Reading Rushdie in Translation: Midnight’s Children, Postcolonial Writing/Translation, and Literatures of the World

Abstract

This article examines translations of Salman Rushdie's second novel, Midnight's Children, into French, German, Italian, and Turkish. Specific examples reveal that while all translators maintain a foreignizing stance toward the source text, their respective target languages and cultures make foreignizing a relative effect, dependent on the target language and target culture's distance from or proximity to the source text/culture. The article also argues that Rushdie's novel fits the notion of literatures of the world, because the translations replicate and also refract the source text in different contexts, thus effectively multiplying a single source novel to become plural in its multiple (language) worlds.