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.
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:
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