Thinking Activity Unit 3 : Translation Studies

 

Hello Readers 👋 

Welcome to my blog. In our syllabus of M.A. part-1 we had one paper on Contemporary literature and Translation Studies. In this paper we had a lots of articles. Dilip Barad assigned us this article in Group presentations Task as well as Thinking Activity task. 

On Translation Tamil Poems 

                   By : A.K.Ramanujam 

Table Content 

• Abstract
• Key Arguments
• Analysis
• Four things making translation possible
• Problems in translation
• Conclusion

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 

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 suggests that English does not have left-branching possibilities, but they are a bit abnormal.

Hopkins and Dylan Thomas used those possibilities stunningly, as we see in Thomas's 'A Refusal to Moum the Death, by Fire, of a  Child in London; both were Welshmen, and Welsh is a left-branching language.

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. 

One could not use Dylanese to translate Tamil, even though many of the above phrases from Thomas can be translated comfortably with the same word order in Tamil.

👉Analysis 

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.

Love and war  become metaphors for one another. In the poem “A Leaf In Love And War” we see entwines the two themes of love and  war - in  an ironic juxtaposition. A wreath of nocci is worn by warrior in war poems a nocci leafskirt is given by a lover to his woman in love poem.

Example God Krishna: both lovers and warriors

Ramanujan take a closer look at the original of Kapilar’s poem Ainkurunuru 203. And he point out that The word annay (in spoken Tamil, ammo), literally 'mother', is a familiar term of address for any woman, here a 'girl friend'. So I 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.

Four things making translation possible

Universals: It such universals did not exist, as Voltaire said of God, we would have had to invent them. Universals of structure in both signifiers and signifieds  are necessary fictions. The indispensable as ifs of our fallible enterprise. 

Interiorised Contexts:  One is translating also this kind of intertextual web, the meaning- making web of colophons and commentaries that surround and contextualise the poem.

Systematicity: One translates not single poems but bodies of poetry that create and contain their original world.

Problem in translation Studies. 

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.

To translate is to 'metaphor', to 'carry across'. Translations are trans-positions, re-enactments, interpretations. Some elements of the original cannot be transposed at all. One can often convey a sense of the original rhythm. but not the language-bound metre: one can mimic levels of diction, but not the actual sound of the original words. 

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 succeed in ’carrying’ the poem in some sense, we will have two poems instead of one.