Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of Modernist Poetic Discourse in Indian Poetry:- 

E.V.Ramakrishnan

In this article the writer tries to say that how translation became a problematic thing, the article is about 20th century modernism. As we all know that Western have their reasons for modernism but the East didn't have such suffering to be modern. So one should question that then how modernism came in India? So one can say that for India modernism is an imported idea through translations , it is not the natural flow of modernism and that's why it doesn't allow us to see clearly. We can not find a particular reason for modernity in India, there is still something missing.

This chapter 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. Translations of major European poets such as Baudelaire, Rilke, Eliot and Yeats contributed towards clearing a space for the modernist discourse in Indian poetry. 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 poetic modes. Many of the major Indian poets - such as Buddhadeb Bose, Agyeya, Gopalakrishna Adiga, Dilip Chitre and Ayyappa Paniker - were also translators. Their translations were 'foreignising' translations that disrupted cultural codes that legislated regimes of reading and writing poetry. Also, translations during the early phase of modernism in major Indian languages appeared in little magazines that played a critical role in opening up the poetic discourse. Translations from African and Latin American poetry played a significant role in this phase of modernism. Poets such as 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 style during the modernist phase of Indian poetry.

Part-1

This chapter uses the term 'translation' to suggest a range of cultural practices, from critical commentary to creation of intertextual texts. Following André Lefevere's concept of translation as refraction/ rewriting, the chapter argues that 'rewritings' or 'refractions' found in the 'less obvious form of criticism..., commentary, historiography of the plot summary of famous works cum evaluation type, in which the evaluation is unabashedly based on the current concept of what "good" literature should be, teaching, the collection of works in anthologies, the production of plays' are also instances of translation. In India, modernism, as a practice, fundamentally differed from that in the West, but it fulfilled a function in the socio-cultural contexts of Indian languages by transforming the relations between the text and the reader, and the modes of writing and reading. Modernist writers were responding to the internal dynamics of their own traditions in selectively assimilating an alien poetic that could be regressive or subversive depending on the context and the content. In this sense, a conservative poet such as Gopalakrishna Adiga in Kannada, or a radical dissident like Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh in Hindi, belonged to the larger modernist tradition which accommodated diverse political ideologies and innovative experimental styles.

The project of modernity in India was implicated in colonialism and imperialism. This 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. As Dilip Chitre observes, 'what took nearly a century and a half to happen in England, happened within a hurried half century' in Indian literature.

Part-2

The term 'modernism' implies a literary/artistic movement that was characterised by experimentation, conscious rejection of the nationalist/ Romantic as well as the popular, and the cultivation of an individualist, cosmopolitan and insular world view. In the European context, it signified a set of tendencies in artistic expression and writing styles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through a new aesthetic that was iconoclastic, insular and elitist.While the modernism that emerged in Indian literatures shared many of these defining features, its political affiliations and ideological orientations were markedly different. Due to its postcolonial location, Indian modernism did not share the imperial or metropolitan aspirations of its European counterpart. It invested heavily in regional cosmopolitan traditions.

The modernist phase in Indian language traditions has not been recognised as part of the global modernist movement. The discourse of modernism is heavily slanted in favour of Western writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Part-3

In the context of Bengali, as Amiya Dev has observed, 'It was not because they imbibed modernism that the adhunik modernist Bengali writers turned away from Rabindranath; on the contrary, Modernism was the means by which they turned away from and they had to turn away, for their history demanded it' 

If European modernism was drawn between the euphoric and the reactive, in Kannada the precipitate modernism was drawn between the Brahmanical and the non-Brahminical. 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. 

Part-4

Translation is central to the modernist poetic as it unfolded in these literary traditions. Each of these three authors was bilingual and wrote essays in English as well as their own languages, outlining their new poetry, thus preparing the reader for new poetic modes.

Part-5

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.

Part-6

In Mardhekar, both irony and self-reflexivity are ways of constituting a new reader by freeing him or her from his or her habits of viewing the world. These are strategies to re-inscribe a self-critical attitude towards the material content of art and life. In 'Mice in the Wet Barrel Died', which became the iconic modernist poem of Marathi, Mardhekar goes to the very limits of language to capture an acute state of anguish that is closer to the saint-poet's suffering than the existential crisis of the modern man or woman.

Part-7

Kurukshetram is a poem of 294 lines in five sections. The opening lines of the Bhagavad Gita are cited as the epigraph of the poem, thus setting a high moral and critical tone in relation to contemporary life and society. As in Eliot's The Waste Land, Kurukshetram's opening lines communicate a pervasive decline of moral values and a disruption of the organic rhythms of society. 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.

Part-8

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 which had already developed internal critiques of Western modernity. In other words, they had access to the intellectual resources of alternative traditions of modernity that were bred in the native context. This enables them to selectively assimilate resources of a Western modernity on their own terms. They 'translate modernity/modernism through the optics of postcolonial 'modernities'. There is an internal dialectic and an external dialogic involved here. The modernist subject was fragmented and fractured in the Indian context, but not for reasons that constituted fragmented selves in the Western context. Colonial modernity operated within the Indian context as a realm of desire which brought into being a new social imaginary.Thus, 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 movement 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.

Video recording of the article presentation:-

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