I have noticed that Muriel is a representative of that vast class of talented youth who are discriminated against by print (as in text) educators who cannot offer her a life-affirming identity in the English classroom. Severely depressed at school, and failing to type or get a printer’s apprenticeship, Muriel finds paid work (and hence, freedom, life, identity, independence) working in her audio visual printed medium of choice: a video store in a new city. Muriel found a sliterate admirer at the video store but she later dumped him for her fantasy man, before leaving him too. One of the points of conjecture on the imdb Muriel’s Wedding site is, did Muriel (in the unwritten future) get back together with admirer Brice Nobes? That we will never know. While a print forms a track that tells us where culture has been, a print cannot be the future, a print is never animate reality. At the end of any trail of prints, one must lift one’s head from the last impression, and negotiate satisfaction in the happening world. References Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Memo Shows US General Approved Interrogations.” 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. British Broadcasting Commission. “Films ‘Fuel Online File-Sharing’.’’ 22 Feb. 2005 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3890527.stm>. Bretherton, I. “The Origins of Attachment Theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth.” 1994. 23 Jan. 2005 http://www.psy.med.br/livros/autores/bowlby/bowlby.pdf>. Bunniesormaybemidgets. Chat Room Comment. “What Did Those Girls Do to Rhonda?” 28 Mar. 2005 http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/>. Chinese Graphic Arts Net. Mantras of the Dharani Sutra. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.cgan.com/english/english/cpg/engcp10.htm>. Ewins, R. Barkcloth and the Origins of Paper. 1991. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.justpacific.com/pacific/papers/barkcloth~paper.html>. Grassl K.R. The DVD Statistical Report. 14 Mar. 2005 http://www.corbell.com>. Hahn, C. M. The Topic Is Paper. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.nystamp.org/Topic_is_paper.html>. Harper, D. Online Etymology Dictionary. 14 Mar. 2005 http://www.etymonline.com/>. Mask of Zorro, The. Screenplay by J McCulley. UA, 1920. Muriel’s Wedding. Dir. PJ Hogan. Perf. Toni Collette, Rachel Griffiths, Bill Hunter, and Jeannie Drynan. Village Roadshow, 1994. O’Hagan, Jack. On The Road to Gundagai. 1922. 2 Apr. 2005 http://ingeb.org/songs/roadtogu.html>. Poole, J.H., P.L. Tyack, A.S. Stoeger-Horwath, and S. Watwood. “Animal Behaviour: Elephants Are Capable of Vocal Learning.” Nature 24 Mar. 2005. Sanchez, R. “Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy.” 14 Sept. 2003. 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. Schultheiss, O.C., M.M. Wirth, and S.J. Stanton. “Effects of Affiliation and Power Motivation Arousal on Salivary Progesterone and Testosterone.” Hormones and Behavior 46 (2005). Sherry, N. The Life of Graham Greene. 3 vols. London: Jonathan Cape 2004, 1994, 1989. Silk Road. Printing. 2000. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.silk-road.com/artl/printing.shtml>. Smith, T. “Elpida Licenses ‘DVD on a Chip’ Memory Tech.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. —. “Intel Boffins Build First Continuous Beam Silicon Laser.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. Watson, R. S. “Eyes And Ears: Dramatic Memory Slicing and Salable Media Content.” Innovation and Speculation, ed. Brad Haseman. Brisbane: QUT. [in press] Watson, R. S. Visions. Melbourne: Curriculum Corporation, 1994. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Watson, Robert. "E-Press and Oppress: Audio Visual Print Drama, Identity, Text and Motion Picture Rebellion." M/C Journal 8.2 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/08-watson.php>. APA Style Watson, R. (Jun. 2005) "E-Press and Oppress: Audio Visual Print Drama, Identity, Text and Motion Picture Rebellion," M/C Journal, 8(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/08-watson.php>.

The effects of translation have been felt in the development of most languages, but it is particularly marked in English language and literature, where it is a highly charged topic because of its fundamental connection with colonial expansion. Britain shaped a "national" literary identity through borrowing from other languages and infected and inflected other languages and literatures in the course of cultural migrations that occurred in Europe since at least the medieval period onward. As Stephen Greenblatt points out in his essay, "Racial Memory and Literary History," the discovery that English is a "mixed, impure, and constantly shifting medium" is not a new one, citing the preface to the first etymological dictionary in English, published in 1689, in which its author describes English as a hybrid tongue: a Composition of most, if not all the Languages of Europe; especially of the Belgick or Low-Dutch, Saxon, Teutonic or High-Dutch, Cambro-British or Welsh, French, Spanish, Italian, and Latin; and now and then of the Old and Modern Danish, and Ancient High-Dutch; also of the Greek, Hebrew, Arabick, Chaldee, Syriack, and Turcick. ((Skinner A3v-A4r, in Greenblatt 52) The "English" literary canon has translated material at its heart; there is the Bible, for instance, and classical works in Greek, which are read and discussed in translation by many who study them. Beowulf is a translation that has been canonized as one of the "original" texts of English literature, and Shakespeare was inspired by translations. Consider, for instance, Greenblatt's description of The Comedy of Errors, where a "Plautine character from a Sicilian city, finding himself in the market square of a city in Asia Minor, invokes Arctic shamanism – and all this had to make sense to a mixed audience in a commercial theater in London" (58), and there is a strong sense of the global cultural discourse that has been translated into a "national" and international canon of literature in English. English as a language and as a literature, however, has not been contained by national boundaries for some time, and in fact is now more comfortably conceived in the plural, or as uncountable, like a multidirectional flow. English has therefore been translated from solid, settled, and certain representations of Anglo-Celtic culture in the singular to a plurality of shifting, hybrid productions and performances which illuminate the tension implicit in cultural exchange. Translation has become a popular trope used by critics to describe that interaction within literatures defined by language rather than nation, and as a mutable and mutual process of reading and reinscription which illuminates relationships of power. The most obvious power relationship that translation represents, of course, is that between the so-called original and the translation; between the creativity of the author and the derivation of the translator. In The Translator's Invisibility (1995), Lawrence Venuti suggests that there is a prevailing conception of the author as a free and unconstrained individual who partially shapes the relationship: "the author freely expresses his thoughts and feelings in writing, which is thus viewed as an original and transparent self-representation, unmediated by transindividual determinants (linguistic, cultural, social) that might complicate authorial individuality" (6). The translation then can only be defined as an inferior representation, "derivative, fake, potentially a false copy" (7) and the translator as performing the translation in the manner of an actor manipulating lines written by someone else: "translators playact as authors, and translations pass for original texts" (7). The transparent translation and the invisibility of the translator, Venuti argues can be seen as "a mystification of troubling proportions, an amazingly successful concealment of the multiple determinants and effects of English-language translation, the multiple hierarchies and exclusions in which it is implicated" (16). That is, translation exerts its own power in constructing identities and representing difference, in addition to the power derived from the "original" text, which, in fact, the translation may resist. Recognition of this power suggests that traditional Western representations of translation as an echo or copy, a slave toiling on the plantation or seductive belle infidèle, each with its clear affinity to sexual and colonial conquest, attempts to deny translation the possibility of its own power and the assertion of its own creative identity. However, the establishment of an alternative power arrangement exists because translations can "masquerade as originals" (Chamberlain 67) and infiltrate and subvert literary systems in disguise. As Susan Stewart contends in Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation, if we "begin with the relation between authority and writing practices rather than with an assumption of authorial originality, we arrive at a quite different sense of history" (9) and, indeed, a different sense of literary creativity. This remainder of this paper will focus on Nicole Brossard's Le désert mauve and Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, to exemlify how a translator may flaunts her creativity, and allow the cultural position of the translator vis à vis language, history, or gender to be critically exposed by the text itself. Québécoise feminist writer Nicole Brossard's 1987 novel, Le désert mauve [Mauve Desert], is perhaps the most striking example of how a translator foregrounds the creative process of reading and re-writing. Brossard constructed her novel by becoming her own reader and asking questions, imagining dialogues between the characters she had already created. This "interactive discourse" shaped the text, which is a dialogue between two versions of a story, and between two writers, one of whom is an active reader, a translator. Le désert mauve is a structural triptych, consisting of Laure Angstelle's novel, Le désert mauve, and Mauve l'horizon, a translation of Angstelle's book by Maude Laures. In the space between the two sites of writing, the translator imagines the possibilities of the text she has read, "re-imagining the characters' lives, the objects, the dialogue" (Interview, 23 April 96). Between the versions of the desert story, she creates a fluid dimension of désir, or desire, a "space to swim with the words" (Interview). Brossard has said that "before the idea of the novel had definitely shaped itself," she knew that it would be in a "hot place, where the weather, la température, would be almost unbearable: people would be sweating; the light would be difficult" (Mauve Desert: A CD-ROM Translation). That site became the desert of the American southwest with its beauty and danger, its timelessness and history, and its decadent traces of Western civilization in the litter of old bottles and abandoned, rusting cars. The author imagined the desert through the images and words of books she read about the desert, appropriating the flowers and cacti that excited her through their names, seduced her through language. Maude Laures, the translator within Brossard's novel, finds the desert as a dimension of her reading, too: "a space, a landscape, an enigma entered with each reading" (133). From her first readings of a novel she has discovered in a used bookshop, Laures, confronts the "the issue of control. Who owns the meaning of the black marks on the page, the writer or the reader?" (Godard 115), and decides the book will belong to her, "and that she can do everything because she has fallen in love with the book, and therefore she's taken possession of the book, the author, the characters, the desert" (Interview). The translator is fascinated by Mélanie, the 15-year-old narrator, who drives her mother's car across the desert, and who has been captivated by the voice and beauty of the geometrician, Angela Parkins, imagining dialogues between these two characters as they linger in the motel parking lot. But she is unwilling to imagine words with l'homme long (longman), who composes beautiful equations that cause explosions in the desert, recites Sanskrit poems, and thumbs through porno in his hotel room. Le désert mauve was an attempt by Brossard to translate from French to French, but the descriptions of the desert landscape – the saguaro, senita, ocotillos, and arroyo—show Spanish to be the language of the desert. In her translation, Maude Laures increases the code switching and adds more Spanish phrases to her text, and Japanese, too, to magnify the echo of nuclear destruction that resonates in l'homme long's equations. She also renames the character l'homme oblong (O'blongman) to increase the dimension of danger he represents. Linking the desert through language with nuclear testing gives it a "semantic density," as Nicholis Entrikin calls it, that extends far beyond the geographical location to recognize the events embedded in that space through associative memory. L'homme long is certainly linked through language to J Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the original atomic bomb project in Los Alamos, New Mexico and his reference to the Bhagavad Gita after seeing the effects of the atomic bomb: "I/am/become Death—now we are all sons of bitches" (17). The translator distances herself by a translating Death/I /am/death—I'm a sonofabitch" (173). The desert imagined by Laure Angstelle seduces the reader, Maude Laures, and her translation project creates a trajectory which links the heat and light of the desert with the cold and harsh reflective glare of sunlit snow in wintry Montréal, where the "misleading reflections" of the desert's white light is subject to the translator's gaze. Laures leans into the desert peopled with geometricians and scientists and lesbians living under poisonous clouds of smoke that stop time, and tilts her translation in another direction. In the final chapter of Laure Angstelle's novel, Mélanie had danced in the arms of Angela Parkins, only to find she had run out of time: Angela is shot (perhaps by l'homme long) and falls to the dance floor. Maudes Laures is constrained by the story and by reality, but translates "There was no more time" into "One more time," allowing the lovers' dance to continue for at least another breath, room for another ending. Brossard has asserted that, like lesbian desire or the translator, the desert was located in the background of our thoughts. Ondaatje's novel, The English Patient (1992), locates the translator in the desert, linking a profession and a place which have both witnessed an averting of Western eyes, both used in linguistic and imperial enterprises that operate under conditions of camouflage. Linked also by association is the war in the Sahara and the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan. As in Brossard, the desert here is a destination reached by reading, how "history enters us" through maps and language. Almásy, "the English patient," knew the desert before he had been there, "knew when Alexander had traversed it in an earlier age, for this cause or that greed" (18). Books in code also serve to guide spies and armies across the desert, and like a book, the desert is "crowded with the world" (285), while it is "raped by war and shelled as if it were just sand" (257). Here the translator is representative of a writing that moves between positions and continually questions its place in history. Translators and explorers write themselves out of a text, rendering themselves invisible and erasing traces of their emotions, their doubts, beliefs, and loves, in order to produce a "neutral" text, much in the way that colonialism empties land of human traces in order to claim it, or the way technology is airbrushed out of the desert in order to conceal "the secret of the deserts from Unweinat to Hiroshima" (295). Almásy the translator, the spy, whose identity is always a subject of speculation, knows how the eye can be fooled as it reads a text in disguise; floating on a raft of morphine, he rewrites the monotone of history in different modes, inserting between the terse lines of commentary a counternarrative of love illumined by "the communal book of moonlight" (261), which translates lives and gives them new meaning. The translator's creativity stems from a collaboration and a love for the text; to deny the translation process its creative credibility is synonymous in The English Patient with the denial of any desire that may violate the social rules of the game of love by unfairly demanding fidelity. If seas move away to leave shifting desert sands, why should lovers not drift, or translations? Ultimately, we are all communal translations, says Ondaatje's novel, of the shifting relationship between histories and personal identities. "We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience" (261). This representation of the translator resists the view of identity "which attempts to recover an immutable origin, a fixed and eternal representation of itself" (Ashcroft 4) by its insistence that we are transformed in and by our versions of reality, just as we are by our readings of fiction. The translators represented in Brossard and Ondaatje suggest that the process of translation is a creative one, which acknowledges influence, contradictory currents, and choice its heart. The complexity of the choices a translator makes and the mulitiplicity of positions from which she may write suggest a process of translation that is neither transparent nor complete. Rather than the ubiquitous notion of the translator as "a servant an invisible hand mechanically turning the word of one language into another" (Godard 91), the translator creatively 'forges in the smithy of the soul' a version of story that is a complex "working model of inclusive consciousness" (Heaney 8) that seeks to loosen another tongue and another reading in an eccentric literary version of oral storytelling. References Ashcroft, Bill. Post-Colonial Transformation. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Brossard, Nicole. Le désert mauve. Montréal: l'Hexagone, 1987. Mauve Desert. Trans. Susanne Lotbinière-Harwood. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1990. Brossard, Nicole. Personal Interview. With Beverley Curran and Mitoko Hirabayashi, Montreal, April 1996. Chamberlain, Lori. "Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation." Reinventing Translation. Lawrence Venuti, Ed. 57-73. Godard, Barbara. "Translating (With) the Speculum." Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction 4 (2) 1991: 85-121. Greenblatt, Stephen. "Racial Memory and Literary History." PMLA 116 (1), January 2001: 48-63. Heaney, Seamus. "The Redress of Poetry." The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures. London, Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995. 1-16. Jenik, Adriene. Mauve Desert: A CD-ROM Translation. Los Angeles: Shifting Horizon Productions, 1997. Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient. Toronto: Vintage Books, 1993. Stewart, Susan. Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991. Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation. London, New York: Routledge, 1995.