Article:1
Translation and Literary History: An Indian View
As J. Hills Miler says that
Translation is the wandering existence of text in a perpetual Exile
This statement obviously alludes to the Christian myth of fall from 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 Translation are not accorded same status as original work
Western literary criticism provides for the guilt of the translation for coming into being after original. the temporal sequentiality is held proof of diminution of literary authenticity of translation. the strong sense of individuality given to western individuals through systematics philosophy and the logic of social history makes them view translation as an intrusion of the 'other'
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 English style has been the authorized translation of the Bible.
It is well known that chaucer translating the style of Boccacio into english when he created canterbury Tales. when dryden and pope wanted to recover sense of order they used to tool of translation
During the two century the role of translation in communicating literary movement across linguistic borders has become important. the tradition that has given us writers like shaw, yeats, joyce, bekett heaney in a single century. the tradition Angelo irish literature branched out of the pratice of translating irish work into english initiated by Macpherson towards the end of 18th century.
The settler colonies like Australia, canada, Newzealand have impressive modern tradition of literature which have resulted from the 'Translations of settler from their Homeland to alien Locations post colonial writing in the former spanish colonies in south America.
Most of primary issues relating to the 'form' and 'meaning' too have not been settled in a relation to translation. no critic has taken any well defined position about the exact placement of translation in literary history.
Roman Jacobson writes in his essay on linguistic of translation proposed a three fold classification of translation
a. Those from verbal order to another verbal order within same language system
b. those from one language system to another language system
c. Those from verbal order to another system of science
Structural Linguistics
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. If 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.
Concept of Translating Consciousness
The concept of a ‘translating consciousness’ and communities of people possessing it are no mere notions. In most Third World countries, where a dominating colonial language has acquired a privileged place, such communities do exist. The use of two or more different languages in translation activity cannot be understood properly through studies of foreign-language acquisition. Owing to the structuralist unwillingness to acknowledge the existence of any non-systemic or extra- systemic core of significance, the concept of synonymy in the West has remained inadequate to explain translation activity. And in the absence of a linguistic theory based on a multilingual perspective or on translation practice, the translation thought in the West overstates the validity of the concept of synonymy.
J.C. catford presents a comprehensive statement theoretical the formulation about the linguistic of translation in A linguistic theory of translation in which he seeks to isolate various linguistic levels of translation
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’
Problems of Translation Studies
The translation problem is not just linguistic problem. it is aesthetic and ideological problem with an important bearing on the question of the literary history. Literary translation is not just replication of a text in other verbal system of signs.it is a replication of an ordered sub system of signs within a related language in another corresponding ordered sub systems of signs related languages.
The problems of translation studies are therefore, very much like those literary History .they are the problems of relationship between origin and sequentiality . the problem of origin has not been tackled satisfactorily.
Conclusion
To conclude The article alluding to Indian metaphysics, Indian metaphysics believes in an unhindered migration of the soul from one body to another. Repeated birth is the very substance of all animated creations. When the soul passes from one body to another, it does not lose any of its essential significance. Elements of plot, stories, characters, can be used again and again by new generations of writers because Indian literary theory does not lay undue emphasis on originality.
Article:2
On Translating Tamil poem
A.K.Ramanujan
This article divided in three parts here i have tried to write all three parts with detailed information
Part I
Ramanujan begin the first part with the question that how one does translate a poem from another time another culture another language? the poems i translate from tamil were written two thousands years ago in the corner of south india. over two thousands poems of diffrant lengths by four hundred poets arranged nine anthologies have survived the vagaries of politics and war changes of taste and religion the crumbling of palm leaves the ravages of insects, Heat, cold, water, fire.
The transport of poems from classical tamil to modern English the hazards the damages of transit the secret paths, and the lucky bypasses.
The chief difficulty of Translation is its impossibility Frost once even identified poetry as that which is lost in translation. Once we accept that as a premise of this art, we can proceed to practice it, or learn.
here the writer question about how shall one can divide up and translate a poem? what are the units of translation? then he also find the answer about this particular question that as he begin with sound that the sound system of Tamil is very different from the English . Tamil has six nasal consonants A labial, A dental, An Alveolar, retroflex, palatal and velar. tamil has long and short vowels but english have dipthongs and glides.
we can map system on to another but never reproduce it
Later he talks about Meter that tamil meter depends on the presence of long vowels and double consonants and on closed an open syllable defined by such vowels and consonants.
further he talks about Grammar briefly, Tamil has no copula verbs for equational sentences in the present tense, as in Englishe.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.
further he talk about syntax that tamil syntax is mostly left branching while english syntaxis by and large right ward the tamil sentence is the mirror image of english one this would also be true for other languages.
After that the writer is talk about the lexicon for lexicon culture is specific terms for fauna, flora caste distinction, kinship systems, body parts even the word donate number are culturally loaded. words are emmeshed in other words in collocations in what can go with what, a white elephant, purple. words are participate in sets, contrast, in mutual recalling. even when the elements of the system may be similar in two languages like mother, father, brother, mother-in-law etc. in kinship the systems of relations and feelings traditionally encouraged.
The classical Tamil poetic tradition uses an entire taxonomy. A classification of reality, The five landscapes of the Tamil area, characterized by hills. seashores, agricultural areas, wastelands, and pastoral fields; each with its forms of life, both natural and cultural. trees, animals, tribes, customs. arts and instruments- all these become part of the symbolic code for the 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 signifying moods, and the themes and motifs of love and war.
Part II
In the second part ramanujan talk about the poem Ainkurunuru in english it can be translated as the '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 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 girl friend.
My pharse to order in english tries to preserve the order and syntax of themes not of single words
1.His land's water followed by
2.leaf covered waterholes
3.muddied by Animals
his poem is a kurinci piece, about the lovers' first union, set in the hillside landscape. My title ('What she said to her girl friend, 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.
Thus, poem follows poem with the same paradigm of parson detalis of landscape often the same phrases but playing different tune on the same string making different figure evoking different mood within same theme.
The love poems get parodied subverted and played within comic poems and the war poems provide models and motifs for religious poem god like krasna both lovers and warriors.
The intertextuality is concentric a pattern of membership as well as neighbourhood of likeness and unlikeness.
Part III
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 which languages participate and of which particular languages were section and combinations no language learning, translation, comparative studies or cross cultural understanding of even the best meagre kind would be possible. they are at least basic explanatory fiction of both linguistic and study of literature.
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 using them to make lexicons and charming the fauna and flora of landscape . when one translate classical tamil poem one is also translating also this kind of intertextual web the meaning of making web of colophones and commentaries that surround and contextualise the poem.
3. Systematicity-
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.
conclusion
To translate is to 'metaphor', to 'carry across'. Translations are transpositions, re-enactments, interpretations. The translation must not only represent, but re-present, the original. loyalty.
With the anecdote of Chinese emperor, Ramanujan say 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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