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.

Thinking Activity

Literature review: Research Methodology - Dissertation writing 

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 Literature review: Research methodology and Dissertation writing. 

🔆Literature Review: 

🔆Define Literature Review: 

A literature review (or “relevant review of the literature”) is an objective, concise, critical summary of published research literature relevant to a topic being researched in an article.

A literature review is a piece of academic writing demonstrating knowledge and understanding of the academic literature on a specific topic placed in context. A literature review also includes a critical evaluation of the material; this is why it is called a literature review rather than a literature report. It is a process of reviewing the literature, as well as a form of writing.

Usually a literature review forms a section or part of a dissertation, research project or long essay. However, it can also be set and assessed as a standalone piece of work.

🔆Why is literature review carried out in research? 

The aim of any literature review is to summarize and synthesize the arguments and ideas of existing knowledge in a particular field without adding any new contributions. Being built on existing knowledge they help the researcher to even turn the wheels of the topic of research. It is possible only with profound knowledge of what is wrong in the existing findings in detail to overpower them. For other researches, the literature review gives the direction to be headed for its success. 

Thinking Activity

Thinking Activity: Unit 3: 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 3: 6,  “Translation and literary history: An Indian view” - Ganesh Devy

This Article is explained by Nilay Rathod and Emisha Ravani, students of the Department of English, MKBU.

 

🔆Abstract : 

This article is about the role of translation in communicating literary movements across linguistic borders. According to J. Hillis Miller ‘Translation is the wandering existence of a text in a perpetual exile.’Chaucer, Dryden and the Pope used the tool of translation to recover a sense of order. The tradition of Anglo-Irish literature branched out of translating Irish works into English.No critic has taken a well-defined position on the place of translations in literary history. Origins of literary movements and literary traditions inhabit various acts of translation.Translations are popularly perceived as unoriginal, not much thought has been devoted to the aesthetics of translation. 

🔆Key Arguments : 

Roman Jakobson in his essay on the linguistics of translation proposed a threefold classification of translations: 

• (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, and

• (c) those from a verbal order to another system of signs (Jakobson, 1959, pp. 232– 9).

In 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. In actual practice, even in Europe, the translating consciousness treats the SL and TL as parts of a larger and continuous spectrum of various intersecting systems of verbal signs.

J.C. Catford presents a comprehensive statement of theoretical formulation about the linguistics of translation in A Linguistic Theory of Translation, in which he seeks to isolate various linguistic levels of translation. His basic premise is that since translation is a linguistic act any theory of translation must emerge from linguistics: ‘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’ (Catford, 1965, p. vii).

♻️"Translation and literary history: An Indian view” - Ganesh Devy

One of the most revolutionary events in the history of English style has been the authorized translation of the Bible. It was also the literary expression of Protestant Christianity. The recovery of the original spirit of Christianity was thus sought by Protestant England through an act of translation. 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. Similar attempts were made in other European languages such as German and French. 

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.

Many of the Anglo-Irish and Indian English writers have been able translators themselves. Similarly the settler colonies such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand have impressive modern traditions of literature, which have resulted from the ‘translation’ of the settlers from their homeland to alien locations. Post- colonial writing in the former Spanish colonies in South America, the former colonies in Africa and other parts of the world has experienced the importance of translation as one of the crucial conditions for creativity. Origins of literary movements and literary traditions inhabit various acts of translation.

Roman Jakobson in his essay on the linguistics of translation proposed a threefold classification of translations:

 (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, and  (c) those from a verbal order to another system of signs (Jakobson, 1959, pp. 232– 9). As he considers, theoretically, a complete semantic equivalence as the final objective of a translation act – which is not possible – he asserts that poetry is untranslatable.

He maintains that only a ‘creative translation’ is possible. The translating consciousness exploits the potential openness of language systems; and as it shifts significance from a given verbal form

to a corresponding but different verbal form it also brings closer the materially different sign systems. 

The concept of a ‘translating consciousness’v 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. Such theories work round the premise that there inevitably is a chronological gap and an order or a priority of scale in language- learning situations. 

However, his level of abstraction marks the farthest limits to which the monolingual Saussurean linguistic materialism can be stretched. In actual practice, even in Europe, the translating consciousness treats the SL and TL as parts of a larger and continuous spectrum of various intersecting systems of verbal signs. Owing to the structuralist unwillingness to acknowledge the existence of any non-systemic or extra- systemic core of significance, the concept of synonymy in the West has remained inadequate to explain translation activity. And in the absence of a linguistic theory based on a multilingual perspective or on translation practice, the translation thought in the West

overstates the validity of the concept of synonymy.

J.C. Catford presents a comprehensive statement of theoretical formulation about the linguistics of translation in A Linguistic Theory of Translation, in which he seeks to isolate various linguistic levels of translation. His basic premise is that since translation is a linguistic act any theory of translation must emerge from linguistics: ‘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’ (Catford, 1965, p. vii). 

The privileged discourse of general linguistics today is closely interlinked with developments in anthropology, particularly after 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. In its various phases of development modern Western linguistics has connections with all these. After the ‘discovery’ of Sanskrit by Sir William Jones, historical linguistics in Europe depended heavily on Orientalism. For a long time afterwards linguistics followed the path of comparative philology. 

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. Translation is not a transposition of significance or signs. After the act of translation is over, the original work still remains in its original position. 

The problems in translation study are, therefore, very much like those in literary

history. They are the problems of the relationship between origins and sequentiality. And as in translation study so in literary history, the problem of origin has not been tackled satisfactorily. The point that needs to be made is that 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 :

Comparative literature implies that between two related languages there are areas of significance that are shared, just as there may be areas of significance that can never be shared. When the soul passes from one body to another, it does not lose any of its essential significance. Indian philosophies of the relationship between form and essence, structure and significance are guided by this metaphysics. 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.

♻️Unit 3: 7, On Translating a Tamil Poem by A. K. Ramanujan

This Article is explained by Himanshi Parmar and Nirav Amreliya, students of the Department of English, MKBU. 

🔆Abstract : 

'How does one translate a poem from another time, another culture,another language? Ramanujan translated poems 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 by passes.The chief difficulty of translation is its impossibility. Frost once even identified poetry as that which is lost in 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.What is everyday in one language must be translated by what is everyday in the 'target' language also, and what is eccentric must find equally eccentric equivalents. In this article Ramanujan took various examples of Tamil poems that he translated into English and he described difficulties that he faced during translation.

🔆Key Arguments:

● Frost once said “poetry as that which is lost in translation”. 

● 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 disabuseus of the commonly-held notion of 'literal' translation. 

● Woollcott argued that English does not have leftbranching possibilities, but they are a bit abnormal. 

● Hopkins's and Thomas's poetry the leftward syntax is employed for special poetic effects-it alternates with other, more 'normal', types of English sentences. In Tamil poetry the leftward syntax is not eccentric, literary or offbeat. but part of everyday 'natural' speech.

♻️On Translating a Tamil Poem by A. K. Ramanujan: 

✴️Part: 1

This essay is divided into three parts. In Part I started with the Question, how does one translate a poem from another time, another culture, another language? The poems I translate 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. 

Of the literatures of the world at that time, Sanskrit in India, Greek and Latin in Europe, Hebrew in the Middle East, and Chinese in the Far East were Tamil's contemporaries. 

The collocations and paradigms make for metonymies and metaphors, multiple contextual meanings clusters special to each language, quile untranslatable into another language like Tamil. Even when the elements of a system may be similar in two languages, like father, mother, brother, mother-in-law, etc., in kinShip, the system of relations and the feelings traditionally encouraged each relative are ali culturally sensitive and therefore part of the expressive repertoire of poets and novelists. Ramanujan took two different poems about love (What She Said) and war ( A Young Warrior ) and made point that, when we move from one to the other we are struck by the associations across them forming a web not only of the akam and puram genres. But also of the five landscape.; with all their contents signifying moods. And the themes and motifs 0f love and war. 

How does one translate a poem from another time, another culture, another language? Of, the literatures of the world at that time, Sanskrit in India, Greek and Latin in Europe, Hebrew in the Middle East, and Chinese in the Far East were Tamil's contemporaries. By this argument he is making clear front of us that Tamil is as old as these languages.

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.

Further, He out the question like ' 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. For instance, Old Tamil has six nasal consonants: a labial, a dental, an alveolar, a retroflex, a palatal and a velar-m, n, n. ii, n, n-three of which are not distinctive in English. How shall we translate a six-way system into a three-way English system (m, n, n).

English words may end in stops, as in 'cut, cup, tuck,' etc.; Tamil words do not. When we add up these myriad systemic differences, we cannot escape the fact that phonologies are systems unto themselves (even as grammatical, syntactic, lexical, semantic systems too 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. We can map one system on to another, but never reproduce it. A poem is identical only with itself-if that.

When we attend to syntax, we see that Tamil syntax is mostly left- branching. English syntax is, by and large, rightward. Even a date like 'the 19th of June, 1988,' when translated into Tamil, would look like '1988, June, 19.' The Tamil sentence is the mirror image of the English one.

When one translates, one is translating not only Tamil, its phonology, grammar and semantics, but this entire intertextual web, this intricate yet lucid second language of landscapes which holds together natural forms with cultural ones in a code, a grammar, a rhetoric, and a poetics. 

✴️Part: 2

Ramanujan takes a closer look at the original of Kapilar's poem, Ainkurunuru 203, 'What She Said', and his translation, quoted earlier in this essay. The word annay (in spoken Tamil, ammo), literally 'mother', is a familiar term of address for any woman, here a 'girlfriend'. So he have translated it as 'friend', to make clear that the poem is not addressed to a mother (as some other poems are) but to a girl friend.

Note the long, crucial, left-branching phrase in Tamil: '. . . hisland's / [in- 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 water holes / covered with leaves and muddied by animals.' His phrase order in English tries to preserve the order and syntax of : themes, not of single words: (I) his land's waler, followed by (2) leaf– covered waterholes, and (3) muddied by animals.

The poem is a kurinci piece, about the lovers' first union, set in the hillside landscape. My title ('What she said to her girl friend, when she returned from the hills') summarizes the whole context (speaker, listener, occasion) from the old colophon that accompanies the poem. The progression is lost if we do not preserve the order of themes so naturally carried by the left-branching syntax of Tamil. More could be said about it from the point of view of the old commentaries.

The love poems get parodied, subverted and played with in comic poems about poems. In a few Centuries, both the love poems and the war poems provide models and motives for religious poems. God like Krsna the are both lovers and Warriors.

Thus any single poem is part of a set, a family of sets, a landscape, a genre. The intertextuality is concentric on a pattern of membership as well as neighborhoods of likenesses and unlikeness. Somehow a translator has to translate each poem in ways that suggest these interest, dialogue and network.

✴️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.

💠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 meager kind would be possible. if such universals did not exist we would have had to invent them.

💠2, Interiorised contexts:

Poems interiorize the entire culture. Indeed we know the culture of the ancient Tamils only through a careful study of these poems. Later colophons and commentaries explore and explicate this knowledge carried by the poems setting them in context using them to make lexicons and charming the fauna and flora of landscape. 

💠3, Systematicity:

The systematicity of such bodies of poetry, the way figures, genres, personae, etc., intermesh in a master-code, is a great help in entering this intricate yet lucid world of words. One translates not single poems but bodies of poetry that create and contain their origins world.

💠4, Structural mimicry: 

The structures of individual poems, the unique figures they make out of all the given codes of their language, rhetoric , and poetics, become the points of entry. So one attempts a structural mimicry, to translate relations, not items not single words but phrases, sequences, sentences; not metrical Units but rhythms; not morphology but syntactic patterns.

🔆Conclusion : 

The translation must not only represent,, but re- present, the original. One walks a tightrope between the To-language and the From-language, in a double loyalty. A translator is an 'artist on oath'. Sometimes one may succeed only in re-presenting a poem, not in closely representing it. At such times one draws consolation from parables like the following.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. 

Thinking Activity

Thinking Activity: Unit 2: Comparative Literature 

 

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: 2, 4: Introduction: What is Comparative Literature Today? 

 

Introduction: What is Comparative Literature Today? by Susan Bassnett. This Article is explained by my self, Nidhi Dave and Janvi Nakum, students of the English department MKBU. 

🔅Here is the video recording of the presentation

🔅Here is the presentation presented in above video:

comparative literature by Susan Bassnett from NidhiDave30

 

♻️Unit: 2, 5: Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline. 

This Article is explained by Hirva Pandya and Vachhalata Joshi, students of the English department MKBU.

 

🔆Abstract:

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. This article focuses on the questions like 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.

 👉Key Arguments:

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 copyright of orphaned books to itself? 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? The Manifesto is a call to Humanists for a much deeper engagement with digital culture production, publishing, access, and ownership. If new technologies are dominated and controlled by corporate and entertainment inter ests, how will our cultural legacy be rendered in new media formats? By whom and for whom? 

Comparative Literature since they raise questions that have formed the methodological, disciplinary, and institutional foundation of a wide - range of academic fi elds in the Humanities, including history and art history, literary and cultural studies, and the humanistic social sciences, such as anthropology, archaeology, and information studies

If new technologies are dominated and controlled by corporate and entertainment inter ests, 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.

The question that we need to confront in the fourth information age concerns the specifi city of the digital medium vis - à - vis other media formats, the various kinds of cultural knowledge produced, the ways of analyzing it, the various platforms that support it, and, fi nally, the modes of authorship and reception that facilitate new architectures of participation and new architectures of power. 

Who is an author? What is a work? What constitutes a text, particularly in an environment in which any text is readerly and writerly by potentially anyone?

Comparative Media Studies thus enables us to return to some of the most fundamental questions of our fi eld with new urgency: Who is an author? What is a work? What constitutes a text, particularly in an environment in which any text is readerly and writerly by potentially anyone? 

Google has already digitized and indexed more than ten million books, allowing scholars to perform ever - more complex searches, discover patterns, and potentially export large datasets derived from the digital book repository into other applications (such as Geographic Information Systems) in order to pursue quantitative questions such as statistical correlations, publishing histories, and semantic analyses as well as qualitative, hermeneutical questions. Spurred by the work of Lev Manovich and Noah Wardrip - Fruin, the fi eld of “ cultural analytics ” has emerged over the past fi ve years to bring the tools of high - end computational analysis and data visualization to dissect large - scale cultural datasets.  Such datasets might include historical data that have been digitized, such as every shot in the fi lms of Vertov or Eisenstein, the covers and content of every magazine published in the United States in the twentieth century, or the collected works of Milton, not to mention contemporary, real - time data fl ows such as tweets, SMS messaging, or search trends. Because meaning, argumentation, and interpretative work are not limited to the “ insides ” of texts or necessarily even require “ close ” readings, 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. My point here is not to pitch “ close ” hermeneutical readings against “ distant ” data mappings, but rather to appreciate the synergistic possibilities between a hyper - localized, deep analysis and a macrocosmic view. 

♻️Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline

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 (despite the belief that both would somehow liberate humanity and join us all together in a happy, interconnected world that never existed before)

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 iany discussion of technology cannot be separated from a discussion about formations of power and instrumentalized authority.

N. Katherine Hayles, I find myself wondering – as we ponder various possible futures for Comparative Literature in the second decade of the twenty - first century – how to rouse ourselves from the “ somnolence [of] five hundred years of print ” (Hayles, 2002 : p. 29). Of course, there is nothing neutral, objective, or necessary about the medium of print; rather it is a medium that has a long and complex history connected to the formation of academic disciplines, institutions, epistemologies, and ideologies, not to mention conceptions of authorship and scholarly research.

Darnton ’s assessment seriously that we are now in the fifth decade of the fourth information age in the history of humankind, it seems to me that we ought to try to understand not only the contours of the discipline of Comparative Literature – and for that matter, the Humanities as a whole – from the perspective of an information - and media - specific analysis, but that we also ought to come to terms with the epistemic disjunction between our digital age and everything that came before it.

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

The “ problem ” of Comparative Literature is to figure out how to take seriously the range of new authoring, annotation, and sharing platforms that have transformed global cultural production. 

• Comparative Media Studies 
• Comparative Data Studies 
• Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies 

1, Comparative Media Studies:

      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.

Comparative Literature be practiced when literature and scholarly work are created, exchanged, and critiqued in a multimodal environment such as the Web? And, at the same time, how do we as scholars develop methodologies that appreciate and evaluate the media - specifi city of every literary or cultural artifact, including print? Comparative Literature as Comparative Media Studies foregrounds the formal material qualities of the surface structures upon which inscriptions are made, the technical processes of reproduction and circulation, the institutional mechanisms of dissemination and authorization, the reading and navigation practices enabled by the media form, and the broad cultural and social implications for literacy and knowledge production. It 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 other.

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?

2, Comparative Data Studies:

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.

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

3, Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies:

While the radically “ democratizing ” claims of the web and information technologies should certainly be critically interrogated, I think that it is incontestable that the barriers for voicing participation, creating and sharing content, and even developing software have been significantly lowered when compared to the world of print. And more than that, collaborative authorship, peer - to - peer sharing of content, and crowdsourced evaluation of data are the hallmarks of the participatory web known as the world of Web 2.0. 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. This is an economy based on abundance, creative commons, open access, and the proliferation of copies, not one based on scarcity, property, trade secrets, and the sanctity of originals, although, as James Boyle points out, there are many corporate entities eager to regulate the public domain and control the “ commons of the mind. 

Comparative literature scholarship has not generally concerned itself with design, interactivity, navigation strategies, and collaboration, these issues are a decisive part of the domain of Comparative Authorship and platform studies.

Conclusion:

This article mainly focuses on this twenty-first century in terms of digital humanities how we are doing comparative studies. After discussing various arguments, we come to know that 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 (Wikipedia Statistics). This is a massive achievement for eight years of work. Wikipedia represents a dynamic, flexible, and open - ended network for knowledge creation and distribution that underscores process, collaboration, access, interactivity, and creativity, with an editing model and versioning system that documents every contingent decision made by every contributing author. 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.