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 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:
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