Hello everyone, I'm Latta Baraiya, a student of the department of English, MKBU. In this blog I'm going to discuss the articles on Contemporary Literature and Translation Studies. This task is assigned by our professor Dilip Barad sir. So let's begin with an article on Translation Studies.
6.Ganesh Devy, “Translation Theory: An Indian Perspective”, In Another Tongue: Essays on Indian English Literature.
Abstract :-
This article is talking about the importance of translation in transmitting literary movements across linguistic borders. In this article Ganesh Devi begins with Christian metaphysics and ends with the Indian metaphysics. Various acts of translation include the origins of literary movements and literary traditions. Translations are widely regarded as unoriginal, and the aesthetics of translation have received little attention.
‘Translation is the wandering existence of a text in a perpetual exile’
J. Hillis Miller
In Western metaphysics translation is an exile, a fall from the origin; and the mythical exile is a metaphoric translation, a post-Babel crisis. No critic has taken any well-defined position about the exact placement of translations in literary history.
Key Arguments :-
In this article we find 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
(a) those from one language system to another language system, and
(a) those from a verbal order to another system of signs.
In A Linguistic Theory of Translation, J. C. Catford gives a comprehensive declaration of theoretical formulation regarding the linguistics of translation, in which he attempts to distinguish several linguistic levels of translation. Because translation is a linguistic act, any theory of translation must originate from linguistics, according to his main premise: 'Translation is a linguistic operation: the process of replacing a text in one language for a text in another; hence, any theory of translation must rest on a theory of language - a general linguistic theory.'
Analysis :-
Various domains of humanistic knowledge were divided into three categories in Europe during the nineteenth century:
1.Comparative studies for Europe,
2.Orientalism for the Orient,
3.Anthropology for the rest of the world
Following Sir William Jones' 'discovery' of Sanskrit, historical linguistics in Europe became increasingly reliant on Orientalism. Further we can see the problem of translation. 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
Conclusion :-
Comparative literature means that there are regions of significance that are shared across two related languages, as well as 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.
7.A.K. Ramanujan, “On Translating a Tamil Poem”, Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan, ed Vinay Dharwadkar.
Abstract :-
Article starts with the talk of world literature
Ramanujan ask the question,
'How does one translate a poem from another time, another culture,another language?
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 bypasses.
Ramanujan took various examples of Tamil poems that he translated into English and he described difficulties that he faced during translation.
Key Arguments :-
Frost once said
“poetry as that which is lost in translation”.
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 argued that English does not have left-branching possibilities, but they are a bit abnormal.
In Hopkins's and Thomas's poetry the leftward syntax is employed for special poetic effects-it alternates with other, more 'normal', types of English sentences. In Tamil poetry the leftward syntax is not eccentric, literary or offbeat. but part of everyday 'natural' speech.
Analysis :-
Translation is not only about text, it's about translation of time, other culture, other language. There are many problems while translation. Researcher Argues that any single poem is part of a set, a family of sets, a landscape, a genre. While translating the Tamil poem Ainkurunuru 203, He begins with the sounds. He found 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. For example : in Gujarati there are 13 vowels and 34 consonants & in English 5 vowels and 21 consonants. The language within a language becomes the second language of Tamil poetry.
He discuss that you have to readjust the structure while translation
For example :
Rama killed Ravana.
રામે રાવણ માર્યો.
You have to do addition in the target language. Because the source language has that absence. There are some words that are not translated for example some Lexicon - semantics words are not translated. Example Gujarati -Sanskrit word :Dharma.
Translation is possible with these things,
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.
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.
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.
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'. This article argues against the view of Frost : poetry is not lost in the translation.
At the end we see the example of a Chinese emperor, who wants to make a tunnel in a mountain. They started work from both sides of the mountain. Engineer said both sides meet in the middle of the mountain. But one asked the question, what if they don't meet ? The counsellor answered, ‘if they don't meet, we will have two tunnels instead of one’.
So the translation work is like that, 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.
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