I am Bhavna Sosa, from department of English MK Bhavnagar University. This task is assigned by Prof. Dr. Dilip Barad sir. This thinking activity about Comparative Literature.
‘Translation is the wandering existence of a text in a perpetual exile,’ says J. Hillis Miller1.
The statement obviously alludes to the Christian myth of the Fall, exile and wandering. In Western metaphysics translation is an exile, a fall from the origin; and the mythical exile is a metaphoric translation, a post-Babel crisis iii. Given this metaphysical precondition of Western aesthetics, it is not surprising that literary translations are not accorded the same status as original works. Western literary criticism provides for the guilt of translations for coming into being after the original; the temporal sequentiality is held as a proof of diminution of literary authenticity of translations. The strong sense of individuality given to Western individuals through systematic philosophy and the logic of social history makes them view translation as an intrusion of ‘the other's. This intrusion is desirable to the extent that it helps define one’s own identity, but not beyond that point.
Analysis :
One of the most revolutionary events in the history of English style has been the authorised translation of the Bible. It was also the literary expression of Protestant Christianity. The recovery of the original spirit of Christianity was thus sought by Protestant England through an act of translation. It is well known that Chaucer was translating the style of Boccacio into English when he created his Canterbury Tales. When Dryden and Pope wanted to recover a sense of order, they used the tool of translation. Similar attempts were made in other European languages such as German and French.
The tradition that has given us writers like Shaw, Yeats, Joyce, Beckett and Heaney in a single century – the tradition of Anglo-Irish literature –branched out of the practice of translating Irish works into English initiated by Macpherson towards the end of the eighteenth century.
Most literary traditions originate in translation and gain substance through repeated acts of translation, it would be useful for a theory of literary history if a supporting theory of literary translation were available.
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).
Structural linguistics considers language as a system of signs, arbitrarily developed, that tries to cover the entire range of significance available to the culture of that language. The signs do not mean anything by or in themselves; they acquire significance by virtue of their relation to the entire system to which they belong. This theory naturally looks askance at translation which is an attempt to rescue/ abstract significance from one system of signs and to wed it with another such system. But language is an open system. It keeps admitting new signs as well as new significance in its fold.
The concept of a ‘translating consciousness v and communities of people possessing it are no mere notions. In most Third World countries, where a dominating colonial language has acquired a privileged place, such communities do exist. In India several languages are simultaneously used by language communities as if these languages formed a continuous spectrum of signs and significance. The use of two or more different languages in translation activity cannot be understood properly through studies of foreign-language acquisition.
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.
And in the absence of a linguistic theory based on a multilingual perspective or on translation practice, the translation thought in the West overstates the validity of the concept of synonymy.
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.
‘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.The privileged discourse of general linguistics today is closely interlinked with developments in anthropology, particularly after Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss. 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. In its various phases of development modern Western linguistics has connections with all these. After the ‘discovery’ of Sanskrit by Sir William Jones, historical linguistics in Europe depended heavily on Orientalism.
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. Translation can be seen as an attempt to bring a given language system in its entirety as close as possible to the areas of significance that it shares with another given language or languages. All translations operate within this shared area of significance. Such a notion may help us distinguish synonymy within one language and the shared significance between two related languages.
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 are, therefore, very much like those in literary history. They are the problems of the relationship between origins and sequentiality. And as in translation study so in literary history, the problem of origin has not been tackled satisfactorily. The point that needs to be made is that probably the question of origins of literary traditions will have to be viewed differently by literary communities with ‘translating consciousness’. The fact that Indian literary communities do possess this translating consciousness can be brought home effectively by reminding ourselves that 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:
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. Indian literary theory does not lay undue emphasis on originality. If originality were made a criterion of literary excellence, a majority of Indian classics would fail the test. The true test is the writer’s capacity to transform, to translate, to restate, to revitalise the original. And in that sense Indian literary traditions are essentially traditions of
translation.
ARTICLE- 7 : On Translating a Tamil Poem by A. K. Ramanujan
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. Frost once even identified poetry as that which is lost in translation.
Analysis :
The 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, etcIn kinShip, the system of relations and the feelings traditionally encouraged by each relative are also 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 the 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 warriors in war poems and a nocci leaf skirt is given by a lover to his woman in a love poem. Example God Krishna: both lovers and warriors. Ramanujan takes a closer look at the origin of Kapilar’s poem Ainkurunuru 203. And he points out that The word annay (in spoken Tamil, ammo), literally 'mother', is a familiar term of address for any woman, here a 'girlfriend'. 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.
Impossible intricate task, foredoomed of failure. What makes it possible at all? At least four things. Maybe even four articles of faith. help the translators.
Structural Mimicry
Systematicity
Interiorized contexts
Universals
1) Universals:
If 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 also translating this kind of intertextual web, the meaning- making a 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.
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 succeeds in ’carrying’ the poem in some sense, we will have two poems instead of one.
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