'On the 'not translated': rethinking translation and food in cross-cultural contexts: a response to 'Translation and food: The case of mestizo writers' by Ma Carmen Africa Vidal Claramonte and Pamela Faber'

摘要

'Food passes any boundary you care to mention' notes the narrator in Salman Rushdie's (1988) novel, The Satanic Verses. In the passage in question, Hind, the fierce and voluble figure at the helm the famed Shaandarr Cafe in London, is remembered as a once 'most blushing of brides' in Dhaka, Bangladesh, ministering to her new husband, the 'erudite schoolmaster' Muhammed Sufyan, a dazzling variety of food and drink. Hind admires her 'secularist husband's... pluralistic openness of mind' (245) and matches his interest in the 'multiple cultures of the [Indian] subcontinent' by first 'struggling' to read key Indian and European writings, and then by 'struggling in her kitchen' (246) to explore the Indian subcontinent by cooking its different regional foods: 'the dosas and uttapams of South India as well as the soft meatballs of Kashmir... the highly spiced dishes of Hyderabad and the high-faluting yoghurt sauces of Lucknow' (246). Such culinary and gastronomical eclecticism becomes a 'grand passion' (246) for Hind but also, in time, a commercially viable business in London. Her famous cooking skills enable her to support her family, and to buy the four-storey building above the Cafe to rent out to other migrants (notably the mysterious Saladin Chamcha). Like the atravesados of the lead article, Translation and food', in her London Cafe, Hind occupies an 'intercultural space' in which she is uniquely placed to enact culinary deterritorializations and reterritorializations of regional Indian food, re-presenting these 'local' cusines within a new glocal context. This is 'a cosmopolitan space in which there is a blending of indigenous and Western discourses' (Claramonte and Faber 2017, 18): the multicultural, migrant city of London.