Hello Readers! I am Divya Parmar and i am writing this Blog to complete task which is given by Dr. Dilip Barad sir. In this blog i will discuss two articles.
1. . 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 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’iv (sometimes pleasurable). This intrusion is desirable to the extent that it helps define one’s own identity, but not beyond that point. It is of course natural for the monolingual European cultures to be acutely conscious of the act of translation.
Key Points:
The philosophy of individualism and the metaphysics of guilt, however, render European literary historiography incapable of grasping the origins of literary traditions.
Most revolutionary events in the history of English style has been the
authorized translation of the Bible.
The recovery of the original spirit of Christianity was thus sought by Protestant England through an act of translation.
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.
Fact that 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.
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 about 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 haunts 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: (1) Those from one verbal order to another verbal order within the same language system.
(2) Those from one language system to another language system.
(3) Those from a verbal order to another system of sign.
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 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.
The field is stratified in terms of value based indicators L1 and L2, though in reality language-learning activity may seem very natural in a country like India.
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.
‘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.
1)Humanistic knowledge into a threefold hierarchy: comparative studies for Europe.
2)Orientalism for the Orient. 3)Anthropology for the rest of the world.
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.
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.
The problems in translation study are, therefore, very much like those in literary history.
The problems of the relationship between origins and sequentiality.
The problem of origin has not been tackled satisfactorily.
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.
Christian metaphysics that conditions reception of translation in the Western world.
Conclusion
Let us allude to Indian metaphysics in 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 revitalize the original. And in that sense Indian literary traditions are essentially traditions of translation.
Article : “Translation and literary history: An Indian view” - Ganesh Devy
Abstract:
The article or an excerpt if to say so with reference to the book titled as 'The Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan' (1999)- titled as 'On Translating a Tamil Poem discusses the difficulties in translating one literary text having its origin in native or particular language into the foreign language on grounds of the diverse nature of phonetics, linguistics, and grammatical aspects of the selected languages which are tabled for translating the text into them. The essay gives meticulous accounts of difficulties and variation with ample examples from Tamil Poetry and English Rhymes while translating selected text of one language into the other one/s. It serves as the pre-reading piece for any translator of the world working within or without the boundaries of academics or is a freelancer translator. The author has objectively put the practical exertion of translation and become the part of the vast field of Translation Studies.
Key points:
Looking at the Grammar briefly, Tamil has no copula verbs for equational sentences in the present tense, as in English, e.g., 'Tom is a teacher'; no degrees of 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. The lies and ambiguities of one language are not those of another.
No translation can be 'literal,' or 'word for word'. That is where the impossibility lies. The only possible translation is a 'free' one.
Remarkably, Tamil syntax is mostly left- branching. English syntax is, by and large, rightward. Even a date like 'the 19th of June, 1988,' when translated into Tamil, would look like '1988, June, 19.' The Tamil sentence is the mirror image of the English one and will also be true for English Languages. Postpositions instead of prepositions, adjectival clauses before nominal phrases, verbs at the end rather than in the middle of sentences.
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. If Poetry is made out of, among other things, 'the best words in the best order', and the best orders of the two languages are the mirror images of each other, what is a translator to do?
The most obvious parts of language cited frequently for their utter untranslatability are the lexicon and the semantics of words. For lexicon are culture-specific. Terms for fauna, flora, caste distinctions, kinship systems, body parts, even the words that denote numbers, are culturally Loaded. 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 other each relative are culturally sensitive and therefore part of the expressive repertoire of poets and novelists.
Add to this the entire poetic tradition, its rhetoric. the ordering of different[ genres with different Functions in the culture, which by its system of differences, distinguishes this particular poem.
The classical Tamil poetic tradition uses an entire taxonomy. A classification of reality, The five landscapes of the Tamil area, characterized 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. The five landscapes with all their contents signifying moods, and the themes and motifs of love and war.
Thus a language within a language becomes the second language of Tamil poetry. When one translates, one is translating not only Tamil, its phonology, grammar and semantics, but this entire intertextual web, this intricate yet lucid second language of landscapes which holds together natural forms with cultural ones in a code, a grammar, a rhetoric, and a poetics.
Ramanujan takes a closer look at the original of Kapilar's poem, Ainkurunuru 203, 'What She Said', and his translation, quoted earlier in this essay. The word annay (in spoken Tamil, ammo), literally 'mother', is a familiar term of address for any woman, here a 'girlfriend'. So he 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.
Note the long, crucial, left-branching phrase in Tamil: '. . . hisland's / [in- leaf-holes low /animals- having- drunk- / and]- leftover, muddied water’(in a piece-by-piece translation). In his English, it becomes 'the leftover water in his land, low in the water holes / covered with leaves and muddied by animals.' His phrase order in English tries to preserve the order and syntax of : themes, not of single words: (I) his land's waler, followed by (2) leaf– covered waterholes, and (3) muddied by animals.
The poem is a kurinci piece, about the lovers' first union, set in the hillside landscape. My title ('What she said to her girl friend, when she returned from the hills') summarizes the whole context (speaker, listener, occasion) from the old colophon that accompanies the poem. The progression is lost if we do not preserve the order of themes so naturally carried by the left-branching syntax of Tamil. More could be said about it from the point of view of the old commentaries.
The love poems get parodied, subverted and played with in comic poems about poems. In a few Centuries, both the love poems and the war poems provide models and motives for religious poems. God like Krsna the are both lovers and Warriors.
Thus any single poem is part of a set, a family of sets, a landscape, a genre. The intertextuality is concentric on a pattern of membership as well as neighborhoods of likenesses and unlikeness. Somehow a translator has to translate each poem in ways that suggest these interest, dialogue and network.
If attempting a translation means attempting an impossibly intricate task, foredoomed to failure. what makes it possible at all'? At least four things-
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 meager kind would be possible. if such universals did not exist we would have had to invent them.
2.Interiorised contexts-
Poems interiorize the entire culture. Indeed we know 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 poems setting them in context using them to make lexicons and charming the fauna and flora of landscape .
3. Systematicity-
Systematicity of such bodies of poetry, the way figures, genres, personae etc., intermesh in a master-code, is a great help in entering this intricate yet world of words. 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, of their world, re-presenting it. Here intertextuality is not the problem, but the solution .
4. Structural mimicry-
In translating poems 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 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.
To translate is to 'metaphor', to 'carry across'. Translations are transpositions, re-enactments, interpretations. 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. Textures are harder to translate than structures, linear order more difficult than syntax, lines more difficult than larger patterns. Poetry is made at all these levels- and so is translation.
The translation must not only represent, but re-present, the original. loyalty. A translator is an 'artist on oath'. Sometimes one may succeed only in re-presenting a poem, not in closely representing it.
With the anecdote of Chinese emperor, Ramanujan say even 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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