This blog is about Thinking Activity on. articles presentations about comparative literature and Translation studies. This task is assigned by Prof. Dr. Dilip Barad sir, Head of the English Department of Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University (MKBU). As a part of the syllabus, students of English department are learning the paper.
Unit 2 : Article 6 present and explain by Nilay Rathod and Emisha Ravni. Complete the article put presentation YouTube Video link and SlideShare link also.
Translation and Literary History : An Indian View"
- Ganesh Devy
💥ABSTRACT
- 'Translation is the wandering existence of a text in a perpetual exile' -J. Hillis Miller
- Western metaphysics translation is an exile, a fall from the origin
- Mythical exile - metaphorical translation
- Translations are not accorded the same status as original work.
- Guilt of translation
- Strong sense of individuality Systematic philosophy & logic of social history makes them view translation as an intrusion of 'the other'.
- The intrusion is desirable to the extent that it helps define one's own identity.
- Philosophy of individualism & Metaphysics of guilt, renders European literary historiography incapable of grasping the origins of literary traditions.
However, since translations are popularly perceived as unoriginal, not much thought has been devoted to the aesthetics of translation. Most of the primary issues relating to form and meaning too have not been settled in relation to translation.
No critic has taken any well-defined position alon the exact placement of translations in literary history.
Do they belong to the history of the "T languages or do they belong to the history of the 'S' languages? Or do they form an independent tradition all by themselves? This ontological uncertainty which haunte translations has rendered translation study a haphazard activity which devotes too much energy discussing problems of conveying the original meaning in the altered structure.
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,
(c) those from a verbal order to another system of signs. As he considers, theoretically, a complete semantic equivalence as the final objective of a translation act which is not possible-he asserts that poetry is untranslatable. He maintains that only a "creative translation is possible.
- Structural linguistic consider language as a system of signs, arbitrarily developed, that tries cover the entire range of significance available to the culture of that language.
- 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.
The concept of a translating consciousness and communities of people possessing are no mere notions to 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.
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 Suuren 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- general linguistic theory (Catford, 1965, p. vii).
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 :
1.comparative studies for Europe,
2 Orientalism for the Orient, and anthropology for the rest of the world.
3In 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.
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.
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
Indian metaphysics believes in an unhindered migration of the soul from one body to another. Repeated birth is the very substance of all animate creations. 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 soul, or significance, is not subject to the laws of temporality; and therefore significance, even literary significance, is ahistorical in Indian
view. Elements of plot, stories, characters, can be used again and again by new generations of writers because 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
revitalize the original. And in that sense Indian literary traditions are essentially traditions of
translation.
On Translating a Tamil Poem
Tamil were written two thousand years ago in a corner of south India, in a Dravidian language relatively untouched by the other classical language of India, Sanskrit. Of the literatures of the world at that time, Sanskrit in India, Greek and Latin in Europe, Hebrew in the Middle East, and Chinese in the Far East were Tamil's contemporaries Over two thousand Tamil poems of different lengths, by over four hundred poets , arranged in nine anthologies, have survived the vagaries of politics and wars: changes of taste and reli- gion; the crumbling of palm leaves; the errors and poverty of scribes, the ravages of insects, heat, cold, water, and fire.
The subject of this paper is not the fascinating external history of this literature, but translation, the transport.of poems from classical Tamil to modern English; the hazards, the damages in transit, the secret paths, and the lucky bypasses.
How shall we divide up and translate this poem? What are the units of translation? We may begin with the sounds. We find at once 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 double consonants that occur in English only across phrases like 'hottin' and `sir night. Such features are well illustrated by the above poem in Tamil. 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. When we add up these myriad systemic differences, we cannot escape the fact that phonologies are systems unto themselves (even as grammatical, syntactic, lexical, semantic systems too are, as we shall see). Any unit we pick is defined by its relations to other units. So it is impossible to translate the phonology of one language into that of another even in a related, culturally neighbour- ing language.
One can see right away that Tamil has no copula verbs for equational sentences in the present tense as in English, eg., "Tom is a teacher po degrees of comparison in adjectives as in English, e.g., 'sweet, sweeter, sweetest, no articles, like 'a, an, the and so on Tamil expresses the semantic equivalents of these grammatical devices by various other means.
When we attend to syntax, we see that Tamil syntax is mostly left branching English syntax is, by and large, nightward Even a date like the 19th of June, 1988, when translated into Tamil, would look like 1988, June, 19. A phrase like
A B C D E
The man who came from Michigan
would be 'Michigan from come-[past tense]-who man'
E D C B A
micigan ilirundu vand a manidan
The Tamil sentence is the mirror image of the English one what is ABCDE in the one would be (by and large) EDCBA in Tamil.
If poetry is made out of, among other things, ' the best words in the best orders of the two languages are the mirror images of each other, what is a what is a translator to do ?
Now, the classical Tamil poetic tradition uses an entire taxonomy, a classification of reality, as part of its stock-in-trade. The five landscapes of the Tamil area, characterised by hills seashores, agricultural areas. wastelands, and pastoral fields, each with its forms of life, both natural and cultural, trees, animals, tribes, customs, arts and instruments all these become part of the symbolic code for the poetry.
Every landscape. with all its contents, is associated with a mood or phase of love or war The landscapes provide the signifiers. The five real landscapes of the Tamil country become. through this system, the interior landscapes of Tamil poetry, And each landscape or mood is also associated with a time of day and a season. Each landscape, along with its mood and the genre of poetry built around it, is usually named after a tree or flower of that region. For instance, the first poem we cited is a kurinci poem-kurindiss a plant that grows six thousand to eight thousand feet above sea level- representing the mountains, the might. the season of dew, the mood of first love, and the lovers' first secret sexual union. In the war poems the same landscape is the scene for another kind of clandestine action: a night attack on a fort set in the hills. The love poems and war poems are somewhat similarly classified.
would now like to take a closer look at the original of Kapilar's poem. Ainkurunuru 203, 'What She Said', and my translation, quoted earlier in this essay.
The word annay (in spoken Tamil, amma), 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.
English tries to preserve the order and syntax of theme, not single words:
1) his land's water, followed by
2) Leaf covered waterholes'
3) Muddied by animals
If attempting a translation means attempting such an impossibly antricate task foredoomed to failure, what makes it possible at all? At least four things, maybe even four articles of faith, help the translator.
1. Universals.
If there were no universals in which languages participate and of which all particular languages were selections and combinations, no language learning, translation, comparative studies or cross-cultural understanding of even the most meagre kind would be possible I such universals did not exist, as Voltaire said of God, we would have had to invent them. They are at least the basic explanatory fictions of both linguistics and the study of literature Universals of Structure in both signifiers (eg. sound systems. grammar, semantics. rhetoric and poetics)and the signifieds (e.g..what poems are about, such as love or war, and what they mean within and across cultures), are necessary fictions the indispensable as ifs of our fallible enterprise.
2 Interiorised contexts.
However culture-specific the details of a poem are. poems like the ones I have been discussing interiorise the entire culture indeed, we know about the culture of the ancient Tamils only through a careful study of these poems. Later colophons and commentaries explore and explicate this knowledge carried by the pos xt, using them to make lexicons and charming the
3. Systematicity
The systematicity of such bodies of poetry, the way figures. genres personae. etc. intermesh in a master-code, is a grea thelp. in entering this intricate yet lucid world of words. One translates not single poems but bodies of poetry that create and contain their original world Even if one chooses not to translate all the poems, one chooses poems that cluster together, that illuminate one another, so that allusions, contrasts, and collective designs are suggested . One's selection then be- -comes a metonymy for their world, re-presenting it. Here intertextuality is not the problem, but the solution. One learns one's lessons here not only from the Tamil arrangements but from Yeats, Blake, and Baudelaire. who all used arrangement as a poetic device.
4. Structural mimicry.
Yet, against all this background, the work of translating single poems in their particularity is the chief work of the translator. In this task, I believe, 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. The poetry and the significance reside in these figures and structures as much as in the untranslatable verbal textures. 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
A Chinese emperor ordered a tunnel to be bored through a great mountain. The engineers decided that the best and quickest way to do it would be to begin work on both sides of the mountain, after precise measurements. If the measurements were precise enough, the two tunnels would meet in the middle, making a single one. 'But what happens if they don't meet?' asked the emperor. The counsellors, in their wisdom, answered, 'If they don't meet, we will have two tunnels instead of one.' So too, 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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