Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is one among many translators of Mahasweta Devi but one who deliberates upon the act of translation both from theoretical as well as practical perspectives. She is also someone who enjoys Devi’s approval and who consciously caters to an international readership. This paper attempts to critically examine the relationship between her theory of translation as predicated on the notion of “surrender to the text” and her practice of translation of Devi’s texts, wherein the translated text is interlaced with dense commentary and is consumed by the English language reader in a heavily mediated form as also to study how effective is this notion of “surrender” to understand the process of translation as such. An attempt has also been made to highlight the politics of translating into English rather than not for a select audience. On the one hand, through her translations, she makes Devi available to an international English language audience, on the other, such attempts at mediation, domestication, institutionalization, appropriation, assimilation and cooptation qualify for a different kind of racism. While acknowledging the necessity yet impossibility of translation, this paper deliberates on some important questions viz can the subaltern speak, who can/should speak for the subaltern, what are the alternatives and what constitutes an ethics of translation.