Hello Readers!!!
Here is my blog on Comparative Literature and Translation Studies. As part of the Master's syllabus in our final semester, we are studying articles related to comparative literature. For detailed reading here I've attached the link to the article here and also embedded the video link below the blog.
1) Introduction: History in Translation by Tejaswini Niranjana
In a post-colonial context, the problematic of translation becomes a significant site for raising questions of representation, power, and historicity. The context is one of contesting and contested stories attempting to account for, to recount, the asymmetry and inequality of relations between peoples, races, and languages. the discourses of philosophy, history, anthropology philology, linguistics, and literary interpretation, the colonial "subject constructed through technologies or practices of power/knowledge is brought into being within multiple discourses and on multiple sites.
Western philosophical notions of reality, representation, and knowledge. Really is seen as something unproblematic, "out there"; knowledge involves a representation of this reality; and representation provides direct, unmediated access to a transparent reality.
Her concern here is to explore the place of translation in contemporary Euro-American literary theory (using the name of this "discipline" in a broad sense) through a set of interre- lated readings. I argue that the deployment of "translation" in the colonial and post-colonial contexts shows us a way of questioning some of the theoretical emphases of poststructuralism.
Chapter 1 outlines the problematic of translation and its relevance to the post-colonial situation. Reading the texts of different kinds of colonial translators.
In chapter 2, she examines how "translation" works in the traditional discourse of translation studies and in ethnographic writing. Caught in an idiom of fidelity and be- trayal that assumes an unproblematic notion of representa- fion, translation studies fail to ask questions about the histor- icity of translation; ethnography, on the other hand, has recently begun to question both the innocence of representation and the longstanding asymmetries of translation.
In chapters 3, 4, and 5, my main focus is the work of Paul de Man Jacques Derrida, and Walter Benjamin (an earlier critic who is becoming increasingly important to post-structuralist thinkers). My analysis shows how translation functions as a "figure" in all three thinkers, becoming synonymous or associated with a major preoccupation in each: allegory or literature in de Man, the problematics of representation and intentionality in Derrida, and the question of materialist historiography in Benjamin. Pointing out the configurations of translation and history in Benjamin's work, she describes the kind of reading provided by de Man and Derrida of Benjamin's important essay "The Task of the Translator." Her argument is that Walter Benjamin's early writings on translation are trapped in significant ways into his later essays on the writing of history, a trope that goes unrecognized by both de Man and Derrida.
The word translation not just to indicate an interlingual process but to name an entire problematic. It is a set of questions, perhaps a "field," charged with the force of all the terms used, even by the traditional discourse on translation, to name the problem, to translate translation. Translatio (Latin) and metapherein (Greek) at once suggest movement, disruption, displacement. So does Übersetzung (German).
Her study of translation does not make any claim to solve the dilemmas of translators. It does not propose yet another way of theorizing translation to enable a more foolproof "method" of "narrowing the gap" between cultures; it seeks rather to think through this gap, this difference, to explore the positioning of the obsessions and desires of translation, and thus to describe the economies within which the sign of translation circulates. Her concern is to probe the absence, lack, or repression of an awareness of asymmetry and historicity.
The post-colonial distrust of the liberal-humanist rhetoric of progress and of universalizing master narratives has obvious affinities with post-structuralism.
That translation became part of the colonial discourse of Orientalism is obvious from British efforts to obtain information about the people ruled by the merchants of the East India Company.
As translator and scholar, Jones was responsible for the most influential introduction of a textualized India to Europe, Within three months of his arrival, the Asiatic Society held its first meeting with Jones as president and Warren Hastings. the governor-general, as patron. It was primarily through the efforts of the members of the Asiatic Society, themselves ad- ministrators and officials of the East India Company's Indian Government, that translation would help "gather in" and "rope off" the Orient.
Grand Jury at Calcutta, his letters, and his "Oriental" poems to show how he contributes to a historicist, teleological model of civilization that, coupled with a notion of translation presupposing transparency of representation.
The most significant nodes of Jones's work are (a) the need for translation by the European, since the natives are unreliable Interpreters of their own laws and culture; (b) the desire to be a lawgiver, to give the Indians their "own" laws; and (c) the desire to "purify" Indian culture and speak on its behalf. The interconnections between these obsessions are extremely complicated.
In Jones's construction of the "Hindus," they appear as a submissive, indolent nation unable to appreciate the fruits of freedom, desirous of being ruled by an absolute power, and sunk deeply in the mythology of an ancient religion. In a let- ter, he points out that the Hindus are "incapable of civil liberty," for "few of them have an idea of it, and those, who have, do not wish it"
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.
Indians thought of liberty as a curse rather than a blessing, since they certainly could not rule themselves or administer their own laws, these laws had first to be taken away from them and "translated" before they could benefit from them.
William Ward's preface to his three-volume A View of the History, Literature, and Mythology of the Hindoos is instructive for the virulence with which it attacks the depravity and im- morality of the natives.
Ward does not see the present state of the Hindus as a falling away from a former Golden Age. Instead, like James Mill, who quotes him approvingly and often, Ward sees the Hindus as corrupt by nature, lacking the means of education and improvement.
Macaulay did not think it necessary for the entire Indian populace to learn English: the function of anglicized education was "to form a class who may be interpreters between us (the British) and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian.in.blood.and.colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect."
A Gauri Viswanathan has pointed out, the introduction of English education can be seen as "an embattled response to historical and political pressures: to tensions between the English Parliament and the East India Company, between Parliament and the missionaries, between the East India Company and the native elite classes. Extending her ar- gument, I would like to suggest that the specific resolution of these tensions through the introduction of English education was enabled discursively by the colonial practice of transla- tion. European translations of Indian texts prepared for a Western audience provided the "educated" Indian with a whole range of Orientalist image) Even when the anglicized Indian spoke a language other than English, "he" would have preferred, because of the symbolic power conveyed by En- glish, to gain access to his own past through the translations and histories circulating through colonial discourse. English education also familiarized the Indian with ways of seeing, techniques of translation, or modes of representation that came to be accepted as "natural".
The construction of the colonial subject presupposes what Pierre Bourdieu has called "symbolic domination." Symbolic domination, and its violence, effectively reproduce the social order through a combination of recognition and misrecogni tion (reconnaissance and méconnaissance)-recognition that the dominant language is legitimate (one thinks again of the use of English in India) and "a misrecognition of the fact that this language.
The notion of auto colonization implicit in the story about the "native boys" begging for English books could be ex- plored in greater depth through Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony.
My central concern here is not to elaborate on the battle for "history" now being staged in Euro-American theory but to ask a series of questions from a strategically "partial" per- spective that of an emergent postcolonial practice willing to profit from the insights of post-structuralism, while at the same time demanding ways of writing history in order to make sense of how subjectification operates.
History in the text of Post-structuralism is a repressive force that obliterates difference and belongs in a chain that includes the meaning, truth, presence, and logos.
If representation stands for the reappropriation of presence, translation emerges as the sign for what Derrida would call "dissemination"
The point is not just to criticize these characterizations as "inadequate" or "untrue"; one should attempt to show the complicity of the representations with colonial rule and their part in maintaining the asymmetries of imperialism.
Clearly, the notion of hybridity, which is of great importance for a Subaltern critique of historiography as well as for a critique of traditional notions of translation, is both "ambiguous and historically complex."" To restrict "hybridity," or what I call "living in translation," to a post-colonial elite is to deny the pervasiveness, however heterogeneous, of the transformations wrought across class boundaries by colonial and neocolonial domination. This is not to present a meta- narrative of global homogenization, but to emphasize the need to reinvent oppositional cultures in non essentializing ways. Hybridity can be seen, therefore, as the sign of a post-colonial theory that subverts essentialist models of reading while it points toward a new practice of translation.
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.
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 'foreignizing' translations that disrupted cultural codes that legislated regimes of reading and writing poetry. Little magazines played a critical role in opening up the poetic discourse.
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 during the modernist phase of Indian poetry.
The translation was integral to the project of modernism in Indian languages, in assimilating a new poetic into the horizon of the 'native' reader's expectations as well as in contesting the claims of prevailing aesthetic norms by breaching its autonomy and authority.
The communal riots and killings that followed the Partition, the perceived failure of the Nehruvian project of modernity and the consequent erosion of idealism which had inspired an earlier generation of writers committed to socialist realism and Romantic nationalism.
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' (2000, 235) are also instances of translation. Hence, an essay on T. S. Eliot in Bengali by Sudhindranath Dutta, or a scathing critique in Malayalam on the poetic practices of Vallathol Narayana Menon by Ayyappa Paniker, can also be described as 'translational' writings as they have elements of translation embedded in them.
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.
An elaboration on the relation between 'modernity' and 'modernism' in the Indian context will need a separate chapter. For the purpose of our discussion, it may be broadly stated that 'modernity' designates an epochal period of wide-ranging transformations brought about by the advent of colonialism, capitalist economy, industrial mode of production, Western models of education, assimilation of rationalist temper, the resurgence of nationalist spirit and emergence of social, political, legal, juridical and educational institutions that constituted a normative subjectivity embodied with cosmopolitan and individualist world views.
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.
When ideologies like nationalism and spirituality become apparatuses of the state, a section of the intelligentsia has no option other than to seek refuge in bunkers of individualism'.
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, the Indian modernism did not share the imperial or metropolitan aspirations of its European counterpart. It invested heavily in regional cosmopolitan traditions. It was oppositional in content and questioned the colonial legacies of the nationalist discourse. It was elitist and formalistic and deeply distrustful of the popular domain.
How are we to evaluate the modernisms that emerged in the postcolonial phase in India? Critics such as Simon Gikandi, Susan Friedman, Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, and Aparna Dharwadker have argued that non-Western modernisms are not mere derivative versions of a European hegemonic practice.
The Eurocentric nature of the discourse on modernism can be laid bare only by documenting the 'modernisms that emerged in non-Western societies. This will enable us to reimagine the centre-periphery dialectic in terms of a dialogic between peripheries.
The emerging problematic will have to contend with issues of ideological differences between the Western modernism and the Indian one, the different trajectories they traversed as a result of the difference in socio- political terrains and the dynamics of the relations between the past and the present in the subcontinent, which has a documented history of more than five thousand years. The problematic that informs this argument is manifest in the critiques of Eurocentric accounts of modernism by Gikandi, Friedman, Doyle and Winkiel, and Rebecca L. Walkonwitz, in different ways.
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 Rabindranath and they had to turn away, for their history demanded it' Commenting on the role of Kannada modernists, 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-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. (in Satchidanandan 2001, 34)
Translation enables us to delineate the complex artistic and ideological undercurrents that shaped the course of modernism in Indian literatures. To discuss this, we will look at three representative modernist authors from three separate Indian literary traditions - Sudhindranath Dutta (1901-60) from Bengali, B. S. Mardhekar (1909-56) from Marathi and Ayyappa Paniker (1936-2004) from Malayalam. These authors help us see the chronological trajectory of modernism across Indian literatures.
The 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 poetic, thus preparing the reader for new poetic modes.
Buddhadeb Bose, another Bengali modernist, rendered 112 poems of Charles Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil into Bengali, apart from translating Rainer Maria Rilke, Friedrich Hölderlin, Ezra Pound, e. e. cummings, Wallace Stevens and Boris Pasternak. Ayyappa Paniker translated European poets into Malayalam, while B. S. Mardhekar's Arts and the Man (which was published in England in 1937) was a treatise on formalist aesthetics that legitimated modernist practice.
Their profound understanding of Western philosophy and artistic/literary traditions equipped these three writers with the critical capacity to see the significance and limitations of the West.
The case for the modernist poetic is argued in a persuasive manner in the context of the everyday world and its needs. In another essay, 'The Highbrow", he observes, 'I agree with Virginia Woolf that creative artists must from time to time seek shelter within the much-maligned Ivory Tower'.
Dutta highlights Eliot's commitment to tradition as 'revolutionary in the fullest sense of the term'. He adds, "But I am convinced that if civilization is to survive the atomic war, Mr. Eliot's ideal must become widely accepted, so that in the oases that may escape destruction it may be cherished through the interregnum' (55). Obviously, Dutta's endorsement of Eliot's worldview has to be seen in relation to his critique of contemporary Indian society. Modernism in India was part of a larger decolonizing project. It was not a mindless celebration of Western values and the European avant-garde.
Kurkshetram 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 eyes suck and sip The tears that spurt;
The nerves drink up the coursing blood;
And it is the bones that
Eat the marrow here
While the skin preys on the bones
The roots turn carnivore
As they prey on the flowers While the earth in bloom
Clutches and tears at the roots. (Paniker 1985, 14-15)
The title, 'Kurukshetram', signifies the place where the epic battle that forms the…
The second section of the poem retreats into a private space, away from these public images. The inner movement of the poetic structure signifies the undercurrents of a conflict that cannot be paraphrased in moral terms. In this sense, the poem defies the representational structure of the mimetic type. Lines such as, 'Rose of my dream, why do you wear the fevered look? / Singer of my vision, why do you droop and wilt!" (18), invoke subterranean depths of the mind from where memories of an organic community speak to the poet. But this vision of harmony is short-lived, as the self once again relapses into its infernal vision of collapse and disruption. The torments of dream, desire, and despair interrupt the existence: poem and the poet recognizes the futility…
The third section returns to the public world of conflicts. The mythical characters of Sugriva, Vibhishana, Vashistha, Lord Ram, Arjuna, and Oedipus are invoked in this section. The wisdom encoded in myths is now inaccessible to modern men and women, who are diminished into fragmented dehumanized figures. Since the self inhabits a violated space, it lacks the power to know itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment