Hello readers!
I am Nidhi Jethava and I am a student of MK Bhavnagar University department of English. As a part of our syllabus, we have one paper on 'Comparative Literature Studies and Translation Studies.' So in this paper, I am going to summarize the third unit's article.
“Translation and Literary History: An Indian View" - Ganesh Devy
From Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice (Eds.) Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi
Introduction
This article is about the importance of translation in transmitting literary movements across linguistic borders.
In this article Ganesh Devi begins with Christian metaphysics and ends with the Indian metaphysics.
Various acts of translation include the origins of literary movements and literary traditions. Translations are widely regarded as unoriginal, and the aesthetics of translation have received little attention.
TranslationUnoriginal The Other/The Origin
● According to J. Hillis Miller ‘ Translation is the wandering existence of a text in a perpetual exile’.
● Christian myth of the Fall, exile and wandering.
● Christian Myth : Post- Babel crisis
● In Western metaphysics translation is an exile, a fall from the origin; and the mythical exile is a metaphoric translation, a postBabel crisis.
● No critic has taken any well-defined position about the exact placement of translations in literary history.
Key Argument
1. Roman Jakobson..…
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
(a) those from one language system to another language system, and
(a) those from a verbal order to another system of signs (Jakobson,1959, pp. 232– 9).
2. J.C.Catford…
● In A Linguistic Theory of Translation, J.C.Catford gives a comprehensive declaration of theoretical formulation regarding the linguistics of translation, in which he attempts to distinguish several linguistic levels of translation.
● Because translation is a linguistic act, any theory of translation must originate from linguistics, according to his main premise: 'Translation is a linguistic operation: the process of replacing a text in one language for a text in another; hence, any theory of translation must rest on a theory of language - a general linguistic theory.'
Findings/Analysis
● Various domains of humanistic knowledge were divided into three categories in Europe during the nineteenth century:
1. Comparative studies for Europe,
2. Orientalism for the Orient,
3. Anthropology for the rest of the world
● Following Sir William Jones' 'discovery' of Sanskrit, historical linguistics in Europe became increasingly reliant on Orientalism.
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.
Conclusion
● Comparative literature means that there are regions of significance that are shared across two related languages, as well as 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.
Work cited
● Catford, J. C. A Linguistic Theory of Translation: An Essay in Applied Linguistics. Oxford University Press, 1965.
● 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/10.7202/002560
● Jakobson, Roman. "On Linguistic Aspects of Translation". On Translation, edited by Reuben Arthur Brower, Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2013, pp. 232-239. https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674731615.c1
On Translating a Tamil Poem By A. K. Ramanujan
Introduction
● Article starts with the talk of world literature
● Ramanujan ask the question, 'How does one translate a poem from another time, another culture,another language?
● 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 bypasses.
● Ramanujan took various examples of Tamil poems that he translated into English and he described difficulties that he faced during translation.
RAMANUJAN’S CONCEPTION OF TRANSLATION.
➢ Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi said in the article that,
❏ In his published work Ramanujan reflected on translation most often in the context of poetry, and conceived of it as a multi- dimensional process in which the translator has to deal with his or her material, means, resources and objectives at several levels simultaneously.
❏ Ramanujan was acutely conscious that even the most scrupulous translator’s care and craftsmanship cannot solve the problems of attempting what John Dryden, in 1680, had called metaphrase, the method of ‘turning an author word by word, and line by line, from one language into another’.
❏ Ramanujan developed his conceptions of ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ poetic form from two culturally incommensurate sources. On the one hand, he owed the distinction in part to Noam Chomsky’s analysis of surface and deep structure in discourse, and to Roman Jakobson’s rather different structuralist analysis of the grammar of poetry, especially the latter’s distinction between ‘verse instance’ and ‘verse design’.
❏ Ramanujan also applied the distinction between outer and inner form to his own practice as a scholar and poet when, in a rare and therefore frequently quoted comment, he said that English and my disciplines (linguistics, anthropology) give me my ‘outer’ forms –linguistic, metrical, logical and other such ways of shaping experience; and my first thirty years in India, my frequent visits and fieldtrips, my personal and professional preoccupations .
❏ with Kannada, Tamil, the classics, and folklore give me my substance, my ‘inner’ forms,images and symbols. They are continuous with each other, and I no longer can tell what comes from where.
❏ To a remarkable extent Ramanujan’s differentiation between outer and inner form, which he formulated in the late 1960s or early 1970s, parallels the distinction between ‘phenotext’ and ‘genotext’ which Julia Kristeva developed around the same time from the same structurallinguistic sources, but which she deployed in a post- structuralist psychoanalytical theory of signifying practices. (Bassnett, Susan, and Harish Trivedi).
Key Arguments:
● Frost once said “poetry as that which is lost in translation”.
● 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 argued that English does not have leftbranching possibilities, but they are a bit abnormal.
● Hopkins's and Thomas's poetry the leftward syntax is employed for special poetic effects-it alternates with other, more 'normal', types of English sentences. In Tamil poetry the leftward syntax is not eccentric, literary or offbeat. but part of everyday 'natural' speech.
Analysis
❏ Translation is not only about text it's about translation of time, other culture, other language.
❏ Problems in translation.
❏ Any single poem is part of a set, a family of sets, a landscape, a genre.
❏ 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.
❏ For example : in Gujarati there are 13 vowels and 34 consonants (Holmes, Jonathan) & in English 5 vowels and 21 consonants.(Questions on Vowels and Consonants)
❏ The language within a language becomes the second language of Tamil poetry.
Conclusion
● The translation must not only represent,, but represent, 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'.
● Argument against the Frost.
● Example of a Chinese emperor - tunnel - work from both side of mountain - meet in the middle - what if they don't meet ? - counsellor answered - ‘if they don't meet, we will have two tunnels instead of one’.
● 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.
Work Cited
● Bassnett, Susan, and Trivedi, Harish. “‘A.K. Ramanujan’s Theory and Practice of Translation.’” Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, Routledge, London, 2005.
● Ramanujan, A.K. “On Translating a Tamil Poem.” The Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2013, pp. 219–231.
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