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This blog task is in response to the task assigned by professor Dilip Barad sir as part of thinking activity.
Translation and Literary History: An Indian View:- Ganesh Devy
Translation is the wandering existence of a text in a perpetual exile,' says J. Hillis Miller! The statement obviously alludes to the Christian myth of the Fall, exile and wandering. In Western metaphysics translation is an exile, a fall from the origin, and the mythical exile is a metaphoric translation, a post-Babel crisis" Given this metaphysical precondition of Western aesthetics, it is not surprising that literary translations are not accorded the same status as original works. 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" (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. The philosophy of individualism and the metaphysics of guilt, however, render European literary historiography incapable of grasping the origins of literary traditions.
During the last two centuries the role of translation in communicating literary movements across linguistic borders has become very important. Considering the 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. 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.
As he says, the translator didn't get more respect compared to the original writer - and if we tried to copy then we lose our epics and literature.
As Plato said - Copies are inferior to original work. Whatever today we look as Indian is also Western way and idea of looking. In Western tradition speaking is more important but in Eastern tradition seeing is more important.
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,
(c) Those from a verbal order to another system of signs
In order to explain linguistic change, historical linguistics employs the concept of semantic differentiation as well as that of phonetic glides. While the linguistic changes within a single language occur more predominantly due to semantic differentiation, they also show marked phonetic glides. However, the degree of such glides is more pronounced when a new language comes into existence. In other words, whereas linguistic changes within a single language are predominantly of a semantic nature, the linguistic differences between two closely related languages are predominantly phonetic. Technically speaking, then, if synonymy within one language is a near impossibility, it is not so when we consider two related languages together.
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 signs do not mean anything by or in themselves, they acquire significance by virtue of their relation to the entire system to which they belong. This theory naturally looks askance at translation which is an attempt to rescue/ abstract significance from one system of signs and to wed it with another such system. But language is an open system. It keeps admitting new signs as well as new significance in its fold. It is also open in the socio-linguistic sense that it allows an individual speaker or writer to use as much of it as he can or likes to do. If this is the case, then how 'open' is a particular system of verbal signs when a bilingual user, such as a translator, rents it open? Assuming that for an individual language resides within his consciousness, we can ask whether the two systems within his consciousness can be shown as materially different and whether they retain their individual identities within the sphere of his consciousness.
The concept of a 'translating consciousness" 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.
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.
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'. 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.
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. All translations operate within this shared area of significance. Such a notion may help us distinguish synonymy within one language and the shared significance between two related languages.
He further says that 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. Translation is not a transposition of significance or signs.
The problems in translation study are, therefore, very much like those in literary history. They are the problems of the relationship between origins and sequentiality. And as in translation study so in literary history, the problem of origin has not been tackled satisfactorily. 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.
Conclusion:-
Indian metaphysics believes in an unhindered migration of the soul from one body to another. Repeated birth is the very substance of all animated creations. 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 soul, or significance, is not subject to the laws of temporality; and therefore significance, even literary significance, is ahistorical in Indian view. Elements of plot, stories, characters, can be used again and again by new generations of writers because 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 revitalise the original. And in that sense Indian literary traditions are essentially traditions of translation.
Video Recording of this article presentation:-
On Translating a Tamil Poem:-
This article divided into three parts
1) Basic introduction of language
2) Example of poem
3) Concluding remarks
Part -1
According to A.K. Ramanujan When you translate something, you lose the spirit of original work. But in this article the writer talks about Tamil poems in English, and Tamil is harder than English. He talked about a poem which was written 2000 years ago in a corner of South India. Sanskrit in India, Greek and Latin in Europe, Hebrew in the Middle East, and Chinese in the Far East were Tamil's contemporaries.
The subject of this paper is not the fascinating external history of this literature, but translation, the transport of poems from classical Tamil to modern English; the hazards, the damages in transit, the secret paths, and the lucky bypasses.
The chief difficulty of translation is its impossibility. Frost once even identified poetry as that which is lost in translation. Once we accept that as a premise of this art, we can proceed to practise it, or learn endlessly to do so.
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 double consonants that occur in English only across phrases like 'hottin' and 'sir right.' Such features are well illustrated by the above poem in Tamil. 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.
Poetry is about,
Sound Grammar Culture
Phonology Syntax Rhetoric
Metre/Rhyme lexicon
Semantics of words Poetic Taxonomy
Part-2
Tamil metre depends on the presence of long vowels and double consonants, and on closed and open syllables defined by such vowels and consonants. Even if we use familiar devices like rhyme, they do not have the same values in different languages. English has a long tradition of end-rhymes-but Tamil has a long tradition of second syllable consonant-rhymes.
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 disabuse us of the commonly-held notion of 'literal' translation. We know now that no translation can be 'literal,' or 'word for word'. That is where the im- possibility lies. The only possible translation is a 'free' one.
When we attend to syntax, we see that 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.' A phrase like
A. B. C. D. E
The man who came from Michigan
would be 'Michigan-from come-past tense who man":
E D C. B A
In Gujarati
એ માણસ મિશિગન થી આવ્યો છે.
B. A. E. D. C.
The Tamil sentence is the mirror image of the English one: what is A B CDE in the one would be by and large E D C B A in Tamil.
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? Many of his devices' indentation, spacing and compromises are made in order to closely mimic the syntactic suspense of the original. The most obvious parts of language cited frequently for their utter untranslatability are the lexicon and the semantics of words.
Even when the elements of a system may be similar in two languages, like father, mother, brother, mother-in-law, etc., in kin- ship, the system of relations (say, who can be a mother-in-law, who can by law or custom marry whom) and the feelings traditionally encouraged about each relative through mother-in-law jokes, step-mother tales, incest taboos are all 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.
Now, the classical Tamil poetic tradition uses an entire taxonomy, a classification of reality, as part of its stock-in-trade. The five landscapes of the Tamil area, characterised 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. The five real landscapes of the Tamil country become, through this system, the interior landscapes of Tamil poetry. And each landscape or mood is also associated with a time of day and a season. Each landscape, along with its mood and the genre of poetry built around it, is usually named after a tree or flower of that region.
Every field has their semantic fields so Ramanujan says that if you want to talk about that particular thing you have to use words from that semantic field. Though the way original appeals translation doesn't
Time is very important in which work is written, for example in history there were no issues in using words like Spanish flu but in contemporary time if somebody used words like - China virus or Vuhan virus then it became problematic. There we found problems with old language and new language.
Part -3
'Process of translation is process of failing'
If attempting a translation means attempting such an impossibly intricate task, foredoomed to failure, what makes it possible at all? At least four things, maybe even four articles of faith, help the translator.
1) Universal:-
Every language has some universal meaning. Language doesn't have meaning but context has meaning.If such universals did not exist, as Voltaire said of God, we would have had to invent them.
2)Interiorised Contexts:-
When one translates a classical Tamil poem, one is also translating this kind of intertextual web, the meaning-making web of colophons and commentaries that surround and contextualise the poem. Even when we disagree with them, they give us the terms in which we construct the argument against them. There is no illusion here of the poem itself".
3)Systematicity:-
The systematicity of such bodies of poetry, the way figures, genres, personae, etc., One translates not single poems but bodies of poetry that create and contain their original world. 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. One's selection then be- -comes a metonymy for their world, re-presenting it. Here intertextuality is not the problem, but the solution. One learns one's lessons here not only from the Tamil arrangements but from Yeats, Blake, and Baudelaire, who all used arrangement as a poetic device.
4)Structural Mimicry:-
The poetry and the significance reside in these figures and structures as much as in the un- translatable 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.
Conclusion:-
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. Textures are harder and impossible 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. At the end he concluded that 'If they don't meet, we will have two tunnels instead of one. So too, 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.
Word Count:- 2779
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