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”.
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
About Tejaswini Niranjana
Tejaswini Niranjana (born 26 July 1958) is an Indian professor, cultural theorist, translator and author. She is best known for her contribution to the fields of culture studies, gender studies, translation, and ethnomusicology (particularly relating to different forms of Indian music). She is the daughter of Kannada playwright and novelist Niranjana and writer Anupama Niranjana. Her partner is Indian author and cultural theorist, Ashish Rajadhyaksha.
In 2021, Tejaswini Niranjana was awarded the American Literary Translators Association Prize for Prose Fiction Translation for No Presents Please, a translation of author Jayant Kaikini's short stories centred around the city of Mumbai. In 2019, No Presents Please was awarded the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2018, which Niranjana shared jointly with Jayant Kaikini.Niranjana was also awarded the Karnataka Sahitya Akademi Award for Best Translation of 1994. Read more about her.
Introduction: History in Translation - Tejaswini Niranjana
Watch here video recording of article.
The passion for English knowledge has penetrated the most obscure, and extended to the most remote parts of India. The steam boats, passing up and down the Ganges, are boarded by native boys, begging, not for money, but for books. . .. Some gentlemen coming to Calcutta were astonished at the eagerness with which they were pressed for books by a troop of boys, who boarded the steamer from an obscure place, called Comercolly. A Plato was lying on the table, and one of the party asked a boy whether that would serve his purpose. "Oh yes," he exclaimed, "give me any book; all I want is a book." The gentleman at last hit upon the expedient of cutting up an old Quarterly Review, and distributing the articles among them.
In a post-colonial context the problematic of translation be-comes a significant site for raising questions of representation, power, and historicity.Translation as a practice shapes, and takes shape within, the asymmetrical relations of power that operate under colonialism. translation depends on the Western philosophical notions of reality ,representation, and knowledge. Reality is seen as something unproblematic, "out there"; knowledge involves a representation of this reality; and representation provides direct, unmediated access to a transparent reality.As Jacques Derrida suggests, the concepts of metaphysics are not bound by or produced solely within the "field" of philosophy. Rather, they come out of and circulate through various discourses in several registers, providing a "conceptual network in which philosophy itself has been constituted."
Chapter - 1
This chapter outlines the problematic of translation and its
relevance to the post-colonial situation. Reading the texts of different kinds of colonial translators.
Chapter - 2
This chapter is about how "translation" works in the traditional discourse of translation studies and in ethnographic writing. Discussing the last two, which are somewhat marginal to literary theory, may nevertheless help us sharpen our critique of translation.
Chapter - 3,4,5
The chapters are focusing on the work of Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Walter Benjamin (an earlier critic who is becoming increasingly important to post-structuralist thinkers). analysis of Tejaswini Niranjana shows how translation functions as a "figure" in all three thinkers, becoming synonymous or associated with a major preoccupation in each: allegory or literature in de Man, the problematics of representation and intentionality in Derrida, and the question of materialist historiography in Benjamin.
In Final Chapter
In the final chapter, with the help of a translation from Kannada, a South Indian language, into English, Tejaswini discuss the "uses" of post-structuralism in post-colonial space. Throughout the book, my discussion functions in all the registers philosophical, linguistic, and political-in which translation "works" under colonialism. If at any point I seem to dwell on only one of these, it is for a purely strategic purpose.
The word translation not just to indicate an interlingual process but to name an entire problematic. It is a set of questions, perhaps a "field," charged with the force of all the terms used, even by the traditional discourse on translation, to name the problem, to translate translation. Translatio (Latin) and metapherein (Greek) once suggest movement, disruption, displacement. So does Ubersetzung (German). The French traducteur exists between interprete and truchement, an indication that we might fashion a translative practice between interpretation and reading, carrying a disruptive force much greater than the other two.
Her study of translation does not make any claim to solve the dilemmas of translators. It does not propose yet another way of theorizing translation to enable a more foolproof "method" of "narrowing the gap" between cultures; it seeks rather to think through this gap, this difference, to explore the positioning of the obsessions and desires of translation, and thus to describe the economies within which the sign of translation circulates. Her concern is to probe the absence, lack, or repression of an awareness of asymmetry and historicity.
Derrida's critique of representation, for example, allows us to question the notion of re-presentation and therefore the very notion of an origin or an original that needs to be re - presented. Derrida would argue that the "origin" is itself dispersed, its "identity" undecidable. A representation thus does not re-present an "original"; rather, it re-presents that which is always already Tejaswini represented. The notion can be employed to undohegemoni "representations" of "the Hindus," like, for example, those put forward by G. W. F. Hegel and James Mill.
TRANSLATION AS INTERPELLATION
That translation became part of the colonial discourse of Orientalism is obvious from late eighteenth-century British efforts to obtain information about the people ruled by the merchants of the East India Company.
William Jones who arrived in India in 1783 to take his place on the bench of the Supreme Court in Calcutta make clear in his project that,
translation would serve "to domesticate the Orient and thereby tum it into a province
of European learning."
Jones, whose Persian translations and grammar of Persian had already made him famous as an Orientalist before he came to India, declared that his ambition was "to know India better than any other European ever knew it."
Grand Jury at Calcutta, his letters, and his "Oriental" poems to show how he contributes to a historicist, teleological model of civilization that, coupled with a notion of translation presupposing transparency of representation. The most significant nodes of Jones's work are
(a) the need for translation by the European, since the natives are unreliable Interpreters of their own laws and culture.
(b) the desire to be a lawgiver, to give the Indians their "own" laws.
(c) the desire to "purify" Indian culture and speak on its behalf. The interconnections between these obsessions are extremely complicated.
In Jones's construction of the "Hindus," they appear as a submissive, indolent nation unable to appreciate the fruits of freedom, desirous of being ruled by an absolute power, and sunk deeply in the mythology of an ancient religion. In a letter, he points out that the Hindus are "incapable of civil liberty," for "few of them have an idea of it, and those, who have, do not wish it".Jones's disgust is continually mitigated by the necessity of British rule and the "impossibility" of giving liberty to the Indians. He brings up repeatedly the idea of "Orientals" being accustomed to a despotic rule.The idea of the "submissive" Indians, their inability to be free, and the native laws that do not permit the question of liberty to be raised are thus brought together in the concept of Asian despotism.
Two main kinds of translators of Indian literature existed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: administrators like William Jones and Christian missionaries like the Serampore Baptists William Carey and William Ward. The latter were among the first to translate Indian religious texts into European languages. Often these were works they had themselves textualized, by preparing "standard versions" based on classical Western notions of unity and coherence.
William Ward's preface to his three-volume A View of the history , Literature, and Mythology of the Hindoos 38 is instructive for the virulence with which it attacks the depravity and immorality of the natives.The author claims, in his obsessive references to "native" sexuality, to have witnessed innumerable scenes of "impurity," for the Hindu institutions are "hotbeds of impurity," and the very services in the temples present "temptations to impurity".
Macaulay did not think it necessary for the entire Indian populace to learn English: the function of anglicized education was "to form a class who may be interpreters between us (the British) and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian.in.blood.and.colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect."
For years a controversy raged between "Orientalists" and "Anglicists" as to whether the money set aside for education
by the act of 1813 was to be used for indigenous education or
Western education. Finally, the compulSions of the changing nature of Company rule enabled, during Bentinck's tenure, the Resolution of March 7, 1835, which declared that the funds provided should "be henceforth employed in imparting to the Native population knowledge of English literature and science through the medium of the English language."
As Gauri Viswanathan has pointed out, the introduction of English education can be seen as "an embattled response to historical and political pressures: to tensions between the English Parliament and the East India Company, between Parliament and the missionaries, between the East India Company and the native elite classes."
The construction of the colonial subject presupposes what Pierre Bourdieu has called "symbolic domination." Symbolic domination, and its violence, effectively reproduce the social order through a combination of recognition and misrecogni tion (reconnaissance and méconnaissance) recognition that the dominant language is legitimate (one thinks again of the use of English in India) and "a misrecognition of the fact that this language.
David Kopf puts it, "By 1805 the college had become a veritable laboratory where Europeans and Asians worked out new transliteration schemes, regularized spoken languages into precise grammatical forms, and compiled dictionaries in lan-guages relatively unknown in Europe." When a fire in 1812 destroyed the printing shop of the Serampore missionaries, one of whom-William Carey-taught in the college, among the manuscripts destroyed was that of a polyglot dictionary "containing words of every known oriental tongue."
The critique of historicism may help us formulate a complex notion of historicity, which would include the" effective history" of the text; this phrase encompasses questions such as: Who uses/interprets the text?How is it used, and for what?
THE QUESTION OF "HISTORY"
Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious, Samuel Weber charges Jameson with using the gesture of "capitalizing History" to address the "challenge of 'post-structuralist' thought."Weber's is one of the latest salvoes in the prolonged skirmishing between the defenders of "post-structuralism" and those (on the right as well as the left) who accuse it of denying "history."
Tejaswini Niranjana's central concern here is not to elaborate on the battle for "history" now being staged in Euro-American theory but to ask a series of questions from a strategically "partial" perspective that of an emergent post-colonial practice willillg to profit from the insights of post-structuralism, while at the same time demanding ways of writing history in order to make sense of how subjectification operates. She use the word historicity to avoid invoking History with a capital H, Tejaswini's concern being with "local" practices (or micro-practices as Foucault calls them) of translation that require no
overarching theory to contain them. As Foucault declares,"effective history affirms knowledge as perspective"; it may be seen as a radical kind of "presentism," which we may be
able to work from.
In "Speech and Phenomena," his essay on Husserl, Derrida says:
When in fact I effectively use words ... I must from the outset operate (within) a structure of repetition whose basic element can only be representative. A sign is never an event, if by event we mean an irreplaceable and irreversible empirical particular.A sign which would take place but "once" would not be a sign .... Since this representative structure is signification itself, I cannot enter into an "effective" discourse without being from the start involved in unlimited representation.
What Derrida is claiming is that there is no primordial "presence" that is then re-presented. The "re-" does not befall the original. In a series of detailed readings of Husserl, Heidegger, Saussure, Levi-Strauss, and Rousseau, Derrida demonstrates how representation and writing already belong to the sign and to signification: "In this play of representation, the point of origin becomes ungraspable There is no longer a simple origin."
In an essay on the Subaltern Studies historians, Gayatri Spivak argues that their practice is akin to "deconstruction," since they put forward a "theory of change as the site of displacement of function between sign-systems" and this is "a theory of reading in the strongest possible general sense."The significant post-structuralist "themes" Spivak refers to are the critique of origins, writing and the attack on phonocentrism, the critique of bourgeois liberal humanism, the notion of the "enabling" discursive failure, and the notion of "affirmative deconstruction."
The notion of consciousness, then, is used strategically, deliberately, unnostalgically, in the service of "a scrupulously visible political interest",to refer to an "emergent collective consciousness" rather than that of the liberal humanist subject.
Derrida would say lhat it should aim to be the kind of writing that ''both marks and goes back over its mark with an undecidable stroke," for this "double mark escapes the pertinence or authority of truth," reinscribing it without over-turning it. This displacement is not an event; it has not "taken place." It is what "writes / is written."Derrida's double writing can help us challenge the practices of "subjectification" and domination evident in colonial histories and translations. question of the hybrid will inform our reading. As Bhabha puts it:
Hybridity is the sign of the productivity of colonial power, its
shifting forces and fixities; it is the name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal (that is, the production of discriminatory identities that secure the "pure" and original identity of authority). Hybridity is the revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity through the repetition of discriminatory identity effects. It displays the necessary deformation and displacement of all sites of discrimination and domination.
Clearly, the notion of hybridity, which is of great importance for a Subaltern critique of historiography as well as for a critique of traditional notions of translation, is both "ambiguous and historically complex."" To restrict "hybridity," or what I call "living in translation," to a post-colonial elite is to deny the pervasiveness, however heterogeneous, of the transformations wrought across class boundaries by colonial and neocolonial domination. This is not to present a meta- narrative of global homogenization, but to emphasize the need to reinvent oppositional cultures in non essentializing ways. Hybridity can be seen, therefore, as the sign of a post-colonial theory that subverts essentialist models of reading while it points toward a new practice of translation.
Article - 2
References
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