Dr. D. B. Gavani
Teaching
of Translation and Deconstruction of Textual Praxis
The phenomenal growth and rapid
development of translation studies is the recent trend setting in 21st
century. Actually the terrain of
translation has emerged during 1980s with regard to lay a greater emphasis on
syntactic and semantic meanings enthralling semiotics of the language and its
cultural entities. Today these translation studies are amassing the wide
variety of fields like linguistics, literary studies, history, psychology,
anthropology and economics. The translation is meant to transliterate the
original cultural ideas into another cultural world. To put it in simple words
translation is a process of putting forth our feelings, emotions and thoughts
from mother tongue to other tongue or vis-à-vis. Sometimes mother tongue
becomes other tongue and other tongue the mother tongue depending upon the
given temporal and spatial situations in which the translator plays a very
pivotal role in equilibrium of cultural devices. The mother tongue may be
Kikuyu, Spanish, Russian, Italian, French, German or Englishes and the other
tongue includes Kannada, Telagu, Tamil, Bengali or Hindi – or vice versa. The mother
tongue always represents the expression of thoughts and ideas in the most
homogeneous order and makes the speaker more confident of his/ her
communication in everyday life. The
other tongue constitutes the heterogeneous world where the cultural identities
are exuded by apartheid, marginalized, downtrodden or subaltern or Dalit
concerns and their inner circle where their boundaries are fixed by the
hegemony of sociology. I am just foregrounding this ideology to disseminate the
knowledge of the present PU First year English text and the forthcoming PU
Second Year English text in the post colonial understanding of the literal and
linguistic meanings.
I would like to focus on
the lessons in the PU First Year English textbook. ‘The Gentleman of Jungle’, written
by Jomo Kenyatta, the First President of Kenya whose imaginary world locates and
resembles George Orwell’s Animal Farm, is an endorsement of the backwardness as
far as class and caste system is concerned. The social hierarchy is well
ridiculed with animal world where men have perchance no place except their
subjugated prison hole. The finest translation of culture is found in K. P.
Purna Chandra Tejashwi’s “Around the Medicinal Creeper” that co-opts the
paradigm shift in the narratology of the subject matter in the novel “The
Mistress of Spices” by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. The process of the
translation KMS has tried to maintain the cultural values of Post Modern
Kannada Literature as propagated by KPP Tejashwi. The nostalgia and pain
circumvents in the story “ Oru Manushyan” written by V M Basheer where
diasporic feelings are haunted by indentured labours, money lenders, watchmen,
soldiers and so on. It is a question of survival by learning to write their
addresses in English. “May... God help you” may not suffice the semiotic
expression as a cliché at the end of the story. Translation as a discovery
marvels the transformation in the lives of people like Babar Ali whose life
portrayal by Samarpita M Sharma has been meticulously designed as a designated
deed with dignity of service. Rowena Hill has translated a poem written by
Mudnakudu Chinnaswamy viz., ‘Nanondu Maravadare’ into English entitled ‘If I
was a Tree’ which has a lackadaisical attitude in elevating the cultural
moorings that the poet expresses in Kannada from the spectrum of society he
belongs to. Translation must be an innovative and intuitive phenomenon rather
than pouring out of equivalent verbose in both the languages. That is why the
translator should know the basic problems that s/he faces at the time of
translating well known text from source language into target language. What am
I translating? Why am I translating? Who am I translating? To whom am I
translating? – these are the questions that translator should introspect and speculate
the novel strategies, methods and
techniques of translatability. R. K. Narayan is at his best in exhibiting the
art of writing in Indian English with colloquial expressions upholding cultural
ethos in his works. The Farmer’s Wife is written by P Lalita Kumari under the
pen name of ‘Volga’ and translated by Vasanth Kannbiran into English. It is a
pathetic note on the farmers’ suicide in India that excelled from the last
decade in rampant way. It denotes the subaltern state of living in post colonial
era where the marginalized or the last neglected person of this society has no
voice to raise against the authority or elite masters or governmental entities.
The life of Frederick Douglass throws light upon the Afro- American diaspora
wherein the slavery is celebrated as a carnival of human suffering that
demarcates the apathy of colour discrimination and class conflict in American
society stating ‘the darkest hours of my career in slavery’. It is poverty that forges character is
profusely precipitated in the poem “The Old Woman” by Arun Kolatkar. It
portrays an agony of neglected or destitute woman who begs at the foothills of
Jejuri. Shaheen Sultan Dhanji has
translated an Urdu poem entitled “Do Not Ask of Me, My Love” written by Faiz Ahmed
Faiz, the renowned Indian Urdu poet. It’s an immortalized ghazal that
exemplifies the true love.
Translation has to do with
authority and legitimacy and ultimately, with power, which is precisely why it
has been and continues to be the subject of so many acrimonious debates.
Translation is not just a “window opened on the another world” or some pious
platitude. Rather, translation is a channel opened, often not without a certain
reluctance, through which foreign influences penetrate into native culture,
challenge it and even to contribute to subverting it. “When you offer a
translation to a nation”, says Victor Hugo, “that nation will almost always
look on the translation as a act of violence against itself”. Translations are
potentially threatening precisely because they confront the receiving culture
with another, the different way of looking at life and society, and the way
that can be seen subversive and must therefore kept out. That is what
instigates me to give a small advice to my highly intellectual teaching
fraternity friends to pay attention at the time of teaching these lessons to
the rural or sub-urban students with great dexterity and uncanny skills should
be inculcated to decipher the knowledge of two different cultures and their
relevance in an android oriented nano world. These lessons would definitely
bring a drastic change in the process of shaping career and personality of
students because the moral and ethical values of colonized counties are
amalgamated and carried forward to Gen Next with jelly bean technical devices.
Again we are looking back for our colonial masters to dictate terms to address
the current situations. India, no more a land of sages and saints, black
magicians, snake charmers and drum beaters as onlookers put her, is a New
Paradise wherein our youths can mould their tenacity and sagacity to explore
new horizons of upholding and comprehending the naked reality with their
inquisitive inquiry into the text they go through even at PU Second Year English
text too.
Translation of literature
poses serious problems for the translator because creative writing uses words
with multiple purposes. Here content and form are equally important. The
ancient Indian theoretician Anandavardhana has stated that the distinctive
feature of literary/poetic language is Oral: Poetic devices embellish literary
language, which makes it a challenging task for the translator to carry it over
to another language dhvani or the range of suggestions contained in the work.
The translator has to bring this world of connotations alive in the TL also,
which is not a mean task. S/he also has to reproduce the stylistic beauty of
the SL text. The beauty of One Hundred Years of Solitude, for example, lies in
the splendour of Marquez's magical realism; the translator has to be skilled in
both Spanish and English to do justice to the SL text. Idioms and metaphors
which abound in poetic use of the language are often difficult to recapture in
the TL because of the structural differences between languages. In fact some
feel that complete translatability is not a criterion of good craftsmanship as
far as a literary work is concerned. Justin O'Brien who has translated Camus
from French into English, quotes Raymond Guerin: “the most convincing criterion
of the quality of a work is the fact that it can only be translated with
difficulty, for if it passes readily into another language without losing its
essence, then it must have no particular essence or at least not one of the
rarest”. It is the awareness of all these challenges that is behind the concept
of the impossibility of perfect equivalence.
The challenges multiply
when the SL text is in verse, as the language of poetry is densely packed with
allusions and other poetic ornaments like metre and figures of speech. The
verse form is the most difficult to transfer to another language as the natural
rhythm and syllabic patterns of languages differ from each other. How does one
translate the majestic sweep of Shakespeare's blank verse into an Indian
language? Nobody can deny that the metre and rhythm of the verse add to its
grandeur. The sonnet with its stipulations of 14 lines and a specific rhyme
scheme is hard to reproduce in a language that is completely different in
speech rhythm and metre. In the case of a creative work there is a perfect
marriage of form and content; the good translator has to render both
adequately. This is perhaps why Robert Frost made the observation that poetry
is what gets lost in translation.
The job of the translator
is made easier if the TL reader does not know the SL. Translations of major
works of literature can be taken as examples. As far as an Indian reader is
concerned, it would be difficult to read Tolstoy or Cervantes or Victor Hugo in
the original. But if it is to be well received, the translation cannot appear
to be too ‘foreign' in style, either. In such cases the translator has to
smooth over the linguistic and stylistic peculiarities and make the text
accessible to the reader. Here the emphasis is on making the text
reader-friendly and hence the translator can take a few liberties in
translation.
What is apparent is that
translation is essentially a reader-oriented or listener-oriented activity. The
translator has to keep this in mind when translating and this will inform
his/her choice of translation method. This also means that the translator has
to correctly interpret the context in which the SL text is situated. This is
especially true of culture-specific references. For example, translation of the
English ‘Hi!' into Hindi is a case in point. This can be translated into
‘Namaste' and it cannot be treated as wrong translation. But the casualness of
the English greeting is not recreated by the Hindi equivalent. If the greeting
is from one friend to another, ‘Namaste' will not work as it is far too formal
for the context. The translator has to understand the reality of the situation
and work accordingly.
Susan Bassnett suggests
various steps in this context. A translator when faced with a difficult term/phrase
should accept that the SL phrase is untranslatable in the TL at the linguistic
level. S/he will have to consider the range of TL terms that are available and
decide on the equivalent word on the basis of the socio-cultural context or, if
it is a conversation, on the basis of gender and age. When the SL is translated
into the TL, what is more important is that the “invariant if it is a
conversation core of the SL phrase in its two referential systems (the
particular system of the text and the system of culture out of which the text
has sprung)” has been reproduced. It has often been pointed out that
Shakespeare's famous sonnet “Shall I compare thee to a summer's day” presents a
thorny problem for translators. In the Indian context, summer is not a pleasant
time and the comparison to summer will not be taken as a compliment. The
translator will have to bear this in mind. If the reader is to understand the
nature of the compliment, the translator will have to come up with a cultural
equivalent.
Similarly if Tolstoy is
considered to be a great writer by everybody and not just Russians, obviously
the text has been communicated without distortions to the reading public in
general. Nida underlines this point when he says “the ultimate purpose of the
translation, in terms of its impact upon its intended audience, is a
fundamental factor in any evaluation of translations”.
Rabindranath Tagore
translated his Bengali poems into English for which he received the Nobel Prize
in Literature in 1913.On this occasion the Swedish Academy gave the award for
the English translations that Tagore had done himself and not for the originals
in Bengali, to which they had no access. The Institution´s official statement
made clear the reasons for giving the award:... For the author himself, who by
education and practice is a poet in his native Indian tongue, has bestowed upon
the poems a new dress, alike perfect in form...This has made them accessible to
all in England, America, and the entire Western world...; because... with
consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English
words, a part of the literature of the West. Luigi Pirandello, the Sicilian
novelist, playwright and author of ‘Six Characters in Search of an Author’,
amongst other titles, wrote many of his works in Sicilian dialect which he
later translated into Italian. He was the Nobel Prize winner for Literature in
1934. The Irish novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett, voluntarily exiled in
Paris, started by writing in English which he later translated into French, but
ended up writing in French and translating himself back into English. He was
the Nobel Prize winner for Literature in 1969. The Polish writer, Isaac
Bashevis Singer, who had emigrated to the United States in 1935 and translated
many of his works from Yiddish to English at times with the help of another
translator, was the Nobel Prize winner for Literature in 1978. The Polish
writer and poet of Lithuanian origin, Czeslaw Milosz, who lived in the United
States for many years and translated his own work from Polish into English,
received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. Joseph Brodsky, who in the USA
translated many of his poems from Russian into English, was awarded the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1987.
By and large, I will be
failing in my duties if I do not mention my deep sense of gratitude to the
Chairperson, Co-ordinator and Members of PU English Textbook Committee for
their sincere venture to fulfil the vision and mission of student centric
quality education by imparting this material to make the teaching-learning
process more effective and meaningful with specific goals and sufficing the
need of an hour of all the stake holders. Lastly, my dream rests upon the Glocalectics
that all my colleagues and students strive upon with benign zeal in glocalized
cosmos.
