6) GN Devy, “Translation Theory: An Indian Perspective”, In Another Tongue: Essays on Indian English Literature. 1993
1) Abstract
This article is about the role of translation in communicating literary movements across linguistic borders. According to J. Hillis Miller ‘Translation is the wandering existence of a text in a perpetual exile.’Chaucer, Dryden, and the Pope used the tool of translation to recover a sense of order. The tradition of Anglo-Irish literature branched out of translating Irish works into English.No critic has taken a well-defined position on the place of translations in literary history. Origins of literary movements and literary traditions inhabit various acts of translation. Translations are popularly perceived as unoriginal, not much thought has been devoted to the aesthetics of translation.
2) Key Arguments
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.
3) Analysis
The Problems in Translation Study
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.
problems of the relationship between origins and sequentiality
the very foundation of modern Indian literature was laid through acts of translation, whether by Jayadeva, Hemcandra, Michael Madhusudan Dutta, H.N. Apte, or Bankim Chandra Chatterjee.
4) Conclusion
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.
Comparative literature implies that between two related languages there are areas of significance that are shared, just as there may be areas of significance that can never be shared.
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.
7) A.K. Ramanujan, “On Translating a Tamil Poem”, Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan, ed Vinay Dharwadkar. Oxford University Press, 1999
1) Abstract
We know now that no translation can be literal,' or 'word for word. That is where the impossibility lies. The only possible translation is a 'free' one. 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. In this article, Ramanujan took various examples of Tamil poems that he translated into English and he described difficulties that he faced during translation.
Comparison of Tamil and English Language
While translating the Tamil poem Ainkurunuru 203, He begins with the sounds. He finds that the sound system of Tamil is very different from English. For instance, Old Tamil has six nasal consonants: a labial, a dental, and 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 stops, as in 'cut, cup, tuck,' etc.; Tamil words do not.
2) Key Arguments
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 a literal translation.
Woollcott suggests that English does not have left-branching possibilities, but they are a bit abnormal.
Hopkins and Dylan Thomas used those possibilities stunningly, as we see in Thomas's 'A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London; both were Welshmen, and Welsh is a left-branching language.
3) Analysis
The collocations and paradigms make for metonymies and metaphors, multiple contextual meanings clusters special to each language, quite untranslatable into another language like Tamil. Even when the elements of a system may be similar in two languages, like father, mother, brother, mother-in-law, etc., in kinship, the system of relations and the feelings traditionally encouraged each Ali culturally relative are all sensitive and therefore part of I culturally onts and novelists. the expressive repertoire of
Ramanujan took two differs and s poems about love (What She Said) and war (A Young Warrior) and made the point that when we move from one to the other we are struck by the associations across them forming a web not only of the aka and Puram genres. But also of the five landscapes.; with all their contents signifying moods. And the themes and motifs of love and war.
Love and war become metaphors for one another. In the poem "A Leaf In Love And War" we see entwines the two themes of love and war in an ironic juxtaposition. A wreath of noise is worn by warriors in war poems a cocci leaf skirt is given by a lover to
his woman in a love poem.
Example God Krishna: both lovers and warriors Ramanujan take a closer look at the original of Kapilar's poem Ainkurunuru 203. And he points out that The word annoy (in spoken Tamil, ammo), literally 'mother', is a familiar term of address for any woman, here a 'girl friend'. So I have 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.
4) Conclusion
May succeed only in representing the poem, not in closely representing it. At such times one draws consolation from parables like the following. 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.
The translation must not only represent,, but present, the original. One walks a tightrope between the To-language and the From-language, in a double loyalty. A translator is an artist on oath'.
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