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 article "Translation and Literary History: An Indian View" by Ganesh Devi.
'Translation is the wandering existence of a text in a perpetual exile,'
- 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 a proof of 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 (sometimes pleasurable).
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 the 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
One of the most revolutionary events in the history of 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 was like Shaw, Yeats, Joyce, Beckett and Heaney in a single century - the tradition of Angles kross literating-branched out of the practice of translating Irish works into English sturatul by Macpherson towards the end of the eighteenth century, Indian English Literatures.
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 untranslata He maintains that only a 'creative translation' is possible. This view further supports formalistic poetics, which considers every act of creation as a completely unique event. It is however, necessary to acknowledge that synonymy within one language system cannot be conceptually identical with synonymy between two different languages.
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 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'.
The privileged discourse of general linguistics today is closely interlinked with developments in anthropology, particularly after Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss. 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.
In its various phases of development modern Western linguistics has connections with all these. After the 'discovery' of Sanskrit by Sir William Jones, historical linguistics in Europe depended heavily on Orientalism.
Translation can be seen as an attempt to bring a given language system in its entirety as close as possible to the areas of significance that it shares with another given language or languages. All translations operate within this shared area of significance. Such a notion may help us distinguish synonymy within one language and the shared significance between two related languages.
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. 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 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 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, Hemchandra, Michael Madhusudan Dutta, H.N. Apte or Bankim Chandra Chatterjee.
Conclusion:-
Christian metaphysics that conditions reception of translation in the Western World. Indian metaphysics is an unhindered migration of the soul from one body to another. Indian philosophies of the relationship between form and essence, structure and significance are guided by this metaphysics. The soul, or significance, is not subject to the laws of temporality; and therefore significance, even literary significance, is ahistorical in Indian view. 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. If originality were made a criterion of literary excellence, a majority of Indian classics would fail the test. 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.
In this full article explanation see in this YouTube video. This Article is explained by Nilay Rathod and Emisha Ravani students of the English department MKBU.
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