1) translation Theory : An Indian perspective
‘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 proof of the 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. 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 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.
One of the most revolutionary events in the history of the English style has been the authorized translation of the Bible. It was also the literary expression of Protestant Christianity. The recovery of the original spirit of Christianity was thus sought by Protestant England through an act of translation. It is well known that Chaucer was translating the style of Boccacio into English when he created his Canterbury Tales. When Dryden and Pope wanted to recover a sense of order, they used the tool of translation. Similar attempts were made in other European languages such as German and French.
During the last two centuries, the role of translation in communicating literary movements across linguistic borders has become very important. The tradition that has given us writers like Shaw, Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, and Heaney in a single century – the tradition of Anglo-Irish literature – branched out of the practice of translating Irish works into English initiated by Macpherson towards the end of the eighteenth century.
Many of the Anglo-Irish and Indian English writers have been able translators themselves. Similarly, the settler colonies such as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand have impressive modern traditions of literature, which have resulted from the ‘translation’ of the settlers from their homeland to alien locations. Post-colonial writing in the former Spanish colonies in South America, the former colonies in Africa, and other parts of the world have experienced the importance of translation as one of the crucial conditions for creativity. Origins of literary movements and literary traditions inhabit various acts of translation. 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. However, since translations are popularly perceived as unoriginal, not much thought has been devoted to the aesthetics of translation. Most of the primary issues relating to ‘form’ and ‘meaning’ have not been settled in relation to translation. 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 that haunts translations has rendered translation study a haphazard activity that devotes too much energy to discussing problems of conveying the original meaning in the altered structure.
Unfortunately for translation, the various developments concerning the interdependence between meaning and structure in the field of linguistics have been based on monolingual data and situations. Even the sophisticated and revolutionary theoretical formulation proposed by structural linguistics is not adequate to unravel the intricacies of translation activity. 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
As he considers, theoretically, a complete semantic equivalence as the final objective of a translation act – which is not possible – he asserts that poetry is untranslatable. He maintains that only a ‘creative translation’ is possible. This view finds further support in formalistic poetics, which considers every act of creation as a completely unique event.
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 a 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, rends it open? Assuming that 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. Or do such systems become a single open and extended system? If the translation is defined as some kind of communication of significance, and if we accept the structuralist principle that communication becomes possible because of the nature of signs and their entire system, it follows that translation is a merger of sign systems. Such a merger is possible because systems of signs are open and vulnerable. The translating consciousness exploits the potential openness of language systems, and as it shifts significance from a given verbal form to a corresponding but different verbal form it also brings closer the materially different sign systems. If we take a lead from phenomenology and conceptualize a whole community of ‘translating consciousness’ it should be possible to develop a theory of interlingual synonymy
as well as a more perceptive literary historiography.
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 the 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.
The privileged discourse of general linguistics today is closely interlinked with developments in anthropology, particularly after Lévi-Strauss. During the nineteenth century, Europe distributed various fields of humanistic knowledge into a threefold hierarchy.
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. The 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 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 point that needs to be made is that probably the question of the origins of literary traditions will have to be viewed differently by literary communities with ‘translating consciousness’. 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.
This article, there are three parts and it is about Tamil literature history and its development during the problems has been face and all possible solutions.
It is starting with 'How does one translate a poem from another time, another culture, another language? Of, the literatures of the world at that time, Sanskrit in India, Greek and Latin in Europe, Hebrew in the Middle East, and Chinese in the Far East were Tamil's contemporaries. By this argument, he is making the clear in front of us that Tamil is as old as these languages.
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 bypasses.
Further, He out the question ' How shall we divide up and translate this poem? What are the units of translation? We may begin with the sounds. We find at once 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. ii, 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)?
English words may end in stops, as in 'cut, cup, tuck,' etc.; Tamil words do not. When we add up these myriad systemic differences, we cannot escape the fact that phonologies are systems unto themselves (even as grammatical, syntactic, lexical, and semantic systems to are, as we shall see). Any unit we pick is defined by its relations to other units. So it is impossible to translate the phonology of one language into that of another-even in a related, culturally neighboring language. We can map one system onto another but never reproduce it. A poem is identical only to itself if.
We should translate metrical systems. Meter is a second-order organization of the sound system of a language and partakes of all the above problems and some more. So by putting this he going towards the Metre in his article.
Tamil Metre depends on the presence of long vowels and double consonants, and on closed and open syllables defined by such vowels and consonants. For instance. in the first word of the above poem, annay, the first syllable is heavy because it is closed (an-), and the second is heavy because it has a long vowel. There is nothing comparable in English to this way of counting feet and combinations (marked in the 'text above by spaces). Even if we take 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. In the above poem the first, second and fourth . . , lines have n as the second consonant in the line-initial words annay, ten "and man.
The 'tradition of one poetry would be the innovation of another.
Looking at the Grammar briefly, Tamil has no copula verbs for equational sentences in the present tense, as in English, e.g., 'Tom is a teacher'; no degrees of adjectives as in English, e.g., 'sweet, sweeter, sweetest’; no articles like 'a, an, the': and So on. Tamil expresses the semantic equivalents of these grammatical devices by various other means. The lies and ambiguities of one language are not those of another.
No translation can be 'literal,' or 'word for word'. That is where the impossibility lies. The only possible translation is a 'free' one.
Remarkably, 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.' The Tamil sentence is the mirror image of the English one and will also be true for English Languages. Postpositions instead of prepositions, adjectival clauses before nominal phrases, and verbs at the end rather than in the middle of sentences.
What is every day in one language must be translated by what is every day in the 'target' language also, and what is eccentric must find equally eccentric equivalents. 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?
The most obvious parts of language cited frequently for their utter untranslatability are the lexicon and the semantics of words. Lexicons are culture-specific. Terms for fauna, flora, caste distinctions, kinship systems, body parts, and even the words that denote numbers, are culturally Loaded. Even when the elements of a system may be similar in two languages, like a father. mother, brother, mother-in-law, etc. In kinship, the system of relations and the feelings traditionally encouraged other each relative are culturally sensitive and therefore part of the expressive repertoire of poets and novelists.
Add to this the entire poetic tradition, it is rhetoric. the ordering of different[ genres with different Functions in the culture, which by its system of differences, distinguishes this particular poem.
The classical Tamil poetic tradition uses an entire taxonomy. A classification of reality, The five landscapes of the Tamil area, are characterized by hills. seashores, agricultural areas, wastelands, and pastoral fields; each with its forms of life, both natural and cultural. trees, animals, tribes, and customs. arts and instruments- all these become part of the symbolic code for poetry. Every landscape, with all its contents, is associated with a mood or phase of love or war. The landscapes provide the signifiers. The five real landscapes of the Tamil country become, through this system, the interior landscapes of Tamil poetry. The five landscapes with all their contents signify moods and the themes and motifs of love and war.
Thus a language within a language becomes the second language of Tamil poetry. When one translates, one is translating not only Tamil, its phonology, grammar and semantics, but this entire intertextual web, this intricate yet lucid second language of landscapes which holds together natural forms with cultural ones in a code, a grammar, a rhetoric, and a poetics.
Ramanujan takes a closer look at the original of Kapilar's poem, Ainkurunuru 203, 'What She Said', and his translation, quoted earlier in this essay. The word annay (in spoken Tamil, ammo), literally 'mother', is a familiar term of address for any woman, here a 'girlfriend'. So he has translated it as 'friend', to make clear that the poem is not addressed to a mother (as some other poems are) but to a girlfriend.
Note the long, crucial, left-branching phrase in Tamil: '. . . island's / [in- leaf-holes low /animals- having- drunk- / and]- leftover, muddied water’(in a piece-by-piece translation). In his English, it becomes 'the leftover water in his land, low in the water holes / covered with leaves and muddied by animals.' His phrase order in English tries to preserve the order and syntax of themes, not of single words: (I) his land's water, followed by (2) leaf–covered waterholes, and (3) muddied by animals.
The poem is a kurinci piece, about the lovers' first union, set in the hillside landscape. My title ('What she said to her girlfriend when she returned from the hills') summarizes the whole context (speaker, listener, occasion) from the old colophon that accompanies the poem. The progression is lost if we do not preserve the order of themes so naturally carried by the left-branching syntax of Tamil. More could be said about it from the point of view of the old commentaries.
The love poems get parodied, subverted, and played with in comic poems about poems. In a few centuries, both the love poems and the war poems provide models and motives for religious poems. God like Krsna is both lover and Warrior.
Thus any single poem is part of a set, a family of sets, a landscape, or a genre. The intertextuality is concentric on a pattern of membership as well as neighborhoods of likenesses and unlikeness. Somehow a translator has to translate each poem in ways that suggest these interests, dialogue, and networks.
If attempting a translation means attempting an impossibly intricate task, foredoomed to failure. what makes it possible at all? At least four things-
1. Universals-
If there were no Universals in which languages participate and of which all particular languages were selections and combinations, no language learning, translation, comparative studies or cross-cultural understanding of even the most meager kind would be possible. if such universals did not exist we would have had to invent them.
2. Interiorised contexts-
Poems interiorize the entire culture. Indeed we know the culture of the ancient Tamils only through a careful study of these poems. Later colophons and commentaries explore and explicate this knowledge carried by the poems setting them in context and using them to make lexicons and charming the fauna and flora of the landscape.
3. 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 world of words. 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, of their world, re-presenting it. Here intertextuality is not the problem, but the solution.
4. Structural mimicry-
In translating poems the structures of individual poems, 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 untranslatable 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.
To translate is to 'metaphor', to 'carry across'.
Translations are transpositions, re-enactments, and interpretations. One can often convey a sense of the original rhythm, but not the language-bound meter: one can mimic levels of diction, but not the actual sound of the original words. Textures are harder to translate than structures, linear order more difficult than syntax, and lines are more difficult than larger patterns. Poetry is made at all these levels- and so is translation.
The translation must not only represent, but re-present, the original. loyalty. A translator is an 'artist on oath'. Sometimes one may succeed only in re-presenting a poem, not in closely representing it. With the anecdote of the Chinese emperor, Ramanujan says even 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.
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