Sunday, 25 December 2022

Shifting centres and Emerging Margins :Translation and shaping of modernist poetic discourse in indian poetry

Shifting  centres and Emerging Margins: 

Translation and shaping of modernist poetic discourse in indian poetry 

This chapter examines role played by translation in shaping a modernist poetic sensibility some of the major literary traditions of India in 20th century between 1950 and 1970. Translations of major European poets such as Baudelaire like Eliot and Yeats contributed towards clearing space for 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 major indian poets  such as Buddhadeb Bose, Agyeya, , Gopala Krishna Adiga  Dilip Chitre and Ayyapa Panikar were also translator. Their translator were foreignising Translations and disrupted cultural codes that legislated regimes of reading and writing poetry. Translations during early phase of modernism  in the major indian languages appeared in little magazine that played a critical role in opening up poetic discourse. 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. 


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.

While the modernism that emerged in Indian literature 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. 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. 


André Lefevere's concept of translation as refraction/ writing, 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.


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 rationalized temper, 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.


The modernist revolt in india was a response to disruption brought about by  colonial modernity  as Dilip  chitre observes that, what a took nearly  a century and half to happen in England, happened within hurried half century in indian literatures. 

While introducing the works of B. S. Mardhekar, a major Marathi modernist, Chitre says. The poet B. S. Mardhekar was the most remarkable product of the cross-pollination between the deeper, larger native tradition and contemporary world culture'. It has been argued that the idea of a self-referential or self-validating literary text which is central to modernist poetic, is rooted in an ideology of the aesthetic that was complicit with colonialism. But one has to note that modernist sensibility, as it appeared in Indian languages was essentially oppositional in content.


D.R.Nagaraj has pointed out that as nationalism become the ideology of the nation-state, writers who had earlier found nationalism to be a form of resistance to colonialism, retreated to individualism. He adds, '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'


Chronologically, in twentieth dimension to the aesthetic of Indian modernism. 

How are we to century? The postcolonial context adds a complex political 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.


 in the third part of article 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 cuphoric 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.


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. c. cummings, Wallace Stevens and Boris Pasternak. Ayyappa Paniker translated European poets into Malayalam, while B. S. Mardhekar's Arts and the Man. 

Mardhekar intervened in Marathi literary tradition as an insider who had mastered the insights given by an alien tradition. Mardhekar's creative reclamation of tradition is a response to the disruption of a moral order in his culture. He had to invent a language to articulate this fragmentation.

Like Mardhekar, Ayyappa Paniker also began as a Romantic poet but transformed himself into a modernist with a long poetic sequence titled Kurukshetram published in 1960. He published a translation of The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock in his journal in 1953.

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


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.


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.

Conclusion

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.








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