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.
8.Tejaswini Niranjana. “Introduction: History in Translation” Siting Translation: History, Poststructuralism and the Colonial Context.
Abstract :-
For a while now, some of the most urgent debates in contemporary cultural and literary studies have emerged out of the troubled interface of poststructuralist theory and historical studies. In its most basic formulation, the problem is that of articulating radical political agendas within a deconstructive framework. For a discipline like literary studies, the raison d'être of which is the analysis of representation, the critique of representation coming from within has engendered profoundly self-reflexive anxieties. She begins by addressing what 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.
Key Arguments :-
Her purpose is to make a modest beginning by examining the “uses” of translation. The rethinking of translation becomes an important task in a context where it has been used since the European Enlightenment to under- write practices of subjectification, especially for colonized peoples.
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, discuss the pertinence of the critique of historicism to a world undergoing decolonization, given the enduring nature of Hegelian 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.
Another 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 with holding of reciprocity and the essentializing of “difference” (what Johannes Fabian calls a denial of coevalness) that permits a stereotypical construction of the other.
Conventionally, translation depends on the Western philosophical notions of reality, representation, and knowledge.
Analysis :-
It is in the context of this crisis that Tejaswini Niranjana's examination
of translation as 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 a 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",
Niranjana persuasively shows that a critique of presence can be taken to its limits and yet not incapacitate the interventionist critic.
Jones's disgust is continually mitigated by the necessity of British rule and the "impossibility" of giving liberty to the Indians. He brings up repeatedly the idea of "Orientals" being accustomed to a despotic rule. In his tenth annual discourse to the Asiatic Society, he says that a reader of "history" "could not but remark the constant effect of despotism in benumbing and debasing all those faculties which distinguish men from the herd that grazes; and to that cause he would impute the decided inferiority of most Asiatic nations, ancient and modern."27 The idea of the "submissive" Indians, their inability to be free, and the native laws that do not permit the question of liberty to be raised are thus brought together in the concept of Asian despotism.
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.
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.
Abstract :-
Translation looked like something shaped Indian modernity. In the language of Bengali, Malayalam and Marathi how modernity comes through the Translation. This article 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, Gopalakrishna Adiga, Dilip Chitre and Ayyappa Paniker were also translators. Translation from Africa and Latin America poetry played a significant role in this phase of modernism. Neruda and Parra were widely translated into Indian languages during this phase.
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 be described as ‘translational’ writing as they have elements of translation embedded in them.
Key Arguments :-
Critics such as Simon Gikandi, Susan Friedman, Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, and Aparna Dharwadker have argued that Non-Western modernism are not mere derivative versions of European hegemonic practice.
R. Sasidhar writes, If European modernism was drawn between the euphoric and the reactive, in Kannada the precipitate modernism was drawn between. the Brahminical and the non-Brahmanical. Just as the euphoric and the reactive modernisms were part of the internal dynamics of modernism itself, so also the Brahmanical and the non-Brahmanical modernisms in Kannada were part and parcel of a modernism that came as a reaction to the Nehruvian environment.
One of the recurring themes in Sudhindranath Dutta's critical essays is the primacy of the word. In 'The Necessity of Poetry', he argues that the persistence of poetry through the ages in all societies, particularly among the unsophisticated and the primitive, attest to its necessity.
Analysis :-
The act of reading becomes an act of recovery when prescriptive protocols and absolutist dictums are subverted through an intimate involvement with the subliminal, the unwritten and the inarticulate embedded in literary texts. The book analyses the moral imaginaries that animate the works of Rabindranath Tagore, Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, Mahasweta Devi, Amitav Ghosh, Bhalchandra Nemade, Anand, M. Mukundan, N. S. Madhavan, Agha Shahid Ali and Jean Arasanayagam as evidence of revisionist ways of radical rethinking that can propel us in the direction of an interdisciplinary domain of comparative humanities.
Conclusion :- 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.
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