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REFLECTIONS: Rethinking Translation

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 REFLECTIONS

Rethinking Translation

At least
and since Walter
George Benjamin,
Steiner, Ortega,
translation Y Gasset,
has grown Roman
into an Jakobson
important
branch of interdisciplinary study engaging some of the best minds
of our time. Translation has been looked upon not only as a literary
phenomenon, but a cultural-political one. In a post colonial context
like ours the problematic of translation becomes a significant site
for raising questions of representation, power and historicity and
accounting for the asymmetry and inequality between peoples, races
and languages.
Several important questions have been raised by recent inves
tigators in the theory of translation : What are the implications of
translation as a decision-making process? What are the principles
of correspondence or equivalence involved in the activity of trans
lation? Is there an authentic original text at all and consequently,
is there a unique authorial voice? Can there be any 'authentic'
translation in the absence of a pre-existing meaning? Is translation
a mimetic activity that mimes the responsibility to the trace of the
other in the self? What is the hermeneutics of translation? What is
the position of translated literature within the literary polysystem?
What are the shifts of cohesion and coherence in translation? Is
translation domestic inscription or cross-cultural communication?
translation an international community-building exercise, a passa
to Utopia? Or is it the opposite, an exposition of linguistic and cultur
difference? What role do language hierarchies play in translatio
How does it build, revise or unbuild literary canons? What effe
do translations have on the literature in the target language? H
do they alter the norms of reading and of criticism? What is th
nature of the relationship between colonialism and translation? Ho
for example, did the colonizers choose Indian texts for translati
into English, what did they look for in those texts? What is th
relationship between translation and the Orientalist ideology?
translation a cannibalistic activity, a consumption of texts and a
absorption of another culture into one's own? Or an encounter fu

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of tension and anxiety? What is the ethics of translation? Academics
may find new answers to these questions and pay special attention
to the state of translation in India and the possibilities of evolving
an Indian approach to the activity of translation.
In India we keep translating every moment of our active life.
We are always bilingual if not multi-lingual, and often mix languages
almost unconsciously in our everyday speech. Our literature too is
founded on translations since the various Ramayanas, Mahabharatas
and Bhagavatas in different languages including the Tribal versions
and the performative improvisations have been the very foundations
of our rich literatures. Even the distinction between the original work
and the translation was rather blurred and uncertain in India's pre
colonial discourse. The Ramayanas of Pampa, Kamban, Ezhuthachan,
Mola, Premananda, Ekanatha, Balarama Dasa, Tulsi, Kritibas or Madhav
Kandali, for example, were taken to be neither translations nor
adaptations, but original works as they were the most brilliant
manifestations of the genius of the respective languages. The story
of Indian literatures until, say, the 19th century was mostly a story
of creative translations, adaptations, re-tellings, interpretations, epito
mes and elaborations of classical texts; and translations from and
into Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic and modern Indian languages knit
together communities, languages, religions and cultures. The colonial
enterprise in translation attempted to produce a colonial form of
subjectivity through technologies and practices of power/knowledge;
translation then became a strategy of containment and a reinforcement
of the hegemonic versions of the colonised as objects without history.
Today we have to retrieve to translation its pre-colonial openness
and see translation as a way of restoring our people's histories and
recording their past and present.
Translation theories have so far mostly been dominated by
translations involving Western cultures. It is necessary to relocate
the theory and practice of translation within hitherto unexplored,
Eastern, cultural contexts. Translation activity needs to be examined
as policy, prioritization, empowerment, enrichment and culture-learn
ing within post-colonial contexts since cross-cultural relations are
constituted not on an abstract transcultural universal of beauty, but
on immediate encounters with other cultural systems. Translation
is also a celebration of difference and a re-inventing of cultural
identities. Translation activity constructs cultural identity by reframing
the boundaries of the sayable, and changing the terms of affiliation.
While theorizing the act of translation, we ought to distinguish
between Western and Indian approaches. J. Hillis Miller considers
translation 'the wandering existence in a perpetual exile' alluding
: / Indian Literature : 201

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obviously to the Biblical myth of the Fall of Man and his exile from
Paradise. Translation here is an exile. The myth of the Tower of Babel
further underlines the idea that man has been cursed to be multi
lingual, after the loss of the original common tongue. However, India
has accepted and lived with multilingualism for centuries, and the
transition from one language to another is as natural to us as a change
of body during rebirth. Our poets like Kabir or Meera, Nanak or
Vidyapati have themselves been multi-lingual without even being
aware of it. We have seldom been haunted by the fear of being
unparadised; translation does not embarrass us as it is a daily act
with us, as physical and as intimate as lovemaking. Ours is tradi
tionally a 'translating consciousness' unlike the monolingual literary
cultures of Europe that are too self-conscious of the act. Again, we
have never considered deviations from the original as sin; on the
other hand we have admired the imaginative: freedom of the different
translators of Ramayana whose differences are even more important
than their commonalities since that was what established them as
original poets in their languages and often the very founders of the
languages themselves. The West was always worried about the
authenticity of the translation by which it often meant literality, a
concept close to Platonic Mimesis, an attempt to re-situate the original
through close imitation. India has no martyrs to the cause of trans
lation like Etienne Dolet, the sixteenth century French, translator of
Plato, executed for the freedom he took with the original text: If we
had followed this example we would have executed the best of our
poets, both the poets of the epics and the Bhakti poets who took
every kind of linguistic and intellectual freedom with their 'original'
texts. Perhaps the very idea of an 'original' text is foreign to us because
of our strong oral traditions that had only perpetually changing texts.
While colonial Europe found in the translation of exotic oriental
texts a way to contain and dominate them, India sought through
translation a living dialogue between its own cultural past and present
as also between its culture and cultures of other lands. For us
translation has been a revitalisation of the original through t
imagination of a writer of another space and another time. Translatio
to us has been a version of intertextuality. Original has never be
specially privileged, it can never be absolutely repeated. Like an
act of reading, translation too is besieged and delivered by t
precariousness of intertextuality. The translator's position has nev
been secondary in India; our greatest poets have been translator
and our greatest translators have been poets. From Bhartrhari onward
- centuries before Derrida - we have believed that meaning exist
in language not as a positive presence but as an absence which reflect

K. Satchidaimndan / 7

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its independent presence. Indian Linguistics since the days of the
Sphota theory has seldom suffered from an anxiety about the loss
of the origin. Deviations have not only been tolerated in India, but
have been welcomed and encouraged.
Look at the Sanskrit words translation: vivarta which in the
Vedantic sense means alteration or altered condition - as the world
is a vivarta of Brahman; paribhasha that can mean anything from speech
and discourse to reproof and common rule, bhashantaram which means
rendering in another dialect or migration into or rebirth in another
language and anuvad which denotes a repetitive interpretation. Words
like anukriti (imitation), arthakriya (enacted or performed meaning),
vyaktivivekam (repetition with individual difference) and the Tamil
word ullurai (inner speech or sub-textual meanings) were used in
the context of translation in the medieval times none of which is
an exact equivalent of the English word 'translation' and all of which
recognise the non-identical nature of the source and the target. Bhashya
or interpretation and localisation were common to Indian translations
of the epics. In pre-colonial India, translations of texts within the
same culture maintained not a paraphrasal relationship, but one of
intertextuality allowing for plenty of diversity. Only the intervention
of colonialism created inhibitions and a sense of sin about deviation
from the so-called original text. Our duty is to give back to the
translator his original pre-colonial status as a careful reader, a sahrdaya
and also a creator in no sense secondary to the writer of the source
text. At the same time we have to be conscious of the contexts of
translation as they exist today: who does the translation? Who decides
the text to be translated? Whose experience is being translated? Wh
is the author of the text? Who forms the target audience? What is
the historical position of the respective figures in the act? The context
or 'effective history' to use a Nietzschean term, becomes integral and
indispensable to the act of translation

J
K. Satchidanandan
Publisher

8 / Indian Literature : 201

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