Thinking Activity

✴️Thinking Activity: Unit: 4: Translation Studies

Hello everyone, i am Nidhi Dave a student of the department of English, MKBU. This blog is response of my Thinking Activity given by professor Dr. Dilip Barad sir. In this blog I'm going to discuss about the articles of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies.  

♻️Unit: 4, 8: Tejaswini Niranjana : SITING TRANSLATION - History, Post -Structuralism and the Colonial Context

This Article is explained by Bhavna Sosa, Hinaba sarvaiya and Dhavni Rajyagur, students of the Department of English, MKBU. 

🔆Abstract: 

The article examines the "positive" or "uto- pian" response to the postcolonial condition developed by Tejaswini Niranjana in Siting Translation: her attempt to harness translation in the service of decolonization.

It traces a postcolonial myth moving from pre coloniality through the recent colonial past and current postcoloniality to an imagined future state of decolonization in order to contrast nationalist versions of that myth, with their emphasis on the purity of the precolonial and decolonized states, to postcolonialist versions, which in- sist that all four states are mixed.

Niranjana draws on Walter Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator" in order to explore the ways in which translating, like rereading/re- writing history. involves a "citing" or "quoting" of words from one context to another, allowing translation to be used by colonists for purposes of colonial subjugation but also by postcolonial subjects for purposes of decolonization.

Finally, the article contrasts Niranjana's Benjaminian sense of literalism as the best decolonizing translational mode with the variety of approaches explored by Vicente Rafael in Contracting Colonialism.

🔅Key Argument:

In the colonial context, a certain conceptual economy is created by the set of related questions that is the problematic of translation. Conventionally, translation depends on the Western philosophical notions of reality, representation, and knowledge.Translation functions as a transparent presentation of something that already exists, although the "original" is actually brought into being through translation. 

✴️Key Points :

• Situating Translation 
• Translation As Interpellation
• The Question of History

In a post-colonial context the problematic of translation be- comes a significant site for raising questions of representa non, power, and historicity. The context is one of contesting and contested stories attempting to account for, to recount, the asymmetry and inequality of relations between peoples, races, languages. 

In the colonial context, a certain conceptual econ- omy is created by the set of related questions that is the prob- lematic of translation. Conventionally, 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 real- ity; and representation provides direct, unmediated access to a transparent reality. 

Chapter 1 - She outlines the problematic of translation and its relevance to the post-colonial situation. Reading the texts of different kinds of colonial translators.

In chapter 2, She examines 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.

Caught in an idiom of fidelity and be trayal that assumes an unproblematic notion of representa fion, translation studies fail to ask questions about the histor icity of translation; ethnography, on the other hand, has recently begun to question both the innocence of representa tion and the long-standing asymmetries of translation.

In chapters 3, 4, and 5, her main focus is the work of Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Walter Benjamin, an earlier critic who is becoming increasingly important to post-structuralist thinkers. Her analysis 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. Pointing out the configurations of translation and history in Benjamin's work, She describe the kind of reading provided by de Man and Derrida of Benjamin's important essay "The Task of the Translator." Her argument is that Walter Benjamin's early writings on translation are trapped in significant ways into his later essays on the writing of history, a trope that goes unrecognised by both de Man and Derrida. She uses trope to indicate a metaphorizing that includes a displacement as well as a re-figuring. The refusal of these major proponents of deconstruction to address the question of history in Benjamin suggests a critical draw- back in their theory and perhaps indicates why deconstruction has never addressed the problem of colonialism.

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. My concern is to probe the absence, lack, or repression of an awareness of asymmetry and historicity in several kinds of writing on translation. 

⭐Translation As Interpellation

As translator and scholar, Jones was responsible for the most influential introduction of a textualized India to Europe. Within three months of his arrival, the Asiatic Society held its first meeting with Jones as president and Warren Hastings, the governor general, as patron. It was primarily through the efforts of the members of the Asiatic Society, themselves administrators and officials of the East India Company's Indian Government, that translation would help "gather in" and "rope off" the Orient. In a letter, 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." His translations are said to have been read by almost every- one in the West who was literate in the nineteenth century.

His translation of Kalidasa's Sakuntala went through successive reprints: Georg Forster's famous German transla- tion of the translation came out in 1791, after which the play was translated into other European languages well. As a twentieth-century scholar puts it, "It is not an exaggeration to say that he altered our [Le., Europe's] whole conception of the Eastern world. If we were compiling a thesis on the influ- ence of Jones we could collect most of our material from foot- notes, ranging from Gibbon to Tennyson." Evidence for Jones's lasting impact on generations of scholars writing about India can be found even in the preface of the 1984 Indian edition of his discourses and essays, where the editor, Moni Bagchee, indicates that Indians should "try to preserve accu- rately and interpret the national heritage by treading the path chalked out by Sir William Jones." 

His works were carefully studied by the writers of the age, especially the Germans-Goethe, Herder, and others. When Jones's new writings reached Europe, the shorter pieces were eagerly picked up and reprinted immediately by different periodicals. 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. 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.

The glorious past of India, according to Jones, is shrouded in superstition, "marked and bedecked in the fantastic robes of mythology and metaphor", but the now "degenerate" and "abased" Hindus were once "eminent in various knowledge." The presentation of the Indians as "naturally" effeminate as well as deceitful often goes hand in hand in Jones's work.

As a Supreme Court judge in India, Jones took on, as one of his most important projects, the task of translating the ancient text of Hindu law, Manu's Dharmasastra. In fact, he began to learn Sanskrit primarily so that he could verify the interpretations of Hindu law given by his pandits. Even before coming to India, Jones had formulated a solution for the problem of the translation of Indian law.

⭐The Question Of History:

Her 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 willing 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 uses the word historicity to avoid invoking History with a capital H, her concern being with "local" practices or micro practices as Foucault calls them of translation that require no overarching theory to contain them. We may also find useful Louis Althusser's critique of his- toricism, which leads him, in Jameson's words, to formulate the notion that "history is a process without a telos or a subject," "a repudiation of... master narratives and their twin categories of narrative closure - telos and of character. 

"History ", in the text of Post structuralism,  is a representative force that obliterates difference and belongs in a chain that includes meaning, truth, presence, and logos.Derrida's critique of representation is important for post- colonial theory because it suggests a critique of the traditional notion of translation as well. In fact, the two problematics have always been intertwined in Derrida's work. He has in- dicated more than once that translation perhaps escapes "the orbit of representation" and is therefore an "exemplary ques- tion. i representation stands for the reappropriation of presence, translation emerges as the sign for what Derrida would call "dissemination."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 quintaining the asymmetries of imperialism.

✴️Conclusion :

Her 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 willing 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. Since it is part of her argument that the problematics of translation and the writing of history are inextricably bound together, She should briefly go over Spivak's main points regardin the "Subaltern historians. Their strategic use of post-structuralist ideas may help us see more clearly how the notions of history and translation she wish to reinscribe are not only enabled by the post-colonial critique of historiography but might also further strengthen that critique. 

♻️Unit: 4, 9:  Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of Modernist Poetic Discourse in Indian Poetry 

This Article is explained by  Nehalba Gohil and Khushbu Makwana, students of the Department of English, MKBU. 

🔆Abstract :

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. The chapter will study examples from Bengali, Malayalam and Marathi, to understand how such translation of modern Western poets were used to breach the hegemony of prevailing literary sensibilities and poetics modes. Many Indian poets such as Buddhadeb Bose, Agyeya,Gopalakrishna Adiga, Dilip Chitre and Ayyappa Paniker were also translators.Translation from Africa and Latin America poetry played a significant role in this phase of modernism. Neruda and Parra were widely translated into India languages during this phase.

In this context, translation enacted a critical act of evaluation, a creative act of intervention, and performative act of legitimation,in evolving a new poetic during the modernist phase of Indian poetry. The term ‘translation ‘ to suggest a range of cultural practices, from critical commentary to creation of intertextual text. Andre Lefevere’s concept of translation as reflections/ rewriting , the chapter argues that ‘rewritings’ and ‘reflections’ found in the ‘less obvious form of criticism…,commentary, historiography , teaching, the collection of works in anthologies, the production of playshare also instance of translation. An essay on T.S. Eliot in Bengali by Sudhindranayh Dutt, or scathing critique in Malayalam on the poetic practices of Vallathol Narayana Menon by Ayyappa Paniker, can also described as ‘ translational’ writing as they have elements of translation embedded in them. 

🔆Key Points :

• Modernity and Modernism
• The project of Modernism in India
• Literary/ artistic movement 
• Postcolonial contex
• The reception of Western modernist discourses in India
• Translation 
• Indigenous roots/ routes ofmodernity and modernism
• Western modernity
• The metaphor of the mice
• The surreal image 

This chapter examines the role played by translation in shaping a modernist poetic sensibility in some of the major literary traditions of India in the twentieth century, between 1950 and 1970. Translations of major European poets such as Baudelaire, Rilke, Eliot and Yeats contributed towards clearing a space for the modernist discourse in Indian poetry. The chapter will study examples from Bengali, Malayalam and Marathi, to understand how such translations of modern Western poets were used to breach the hegemony of prevailing literary sensibilities and poetic modes. Many of the major Indian poets - such as Buddhadeb Bose, Agyeya, Gopalakrishna Adiga, Dilip Chitre and Ayyappa Paniker - were also translators. Their translations were 'foreignising' translations that disrupted cultural codes that legislated regimes of reading and writing poetry. Also, translations during the early phase of modernism in major Indian languages appeared in little magazines that played a critical role in opening up the poetic discourse. Translations from African and Latin American poetry played a significant role in this phase of modernism. Poets such as Neruda and Parra were widely translated into Indian languages during this phase. In this context, translation enacted a critical act of evaluation, a creative act of intervention, and a performative act of legitimation, in evolving a new poetic style during the modernist phase of Indian poetry.

The Indian moderni form emerged from a socio-political formation that demanded change and as mich, the dynamics of Indian culture was responding deeper seismic forces shaped by historical events as the communal ren and killings that followed the Partition, the perceived failure of the Nehruvian project of modernity and the consequent erosion of idealism which had inspired an earlier generation of writers committed to socialist realism and Romantic nationalism.

💠Part: 1

'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 about by the advent of colonialism, capitalist economy, industrial mode of production, Western models of education, assimilation of rationalist 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 calmural life of India, separating its 'modern period from what was 'pre- modern. Such a view may be disputed but it can be convincingly shown that the dynamics of literary expression and the apparatus of cultural transmission came to be redefined in the 'modern' period.

The project of modernity in India was implicated in colonialism and imperialism. This colonial modernity informed literary and cultural movements, beginning from the reformist movement of the nineteenth century to the modernist movement of the mid-twentieth century. As Dilip Chitre observes, 'what took nearly a century and a half to happen in England, happened within a hurried half century' in Indian literature.

💠Part: 2

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

The postcolonial context adds a complex political dimension to the aesthetic of Indian modernism. How are we to evaluate the modernisms that emerged in the postcolonial phase in India? Critics such as Simon Gikandi, Susan Friedman, Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, and Aparna Dharwadker have argued that non- Western modernisms are not mere derivative versions of a European hegemonic practice. The emergence of modernism in societies in Asia, Africa or Latin America cannot be seen in terms of a European centre and non- European peripheries. 

💠Part: 3

In the context of Bengali, as Amiya Dev has observed, 'It was not because they imbibed modernism that the adhunik modernist Bengali writers turned away from Rabindranath; on the contrary, Modernism was the means by which they turned away from and they had to turn away, for their history demanded it' 

If European modernism was drawn between the euphoric and the reactive, in Kannada the precipitate modernism was drawn between the Brahmanical and the non-Brahminical. Just as the euphoric 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-4

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 poetry, thus preparing the reader for new poetic modes.

💠Part-5

One of the recurring themes in Sudhindranath Dutta's critical essays is the primacy of the word. In 'The Necessity of Poetry', he argues that the persistence of poetry through the ages in all societies, particularly among the unsophisticated and the primitive, attest to its necessity.

💠Part-6

In Mardhekar, both irony and self-reflexivity are ways of constituting a new reader by freeing him or her from his or her habits of viewing the world. These are strategies to re-inscribe a self-critical attitude towards the material content of art and life. 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.

💠Part-7

Kurukshetram 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 title, 'Kurukshetram', signifies the place where the epic battle that forms the central theme of the Mahabharata took place. The poem progresses through broken images from contemporary life, but there are also redemptive memories of forgotten harmonies that recur through the metaphor of the dream.

💠Part-8

It is important to understand the indigenous roots/routes of modernity and modernism in all the three writers discussed above. They partake of the logic of a postcolonial society which had already developed internal critiques of Western modernity. 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 modernist subject was fragmented and fractured in the Indian context, but not for reasons that constituted fragmented selves in the Western context. Colonial modernity operated within the Indian context as a realm of desire which brought into being a new social imaginary.The formalist poetic of modernist poetry corresponded to an inner world of desire that produced a language bristling with disquiet and angst. Translation enabled the displaced self of modernity to locate itself in a language that was intimately private and, also, outspokenly public. The idiom of their expression afforded the possibility of self-knowledge through epiphanies that brought 'momentary stays against confusion' (Ramanan 1996, 56).

✴️Conclusion :

Thus, 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.