translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

Richard’s journey from childhood to maturity, from the cultivation of
his imagination to the search for a forceful realist style, from a plantation
“Black boy” to an engaged Black intellectual, is paralleled by forays into
various aspects of Black experience in America. Though Wright is
identified by others as a Black Boy and a colored man, his personal sense of
his uniqueness in his yearning for emotional liveliness indicates that his
life, as he reconstructed it in Black Boy and American Hunger, stands in both
metonymic and metaphorical relationship to collective Black identity and
Black experience.
In an ironic gesture, Black Boy is framed by a Biblical quote, though
throughout the book one of the author/narrator’s main jeremiads is against
religion: “His strength shall be hunger-bitten,/And destruction shall be
ready at his side.” (Wright, 1991: 4)
One hermeneutic key into the book then is via the figure of Job.
Traditionally, Job has been considered an epitome of patience, resilience and
mute acceptance of confrontations with divine violence. In the
fundamentalist family of Wright’s grandmother, Job must have served as an
exemplary figure, whose life epitomized grandma’s notion of “good life.”
On a macro scale, “good life” in the South consisted in daily, more or
less conscious surrender of one’s self in the hands of white masters. Like
Job, Black Americans practiced submission, renunciation of their own will,
and complacent acceptance of their abuse at the hands of the whites.
However, whereas Job put his life in God’s hands out of an initial gesture
of trust and faith, and in the hope of ultimate delivery, for Black Americans
there was no earthly salvation to be expected from white Southerners, nor,
in Wright’s portrayal, any consistent concern to change the circumstances
of their life and survive as a group. Social change is not only “not done”,
but not even thinkable, since Richard’s constant questions about relations
between Blacks and Whites in America always meet with stern denial of an
answer. If there is any change in behavior, that change implies the
refinement of one’s ways to bow down lower in front of the whites, and to
adapt to a culture of terror that requires complete submissiveness and
denial of actions, words and thoughts.
Submissiveness, awe and lack of social and political agency make up
an utterly non-flattering portrait of life in the South. This is surprising
because by the time when Wright published Black Boy in 1945, two
convergent tendencies had been crystallized in the portrayal of Black
identity and Black experience in the South. On the first hand, there was the
tradition of Black writers describing the vibes and warmth of plantation life
and Black communities that found within themselves the resource to
endure in the face of white regimes of absolute institutions. (Frederickson,
Lasch, 1973: 123) In J. Lee Greene’s words,
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