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, 'Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of Modernist Poetic Discourse in Indian Poetry' by E.V. Ramkrishnan.
This chapter examines the role played by translation in shaping a modernist poetic sensibility in some of the major literary traditions of India in the twentieth century, between 1950 and 1970. Translations of major European poets such as Baudelaire, Rilke, Eliot and Years contributed towards clearing a space for the 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 the major Indian poets-such as Buddhadeb Bost, Agyeya, Gopalakrishna Adiga, Dilip Chitre and Ayyappa Paniker -were also translators.
Their translations were foreignising translations that disrupted cultural codes that legislated regimes of reading and writing poetry. Also, translations during the early phase of modernism in major Indian languages appeared in little magazines that played a critical role in opening up the poetic discourse.
Apart from providing alternative models of baking and imagining the world, these translations also legitimised experimental writing styles that became a defining feature of modernist Indian poetry. As the contradictions within the 'high' modernist mode depened in the politically turbulent 1960s, one witnessed a gradual tadicaliation of modernist sensibility in these languages. Here, once again, it is a translation that enabled poets to turn away from modernist high style, providing a critique of its elitism and complicity with nationalist discourses.
André Lefevere's concept of translation as refraction/ rewriting, 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.
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. Both these essays 'carry across' modes and models from an alien Western tradition to interrogate the self-sufficiency of an entrenched poetic.
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.
The term 'modernism' implies a literary/artistic movement that was characterised by experimentation, conscious rejection of the nationalist/ Romantic as well as the popular, and the cultivation of an individualist, Cosmopolitan and insular world view. In the European context, it signified a set of tendencies in artistic expression and writing styles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through a new aesthetic that was iconoclastic, insular and elitist. The aesthetics of modernism in the West had a transnational, metropolitan worldview that excluded the claims of the local and the national and made no concession to the popular taste.
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, Indian modernism did not share the imperial or metropolitan aspirations of its European counterpart. It invested heavily gional cosmopolitan traditions. It was oppositional in content and questioned the colonial legacies of the nationalist discourse. It was elitist and formalistic and deeply distrustful of the popular domain.
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, which has a documented history of more than five thousand years. The problematic that informs this argument is manifest in the critiques of Eurocentric accounts of modernism by Gikandi, Friedman, Doyle and Winkiel, and Rebecca L. Walkonwitz. in different ways.
In the context of Bengali, as Amiya Dev has observed, 'It was not because they imbibed modernism that the adhunik [modernist] Bengali writers turned away from Rabindranath; on the contrary, Modernism was the means by which they turned away from Rabindranath and they had to turn away, for their history demanded it (in Ananthamurthy et al 1992, 7). Commenting on the role of Kannada modernists. R. Sasidhar writes,
If European modernism was drawn between the euphoric and the reactive. In Kannada the precipitate modernism was drawn between the Brahmanical and the non-Brahmanical. Just as the euphoric 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. (in Satchidanandan 2001, 34)
We will look at three representative modernist authors from three separate Indian literary traditions - Sudhindranath Dutta (1901-60) from Bengali, B. S. Mardhekar (1909-56) from Marathi and Ayyappa Paniker (1936-2004) from Malayalam. These authors help us see the chronological trajectory of modernism across Indian literature. While the modernist shift in Bengali emerged in the 1930s and continued into the 40s and 50s, it manifested itself in Marathi from the 1950s to the 60s. It was in the 1960s that the Malayalam literary sensibility was transformed into the modernist mould, its influence slowly waning by the late 70s, though by that time, it had redefined the relations between content and form in all literary forms.
Translation is central to the modernist poetic as it unfolded in these literary traditions. Each of these three authors was bilingual and wrote essays in English as well as their own languages, outlining their new, poetic, thus preparing the reader for new poetic modes.
We can see one of the complex contradictions that beset Indian modernists: their pursuit of cosmopolitan and universal values could not be at the cost of a complete disjunction from tradition. In his radio talk on Eliot, delivered on the occasion of the latter winning the Nobel Prize in 1948, Dutta highlights Eliot's commitment to tradition as 'revolutionary in the fullest sense of the term'. He adds, 'But I am convinced that if civilization is to survive the atomic war, Mr. Eliot's ideal must become widely accepted, so that in the oases that may escape destruction it may be cherished through the interregnum' (55). Obviously, Dutta's endorsement of Eliot's world view has to be seen in relation to his critique of contemporary Indian society. Modernism in India was part of a larger decolonising project. It was not a mindless celebration of Western values and the European, avant-garde.
Ayyappa Paniker also began as a Romantic poet but transformed himself into a modernist with a long poetic sequence titled Kurukshetram published in 1960. Paniker was a poet, critic and translator, who, apart from introducing world poetry to Malayalam readers through translations published in his little magazine, Kerala Kavita, also created the cultural environment for a shift in the literary sensibility through critical interventions. He published a translation of The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock in his journal in 1953. Earlier, in 1950, in an article on T. S. Eliot, Paniker had highlighted the idea that it was not form and prosody that created poetry but the invention of rhythm and resonance that befit the emotion. He urged Malayalam poets to reject prosody in favour of rhythmic free verse.
The Romantic poets had made a shift from Sanskritic traditions to folk metres, which was a movement towards forms. The experimental open of the modernists, on the other hand, opened up poetic forms poetry further, by using imagist, suggestive free verse that affirmed that cach poem has its authentic form which cannot be approximated to a metre which functions independent of content.
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. In other words, they had access to the intellectual resources of alternative traditions of modernity that were bred in the native context. This enables them to selectively assimilate resources of a Western modernity on their own terms. They translate modernity/modernism through the optics of postcolonial 'modernities' There is an internal dialectic and an external dialogic involved here.
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.
The formalist poetry of modernist poetry corresponded to an inner world of desire that produced a language bristling with disquiet and angst. Translation enabled the displaced self of modernity to locate itself in a language that was intimately private and, also, outspokenly public. The idiom of their expression afforded the possibility of self-knowledge through epiphanies that brought 'momentary stay against confusion (Ramanan 1996, 56).
Thus, language became, for the modernists, the only reality that they could relate to. Their moment of recognition, enabled by the discourses of 'Western' modernism, was postcolonial in its essence. The self-reflexive movement was also made possible by the carrying across of not content or form, but an interior mode of being that questioned the prevailing limits of freedom.
In this full article explanation see in this YouTube video. This Article is explained by Khushbu Makvana and Nehalba Gohil students of the English department MKBU.
Presentation Slides
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