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 about two articles.1) Tejaswini Niranjana, “Introduction: History in Translation”, and 2)E.V. Ramakrishnan, “ Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of the Modernist Poetic Discourse in Indian Poetry”.
Article - 1
Article - 2
Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of the Modernist Poetic Discourse in Indian Poetry. - E.V. Ramakrishnan.
Watch video recording of this article explanation here.
This article is divided into 8 parts.
Introduction
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 Yeats 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 Bose, 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.it is translation that enabled poets to turn away from the modernist 'high' style, providing a critique of its elitism and complicity with nationalist discourses. Translations from African and Latin American poetry played a significant role in this phase of modernism.
This chapter uses the term 'translation' to suggest a range of cultural practices, from critical commentary to creation of intertextual texts. Following 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, teaching, the collection of works in anthologies, the production of plays' are also instances of translation.
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.
conservative poet such as Gopalakrishna Adiga in Kannada, or a radical dissident like Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh in Hindi, belonged to the larger modernist tradition which accommodated diverse political ideologies and innovative experimental styles.
Part - 1
An elaboration on the relation between 'modernity' and 'modernism in the Indian context will need a separate chapter.The project of modernity in India was implicated in colonialism and imperialism. This colonial modernity informed literary and cultural movements, beginning from the reformist movement of the nineteenth century to the modernist movement of the mid-twentieth century.
Dilip Chitre observes, 'what took nearly a century and a half to happen in England, happened within a hurried half century' in Indian literatures.While introducing the works of B. S. Mardhekar, a major Marathi modernist, Chitre says, 'The poet B. S. Mardhekar was the most remarkable product of the cross- pollination between the deeper, larger native tradition and contemporary world culture'.
D. R. Nagaraj has pointed out that as nationalism became the ideology of the nation state, writers who had earlier found nationalism to be a form of resistance to colonialism, retreated to individualism. He adds, 'When ideologies like nationalism and spirituality become apparatuses of the state, a section of the intelligentsia has no option other than to seek refuge in bunkers of individualism'.
Part - 2
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.Due to its postcolonial location, the Indian modernism did not share the imperial or metropolitan aspirations of its European counterpart. It invested heavily in regional cosmopolitan traditions. It was oppositional in content and questioned the colonial legacies of the nationalist discourse.
The postcolonial context adds a complex political dimension to the aesthetic of Indian modernism. How are we to evaluate the modernisms that emerged in the postcolonial phase in India? Critics such as Simon Gikandi, Susan Friedman, Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, and Aparna Dharwadker have argued that non- Western modernisms are not mere derivative versions of a European hegemonic practice.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.
Part - 3
The oppositional content of the modernist sensibility functioned differently in each regional language. 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'. R. Sasidhar writes,
If European modernism was drawn between the euphoric and the reactive, in Kannada the precipitate modernism was drawn between the Brahminical and the non-Brahminical. Just as the cuphoric 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)
Issues of caste, ethnicity, progress, freedom, individualism, region and nation figure variously in different modernist traditions in India.
Part - 4
Translation enables us to delineate the complex artistic and ideological undercurrents that shaped the course of modernism in Indian literatures.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 literatures. 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.
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. Their essays elaborated the basic features of a new aesthetic against the prevailing Romantic-nationalist or Romantic-mystical traditions. Sudhindranath Dutta translated Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry into Bengali.Buddhadeb Bose, another Bengali modernist, rendered 112 poems of Charles Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil into Bengali, apart from translating Rainer Maria Rilke, Friedrich Hölderlin, Ezra Pound, e. e. cummings, Wallace Stevens and Boris Pasternak. Ayyappa Paniker translated European poets into Malayalam, while B. S. Mardhekar's Arts and the Man (which was published in England in 1937) was a treatise on formalist aesthetic that legitimated modernist practice. Mardhekar had earlier attempted original poems in English, while he was in England in the 30s.
Part - 5
In "The Necessity of Poetry', Sudhindranath Dutta argues that the persistence of poetry through the ages in all societies, particularly among the unsophisticated and the primitive, attest to its necessity.Though he claims himself to be a pragmatist, Dutta believes that 'only the poetic mind, whatever its norm, can intuit associations where reason faces a void.In another essay, The Highbrow". he observes, 'I agree with Virginia Woolf that creative artists must from time to time seek shelter within the much maligned Ivory Tower'.
He constantly invokes the progressive role of the writer in a society, and underlines the role played by the masses in the creation of a literary tradition.In Dutta's well-known poem, "The Camel-Bird', one may glimpse this critical spirit and desire to reinvent tradition from a cosmopolitan perspective. The poem is about the crisis of perception that can only be remedied by reinventing oneself completely.The poem speaks of the poet's alienation in the present, his disjunction with the past, his need to recover a bond with the world outside and the angst inherent in the quest for meaning in a world haunted by violence and servility.
Part - 6
B. S. Mardhekar was deeply aware of the entire 'tradition' of Marathi poetry from its beginnings. He published a treatise on aesthetics, Arts and the Man, in London in 1937, and Two Lectures on the Aesthetic of Literature in Bombay (Mumbai) in 1944.Mardhekar intervened in Marathi literary tradition as an insider who had mastered the insights given by an alien tradition. Mardhekar's creative reclamation of tradition is a response to the disruption of a moral order in his culture.
Mardhekar's own poetic practice, which was much more complex than his critical arguments, problematised the relation between the poet and the reader, contemporary poetry and its past, and poetic form and its ideological function in society.Mardhekar's poetic line carried echoes of saint-poets like Tukaram, creating a self- reflexive idiom.
Part - 7
Like Mardhekar, Ayyappa Paniker also began as a Romantic poet but transformed himself into a modernist with a long poetic sequence titled Kurukshetram published in 1960. 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. In a scathing attack on Vallathol Narayana Menon, a canonical figure of Malayalam Romantic poetry, Paniker brought out Vallathol's lack of intellectual rigour, his dubious political attitudes and adherence to wornout idioms and stale diction.
One may also recall the contribution of M. Govindan, a poet-critic who was closely associated with the modernist movement in Malayalam from its very beginning, particularly through his patronage of young writers such as Paniker, through his avant-garde journal, Sameeksha Govindan advocated a return to the Dravidian sources of Malayalam poetry, which he thought could rejuvenate its syntax and rhythm through a robust earthliness that had been curbed by the scholastic Sanskritic tradition.Kurkshetram is a poem of 294 lines in five sections. The opening lines of the Bhagavad Gita are cited as the epigraph of the poem, thus setting a high moral and critical tone in relation to contemporary life and society. As in Eliot's The Waste Land, Kurukshetram's opening lines communicate a pervasive decline of moral values and a disruption of the organic rhythms of society:
The eyes suck and sip The tears that spurt;
The nerves drink up the coursing blood;
And it is the bones that
Eat the marrow here While the skin preys on the bones
The roots turn carnivore As they prey on the flowers
While the earth in bloom
Clutches and tears at the roots.
The title, 'Kurukshetram', signifies the place where the epic battle that forms the central theme of the Mahabharata took place.
The second section of the poem retreats into a private space, away from these public images. The inner movement of the poetic structure signifies the undercurrents of a conflict that cannot be paraphrased in moral terms.
The third section returns to the public world of conflicts. The mythical characters of Sugriva, Vibhishana, Vashistha, Lord Ram, Arjuna and Oedipus are invoked in this section.
In the fourth section, the poet denounces the promises made by faith as well as politics, to turn towards the inner resources of the self.
In the last section, with the figure of Gandhi as a failed prophet standing at its centre. But the poet also addresses the dream which has been haunting him all through. He has wandered after false gods all his life and now, in the hour of acute self fragmentation, he turns to his dream which shines like a beacon of life.
Part - 8
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.They 'translate modernity/modernism through the optics of postcolonial 'modernities". There is an internal dialectic and an external dialogic involved here.
The act of translation answers something deep within their ambivalent existence, as it embodies their complex relation with a fragmented society. Translation allows them to be 'within' their speech community and 'without it, at the same time. Their bilingual sensibility demanded a mode of expression that could transit between native and alien traditions.
Colonial modernity operated within the Indian context as a realm of desire which brought into being a new social imaginary. The formalist poetic of modernist poetry corresponded to an inner world of desire that produced a language bristling with disquiet and angst.language became, for the modernists, the only reality that they could relate to.
I hope this blog will be helpful to you. Thank you.
