Unit 3 blog

“Translation and Literary History: An Indian View”

                           - Ganesh Devy

From: Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice (Eds.)

 Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi

Key Words

●Translating Irish works into English

●Literary history and translation

●Roman Jakobson

●Language as a system of sign

●Translating consciousness

●Chomsky’s linguistics the concept of semantic universals

●J.C. Catford-linguistics of translation

●Fields of humanistic

●The problems in translation study 

Abstract

This article is about the  role of translation in communicating literary movements across linguistic borders. According to J. Hillis Miller ‘Translation is the wandering existence of a text in a perpetual exile.’Chaucer, Dryden and the Pope used the tool of translation to recover a sense of order. The tradition of Anglo-Irish literature branched out of translating Irish works into English.No critic has taken a well-defined position on the place of translations in literary history. Origins of literary movements and literary traditions inhabit various acts of translation.Translations are popularly perceived as unoriginal, not much thought has been devoted to the aesthetics of translation. 

Key Arguments

●Roman Jakobson in his essay on the linguistics of translation proposed a threefold classification of translations:

(a) those from one verbal order to another verbal order within the same language         system

(b) those from one language system to another language system, and

(c) those from a verbal order to another system of signs (Jakobson, 1959, pp. 232– 9).

●In Chomsky’s linguistics the concept of semantic universals plays an important role. However, his level of abstraction marks the farthest limits to which the monolingual Saussurean linguistic materialism can be stretched. In actual practice, even in Europe, the translating consciousness treats the SL and TL as parts of a larger and continuous spectrum of various intersecting systems of verbal signs

J.C. Catford presents a comprehensive statement of theoretical formulation about the linguistics of translation in A Linguistic Theory of Translation, in which he seeks to isolate various linguistic levels of translation. His basic premise is that since translation is a linguistic act any theory of translation must emerge from linguistics: ‘Translation is an operation performed on languages: a process of substituting a text in one language for a text in another; clearly, then, any theory of translation must draw upon a theory of language – a general linguistic theory’ (Catford, 1965, p. vii).

During the nineteenth century, Europe had distributed various fields of humanistic knowledge into a threefold hierarchy:

❖ comparative studies for Europe,

❖Orientalism for the Orient, and

❖anthropology for the rest of the world

After the ‘discovery’ of Sanskrit by Sir William Jones, historical linguistics in Europe depended heavily on Orientalism.

And after Saussure and Lévi-Strauss, linguistics started treating language with an anthropological curiosity.

 Findings/Analysis

The Problems in Translation Study

●The translation problem is not just a linguistic problem. It is an aesthetic and ideological problem with an important bearing on the question of literary history.

 Literary translation is not just a replication of a text in another verbal system of signs. It is a replication of an ordered sub-system of signs within a given language in another corresponding ordered sub-system of signs within a related language

The Problems in Translation Study

●The translation is not a transposition of significance or signs. After the act of translation is over, the original work still remains in its original position. Translation is rather an attempted revitalization of the original in another verbal order and temporal space. Like literary texts  that continue to belong to their original periods and styles and also exist through successive chronological periods, translation at once approximates the original and transcends it.

●problems of the relationship between origins and sequentiality

the very foundation of modern Indian literatures was laid through acts of translation, whether by Jayadeva, Hemcandra, Michael Madhusudan Dutta, H.N. Apte or Bankim Chandra Chatterjee

Conclusion

●Comparative literature implies that between two related languages there are areas of significance that are shared, just as there may be areas of significance that can never be shared.

● When the soul passes from one body to another, it does not lose any of its essential significance. Indian philosophies of the relationship between form and essence, structure and significance are guided by this metaphysics.

●The true test is the writer’s capacity to transform, to translate, to restate, to revitalize the original. And in that sense Indian literary traditions are essentially traditions of translation.

Reference

●Devy, G. N. “Literary History and Translation: An Indian View.” Traduction Et Post-Colonialisme En Inde — Translation and Postcolonialism: India, vol. 42, no. 2, 2002, pp. 395–406., https://doi.org/10.7202/002560ar . 

On Translating a Tamil Poem

A.K.Ramanujan

Table of Content

• Abstract

• Comparison of Tamil and English Language

• Key Arguments

• Analysis

• Four things making translation possible

• Problems in translation

• Conclusion

Abstract

'How does one translate a poem from another time, another culture,another language? Ramanujan translated poems from Tamil were written two thousand years ago in a comer of south India, in a Dravidian language relatively untouched by the other classical language of India, Sanskrit. The subject of this paper is not the fascinating external history of this literature, but translation, the transport of poems from classical Tamil to modem English; the hazards, the damages in transit, the secret paths, and the lucky by passes.The chief difficulty of translation is its impossibility. Frost once even identified poetry as that which is lost in translation.

We know now that no translation can be 'literal,' or 'word for word'. That is where the impossibility lies. The only possible translation is a 'free' one.What is everyday in one language must be translated by what is everyday in the 'target' language also, and what is eccentric must find equally eccentric equivalents. In this article Ramanujan took various examples of Tamil poems that he translated into English and he described difficulties that he faced during translation.

Comparison of Tamil and English Language

• While translating Tamil poem Ainkurunuru 203, He begin with the sounds. He find that the sound system of Tamil is very different from English. For instance, Old Tamil has six nasal consonants: a labial, a dental, an alveolar, a retroflex, a palatal and a velar-m, n, n, ñ, n, n-three of which are not distinctive in English.

• How shall we translate a six-way system into a three-way English system (m, n, n)? Tamil has long and short vowels, but English (or most English dialects) have diphthongs and glides.

• Tamil has no initial consonant clusters, but English abounds in them: 'school, scratch, splash, strike', etc. English words may end in stops, as in 'cut, cup, tuck,' etc.; Tamil words do not.

• So it is impossible to translate the phonology of one language into that of another even in a related, culturally neighbouring language. 

• Tamil metre depends on the presence of long vowels and double consonants,can map one system on to another, but never reproduce it.

• English has a long tradition of end-rhymes-but Tamil has a long tradition of second syllable consonant-rhymes. 

• End-rhymes in Tamil are a modern innovation, just as second syllable rhymes in Engljsh would be considered quite experimental. The 'tradition of one poetry would be the innovation of another.

• The Tamil sentence is the mirror image of the English one: what is A B C D E in the one would be (by and large) E D C B A in Tamil.

• Tamil syntax is mostly left-branching. English syntax is, by and large, rightward.

Key Arguments

• Evans-Pritchard, the anthropologist, used to say: If you translate all the European arguments for atheism into Azande, they would come out as arguments for God in Azande. Such observations certainly disabuseus of the commonly-held notion of 'literal' translation.

• Woollcott suggests that English does not have left-branching possibilities, but they are a bit abnormal.

• Hopkins and Dylan Thomas used those possibilities stunningly, as we see in Thomas's 'A Refusal to Moum the Death, by Fire, of a  Child in London; both were Welshmen, and Welsh is a left-branching language.

Analysis

• The collocations and paradigms make for metonymies and metaphors, multiple contextual meanings clusters special to each language, quile untranslatable into another language like Tamil. Even when the elements of a system may be similar in two languages, like father, mother, brother, mother-in-law, etc., in kinShip, the system of relations  and the feelings traditionally encouraged each relative are ali culturally sensitive  and therefore part of the expressive repertoire of poets and novelists.

• Ramanujan took two different  poems about love (What She Said) and war ( A Young Warrior ) and made point that, when we move from one to the other we are struck by the associations across them forming a web not only of the akam and puram genres. But also of the five landscape.; with all their contents signifying moods. And the themes  and motifs 0f love and war.

• Love and war  become metaphors for one another. In the poem “A Leaf In Love And War” we see entwines the two themes of love and  war - in  an ironic juxtaposition. A wreath of nocci is worn by warrior in war poems a nocci leafskirt is given by a lover to his woman in love poem.

• Example God Krishna: both lovers and warriors

• Ramanujan take a closer look at the original of Kapilar’s poem Ainkurunuru 203. And he point out that The word annay (in spoken Tamil, ammo), literally 'mother', is a familiar term of address for any woman, here a 'girl friend'. So I have translated it as 'friend', to make clear that the poem is not addressed to a mother (as some other poems are) but to a girl friend.

Four things that makes translation possible

Struc 12

1. Universals: It such universals did not exist, as Voltaire said of God, we would have had to invent them. Universals of structure in both signifiers and signifieds  are necessary fictions. The indispensable as ifs of our fallible enterprise. 

2. Interiorised Contexts:  One is translating also this kind of intertextual web, the meaning- making web of colophons and commentaries that surround and contextualise the poem.

3. Systematicity: One translates not single poems but bodies of poetry that create and contain their original world.

4. Structural mimicry:  The structures of individual poems, the unique figures they make out of all the given codes of their language, rhetoric , and poetics, become the points of entry. So one attempts a structural mimicry, to translate relations, not items not single words but phrases, sequences, sentences; not metrical Units but rhythms; not morphology but syntactic patterns.

Problems in translation

• To translate is to 'metaphor', to 'carry across'. Translations are trans-positions, re-enactments, interpretations. Some elements of the original cannot be transposed at all. One can often convey a sense of the original rhythm. but not the language-bound metre: one can mimic levels of diction, but not the actual sound of the original words.

Conclusion

• The translation must not only represent,, but re-present, the original. One walks a tightrope between the To-language and the From-language, in a double loyalty. 

• A translator is an 'artist on oath'.

• Sometimes one may succeed only in re-presenting a poem, not in closely representing it. At such times one draws consolation from parables like the following.

• If the representation in another language is not close enough, but still succeed in ’carrying’ the poem in some sense, we will have two poems instead of one. 

Reference: 

Ramanujan, A. K. “On Translating a Tamil Poem.” p. 13.

Unit 2

 

1. Introduction: What is Comparative Literature Today?

                                                                          Susan Bassnett

Abstract :

Sooner or later, anyone who claims to be working in comparative literature has to try and answer the inevitable question: What is it? The simplest answer is that comparative literature involves the study of texts across cultures, that it is interdisciplinary and that it is concerned with patterns of connection in literatures across both time and space. Susan Bassnett gives a critical understanding of Comparative literature. She says that there is no particular object for studying comparative literature. Another thing is, we cannot give a definite term for comparative literature. Different authors of literature give various perspectives about comparative literature. 

Key Arguments

 Critics at the end of the twentieth century,in the age of postmodernism,still wrestle with the same questions that were posed more than a century ago: “What is the object of the study in comparative literature? How can comparison be the objective of anything? If individual literatures have canon,what might a comparative canon be? How can be comparatist select what to compare ?Is comparative literature a discipline? Or is it simply a field of study ?”  Susan Bassnett argues that there are different terms used by different scholars for comparative literature studies. Therefore, we cannot put in a single compartment for comparative literature.  The second thing she argues is that the west students of 1960 claimed that comparative literature could be put in single boundaries for comparative literature study, but she says that there is no particular method used for claiming.

The key points in Analysis

1. The methodology of comparative literature. 

2. Dynamic shifts in comparative literature. 

3. Crisis of comparative literature in the postmodern literature field. 

Analysis

The comparative literature has been developed through the progress of the world and through various cultures of different continents.  A different cultures of the continents have played a vital role in comparative literature studies, be it European, African, American and Eastern so on. Matthew Arnold in his Inaugural lecture at Oxford in 1857 when he said : “Everywhere there is connection, everywhere there is illustration. No single event,no single literature is adequately comprehend except in relation to other events,to other literature.”  Goethe termed Weltliteratur.Goethe noted that he liked to “keep informed about foreign productions’ and advised anyone else to do the same.It is becoming more and more obvious to me,”he remarked, “that poetry is the common property of all mankind.”  Benedetto Croce argued that comparative literature was a non-subject,contemptuously dismissing the suggestion that it might be seen as separate discipline.  Wellek and Warren in their Theory of Literature, a book that was enormously significant in comparative literature when it first appeared in 1949,suggest that : “Comparative Literature …will make high demands on the linguistic proficiencies of our scholars.It asks for a widening of perspectives, a suppression of local and provincial sentiments,not easy to achieve.”

Conclusion.

The comparative literature could not be brought under one umbrella unless it becomes a particular branch of the discipline of literature. There are a lot of efforts are being taken to study comparative literature through a common language that is done in translation, which is understood by all people.  Comparative Literature has traditionally claimed translation as a subcategory,but this assumption in now being questioned.The work of scholars such as Toury,Lefevere,Hermans,Lembert and many others has shown that translation is especially at moments of great cultural changes. Evan Zohar argued that extensive translation activity takes place when a culture is in a period of translation :when it is expanding,when it needs renewal,when it isin a pre-revolutionary phase,then translation plays a vital part. Comparative Literature have always claimed that translation as a subcategory,but as translation studies establishes itself firmly as a subject based in inter-cultural study and offering a methodology of some rigour, both in terms of theoretical and descriptive work, so comparative literature appears less like a discipline and more like a branch of something else.  Seenin this way, the problem of the crisis could then be put into perspective,and the long,unresolved debate on whether comparative literature is or is not a discipline i its own right could finally and definitely be shelved. 

Work Cited

BASSNETT, SUSAN. “Introduction: What is Comparative Literature Today?” 1993, p. 26.

Comparative Literature in the  Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline   

                                     - Todd Presner 

Abstract:-

After five hundred years of print and the massive transformations in society and  culture that it unleashed, we are in the midst of another watershed moment in human  history that is on par with the invention of the printing press or perhaps the discovery  of the New World.

This article focuses on the questions like  it is essential that humanists assert and insert themselves into  the twenty - first century cultural wars, which are largely being defined, fought, and  won by corporate interests.

Why, for example, were humanists, foundations, and  universities conspicuously – even scandalously – silent when Google won its book  search lawsuit and, effectively, won the right to transfer copyright of orphaned books  to itself? Why were they silent when the likes of Sony and Disney essentially engineered the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, radically restricting intellectual property, copyright, and sharing? The Manifesto is a call to Humanists for a much deeper  engagement with digital culture production, publishing, access, and ownership. If  new technologies are dominated and controlled by corporate and entertainment inter ests, how will our cultural legacy be rendered in new media formats? By whom and  for whom?

Key Arguments:-

Nicholas Negroponte once asserted in his wildly optimistic book Being  Digital (Negroponte, 1995 ), for they always have an underbelly: mobile phones, social  networking technologies, and perhaps even the hundred - dollar computer, will not  only be used to enhance education, spread democracy, and enable global communication but will likely be used to perpetrate violence and even orchestrate genocide in  much the same way that the radio and the railway did in the last century (despite the  belief that both would somehow liberate humanity and join us all together in a happy,  interconnected world that never existed before)

Paul Gilroy  analyzed in his study of “ the fatal junction of the concept of nationality with the  concept of culture ” along the “ Black Atlantic, ” voyages of discovery, enlightenment,  and progress also meant, at every moment, voyages of conquest, enslavement, and  destruction. Indeed, this is why iany discussion of technology cannot be separated from  a discussion about formations of power and instrumentalized authority.

N. Katherine Hayles, I find myself wondering – as we  ponder various possible futures for Comparative Literature in the second decade of the  twenty - first century – how to rouse ourselves from the “ somnolence [of] five hundred  years of print ” (Hayles, 2002 : p. 29). Of course, there is nothing neutral, objective,  or necessary about the medium of print; rather it is a medium that has a long and  complex history connected to the formation of academic disciplines, institutions, epistemologies, and ideologies, not to mention conceptions of authorship and scholarly research.

Darnton ’s assessment seriously that we are now in the fifth decade of the  fourth information age in the history of humankind, it seems to me that we ought to  try to understand not only the contours of the discipline of Comparative Literature  – and for that matter, the Humanities as a whole – from the perspective of an information - and media - specific analysis, but that we also ought to come to terms with  the epistemic disjunction between our digital age and everything that came before it.

Walter Benjamin did in  The Arcades Project (1928 – 40; 1999), it is necessary, I believe, to interrogate both the  media and methodologies for the study of literature, culture, and society. 

The “ problem ” of Comparative Literature is  to figure out how to take seriously the range of new authoring, annotation, and sharing  platforms that have transformed global cultural production.

Key points:-Key points:-

• Comparative Media Studies  

• Comparative Data Studies  

• Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies

• Comparative Media Studies  

For Nelson, a hypertext is a:-

Body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could  not conveniently be presented or represented on paper [ … ] Such a system could grow  indefinitely, gradually including more and more of the world ’ s written knowledge.   (Nelson, 2004: pp. 134 – 145)

Comparative Data Studies:-

• Lev Manovich and Noah  Wardrip - Fruin, the field of “ cultural analytics ” has emerged over the past five years  to bring the tools of high - end computational analysis and data visualization to dissect  large - scale cultural datasets.

• Jerome McGann argues with  regard to the first in his elegant analysis of “ radiant textuality, ” the differences  between the codex and the electronic versions of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Conclusion:-

This article mainly focuses on this twenty-first century in terms of digital humanities how we are doing comparative studies. After discussing various arguments, we come to know that to date, it has more than three million content pages, more than three hundred  million edits, over ten million registered users, and articles in forty - seven languages  (Wikipedia Statistics). This is a massive achievement for eight years of work. Wikipedia  represents a dynamic, flexible, and open - ended network for knowledge creation and  distribution that underscores process, collaboration, access, interactivity, and creativity, with an editing model and versioning system that documents every contingent  decision made by every contributing author. At this moment in its short life, Wikipedia  is already the most comprehensive, representative, and pervasive participatory platform for knowledge production ever created by humankind. In my opinion, that is  worth some pause and reflection, perhaps even by scholars in a future disciplinary  incarnation of Comparative Literature.

Work Cited

Presner, Todd. “Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline.” p. 16.

Introduction: What is Comparative Literature Today? by Susan Bassnett

 Introduction: What is Comparative Literature Today?

                                                                          Susan Bassnett

Abstract :

Sooner or later, anyone who claims to be working in comparative literature has to try and answer the inevitable question: What is it? The simplest answer is that comparative literature involves the study of texts across cultures, that it is interdisciplinary and that it is concerned with patterns of connection in literatures across both time and space. Susan Bassnett gives a critical understanding of Comparative literature. She says that there is no particular object for studying comparative literature. Another thing is, we cannot give a definite term for comparative literature. Different authors of literature give various perspectives about comparative literature. 

Key Arguments

 Critics at the end of the twentieth century,in the age of postmodernism,still wrestle with the same questions that were posed more than a century ago: “What is the object of the study in comparative literature? How can comparison be the objective of anything? If individual literatures have canon,what might a comparative canon be? How can be comparatist select what to compare ?Is comparative literature a discipline? Or is it simply a field of study ?”  Susan Bassnett argues that there are different terms used by different scholars for comparative literature studies. Therefore, we cannot put in a single compartment for comparative literature.  The second thing she argues is that the west students of 1960 claimed that comparative literature could be put in single boundaries for comparative literature study, but she says that there is no particular method used for claiming.

The key points in Analysis

1. The methodology of comparative literature. 

2. Dynamic shifts in comparative literature. 

3. Crisis of comparative literature in the postmodern literature field. 

Analysis

The comparative literature has been developed through the progress of the world and through various cultures of different continents.  A different cultures of the continents have played a vital role in comparative literature studies, be it European, African, American and Eastern so on. Matthew Arnold in his Inaugural lecture at Oxford in 1857 when he said : “Everywhere there is connection, everywhere there is illustration. No single event,no single literature is adequately comprehend except in relation to other events,to other literature.”  Goethe termed Weltliteratur.Goethe noted that he liked to “keep informed about foreign productions’ and advised anyone else to do the same.It is becoming more and more obvious to me,”he remarked, “that poetry is the common property of all mankind.”  Benedetto Croce argued that comparative literature was a non-subject,contemptuously dismissing the suggestion that it might be seen as separate discipline.  Wellek and Warren in their Theory of Literature, a book that was enormously significant in comparative literature when it first appeared in 1949,suggest that : “Comparative Literature …will make high demands on the linguistic proficiencies of our scholars.It asks for a widening of perspectives, a suppression of local and provincial sentiments,not easy to achieve.”

Conclusion.

The comparative literature could not be brought under one umbrella unless it becomes a particular branch of the discipline of literature. There are a lot of efforts are being taken to study comparative literature through a common language that is done in translation, which is understood by all people.  Comparative Literature has traditionally claimed translation as a subcategory,but this assumption in now being questioned.The work of scholars such as Toury,Lefevere,Hermans,Lembert and many others has shown that translation is especially at moments of great cultural changes. Evan Zohar argued that extensive translation activity takes place when a culture is in a period of translation :when it is expanding,when it needs renewal,when it isin a pre-revolutionary phase,then translation plays a vital part. Comparative Literature have always claimed that translation as a subcategory,but as translation studies establishes itself firmly as a subject based in inter-cultural study and offering a methodology of some rigour, both in terms of theoretical and descriptive work, so comparative literature appears less like a discipline and more like a branch of something else.  Seenin this way, the problem of the crisis could then be put into perspective,and the long,unresolved debate on whether comparative literature is or is not a discipline i its own right could finally and definitely be shelved. 

Work Cited

BASSNETT, SUSAN. “Introduction: What is Comparative Literature Today?” 1993, p. 26.