Hello Everyone,
I am Hinaba Sarvaiya, a student of the English department at MKBU. This blog is my part of Thinking Activities assigned by our pro. Dr. Dilip Barad sir. In this blog based on paper 208: Comparative Literature and Translation Studies. And here I am discussing, The Collection Essay of A.K. Ramanujan "On Translation a Tamil Poem".
Part I
This essay is divided into three parts. In Part I started with the Question, how does one translate a poem from another time, another culture, another language? The poems I translate from Tamil were written two thousand years ago in a comer of south India, in a Dravidian language relatively untouched by the other classical language of India, Sanskrit.
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.
Over two thousand Tamil poems of different lengths, by over four hundred poets, arranged in nine anthologies, have survived the vagaries of politics and wars; changes of taste and reli gion; the crumbling of palm leaves; the errors and poverty of scribes; the ravages of insects, heat, cold, water, and fire.
The subject of this paper is not the fascinating external history of thi literature, but translation, the transport of poems from classical Tamil modern English; the hazards, the damages in transit, the secret paths, and the lucky bypasses.
The chief difficulty of translation is its impossibility. First once even identified poetry as that which is lost in translation.
Here is a poem from an early Tamil anthology, Ainkurunuru 203, in modern Tamil script (Ramanujan 1985, 230).
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, ñ, ǹ, 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 has diphthongs and glides. So it is impossible to translate the phonology of one language into that 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.
When we attend to syntax, we see that 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.
The most obvious parts of language cited frequently for their utter untranslatability are the lexicon and the semantics of words. For lexicons are culture-specific. Terms for fauna, flora, caste distinctions, kinship systems, body parts, even the words that denote numbers, are culturally loaded. Words are enmeshed in other words-in collocations, in what can go with what ('a blue moon, a red letter day, a white elephant, purple prose').
Even when the elements of a system may be similar in two languages, like father. mother, brother, mother-in-law.etc..ukin- ship, the system of relations (say, who can be a mother-in-law, who can by law or custom marry whom) and the feelings traditionally encouraged about each relative.
The five landscapes of the Tamil area, characterised by hills, seashores, agricultural areas, wastelands, and pastoral fields, each with its forms of life, both natural and cultural.
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.
Part II
The love poems get parodied, subverted, and played with in comic poems and poems about poems. In a few centuries. both the love poems and the war poems provide models and motifs for religious poems. Gods like Krsna are both lovers and warriors. Human love as well as human politics and conflict become metaphors for man's relations with the divine. The relations of lover and beloved, poet and patron, bard and hero, get transposed, or translated if you will, to poet- saint and god.
Thus any single poem is part of a set, a family of sets, a landscape , a genre. The intertextuality of s concentric. a pattern of memberships as well as neighbourhoods, of kenesses and unlikeness. Somehow a translator has to translate each poem in ways that suggest these interests, dialogues, and networks.
Part III
This part III given four things like:
Universals
If there were no universals in which languages partic- ipate and of which all particular languages were selections and combinations, no language learning, translation. comparative studies or cross-cultural understanding of even the most meagre kind would be possible. If such universals did not exist, as Voltaire said of God, we would have had to invent them. They are at least the basic explanatory fictions of both linguistics and the study of literature.
Interiorised contexts
However culture-specific the details of a poem are. poems like the ones I have been discussing interiorise the entire culture. Indeed, we know about the culture of the ancient Tamils only through a careful study of these poems Later coloptions and com mentaries explore and explicate this knowledge carried by the poems.
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 lucid world of words. One translates not single poems but bodies of poetry that create and contain their origins world.
Structural mimicry
Yet, against all this background, the work of translating single poems in their particularity is the chief work of the translator. In this task, I believe, the structures of individual poeins, 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 the un- translatable verbal textures.
Conclusion:-
End of this essay Ramanujan gave an example of a Chinese emperor who ordered a tunnel to be bored through a great mountain. The engineers decided that the best and quickest way to do it would be to begin work on both sides of the mountain, after precise measurements. If the measurements were pre- cise enough, the two tunnels would meet in the middle, making a single one. (But what happens if they don't meet? asked the emperor. The coun- sellors, in their wisdom, answered, (If they don't meet, we will have two tunnels instead of one. So too, 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.
In this full article explanation see in this YouTube video. This Article is explained by Nirav Amrelia and Himanshi Parmar students of the English department MKBU.
Presentation Slides:-
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