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