Thinking Activity : Comparative Studies : Unit - 3 : Ganesh Devy, “Translation Theory: An Indian Perspective”, and A.K. Ramanujan, “On Translating a Tamil Poem”.

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.

On Translating a Tamil Poem - A. K. Ramanujan.pptx from Nirav Amreliya

I hope this information will be helpful to you. Thank you.

References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._N._Devy

Thinking Activity : Unit 2 : Comparative Studies : Todd Presner, ‘Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline’.

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) Susan Bassnett, “What is Comparative Literature Today?” Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction. 1993, and 2) Todd Presner, ‘Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline’ in Ali Behdad and Thomas eds. A Companion to Comparative Literature’ 2011, 193- 207.

Article - 1

What is Comparative Literature Today? By Susan Bassnett

Article - 2

Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline by Todd Presner.

About Todd Presner

Todd Presner is Chair of UCLA’s Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies and serves as Special Advisor to Vice Chancellor Roger Wakimoto in the Office of Research and Creative Activities (2018-present). Previously, he was the chair of UCLA’s Digital Humanities Program (2011-21), and from 2011-2018, he served as the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies. From 2018-21, he was Associate Dean of Digital Innovation. He holds the Michael and Irene Ross Chair in the UCLA Division of the Humanities. His research focuses on European intellectual and cultural history, Holocaust studies, visual culture, and digital humanities.From 2005-2015, Presner was director of HyperCities, a collaborative, digital mapping platform that explores the layered histories of city spaces. It was awarded one of the first “digital media and learning” prizes by the MacArthur Foundation/HASTAC in 2008. Click to read more.

Video recording of Article explanation.

After five hundred years of print and the massive transformations in society and culture that it unleashed, we are in the midst of another watershed moment in human history that is on par with the invention of the printing press or perhaps the discovery of the New World. With the invention of the printing press, communication, literacy, and the state of knowledge completely changed, providing the conditions of possibility for the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the age of Humanism, and the rise of mass media. Innovations in print technology became the very instrument for producing, sharing, and transforming humanistic and scientific knowledge. Analogously, with the opening up of the New World, not only were the profound limitations of conventional knowledge and epistemologies exposed, but the “discovery ” reconfigured  for better and for worse the entire surface of the earth, enabled the ascendancy of rationality (and it's deep link to barbarism), gave rise to new economies, provided the seedbed for colonialism, and was the prerequisite of the modern nation - state.Both the impact of print and the “ discovery ” of the New World were predicated on networking technologies, which not only enabled the dissemination of knowledge into new cultural and social spheres, but also brought together people, nations, cul tures, and languages that were previously separated.

Nicholas Negroponte in his Wildly optimistic book Being Digital (Negroponte, 1995) asserted These technologies of networking and connection do not necessarily bring about the ever - greater liberation of humankind.For they always have an underbelly : Mobile phones, Social networking technologies, and perhaps even the hundred - dollars computer, will not only be used to enhance education, spread democracy, and enable global communication but will likely be used to perpetrate violence and even orchestrate genocide much the same way that the radio and the railway did in the last century.

Paul Gilroy analysed in his study of "the fatal junction of the concept of nationality with the concept of culture” along the “Black Atlantic, ” voyages of discovery, enlightenment, and progress also meant, at every moment, voyages of conquest, enslavement, and destruction. Indeed, this is why any discussion of technology cannot be separated from a discussion about formations of power and instrumentalized authority.

N. Katherine Hayles ponder various possible futures for Comparative Literature in the second decade of the twenty - first century – how to rouse ourselves from the "somnolence five hundred years of print".There is nothing neutral, objective, or necessary about the medium of print ; rather it is a medium that has a long and complex history connected to the formation of academic disciplines, institutions, epistemologies, and ideologies, not to mention conception of authorship and scholarly research.

 While the materiality of the vast majority of artifacts that we study as professors of Comparative Literature has been print, the burgeoning field of electronic literature has necessitated a reconceptualization of “materiality as the interplay between a text ’s physical characteristics and its signifying practices.” Hayles argues, for permission to consider texts as "embodied entities"and still foreground interpretative practices.

Walter Benjamin in The Arcades project (1928-40; 1999)  it is necessary, I believe, to interrogate both the media and methodologies for the study of literature, culture, and society.

Electronic literature offers a significant and multivalent possibility for exploring the future of Comparative Literature. By situating the transformation of the literary vis - à - vis a set of issues that have emerged over the past decade in the “Digital Humanities.” the Humanities, including history and art history, literary and  cultural studies, and the humanistic social sciences, such as anthropology, archaeology,  and information studies. In fact, these issues, brought to the foreground in the digital  world, necessitated a fundamental rethinking of how knowledge gets created, what knowledge looks (or sounds, or feels, or tastes) like, who gets to create knowledge,  when it is “done” or published, how it gets authorised and disseminated, and how it  involves and is made accessible to a significantly broader (and potentially global)  audience. The Humanities of twenty - First century, has potential to generate, legitimate, and disseminate knowledge in radically new ways, on a scale never engaged in a global knowledge - creation enterprise.

Digital Humanities is an umbrella term for a wide array of interdisciplinary practices for creating, applying, interpreting,interrogating, and hacking both new and old information technologies.Digital Humanities is an outgrowth and expansion of the traditional scope of the Humanities, not a replacement or rejection of humanistic inquiry. The roll pf humanist is more critical at this historic moment than perhaps ever before, as our cultural legacy as a species migrates to digital formats and our relation to knowledge, cultural material, technology, and society at large is radically re - conceptualized.humanists that we should turn to help us to understand, critique, compare, and historicize, and evaluate the explosion of "born digital" publications.

According to Jeffery Schnapp and Todd presner in “ Digital Humanities Manifesto, ”- it is essential that humanists assert and insert themselves into the twenty - first century cultural wars, which are largely being defined, fought, and won by corporate interests.

Robert Darnton (2008) points out, represents the beginning of the fourth information age not the first. Far from the providing the right answers, the Manifesto was an attempt to examine the explanatory power, relevance, and cogency of established organizations of knowledge, largely inherited from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and to imagine creative possibilities and futures that are built on long - standing humanistic traditions.Robert Darnton’s assessment seriously that we are now in the fifth decade of the fourth information age in the history of humankind. Although the Internet is barely forty years old and the World Wide Web is barely two decades old, it is striking to ponder the sheer volume of “ data ” already produced. It is evident that we are producing, sharing, consuming, and archiving exponentially more cultural material, particularly textual and visual data, than ever before in the history of our species. While much of this data is not “ literature ” and may not be studied under the conventional academic rubric of “ Comparative Literature, ” it brings into stark relief the constitution of the tiny canon of print artifacts with which the field currently engages.

The central issue is the fact that the artifacts constituted by the world of print are comparatively different – in terms of material composition, authorship, meaning - making, circulation, reading practices, viewing habits, navigation features, embodiment, interactivity, and expressivity – from those artifacts constituted by digital technologies and which “ live ” in various digital environments.

It is to insist on the multiplicity of media and the varied processes of mediation and remediation in the formation of cultural knowledge and the idea of the literary. Just “ studying ” the technologies and their impact, Presner believes that we must actively engage with, design, create, critique, and finally hack the environments and technologies that facilitate this research, render this world as a world, and produce knowledge about who we are, where we live, and what that means.We will have to design and employ new tools to thoughtfully sift through, analyze, map, and evaluate the unfathomably large deluge of data and cultural material that the digital age has already unleashed.

Franco Moretti ’ s provocation, is to consider Comparative Literature as a “ problem ” (not a canon of objects, a theoretical position, or a particular medium) that “ asks for a new critical method ” (Moretti, 2000 : p. 55) to analyze both the print world in the digital age and the digital world in the post - print age. The “ problem ” of Comparative Literature is to fi gure out how to take seriously the range of new authoring, annotation, and sharing platforms that have transformed global cultural production. Digital media are always hypermedia and hypertextual.

Hayles points out in her recent study on the transforming power of digital humanities, even if we were to read a book a day for our entire adult life, the upper end of the number of books that can be read is about twenty - five thousand, and this does not even take into consideration the reading and composition of digital forms of data and cultural material.

Presner discusses the three futures for “Comparative Literature ” in the Digital Age.

1] Comparative Media Studies

The forgoing terms were originally coined in 1965 by the visionary media theorist, Theodor Nelson, in his early articulations of the conceptual infrastructure for the World Wide Web. For Nelson, a hypertext is a:

'Body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a 

complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or 

represented on paper [ ... ] Such a system could grow 

indefinitely, gradually including more and more of the world ’ s 

written knowledge.'

Comparative Literature be practiced when literature and scholarly work are created, exchanged, and critiqued in a multimodal environment such as the Web? And, at the same time, how do we as scholars develop methodologies that appreciate and evaluate the media - specifi city of every literary or cultural artifact, including print? Comparative Literature as Comparative Media Studies foregrounds the formal material qualities of the surface structures upon which inscriptions are made, the technical processes of reproduction and circulation, the institutional mechanisms of dissemination and authorization, the reading and navigation practices enabled by the media form, and the broad cultural and social implications for literacy and knowledge production. It investigates all media as information and knowledge systems that are bound up with histories of power, institutions, and governing and regulatory bodies which legitimate and authorize certain utterances, while screening out and dismissing other.

Comparative Media Studies also implies that the output or scholarly “ work ” is not uni - medial and might not even be textual. It draws attention to the design and interrelationship of every unit of the argument, whether a page, a folio, a database field, XML metadata, a map, a film still, or something else. Comparative Media Studies enables us to return to some of the most fundamental questions of our field with new urgency: Who is an author? What is work? What constitutes a text, particularly in an environment in which any text is readerly and writerly by potentially anyone?

2) Comparative Data Studies

Work of Lev Manovich and Noah Wardrip - Fruin, the field of “ cultural analytics ” has emerged over the past five years to bring the tools of high - end computational analysis and data visualization to dissect large - scale cultural datasets. Comparative Data Studies allows us to use the computational tools of cultural analytics to enhance literary scholarship precisely by creating models, visualizations, maps, and semantic webs of data that are simply too large to read or comprehend using unaided human faculties. performing “ close ” and “ distant ” analyses of data, Comparative Data Studies also radically broadens the canon of objects and cultural material.

Jerome McGann argues with elegant analysis of “radiant textuality,” the differences between the codex and the electronic versions of the Oxford English Dictionary.

The “data” of Comparative Data Studies is constantly expanding in terms of volume, data type, production and reception platform, and analytic strategy.

3) Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies

While the radically “democratizing” claims of the web and information technologies should certainly be critically interrogated, might it is incontestable that the barriers for voicing participation, creating and sharing content, and even developing software have been significantly lowered when compared to the world of print. And more than that, collaborative authorship, peer - to - peer sharing of content, and crowdsourced evaluation of data are the hallmarks of the participatory web known as the world of Web 2.0. We no longer just “browse” and passively consume predigested content but are actively engaged in the production, annotation, and evaluation of digital media and software thanks to the open - source movement.

James Boyle points out, there are many corporate entities eager to regulate the public domain and control the “commons of the mind."

Conclusion

Michael Gorman, former President of the American Library Association (qtd. in Stothart)

Presner believes-

Wikipedia represents a truly innovative, global, multilingual, collaborative knowledge - generating community and platform for authoring, editing, distributing, and versioning knowledge.

To date, it has more than three million content pages, more than three hundred million edits, over ten million registered users, and articles in forty - seven languages.This is a massive achievement for eight years of work. Wikipedia represents a dynamic, flexible, and open - ended network for knowledge creation and distribution that underscores process, collaboration, access, interactivity, and creativity, with an editing model and versioning system that documents every contingent decision made by every contributing author.

I hope my blog will be helpful to you, Thank you.