Thinking Activity Unit -4 : 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. Me and Bhumika gave presentation on the article of E.V.Ramakrishnan's " Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of Modernist Poetics Discourse in Indian Poetry. 

I attached my presentation ppt here you can click on this link and watch my presentation.

Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of Modernist Poetics Discourse in Indian Poetry- E. V. Ramakrishnan.

This is the table Content of this article. Let's we discuss about Abstract, key points,  key Arguments, Analysis and conclusion. 

👉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 of    modernity and modernism. 
•  Western modernity. 
•  The metaphor of the mice.
•   The surreal image .

👉Key Arguments 

• It has been argued that the Idea of a ‘Self-reflection or Self-validating’ literary text, which is central to modernist poetic,  is rooted in an ideology of the aesthetic that was complicated with colonialism. 

• D.R.Nagaraj has pointed out that as nationalism became the ideology of the nation state. 

• 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 modernism are not mere derivate versions of European hegemonic practice. 

• In the context of Bengali,  as Amiya Dev has observed, ‘It was not because they imbibed modernism that the adbunik Bengali writers turned away from Rabindranath Tagore.

• In ‘The Necessity of poetry’, Dutta argues that the persistence of poetry through the ages in all societies ,particularly among the unsophisticated and the primitive, attest to its necessity. 

Mardhekar points to their blind search for survival in a hostile world. The surreal image in the line, 'sadness has poisonous eyes made of glass, sums up the opaqueness of their vision and the toxic nature of their condemned existence unrelieved by any sense of benign order of life.

👉Analysis 

Chepter 1 and 2

The relation between ‘Modernity’ and ‘Modernism’ in Indian context , the purpose of 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. The 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. The term ‘Modernism’ implies a literary/artistic movement that was characterised by experimentation,  conscious rejection of the nationalist/ Romantic as well as popular. The pistcolonial  context adds a complex political dimension to the aesthetic of Indian Modernism. 

Chepter 3 and 4

The reception of Western modernist discourses in India was mediated by the dynamics of socio-political upheavals related to the formation of the nation state and the realignment of power structures in society. Translation enables us to delineate the complex artistic and ideological undercurrents that shaped the course of modernism in Indian literature. The three representative modernist authors from three separate Indian literary traditions-Sudhindranath Dutta(1901-60) from Bengali, ,B.S.Mardhekar(1909-56) from marathi,and Ayyappa Paniker(1936-2004) from Malayalam. These three authors was bilingual and wrote essay in English as well as their own languages. Bengali emerged in 1930s and continued into the 40s and 50s, Marathi from 1950s to the 60s. Dutta's discussion of Aristotle, Plato, Voltaire, Byron, Mallarmé and Yeats prove his mastery over Western thought.

Chepter 5

Dutta's discussion of Aristotle, Plato, Voltaire, Byron, Mallarmé and Yeats prove his mastery over Western thought. Though he claims himself to be a pragmatist, Dutta believes that 'only the poetic mind. whatever its Dutta's discussion of Aristotle, Plato, Voltaire, Byron, Mallarmé and Yeats prove his mastery over Western thought. Though he claims himself to be a pragmatist, Dutta believes that 'only the poetic mind. whatever its norm, can intuit associations where reason faces a void'. In assigning a higher role for poetry in life, he seems to reject the centrality. of the Enlightenment idea of reason in modern society. 

Thus, the case for the modernist poetic is argued in a persuasive manner in the context of the everyday world and its needs. In another essay. "The Highbrow". he observes, 'I agree with Virginia Woolf that creative artists must from time to time seek shelter within the much maligned Ivory Tower'. This does not mean that Dutta was a formalist committed to a hermetic aesthetic. He constantly invokes the progressive role of the writer in a society, and underlines the role played by the masses in the creation of a literary tradition. He observes in 'Whiggism, Radicalism and Treason in Bengal': 'Not the introspecting intellectuals, but the enduring masses are the guardians of tradition and directors of progress; and whatever be the calibre of the experimenter, unless he passes the pragmatic test of his people, the facts he would establish are febrile dreams, and the truths he would loudly proclaim are a maniac's fancies'.

Dutta's well-known poem, "The Camel-Bird'. one may glimpse this critical spirit and desire to reinvent tradition from a cosmopolitan perspective. The poem is about the crisis of perception that can only be remedied by reinventing oneself completely. In the poem, the bird is presented as vulnerable and incapable of defending itself against the hunter.

As a modernist poem, "The Camel-Bird' moves beyond the personal by embodying the condition of inertia that a colonised community is condemned to. While its voice of anguish is personal and intimate, bearing testimony to a personal crisis, its larger burden is the quest for humanity in a brutalised world, and the recovery of a sense of community in an uprooted world of isolated selves., can intuit associations where reason faces a void'. In assigning a higher role for poetry in life, he seems to reject the centrality. of the Enlightenment idea of reason in modern society. 

Thus, the case for the modernist poetic is argued in a persuasive manner in the context of the everyday world and its needs. In another essay. "The Highbrow". he observes, 'I agree with Virginia Woolf that creative artists must from time to time seek shelter within the much maligned Ivory Tower'. This does not mean that Dutta was a formalist committed to a hermetic aesthetic. He constantly invokes the progressive role of the writer in a society, and underlines the role played by the masses in the creation of a literary tradition. He observes in 'Whiggism, Radicalism and Treason in Bengal': 'Not the introspecting intellectuals, but the enduring masses are the guardians of tradition and directors of progress; and whatever be the calibre of the experimenter, unless he passes the pragmatic test of his people, the facts he would establish are febrile dreams, and the truths he would loudly proclaim are a maniac's fancies'.

Dutta's well-known poem, "The Camel-Bird'. one may glimpse this critical spirit and desire to reinvent tradition from a cosmopolitan perspective. The poem is about the crisis of perception that can only be remedied by reinventing oneself completely. In the poem, the bird is presented as vulnerable and incapable of defending itself against the hunter.

As a modernist poem, "The Camel-Bird' moves beyond the personal by embodying the condition of inertia that a colonised community is condemned to. While its voice of anguish is personal and intimate, bearing testimony to a personal crisis, its larger burden is the quest for humanity in a brutalised world, and the recovery of a sense of community in an uprooted world of isolated selves.

Chepter 6

Mardhekar's poetic line carried echoes of saint-poets like Tukaram, creating a self reflexive idiom. This enabled him to embody the moral squalour of contemporary society even as he invoked an order of the sacred rooted in tradition.

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. The opening lines of the poem capture the wretched nature of their existence:

"mice in the wet barrel died;

their necks dropped, untwisted;

their lips closed with lips;

their necks fell, undesiring. (Chitre 1967, 55)"

The metaphor of the mice is meant to evoke the morbid and the malevolent in modern life. In the subsequent lines of the poem, Mardhekar points to their blind search for survival in a hostile world. The surreal image in the line, 'sadness has poisonous eyes made of glass, sums up the opaqueness of their vision and the toxic nature of their condemned existence unrelieved by any sense of benign order of life. This sense of being trapped with no exit is a characteristically urban/ metropolitan experience one encounters in modern literature. When this poem was originally published in Marathi, in Abhiruchi, it was met with several disapproving comments, leading to long discussions and even parodies of the poem in Marathi. 

Chepter 7

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. (Paniker 1985, 14-15) "

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. The evocative rhythms of the poem provoke a profound disquiet that cannot be particularised. The self is seen as a site of struggle and conflict, but the modern men and women are denied the tragic dignity of epic heroes. 

👉Chepter 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. They 'translate modernity/modernism through the optics of postcolonial 'modernities'. There is an internal dialectic and an external dialogic involved here. Their relations with Western modernism need to be seen in terms of a dialogism that allows them to negotiate its modes of representation without surrendering to its ideological baggage. At the same time, what allows them to enter into this dialogic relationship is a dialectic that operates in their own culture. 

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 transit between native and alien traditions.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.

👉 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.