Hello, I am Himanshi Parmar, student of MK Bhavnagar University. This blog i have written as a response to Thinking Activity, Which is a Part of my academic Work. Which we get after each unit. In this blog, i am going to discuss briefly about Two articles, 1) Ganesh Devy, “Translation Theory: An Indian Perspective”, and 2) A.K. Ramanujan, “On Translating a Tamil Poem”.
What is Comparative Studies?
The studies which reveal similarities or differences between different markets, countries, aspects of companies, etc. They help to illustrate links and dissimilarities between these different elements. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary,
"Comparative Literature is the study of the interrelationship of the literature of two or more national cultures usually of differing languages and especially of the influences of one upon the other."
In another words Comparative Literature is traditionally known as the study of two or more literatures in comparison (English and German, for example) and their multi-dimensional components which may encompass aspects such as the historical, gender, economic, cultural, social, philosophical, religious, and linguistic factors of the distinct cultures being analyzed.
Comparative Literature focuses on the study of literature from different cultures, nations, and genres, and explores relationships between literature and other forms of cultural expression. Comparative Literature poses such questions as, What is the place of literature in society? How does literature as a form change over time, and in relation to other forms of making art? How does literature shape and respond to values, social movements, or political contexts? Click to Read more.
Article -1
Translation and Literary History: An Indian View -Ganesh Devy.
Video recording of the article explanation.
About Ganesh Devy
Ganesh N. Devy was born on 1 August 1950. He is an Indian literary critic and former professor. He is known for the People's Linguistic Survey of India and the Adivasi Academy created by him.He is credited to start the Bhaashaa research and Publication Centre. He writes in three languages—Marathi, Gujarati and English. His first full length book in English After Amnesia (1992). He has written and edited close to ninety books in areas including Literary Criticism, Anthropology, Education, Linguistics and Philosophy.G. N. Devy has received several Lifetime Achievement Awards. He was awarded Padma Shri on 26 January 2014 in recognition of his work with denotified and nomadic tribes and endangered languages. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award (1993) for After Amnesia, and the SAARC Writers’ Foundation Award (2001) for his work with denotified tribals. He was given the reputed Prince Claus Award (2003) for his work for the conservation of tribal arts and craft. His Marathi book Vanaprasth received eight awards including the Durga Bhagwat Memorial Award and the Maharashtra Foundation Award. Along with Laxman Gaikwad and Mahashweta Devi, he was one of the founders of The Denotified and Nomadic Tribes Rights Action Group (DNT-RAG). He won the 2011 Linguapax Prize for his work for the preservation of linguistic diversity. Click to read more of him.
Article - Translation and Literary History: An Indian View.
The article begins with the quote by J. Hillis Miller, ‘Translation is the wandering existence of a text in a perpetual exile'. In Western metaphysics translation is an exile, a fall from the origin; and the mythical exile is a metaphoric translation, a post-Babel crisisiii. 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.
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. 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 us writers like Shaw, Yeats, Joyce, Beckett and Heaney in a single century – the tradition of
Anglo-Irish literature – branched out of the practice of translating Irish works into English initiated by Macpherson towards the end of the eighteenth century.Most of the primary issues relating to ‘form’ and ‘meaning’ too have not been settled in relation to translation. No critic has taken any well-defined position about the exact placement of translations in literary history. Do they belong to the history of the ‘T’ languages or do they belong to the history of the ‘S’ languages? Or do they form an independent tradition all by themselves? This ontological uncertainty which haunts translations has rendered translation study a haphazard activity which devotes too much
energy discussing problems of conveying the original meaning in the altered structure.
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 (Jakobson, 1959, pp.
232– 9).
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 untranslatable. He maintains that only a ‘creative translation’ is possible. This view finds further support in formalistic poetics, which considers every act of creation as a completely unique event.
Historical linguistics has some useful premises in this regard. In order to explain linguistic change, historical linguistics employs the concept of semantic differentiation as well as that of phonetic glides. The linguistic changes within a single language occur more predominantly due to semantic differentiation, they also show marked phonetic glides.
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.This theory naturally looks askance at translation which is an attempt to rescue/ abstract significance from one system of signs and to wed it with another such system. But language is an open system. It keeps admitting new signs as well as new significance in its fold. It is also open in the socio-linguistic sense that it allows an individual speaker or writer to use as much of it as he can or likes to do.
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 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. In India several languages are simultaneously used by language communities as if these languages formed a continuous spectrum of signs and significance. The use of two or more different languages in translation activity cannot be understood properly through studies of foreign-language acquisition.
Chomsky’s linguistics the concept of semantic universals plays an important role. However, his level of abstraction marks the farthest limits to which the monolingual Saussurean linguistic materialism can be stretched.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.
‘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 – ageneral 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.
After the ‘discovery’ of Sanskrit by Sir William Jones, historical linguistics in Europe depended heavily on Orientalism. After Saussure and Lévi-Strauss, linguistics started treating language with an anthropological curiosity. Comparative literature implies that between two related languages there are areas of
significance that are shared, just as there may be areas of significance that can never be
shared.
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. It is a 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 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, Hemcandra, Michael Madhusudan Dutta, H.N. Apte or Bankim Chandra Chatterjee.
We began our discussion by alluding to the Christian metaphysics that conditions
reception of translation in the Western world.Indian metaphysics believes in an unhindered migration of the soul from one body to another.
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.
Article - 2
On Translating a Tamil Poem - A. K. Ramanujan.
Here is the YouTube video of article explanation.
Presentation of the article.
I hope this information will be helpful to you. Thank you.
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