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I'm Nehalba Gohil Student of Department of English,MKBU. This blog is a part of my classroom thinking activity and this activity given by Dr.Dilip Barad Sir. The article of translation studies
Translation and Literary History: An Indian view by
Ganesh Devy
Abstract
Translation is 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 wondering. In western metaphysics translation is an exile a fall from the origin and the mythical exile is a metaphoric translation a post Babel crisis . Translation are not accorded the same status as original works. It is well known that Chaucer was translating the style of Boccacio into English when he created his Canterbury Tales . When Dyren and Pope wanted to recover a sense of order they used the tool of translation. In other European languages such as German and French. The tradition that has given us writes like Shaw yeates , Joyce, Beckett and Heney in a single century the tradition of Anglo - Irish literature branched out of the practice of translating Irish works into English initiated by MacPherson toward the end of the eighteenth century.
Roman Jacobson
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, and
(c) those from a verbal order to another system of signs (Jakobson,1959, pp. 232– 9).
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’ (Catford, 1965, p. vii).
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.
And after Saussure and Lévi-Strauss, linguistics started treating language with an anthropological curiosity.
Analysis
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
The translation is not a transposition of significance or signs. After the act of translation is over, the original work still remains in its original position. Translation is rather an attempted revitalization of the original in another verbal order and temporal space. Like literary texts that continue to belong to their original periods and styles and also exist through successive chronological periods, translation at once approximates the original and transcends it.
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
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. Elements of plot stories characters can be used again and again by new generation of writers because Indian 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.
On Translating a Tamil Poem
A.K. Ramanujan
Abstract
'How does one translate a poem from another time, another culture,another language? Ramanujan translated poems from Tamil were written two thousand years ago in a comer of south India, in a Dravidian language relatively untouched by the other classical language of India, Sanskrit. The 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 by passes.
The chief difficulty of translation is its impossibility. Frost once even identified poetry as that which is lost in translation. As often as not this love like other loves seems to be begotten by despair upon impossibility in Marvells phrase. Let me try to define this impossibility a little more precisely
Here is a poem from an early Tamil anthology Ainkurunuru 203 in modern Tamil script ( Ramanujan 1985 , 230 )
Part 1 - 2
How shall he divide up and translate this poem he may begin with the sound. He find 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.
Tamil has no initial consonant clusters but English abounds in them school, scratch, splash, strike,etc . English words may end in stop as in cut,cup ,tuck etc. Tamil words do not.
Let us look at the grammar briefly if he separate and display the meaningful units of abov poem
The transaction piece by piece would be :
Mother,may { you }- live ,desire ( to listen) ,mother,/ our garden - honey - mixed - with - milk- than sweet ( er ) / ( is ) his land's ( in ) leaf - holes - low , animals - having - drunk - ( and ) leftover, muddied water/
In my English rendering it becomes the following :
WHAT SHE SAID
to her girl friend, when she returned
from the hills
Bless you, friend.Listen
Sweeter than milk
mixed with honey from our gardens
is the leftover water in his land
low in the waterholes
covered with leaves and muddied by animals
Kapilar . Ainkurunuru 203
He attend to syntax he see that Tamil syntax is mostly left ranching. Even a date like the 19th of June 1988 Tamil would look like 1988 June 19 a phrase like
Woollcott argued that English does not have leftbranching possibilities, but they are a bit abnormal. Hopkins and Thomas used those possibilities stunningly Thomas's A Refusal to Moum the death by Fire of a children in London
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' speeches
Part - 3
Universals
If there were no universals in which languages partic- ipate and of which all particular languages were selections and combinations, no language learning, translation. comparative studies or cross-cultural understanding of even the most meagre kind would be possible. If such universals did not exist, as Voltaire said of God, we would have had to invent them. They are at least the basic explanatory fictions of both linguistics and the study of literature. Universals of structure in both signifies and the signifies are necessary fictions.
Interiorised contexts
However culture-specific the details of a poem are. poems like the ones I have been discussing interiorise the entire culture. Indeed, we know about the culture of the ancient Tamils only through a careful study of these poems Later coloptions and com mentaries explore and explicate this knowledge carried by the poems. settings them in context using them to make lexicon and chatting the fauna and flora of landscapes
Systematicity
The 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 lucid world of words. One translates not single poems but bodies of poetry that create and contain their origins world. Even if one chooses not to translate all the poems Tamil arrangement as a poetic device.
Structural mimicry
Yet, against all this background, the work of translating single poems in their particularity is the chief work of the translator. In this task, I believe, the structures of individual poeins, 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 the un- translatable verbal textures. One attempts a structural mimicry to translate relations not items not single words but phrases sequences sentence not metrical units but rhythms not morphology but syntactic patterns .
Conclusion:-
The engineers decided that the best and quickest way to do it would be to begin work on both sides of the mountain, after precise measurements. If the measurements were pre- cise enough, the two tunnels would meet in the middle, making a single one. (But what happens if they don't meet? asked the emperor. The coun- sellors, in their wisdom, answered, (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.
