Unit 4: Translation Studies

 

9) E.V. Ramakrishnan, “ Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of the Modernist Poetic Discourse in Indian Poetry”, in Indigenous Imaginaries: Literature, Region, Modernity, 2017

1) Abstract

It 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.

● 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 poetics modes.

● Many Indian poets such as Buddhadeb Bose, Agyeya, Gopalkrishna Adiga, Dilip Chitre, and Ayyappa Paniker were also translators.

● Translation from Africa and Latin American poetry played a significant role in this phase of modernism. 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 during the modernist phase of Indian poetry.

● The term ‘translation ‘suggests a range of cultural practices, from critical commentary to the creation of intertextual text.

● Andre Lefevere’s concept of translation as reflections/ rewriting, the chapter argues that ‘rewritings’ and ‘reflections’ found in the ‘less obvious form of criticism…, commentary, historiography, teaching, the collection of works in anthologies, the production of plays are also an instance of translation.

● An essay on T.S. Eliot in Bengali by Sudhindranayh Dutt, or scathing critique in Malayalam on the poetic practices of Vallathol Narayana Menon by Ayyappa Paniker, can also describe as ‘ translational’ writing as they have elements of translation embedded in them.

2) Key Arguments

It has been argued that the Idea of a ‘Self-reflection or Self-validating’ literary text, which is central to modernist poetic, is rooted in an ideology of the aesthetic that was complicated with colonialism.

• D.R.Nagaraj has pointed out that nationalism became the ideology of the nation-state.

• How are we to evaluate the modernisms that emerged in the postcolonial phase in India? Critics such as Simon Gikandi, Susan Friedman, Laura Doyle, Laura Winkel, and Aparna Dharwadker have argued that Non-Western modernism is not mere derivate versions of European hegemonic practice.

• In the context of Bengali, as Amiya Dev has observed, ‘It was not because they imbibed modernism that the debunk Bengali writers turned away from Rabindranath Tagore.

• In ‘The Necessity of poetry’, Dutta argues that the persistence of poetry through the ages in all societies, particularly among the unsophisticated and the primitive, attest to its necessity.

• Mardhekar points to their blind search for survival in a hostile world. The surreal image in the line, 'sadness has poisonous eyes made of glass sums up the opaqueness of their vision and the toxic nature of their condemned existence unrelieved by any sense of benign order of life.

3) Main Analysis

• The relation between ‘Modernity’ and ‘Modernism’ in the Indian context,

the purpose of discussion it may be broadly stated that Modernity designates an epochal period of wide-ranging transformations brought about by the advent of colonialism, capitalist economy, industrial mode of production. 

● 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 term ‘Modernism’ implies a literary/artistic movement that was

characterized by experimentation, conscious rejection of the nationalist/ Romantic as well as popular.

● The postcolonial context adds a complex political dimension to the aesthetic of Indian Modernism.

• The reception of Western modernist discourses in India was mediated

by the dynamics of socio-political upheavals related to the formation of the nation-state and the realignment of power structures in society.

• Translation enables us to delineate the complex artistic and ideological undercurrents that shaped the course of modernism in Indian literature.

• The three representative modernist authors from three separate I-Indian literary traditions-Sudhindranath Dutta(1901-60) from Bengali,, B.S.Mardhekar(1909-56) from marathi,and Ayyappa Paniker(1936-2004) from Malayalam. These three authors were bilingual and wrote an essay in English as well as their own languages. Bengali emerged in the 1930s and continued into the 40s and 50s, Marathi from the 1950s to the 60s.

• Dutta's discussion of Aristotle, Plato, Voltaire, Byron, Mallarmé and

● As a modernist poem, "The Camel-Bird' moves beyond the personal by embodying the condition of inertia that a colonized community is condemned to.

● B. S. Mardhekar transformed Marathi poetry and its dire dynamics in terms of its vision, form, and content. Mardhekar intervened in Marathi literary tradition as an insider who had mastered the insights given by an

alien tradition.

● In 'Mice in the Wet Barrel Died', which became the iconic modernist poem of Marathi. The metaphor of the mice is meant to evoke the morbid and malevolent in modern life. When this poem was originally published in Marathi, in Abhiruchi, was met with several disapproving comments, leading to long discussions and even parodies of the poem in Marathi.

• Ayyappa Paniker was a poet, critic, and translator, who, apart from introducing world poetry to Malayalam readers

• The title, 'Kurukshetram', signifies the place where the epic battle that forms the central theme of the Mahabharata took place. The poem progresses through broken images from contemporary life, but there are also redemptive memories of forgotten harmonies that recur through the metaphor of the dream. The evocative rhythms of the poem provoke a profound disquiet that cannot be particularised. The self is seen as a site of struggle and conflict, but modern men and women are denied the tragic dignity of epic heroes. 

• It is important to understand the indigenous roots/routes of modernity and modernism in all the three writers discussed above. They partake of the logic of a postcolonial society that had already developed internal

critiques of Western modernity.

4) Conclusion

A language became, for the modernists, the only reality that they could relate to. Their moment of recognition. enabled by the discourses of 'Western' modernism was postcolonial in its essence. The self-reflexive mo(ve)ment was also made possible by the carrying across of not content or form, but an interior mode of being that questioned the prevailing limits of freedom.

8) Tejaswini Niranjana. “Introduction: History in Translation” Siting Translation: History, Poststructuralism, and the Colonial Context, 1992

1) Abstract

she sees as deconstructive criticism's failure to address the problem of colonialism, as well as the neglect by translation studies to ask questions about its own historicity. Contemporary critiques of representation have not extended themselves to the point of questioning the idea of translation, of re-presenting linguistic meaning in interlinguistic transfers. The translation is made possible by the belief in mimesis, which in turn assumes the purity of the original. Niranjana cites powerful examples from the post-colonial context to show how translation was "a significant technology of colonial domination" (21); the use of translation to codify Hindu law, for instance, is revealed as imperialist cathexis, "to create a subject position for the colonized" (19) which would "discipline and regulate the lives of" Hindu subjects (18). In other words, the notion of "original" text was itself used to fashion the native's essence-an an instance of colonialism's attempt to erase heterogeneity.

In the context of this crisis, Tejaswini Niranjana's examination of translation as a critical practice is made possible. Her analysis seems to amplify and elaborate the possibilities of the claim made by other postcolonial theorists like Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, as well as feminists such as Jane Gallop and Nancy K. Miller, that deconstruction can be used in politically enabling ways. Insisting that questioning of humanist or Enlightenment models of representation and translation "can underwrite a new practice of translation . . . reinscribing its potential as a strategy of resistance" (6), Niranjana persuasively shows that a critique of presence can be taken to its limits and yet not incapacitate the interventionist critic.

2) Key Arguments

Translation functions as a transparent presentation of something that already exists, although the "original" is actually brought into being through translation. Paradoxically, translation also provides a place in "history" for the colonized.

She was, therefore, discussing the pertinence of the critique of historicism to a world undergoing decolonization, given the enduring nature of Hegelianthe presentation of the non-West and the model of teleological history that authorizes them, a questioning of the model could underwrite a new practice of translation.

In the final chapter, with the help of a translation from Kannada, a South Indian language, into English, I discuss the "uses" of post-structuralism in post-colonial space. Throughout the book, my discussion functions in all the philosophical, linguistic, and political registers in which translation "works" under colonialism. If I seem to dwell on only one of these at any point, it is for a purely strategic purpose.

3) Main Analysis

The aspect of post-structuralism that is significant for a rethinking of translation is its critique of historicism, which shows the genetic (searching for an origin) and teleological (positing a certain end) nature of traditional historiography.

A critique of historicism might show us a way of deconstructing the "pusillanimous" and "deceitful" Hindus of Mill and Hegel. Her concern here is not, of course, with the alleged misrepresentation of the "Hindus." Rather, I am trying to question the holding of reciprocity and the essentializing of “difference” (what Johannes Fabian calls a denial of co evilness) that permits a stereotypical construction of the other.

This kind of deployment of translation, I argue, colludes with or enables the construction of a teleological and hierarchical model of cultures that places Europe at the pinnacle of civilization, and thus also provides a position, for the colonized.

This work belongs to the larger context of the “crisis” in "English" that is a consequence of the impact of structuralism and post-structuralism on literary studies in a rapidly decolonized world.

4) Conclusion

Since it is part of her argument that the problematics of translation and the writing of history are inextricably bound together, She should briefly go over Spivak's main points regarding the "Subaltern historians. Their strategic use of post-structuralist ideas may help us see more clearly how the notions of history and translation she wish to reinscribe are not only enabled by the post-colonial critique of historiography but might also further strengthen that critique. Her central concern here is not to elaborate on the battle for “History" now being staged in Euro-American theory but to ask a series of questions from a strategically "partial“ perspective- that of an emergent post-colonial practice willing to profit from the insights of post-structuralism, while at the same time demanding ways of writing history to make sense of how subjectification operates.