Article-8 Introduction: History in Translation by Tejaswini Niranjana
Hello friends
This Blog-post is a response to the thinking activity task on 'Comparative Studies' given by our professor Dr.Dilip Barad Sir. This task is group task. I, Bhavna Sosa, Dhvani Rajyaguru and Hinaba Sarvaiya presented an article on Introduction: History in Translation by Tejaswini Niranjana. So here is the presentation and video.
Article - 9 Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of Modernist Poetic Discourse in Indian Poetry by E.V. Ramkrishnan
Abstract :
This chapter examines the role played by translation in shaping a modernist poetic sensibility in some of the major literary traditions of India in the twentieth century, between 1950 and 1970. Translations of major European poets such as Baudelaire, Rilke, Eliot and Yeats contributed towards clearing a space for the modernist discourse in Indian poetry. The chapter will study examples from Bengali. Malayalam + and Marathi, to understand how such translations of modern Western poets were used to breach the hegemony of prevailing literary sensibilities and poetic modes. As the contradictions within the 'high' modernist mode deepened in the politically turbulent 1960s, one witnessed a gradual radicalisation of modernist sensibility in these languages. Translations from African and Latin American poetry played a significant role in this phase of modernism. Poets such as Neruda and Parra were widely translated into Indian languages during this phase. In this context, translation enacted a critical act of evaluation. a creative act of intervention, and a performative act of legitimation, in evolving a new poetic style during the modernist phase of Indian poetry.
Key points :
Modernity/Modernism
Literary/artistic movement of modernism
The reception of Western modernist discourses in India
Translation the course of modernism in Indian Literature
The indigenous roots/routes of modernity and modernism
Analysis:
An elaboration on the relation between 'modernity' and 'modernism in the Indian context will need a separate chapter. It has also been argued that such a modular modernity, as envisaged in Western terms, brought about a rupture in the social and cultural life of India, separating its 'modern period' from what was 'pre- modern'. Such a view may be disputed but it can be convincingly shown that the dynamics of literary expression and the apparatus of cultural transmission came to be redefined in the 'modern' period.
The project of modernity in India was implicated in colonialism and imperialism. This colonial modernity informed literary and cultural movements, beginning from the reformist movement of the nineteenth century to the modernist movement of the mid-twentieth century. The breaching of entrenched traditions resulted in a crisis which had to be tackled creatively by resorting to the resources of alien traditions. While introducing the works of B. S. Mardhekar, a major Marathi modernist, Chitre says. The poet B. S. Mardhekar was the most remarkable product of the cross- pollination between the deeper, larger native tradition and contemporary world culture'.
The term 'modernism' implies a literary/artistic movement that was characterised by experimentation, conscious rejection of the nationalist/ Romantic as well as the popular, and the cultivation of an individualist, Cosmopolitan and insular world view. In the European context. It signified a set of tendencies in artistic expression and writing styles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through a new aesthetic that was iconoclastic, insular and elitist.
The aesthetics of modernism in the West had a transnational, metropolitan worldview that excluded the claims of the local and the national and made no concession to the popular taste. While the modernism that emerged in Indian literature shared many of these defining features, its political affiliations and ideological orientations were markedly different. Due to its postcolonial location, Indian modernism did not share the imperial or metropolitan aspirations of its European counterpart.
It invested heavily in regional cosmopolitan traditions. It was oppositional in content and questioned the colonial legacies of the nationalist discourse. It was elitist and formalistic and deeply distrustful of the popular domain.
In the context of Bengali as Amiva Dey has observed, 'It was not because they inhibed modernism that the a [modernist] Bengali writers turned away from Rabindranath, on contrary, Modernism was the means by which they turned away from Rabindranath and they had to turn away, for their history demanded itIn the context of Bengali as Amiva Dey has observed, 'It was not because they inhibited modernism that the a [modernist] Bengali writers turned away from Rabindranath, on contrary, Modernism was the means by which they turned away from Rabindranath and they had to turn away, for their history demanded it in Anandamurthy et al 1972. 71. Commenting on the role of Kannada modernists, R. Satidhar writes,
If European modernism was drawn hersee the cupluri and the me in Kannada the precipitare modernism was drawn herwen the Brahminical and the non Brahminical Just as the cuplion and te active modernisms were part of the internal dynamics of modernism elf, also the Brahmanical and the non-Brahmanical modernisms in Kannada were part and parcel of a modernism that came as a reaction to the Nehruvian environment fin Satchidanandan 2001, 34).
Translation enables us to delineate the complex artistic and ideological undercurrents that shaped the course of modernism in Indian literature. To discuss this, we will look at three representative modernist authors from three separate Indian literary traditions-Sudhindranath Dutta (1901-60) from Bengali, B. S. Mardhekar (1909-56) from Marathi and Ayyappa Paniker (1936-2004) from Malayalam. These authors help us see the chronological trajectory of modernism across Indian literature.
Translation is central to the modernist poetic as it unfolded in these literary traditions. Each of these three authors was bilingual and wrote essays in English as well as their own languages, outlining their new, getic, thus preparing the reader for new poetic modes.
The Romantic poets had made a shift from Sanskritic traditions to folk metres, which was a movement towards open forms. The experimental poetry of the modernists, on the other hand, opened up poetic forms further, by using imagist, suggestive free verse that affirmed that cach poem has its authentic form which cannot be approximated to a metre which functions independent of content.
Conclusion:
The modernist subject was fragmented and fractured in the Indian context, but not for reasons that constituted fragmented selves in the Western context. Colonial modernity operated within the Indian context as a realm of desire which brought into being a new social imaginary. The formalist poetic of modernist poetry corresponded to an inner world of desire that produced a language bristling with disquiet and angst. Translation enabled the displaced self of modernity to locate itself in a language that was intimately private and, also, outspokenly public. The idiom of their expression afforded the possibility of self-knowledge through epiphanies that brought 'momentary stays against confusion'.
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