Critical Intimacy: An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak:

April 29, 2019 7:47 AM

Steve Paulson interviews Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak When she first started working on a translation of Derrida’s treatise, Spivak was an unknown academic in her mid-20s — “this young Asian girl,” as she says, trying to navigate the strange world of American academe. Spivak was a most unlikely translator. She had no formal training in philosophy and was not a native English or French speaker, so it was an audacious — almost preposterous — project to translate such a complex work of high theory. She not only translated the book; she also wrote her own monograph-length preface that introduced Derrida to a new generation of literary scholars.
posted by gusottertrout (9 comments total)

Now off to deconstruct the translation of a deconstructed deconstruction.
posted by sammyo at 8:02 AM on April 29, 2019

Thank you gusottertrout -- I have heard Spivak's name for years but never learned more about her. What fascinating points of view she shares in this interview! I particularly appreciated getting to learn more about how she deals forthrightly with the distance between her and some of her students.
posted by brainwane at 8:09 AM on April 29, 2019

I had no idea that someone translated it from French to English, when neither was her native language. That is remarkable, to say the least.
posted by thelonius at 8:10 AM on April 29, 2019 [2 favorites]

I have heard Spivak's name for years but never learned more about her. What fascinating points of view she shares in this interview! I particularly appreciated getting to learn more about how she deals forthrightly with the distance between her and some of her students.

Yeah, it was the same for me. I debated using her "I'm your enemy" quote as the pull text, but it didn't quite read right.
posted by gusottertrout at 8:11 AM on April 29, 2019

"I only met him in 1971. And I did not recognize him until he came up to me and said, in French, “Je m’appelle Jacques Derrida,” and I almost died."

Haha! That's very endearing.
I'm re-reading Spivak's Can the Subaltern Speak? right this moment and I'm still not the greatest fan of her cumbersome use of language (and neither is she, apparently, by referring to this essay as "torpid piece") but the theory itself is unquestionably seminal.
posted by bigendian at 8:12 AM on April 29, 2019 [3 favorites]

So I thought, “Well, I’m a smart young foreign woman, and here’s an unknown author. Nobody’s going to give me a contract for a book on him, so why don’t I try to translate him?” And I had heard at a cocktail party that the University of Massachusetts Press was doing translations, so I wrote them a very innocent query letter in late 1967 or early 1968. They told me later that they found my query letter so brave and sweet that they thought they should give me a chance. [Laughs.] It’s really ridiculous, but there it was.

Oh, that's fantastic. I love stories like this, where someone just sees an opportunity and does the thing. And then becomes a superstar!
posted by xingcat at 8:22 AM on April 29, 2019 [6 favorites]

Man, I need to reread “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” which I remember having a big impact on younger me. That was an interesting interview. I have to admit, I didn’t know that much about her beyond that essay.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 10:14 AM on April 29, 2019

Can the subaltern speak? In pdf
posted by pasici at 4:51 PM on April 29, 2019 [3 favorites]

Great interview. I never wanted to read Derrida, but now I do.
posted by zompist at 8:11 PM on April 29, 2019