Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of Modernist Poetic Discourse in Indian Poetry by E.V.Ramkrishnan

This Blog-post is a response to the thinking activity task on 'Comparative Studies' given by our professor Dr.Dilip Barad Sir. To know more about Comparative Literary Studies, CLICK HERE.

Here I hyperlinked other articles. 

Article 1. 'Why Comparative Indian Literature?' by Sisir Kumar Das

Article 2. Comparative Literature in India by Amiya Dev.

Article 3. 'An Overview of its History; by Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta

Article 4. What is Comparative Literature Today? by Susan Bassnett

Article 5. Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline' by Todd Presner

Article 6. Translation and Literary History: An Indian View by Ganesh Devy 

Article. 7  On Translating a Tamil Poem' by A.K. Ramanujan

Article. 8 History in Translation by Tejaswni Niranjana

Article 9. Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of Modernist Poetic Discourse in Indian Poetry by E.V.Ramkrishnan

The task assigned by our professor is to read the article and give an Introductory presentation on a particular topic with our group members. We studying the paper, 'Comparative Literature and Translation Studies in which the ninth article 'Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of Modernist Poetic Discourse in Indian Poetry' by E.V.Ramakrishnan presented by Nehalba Gohil and Khushbu Makwana on 20 December 2022.

Introduction/Key Points: 

In this article, Ramakrishnan states that Modernity comes into India as a part of Translation or we can say that it is an imported idea. The evaluation is in eight parts.

This article 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.

It 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.

Apart from providing alternative models of thinking and imagining the world, these translations also legitimized experimental writing styles that became a defining feature of modernist Indian poetry. 

Translation enacted a critical act of evaluation. a creative act of intervention, and a performative act of legitimation, in evolving a new poetic during the phase of Indian poetry.

PART-I

An elaboration on the relation between 'modernity and modernism in the Indian context will need a separate chapter. For the purpose of our discussion, it may be broadly stated that modernity' designates an epochal period of wide-ranging transformations brought abour by the advent of colonialism, capitalist economy, industrial mode of production, Western models of education, assimilation of more rational temper, resurgence of nationalist spirit and emergence of social political, legal, juridical and educational institutions that constituted a normative subjectivity embodied with cosmopolitan and individualist world views. It has also been argued that such a modular modernity, as envisaged in Western terms, brought about a rupture in the social and cultural life of India, separating its 'modern period from what was pre-modern'.

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'. It has been argued that the idea of a self-referential or self-validating literary text which is central to modernist poetic, is rooted in an ideology of the aesthetic that was complicit with colonialism. But one has to note that modernist sensibility, as it appeared in Indian languages was essentially oppositional in content.

D.R.Nagaraj has pointed out that as nationalism become 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-II

The term 'modernism implies a literary/artistic movement that was characterized by experimentation, conscious rejection of the nationalist/Romantic as well as the popular, and the cultivation of an individualist, cosmopolitan and insular worldview.

While the modernism that emerged in Indian literatures shared many of these defining features, its political affiliations and ideological orientations were markedly different. 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.

Chronologically, in twentieth dimension to the aesthetic of Indian modernism. How are we to century? The postcolonial context adds a complex political 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.

PART-III

In the context of Bengal, as Amiya Dey 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.

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 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.

PART-IV

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. c. cummings, Wallace Stevens and Boris Pasternak. Ayyappa Paniker translated European poets into Malayalam, while B. S. Mardhekar's Arts and the Man. 

Their profound understanding of Western philosophy and artistic/literary traditions equipped these three writers with the critical capacity to see the significance and limitations of the West.

PART-V

One of the recurring themes in Sudhindranath Dutta's critical essays is the primacy of the word.

In another essay 'The Highbrow' he observes, Dutta believes that 'only the poetic mind. whatever its norm, can intuit associations where reason faces a void'.

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'

Modernism in India was part of a larger decolonizing project. It was not a mindless celebration of Western values and the European avant-garde.

PART-VI

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. He had to invent a language to articulate this fragmentation.

In 'Mice in the Wet Barrel Died', which became the iconic modernist poem of Marathi, Mardhekar goes to the very limits of language to capture an acute state of anguish that is closer to the saint-poet's suffering than the existential crisis of the modern man or woman.

To see how subversive Mardhekar could be in the original, we need to remember that he could address God with such irreverence: "There is still a choice curse / on my tongue for you.' This is followed by a prayer: 'Grant me, O Lord, just his one boon: Let my tongue never be paralysed.' As Vilas Sarang (1988) points out, in the original Marathi version, Mardhekar uses two separate words, jibha and juha, for 'tongue', the former a modern colloquial word and the latter an archaic term suggesting 'devotion' Mardhekar constantly uses the archaic diction of the saint-poets of the medieval period. He also formal 'poetic' words with everyday English words, creating a collage of juxtaposes images. In the poem 'Although the Lights', Mardhekar uses the words 'punctured', 'pumps', 'rubber' and 'pumps' in unusual collocations. The poem opens with lines that suggest a surge of darkness against lights 'that puncture the night', as a mechanical activity. The night is seen as a synthetic substance that is formless, suggesting a process of dissolution:

The rubber night went suddenly flat 

There is no other tyre in space;

The dogs sit licking the piles

Of the slough of a coarse mind.

The human and the mechanical/artificial intermingle in the subsequent lines suggesting a loss of the human in the urban landscape.

PART-VII

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. He published a translation of The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock in his journal in 1953.

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.

Ramakrishnan further elaborates on the poem. 

PART-VIII

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 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 transition between native and alien traditions. 

Conclusion /Concluding remark:

In the concluding part, Ramanujan states that 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 mo(ve)ment 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.

Here are the presentation video and the presentation: 

sem4 comparative study.pptx from Khushbumakwana3

History in Translation by Tejaswni Niranjana

This Blog-post is a response to the thinking activity task on 'Comparative Studies' given by our professor Dr.Dilip Barad Sir. To know more about Comparative Literary Studies, CLICK HERE.

Here I hyperlinked other articles. 

Article 1. 'Why Comparative Indian Literature?' by Sisir Kumar Das

Article 2. Comparative Literature in India by Amiya Dev.

Article 3. 'An Overview of its History; by Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta

Article 4. What is Comparative Literature Today? by Susan Bassnett

Article 5. Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline' by Todd Presner

Article 6. Translation and Literary History: An Indian View by Ganesh Devy 

Article. 7 On Translating a Tamil Poem' by A.K. Ramanujan

Article. 8 History in Translation by Tejaswni Niranjana

The task assigned by our professor is to read the article and give an Introductory presentation on a particular topic with our group members. We studying the paper, 'Comparative Literature and Translation Studies in which the eighth article 'History in Translation' by Tejaswni Niranjana presented by Hinaba Sarvaiya, Bhavna Sosa, and Dhvani Rajyaguru on 19 December 2022.

Introduction/Key Points:

In the article, Niranjana's concern is to explore the place of translation in contemporary Euro-American literary theory (using the name of this "discipline" in a broad sense) through a set of interrelated readings. She argues that the deployment of "translation" in the colonial and post-colonial contexts shows us a way of questioning some of the theoretical emphases of poststructuralism.

1. Situating Translation: 

Colonial relations of power have often been reproduced in conditions that can only be called neocolonial, and ex-colonials sometimes hunger for the "English book" as avidly as their ancestors.

By now it should be apparent that I use 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.

The thrust of displacement is seen also in other Latin terms such as transponere, transferre, reddere, vertere. In my writing, translation refers to:

(a) the problematic of translation that authorizes and is authorized by certain classical notions of representation and reality; and 

(b) the problematic opened up by the post-structuralist critique of the earlier one, and that makes translation always the "more," or the supplement, in Derrida's sense.

Niranjana's study of the translation does not make any claim to solve but it seeks rather think through this gap,. this difference, to explore the position. 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 in several kin sown ng on translation.

The post-colonial distrust of the liberal-humanist rhetoric of progress and of universalizing master narratives has obvious affinities with post-structuralism.  

A critique of historicism might show us a way of deconstructing the "pusillanimous" and "deceitful" Hindus. Her concern here is not, of course, with the alleged misrepresentation of the "Hindus.". Rather, I am trying to question the withholding of reciprocity and the essentializing of "difference". 

Niranjana states at the end of this point that, her concern is not, of course, with the alleged misrepresentation of the "Hindu". Rather, she tries to question the withholding reciprocity and the essentializing of "difference"

2.Translation as Interpellation:

Her main concern in examining the texts of Jones is not necessarily to compare his translation of Sakuntala or Manu's  Dharmasastra with the so-called originals. Rather, what I propose to do is to examine the "outwork" of Jones's .translations-the prefaces, the annual discourses to the Asiatic Society, his charges to the 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, helps construct a powerful version of the "Hindu" that later writers of different philosophical and political persuasions incorporated into their texts in an almost seamless fashion. 

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; and

(c) the desire to "purify" Indian culture and speak on its behalf.

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.

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.

he be- gan to learn Sanskrit primarily so that he could verify the interpretations of Hindu law given by his pandits. In a letter, he wrote of the difficulty of checking and controlling native interpreters of several codes, saying: "Pure Integrity is hardly to be found among the Pandits [Hindu learned men] and Maulavis [Muslim learned men], few of whom give opinions without a culpable bias". Before embarking on his study of Sanskrit, Jones wrote to Charles Wilkins, who had already translated a third of the Dharmasastra: "It is of the utmost importance, that the stream of Hindu law should be pure; for we are entirely at the devotion of the native lawyers, through our ignorance of Shanscrit. 

Even before coming to India, Jones had formulated a solution for the problem of the translation of Indian law.

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.

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 im- morality of the natives.

Unlike William Jones, however, Ward does not see the present state of the Hindus as a falling away from a former Golden Age. Instead, like James Mill, who quotes him approvingly and often, Ward sees the Hindus as corrupt by nature, lacking the means of education and improvement. He suggests that the "mental and moral improvement'' of the Hindus is the "high destiny" of the British nation. Once she was made "enlightened and civilized," India, even if she became independent, would "contribute more to the real prosperity of Britain" by "consuming her manufactures to a vast extent.'

In the last part of this discussion, Niranjana makes a critique of history. She states that 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?" Both the critique of representation and the critique of historicism em- power the post-colonial theorist to undertake an analysis of what Homi Bhabha (following Foucault) has called technologies of colonial power. These critiques also enable the reinscription of the problematic of translation: the deconstruction of colonial texts and their "white mythology" helps us to see how translation brings into being notions of representation and reality that endorse the founding concepts of Western philosophy as well as the discourse of literary criticism.

3. The Question of "History"

At the final of this article. Niranjana's concern 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 perspective that of an emergent post-colonial practice willing to profit from the insights of post-structuralism, while at the time demanding ways of writing history in order to make so of how subjectification operates.

She elaborates that how the word historicity to avoid invoking History with a capital H, my concern being with "local" practices (or micro practices as Foucault calls them) of translation that requires no overarching theory to contain them.

"History," in the texts of post-structuralism, is a repressive force that obliterates difference and be- longs in a chain that includes the meaning, truth, presence, and logos.

The point is not just to criticize these characterizations as "inadequate" or "untrue"; one should attempt to show the complicity of the representations with colonial rule and their part in maintaining the asymmetries of imperialism.

It is part of my argument that the problematics of translation and the writing of history are inextricably bound together, I shall briefly go over Spivak's main points regarding the Subaltern historians.

Derrida's double writing can help us challenge the practices of "subjectification" and domination evident in colonial histories and translations. The challenge will not, however, be made in the name of recovering a lost essence or an undamaged self. Instead, the 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 re- versal 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 re-valuation 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.

Conclusion/Concluding remark:

In the concluding part of the article, Niranjana about Hybridity. She noted that 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." 96 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 nonessentializing 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.

Here are the presentation video and the presentation.

I am sharing 'I am sharing 'Introduction _ History in Translation ' with you' with you.pptx from HinabaSarvaiya

On Translating a Tamil Poem by A.K. Ramanujan

This Blog-post is a response to the thinking activity task on 'Comparative Studies' given by our professor Dr.Dilip Barad Sir. To know more about Comparative Literary Studies, CLICK HERE.

Here I hyperlinked other articles. 

Article 1. 'Why Comparative Indian Literature?' by Sisir Kumar Das

Article 2. Comparative Literature in India by Amiya Dev.

Article 3. 'An Overview of its History; by Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta

Article 4. What is Comparative Literature Today? by Susan Bassnett

Article 5. Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline' by Todd Presner

Article 6. Translation and Literary History: An Indian View by Ganesh Devy 

Article. 7 On Translating a Tamil Poem' by A.K. Ramanujan

Article. 8 History in Translation by Tejaswni Niranjana

Article 9. Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of Modernist Poetic Discourse in Indian Poetry by E.V.Ramkrishnan

The task assigned by our professor is to read the article and give an Introductory presentation on a particular topic with our group members. We studying the paper, 'Comparative Literature and Translation Studies in which the seventh article 'On Translating a Tamil Poem' by A.K. Ramanujan presented by Nirav Amreliya and Himanshi Parmar on 16 December 2022.

Introduction/Key Points: 

This article is divided into three Parts.

PART: I

It is about how Ramanujan's thinking about translation rather than doing translation and gives the language to translation or a particular canon to look at translation studies. Ramanujan states 'How does one translate a poem from another time, another culture, another language? The poems Ramanujan translated from Tamil were written two thousand years ago in a comer of south India, in a Dravidian language relatively untouched by the other classical language of India, Sanskrit.

The subject of this paper is not the fascinating external history of this literature, but translation, the transport of poems from classical Tamil to modem English; the hazards, the damages in transit, the secret paths, and the lucky bypasses.

The chief difficulty of translation is its impossibility. Frost once even identified poetry as that which is lost in translation.

Ramanujan gave some examples of translation like a poem from an early Tamil anthology, Ainkuruniiru 203, in modern Tamil script:

Then further he argued that, How shall we divide up and translate this poem? What are the units of translation? We may begin with the sounds. We find at once that the sound system of Tamil is very different from English.the fact that phonologies are systems unto themselves (even as grammatical, syntactic, lexical, and semantic systems to are, as we shall see). Any unit we pick is defined by its relations to other units. So it is impossible to translate the phonology of one language into that of another-even in a related, culturally neighboring language.

Sometimes it is said that we should translate metrical systems. Metre is a second-order organization of the sound system of a language and partakes of all the above problems and some more. At readings, someone in the audience always asks, 'Did you translate the metre?' as if it is possible to do so. Some examples he gives about how the translated poem and original Tamil poems are different in their rhymes, consonants,end-rhyms, and lable consonant rhymes. 

The Tradition of one poetry would be the innovation of another. 

Evans-Pritchard, the anthropologist, used to say: If you translate all the European arguments for atheism into Azande, they would come out as arguments for God in Azande. Such observations certainly disabuse us of the commonly-held notion of 'literal' translation. We know now that no translation can be 'literal,' or 'word for word'. That is where the impossibility lies. The only possible translation is a 'free' one.

In short in the first part, Ramanujan talked about the problems in translation and thinks about it in through various category like: 

Sounds, Phonology, Metre/Rhythm, Grammar, Syntax, Lexicon-Semantics of Words, Culture Specificity, Rhetoric, Taxono,y, Poetics. (interdisciplinary view of looking at problems)

At the end of part one, Ramanujan noted that, a language within a language becomes the second language of Tamil poetry. Not only Tamil, but the landscapes and all their contents, the system of genres, themes, and allusions, become the language of this poetry. Like ordinary language, this art language too makes possible (in Wilhelm Humboldt's phrase) 'an infinite use of finite means'.

PART:2

Further, Ramanujan takes a closer look at the original of Kapilar's poem Airikuruneu 203, 'What She Said', and his translation. Note the long, crucial, left-branching phrase in Tamil: '. . . hisland's /lin-1 leaf-holes low /animals-having-drunk-{and}-leftover muddied water(in a piece-by-piece translation) In his English, it becomes 'the leftover water in his land, / low in the waterholes / covered with leaves and muddied by animals.'

After the examination of the poem, he marked that the love poems get parodied, subverted and played with in comic poems and poems about poems. Thus, he makes that any single poem is part of a set, a family of sets, a landscape(one of five) a genre. The intertextuality is concentric, a pattern of membership as well as neighbourhoods, of likeness and unlikenesses. Somehow a translator has to translate each poem in ways that suggest these interests, dialogues and networks. 

PART:3

If attempting a translation means attempting such an impossibly intricate task, foredoomed to failure. what makes it possible at all? At least four things, maybe even four articles of faith. help the translator. 

1. Universals: 

If there were no universals in which languages participate and of which all particular languages were selections and combinations, no language learning, translation, comparative studies or cross-cultural understanding of even the most meagre kind would be possible. 

2. Interiorised  Contexts:

The culture-specific details of a poem are poems like the ones that Ramanujan has been discussing interiorise the entire culture. When one translates a classical Tamil poem, one is translating also this kind of intertextual web. the meaning-making web of colophons and commentaries that surround and contextualise the poem.

3. Systematicity: 

One translates not single poems but bodies of poetry that create and contain their original world. Even if one chooses not to translate all the poems, one chooses poems that cluster together, that illuminate one another, so that allusions, contrasts, and collective designs are suggested. One's selection then becomes a metonymy for their world. re-presenting it. Here intertextuality is not the problem, but the solution.

4. Structural mimicry: 

The poetry and the significance reside in these figures and structures as much as in the un-

translatable verbal textures. So one attempts a structural mimicry, to translate relations, not items-not single words but phrases, sequences, and sentences; not metrical units but rhythms; not morphology but syntactic patterns.

Conclusion/Concluding remark:

In the concluding part, Ramanujan pointed out a very interesting anecdote, A Chinese emperor ordered a tunnel to be bored through a great mountain. The engineers decided that the best

and the quickest way to do it would be to begin work on both sides of the mountain, after precise measurements. If the measurements were precise enough, the two tunnels would meet in the middle, making a single one. 'But what happens if they don't meet?' asked the emperor. The counsellors, in their wisdom, answered, 'If they don't meet, we will have two tunnels instead of one.' So too, if the representation in another language is not close enough, but still succeeds in 'carrying' the poem in some sense, we will have two poems instead of one. 

Here is the presentation video and the presentation: 

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

Translation and Literary History: An Indian View by Ganesh Devy

This Blog-post is a response to the thinking activity task on 'Comparative Studies' given by our professor Dr.Dilip Barad Sir. To know more about Comparative Literary Studies, CLICK HERE.

Here I hyperlinked other articles. 

Article 1. 'Why Comparative Indian Literature?' by Sisir Kumar Das

Article 2. Comparative Literature in India by Amiya Dev.

Article 3. 'An Overview of its History; by Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta

Article 4. What is Comparative Literature Today? by Susan Bassnett

Article 5. Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline' by Todd Presner

Article 6. Translation and Literary History: An Indian View by Ganesh Devy 

Article. 7 On Translating a Tamil Poem' by A.K. Ramanujan

Article. 8 History in Translation by Tejaswni Niranjana

Article 9. Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of Modernist Poetic Discourse in Indian Poetry by E.V.Ramkrishnan

The task assigned by our professor is to read the article and give an Introductory presentation on a particular topic with our group members. We studying the paper, 'Comparative Literature and Translation Studies in which the fifth article 'Translation and Literary History: An Indian View' by Ganesh Devy presented by Nilay Rathod and Emisha Ravani on 15 December 2022.

Introduction/Key Points: 

In the article, introductory part he quoted J.Hills Miller's that ,‘Translation is the wandering existence of a text in a perpetual exile,’ The article starts from Western mythology and ends with Indian Mythology as the reference to throw the light on Translation Studies. Miller's statement, Devy further noted that is obviously alludes to the Christian myth of the Fall, exile and wandering. In Western metaphysics translation is an exile, a fall from the origin; and the mythical exile is a metaphoric translation, a post-Babel crisis.

The strong sense of individuality given to Western individuals through systematic philosophy and the logic of social history makes them view translation as an intrusion of ‘the other’. The philosophy of individualism and the metaphysics of guilt, however, render European literary historiography incapable of grasping the origins of literary traditions.

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.

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.

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.

Threefold classification of translations by Roman Jakobson: 

(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.

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.

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. 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.

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.

J.C. Catford presents a comprehensive statement of theoretical formulation about the linguistics of translation in A Linguistic Theory 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 – a general linguistic theory’

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.

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.

Probably the question of origins of literary traditions will have to be viewed differently by literary communities with ‘translating consciousness’ 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.

Conclusion/Concluding remark:

In the concluding part, Devy pointed that, The soul, or significance, is not subject to the laws of temporality; and therefore significance, even literary significance, is ahistorical in Indian view. 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. 

Presentation video and Presentation of the article: 

Translation and literary History An Indian View by Ganesh Devi.pptx from Nilay Rathod

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

This Blog-post is a response to the thinking activity task on 'Comparative Studies' given by our professor Dr.Dilip Barad Sir. To know more about Comparative Literary Studies, CLICK HERE.

Article 1. 'Why Comparative Indian Literature?' by Sisir Kumar Das

Article 2. Comparative Literature in India by Amiya Dev.

Article 3. 'An Overview of its History; by Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta

Article 4. What is Comparative Literature Today? by Susan Bassnett

Article 5. Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline' by Todd Presner

Article 6. Translation and Literary History: An Indian View by Ganesh Devy 

Article. 7 On Translating a Tamil Poem' by A.K. Ramanujan

Article. 8 History in Translation by Tejaswni Niranjana

Article 9. Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of Modernist Poetic Discourse in Indian Poetry by E.V.Ramkrishnan

The task assigned by our professor is to read the article and give an Introductory presentation on a particular topic with our group members. We studying the paper, 'Comparative Literature and Translation Studies in which the fourth article Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline' by Todd Presner presented by Vachchhalata Joshi and Hirva Pandya on 13 December 2022. 

Article 5. 'Comparative Literature and Translation Studies in which the fourth article Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline' by Todd Presner

Introduction/Key Points: 

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.

These technologies of networking and connection do not necessarily bring about the ever-greater liberation of humankind, as Nicholas Negroponte once asserted in his wildly optimistic book Being Digital (Negroponte, 1995 ), for they always have an underbelly: mobile phones, social networking technologies, and perhaps even the hundred-dollar 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 in much the same way that the radio and the railway did in the last century. 

Or as Paul Gilroy analyzed 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. 

As Walter Benjamin did in 'The Arcades Project (1928–40; 1999), it is necessary, as Toddy believes, to interrogate both the media and methodologies for the study of literature, culture and society.

While electronic literature offers a significant and multivalent possibility for exploring the future of Comparative Literature, I want to examine the field a bit more broadly 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, include 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, necessitate 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 authorized and disseminated, and how it involves and is made accessible to a significantly broader (and potentially global) audience.

The Humanities of the twenty-first century, as Prenser argues here, have the potential to generate, legitimate, and disseminate knowledge in radically new ways, on a scale never before realized, involving technologies and communities that rarely (if ever) were engaged in a global knowledge - creation enterprise. The purpose of this chapter is to provide some preliminary signposts for figuring out what this means for the Humanities generally and for Comparative Literature more specifically.

Further Presner and Jeffrey Schnapp articulated in various instantiations of the “ 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.

1. Why, for example, were humanists, foundations, and universities conspicuously–even scandalously –silent when Google won its book search lawsuit and, effectively, won the right to transfer the copyright of orphaned books to itself?
2. Why were they silent when the likes of Sony and Disney essentially engineered the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, radically restricting intellectual property, copyright, and sharing?
3. If new technologies are dominated and controlled by corporate and entertainment interests, how will our cultural legacy be rendered in new media formats? By whom and for whom?

These are questions that Humanists must urgently ask and answer 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 make it variously porous), and produce knowledge about who we are, where we live, and what that means.

Moretti has already indicated one possible way of doing this in his articulation of “ distant reading, ” a specific form of analysis that focuses on larger units and fewer elements in order to reveal “ their overall interconnection [through] shapes, relations, structures.

Three futures for “ Comparative Literature ” in the Digital Age:

Comparative Media Studies:

Digital media are always already hypermedia and hypertextual. Both of the foregoing 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.

Hypertextual or hypermedia documents deploy a multiplicity of media forms in aggregate systems that allow for annotation, indefinite growth, mutability, and non-linear navigation. comparative studies 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 others.

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?

Comparative Data Studies

Through the 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.

As Jerome McGann argues with elegant analysis of “radiant textuality, ” the differences between the codex and the electronic versions of the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, illustrate that the electronic OED is “ a metabook [that has] consumed everything that the code OED provides and reorganized it at a higher level ” adding value through new indexing and search mechanisms, hyperlinks, editing and annotation tools, and even reading strategies.

Comparative Authorship and Platform studies

While the radically “ democratizing ” claims of the web and information technologies should certainly be critically interrogated. 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.

The real danger is not unauthorized file sharing but “ failed sharing ” due to enclosures and

strictures placed upon the world of the creative commons.The knowledge platforms cannot be simply “ handed off ” to the technicians, publishers, and librarians, as if the curation of knowledge – the physical and virtual arrangement of information as an argument through multimedial constellations – is somehow not the domain of literary scholars. While preserving the authority of peer review, the publication platform foregrounds collaborative authorship and public feedback through threaded discussion forums and annotation features.

This emphasis on openness and collaboration is, of course, nowhere more apparent than with Wikipedia, a revolutionary knowledge production and editing platform. While it is easy to dismiss Wikipedia as amateurish and unreliable or to scoff at its lack of scholarly rigor.

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.

Conclusion/Concluding remark:

Presner concludes by suggesting that it is actually a model for rethinking collaborative research and the dissemination of knowledge in the Humanities and at institutions of higher learning, which are all - too - often fixated on individual training, discrete disciplines, and isolated achievement and accomplishment.

At this moment in its short life, Wikipedia is already the most comprehensive, representative, and pervasive participatory platform for knowledge production ever created by humankind. In my opinion, that is worth some pause and reflection, perhaps even by scholars in a future disciplinary incarnation of Comparative Literature.

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

Here is the video presentation and the Presentation is embedded:

Comparative_Literature_in_the_Age_of_Digital_Humanities.pptx from VachchhalataJoshi

What is Comparative Literature Today? by Susan Bassnett

This Blog-post is a response to the thinking activity task on 'Comparative Studies' given by our professor Dr.Dilip Barad Sir. To know more about Comparative Literary Studies, CLICK HERE.

Article 1 'Why Comparative Indian Literature?' by Sisir Kumar Das

Article 2. Comparative Literature in India by Amiya Dev.

Article 3. 'An Overview of its History; by Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta

Article 4. What is Comparative Literature Today? by Susan Bassnett

Article 5. Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline' by Todd Presner

Article 6. Translation and Literary History: An Indian View by Ganesh Devy 

Article. 7 On Translating a Tamil Poem' by A.K. Ramanujan

Article. 8 History in Translation by Tejaswni Niranjana

Article 9. Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of Modernist Poetic Discourse in Indian Poetry by E.V.Ramkrishnan

The task assigned by our professor is to read the article and give an Introductory presentation on a particular topic with our group members. We studying the paper, 'Comparative Literature and Translation Studies in which the third article 'What is Comparative Literature Today?' by Susan Bassnett presented by Janvi Nakum and Nidhi Dave on 12 December 2022. 

Article 3. What is Comparative Literature Today? by Susan Bassnett:

Introduction/Key Points:

The article starts with an explanation of the term 'Comparative Literature' that it involves the study of texts across cultures, that it is interdisciplinary, and that it is concerned with patterns of connection in literature across both time and space. Most people do not start with comparative literature, they end up with it in some way or other, traveling towards it from different points of departure. Sometimes the journey begins with a desire to move beyond the boundaries of a single subject area that might appear to be too constraining, at other times a reader may be impelled to follow up on what appear to be similarities between texts or authors from different cultural contexts. 

Matthew Arnold in his Inaugural Lecture at Oxford in 1857 when he said: 

Everywhere there is connection, everywhere there is illustration. No single event, no single literature is adequately comprehended except in relation to other events, to other literatures.

Russian writers (in trans- lation, of course), compare how James Joyce borrowed from and loaned to Italo Svevo.

Critics at the end of the twentieth century, in the age of post-modernism, still wrestle with the same questions that were posed more than a century ago:

1. What is the object of study in comparative literature?
2. How can comparison be the object of anything?
3. If individual literatures have a canon, what might a comparative canon be? 
4. How does the comparatist select what to compare?
5. Is comparative literature a discipline? Or is it simply a field of study? 

As early as 1903, Benedetto Croce argued that comparative literature was a non-subject, contemptuously dismissing the suggestion that it might be seen as a separate discipline. He discussed the definition of comparative literature as the exploration of 'the vicissitudes, alterations, developments and reciprocal differences' of themes and literary ideas across literatures, and concluded that 'there is no study more arid than researches of this sort'.

Croce maintained, is to be classified 'in category of erudition purely and simply'. Instead of something called comparative literature, he suggested that the proper object of study should be literary history: 

the comparative history of literature is history understood in its true sense as a complete explanation of the literary work, en- compassed in all its relationships, disposed in the composite whole of universal literary history (where else could it ever be placed?), seen in those connections and preparations that are its raison d'être.s 

Croce claimed he could not distinguish between literary history pure and simple and comparative literary history. The term, 'comparative literature', he maintained, had no substance to it. 

Charles Mills Gayley, one of the founders of North American comparative literature, proclaimed in the same year as Croce's attack that the working premise of the student of comparative literature was: 

literature as a distinct and integral medium of thought, a common institutional expression of humanity; differentiated, to be sure, by the social conditions of the individual, by racial, historical, cultural and linguistic influences, opportunities, and restrictions, but, irrespective of age or guise, prompted by the common needs and aspirations of man, sprung from common faculties, psychological and physiological, and obeying common laws of material and mode, of the individual and social humanity." 

Yet even as that process was underway in the West, comparative literature began to gain ground in the rest of the world. New programmes in comparative literature began to emerge in China, in Taiwan, in Japan and other Asian countries, based, however, not on any ideal of universalism but on the very aspect of literary study that many western comparatists had sought to deny: the specificity of national literatures. As Swapan Majumdar puts it: 

it is because of this predilection for National Literature - much deplored by the Anglo-American critics as a methodology - that Comparative Literature has struck roots in the Third World nations and in India in particular.

Ganesh Devy goes further, and suggests that comparative literature in India is directly linked to the rise of modern Indian nationalism, noting that comparative literature has been 'used to assert the national cultural identity' There is no sense here of national literature and comparative literature being incompatible. 

Homi Bhabha sums up the new emphasis in an essay discussing the ambivalence of post- colonial culture, suggesting that: 

Instead of cross-referencing there is an effective,productive cross- cutting across sites of social significance, that erases the dialectical, disciplinary sense of 'Cultural' reference and relevance.

 James Snead, in an essay attacking Hegel, points out that: 

The outstanding fact of late twentieth-century European culture is its ongoing reconciliation with black culture. The mystery may be that it took so long to discern the elements of black culture already there in latent form, and to realize that the separation between the cultures was perhaps all along not one of nature, but one of force.

What we have today, then, is a very varied picture of comparative literary studies that changes according to where it is taking place. African, Indian, Caribbean critics have challenged the refusal of a great deal of Western literary criticism to accept the implications of 

their literary and cultural policy.of force.

Ganesh Devy's argument that comparative literature in India coincides with the rise of modern Indian nationalism is important, because it serves to remind us of the origins of the term 'Comparative Literature' in Europe, a term that first appeared in an age of national struggles, when new boundaries were being erected and the whole question of national culture and national identity was under discussion throughout Europe and the expanding United States of America.

What distinguishes translation studies from translation as traditionally thought of, is its derivation from the polysystems theory developed by Itamar Evan- Zohar and later by Gideon Toury in Tel Aviv.19 Translation studies will be discussed in more detail later in this book, but essentially the key to its rapid expansion and successful entry into literary studies lies in its emphasis on literature as a differentiated and dynamic 'conglomerate of systems', characterized by internal oppositions and dynamic shifts. This notion of literature as a polysystem sees individual literary systems as part of a multi-faceted whole, thereby changing the terms of the debates about 'majority' and 'minority' cultures, about 'great' literatures and 'marginal' literatures.

Conclusion/Concluding remark:

Comparative literature has always claimed translation as a sub-category, but as translation studies establishes itself firmly as a subject based in inter-cultural study and offering a methodology of some rigour, both in terms of theoretical and descriptive work, so comparative literature appears less like a discipline and more like a branch of something else. Seen in this way, the problem of the crisis could then be put into perspective, and the long, unresolved debate on whether comparative literature is or is not a discipline in its own right could finally and definitely be shelved. 

Here is the video presentation and the Presentation is embedded:

Introduction: what is comparative literature Today ? from JanviNakum

To read the next blog on Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline' by Todd Presner, CLICK HERE.