Welcome readers! This blog is written in response as a part of my last Semester assignment in Paper No. 208 Comparative Literature and Translation Studies. In this blog, I will explore Ganesh Devy's article Translation & Literary History : An Indian view.
● Name :- Hetal Pathak
● Roll No. :- 09
● Semester :- 4 [ Batch 2022- 2024]
● Enrollment No. :- 4069206420220022
● Paper No. :- 208
● Paper Name :- Comparative Literature and Translation Studies
● Topic :- Translation Theory : An Indian Perspective by Ganesh Devy
● Submitted to :- Smt. S.B. Gardi Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
● Email Address :- hetalpathak28@gmail.com
● Date of Submission :- 26th April, 2024
Translation & Literary History : An Indian View by Ganesh Devy
Abstract :-
A discussion of the relations between canonised and non-canonized literary forms, between 'self' and 'other', within the Indian context, leads to a différenciation between the Western tradition of a single dominant literary tradition and the more diverse, and inclusive, parallel and multiple traditions of India. At the origin of such traditions, and holding them together long enough to permit cross fertilisation, are acts of translation, merging sign systems and forming a community of 'translating consciousness' where several languages are used simultaneously and are parts of a larger, continuous spectrum. Translation in such a multilingual context plays a fundamental role, transforming and revitalising original texts.
Literary history has always treated literary translations as a branch of non - canonical. In the Indian Literary tradition, Translation has had a place of crucial importance since most literary traditions in modern Indian languages originate in some pioneering work of Translation. Therefore, in order to understand the significance of translation in Indian culture, it becomes necessary to discuss at some length.
Translating Consciousness of India
India is a multilingual country and has always been so. G. N. Devy terms the Indian consciousness as a “translating consciousness” (In another Tongue:). Sanskrit was the dominant language in the northern part of India but other languages like Prakrit, Pali and Apabhramsa were used as languages of communication by the common masses. Sanskrit was the language of literature and religious rites. But even in the Sanskrit plays of Kalidasa and other playwrights of the time, the women and lower caste/ class characters speak Prakrit or other dialects like Sauraseni and Magadhi. It was normal and acceptable to change from one dialect into another or one language into another in the course of the same text. Devy points out: “The extent to which bilingual literary production has been accepted in India as a normal literary behaviour, and the historical length of the existence of such practice are indicative of India 's ‘translating consciousness'.
There are actually two distinct language families in India – the Indo-Aryan and the Dravidian. The most ancient of the Dravidian languages is Tamil.The other Dravidian languages are Kannada, Telugu and Malayalam which evolved later than from Tamil. The primary Indo-Aryan language is Sanskrit which combined with various local dialects to give rise to the languages of the north. The Indo-Aryan languages might share linguistic features with the languages of the west, more than with the Dravidian group of languages. So, translation from Hindi to Malayalam means that translation is between two languages that are radically different although they belong to the same region called India. The translator has to be very conscious of this while s/he translates in India. But despite this diversity, we can safely state that Indian languages own a shared sensibility, partly derived from ancient theories of literature and language.
Devy points out how the obsession with equivalence in translation is essentially a western metaphysical obsession. He quotes Hillis Miller's statement: “Translation is the wandering existence in a perpetual exile”. This is linked to the Christian theological concept of the fall from Paradise and the consequent exile in search of a country. Devy explains: “In Western metaphysics translation is an exile, and an exile is a metaphorical translation—a post-Babel crisis. The multilingual, eclectic Hindu spirit, ensconced in the belief in the soul's perpetual transition from form to form, may find it difficult to subscribe to the Western metaphysics of translation”
What he is emphasising is the basic difference in the world views of two different cultures that is bound to have an impact on all aspects of creativity, including translation. The obsession with the original and the anxiety of not being able to capture the meaning is in some way connected to the theological concept of a paradise that has been lost and has to be regained. The Indian psyche that believes in the constant progression of the soul from one birth to the other is not concerned about an original state. This is because we have the cyclical concept of life and time where there are no origins or endings. Hence the almost metaphysical obsession about equivalence that haunts translation activity in the west is alien to us.
Ganesh Devy :-
Ganesh N. Devy (1st August, 1950) is a thinker, cultural Activist and institution builder best Known for the People’s Linguistic survey of India and the Adivasi Academy created by him. He writes in three languages—Marathi, Gujarati and English. His first full length book in English After Amnesia (1992) was hailed immediately upon its publication as a classic in literary theory. Since its publication, he has written and edited close to ninety influential books in areas as diverse as Literary Criticism, Anthropology, Education, Linguistics and Philosophy.
G. N. Devy was educated at Shivaji University, Kolhapur and the University of Leeds, UK. Among his many academic assignments, he held fellowships at Leeds University and Yale University and has been THB Symons Fellow (1991–92) and Jawaharlal Nehru Fellow (1994–96). He was a Professor of English at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda from 1980 to 96. In 1996, he gave up his academic career in order to initiate work with the Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNT) and Adivasis. During this work, he created the Bhasha Research and Publication Centre at Baroda, the Adivasis Academy at Tejgadh, the DNT-Rights Action Group and several other initiatives. Later he initiated the largest-ever survey of languages in history, carried out with the help of nearly 3000 volunteers and published in 50 multilingual volumes.
"When a language dies,
something irreplaceable dies.”
-G.N.Devy
Devy has continued to combine his academic work with his work for marginalised communities and cultures. After creating the Adivasi Academy, Devy worked as Professor of Humanities at the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information Technology (2003-2014), Gandhinagar, Honorary Professor at the Centre for Multidisciplinary Development Research, Dharwad( 2015-18), Obaid Siddiqi Chair Professor at the National Centre for Biological Sciences—TIFR, Bangalore (2022-23) and is currently Professor of Eminence and Director, school of Civilisation at the Somaiya Vidyavihar University, Bombay.
In response to the growing intolerance and murders of several intellectuals in India, he launched the Dakshinayan (Southward) movement of artists, writers, and intellectuals. In order to lead this movement, he moved to Dharwad in 2016. The Dakshinayan movement follows the ideas of Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar.
Translation and Literary history : An Indian view : Ganesh Devy
[This Article is taken from ‘Postcolonial Translation : Theory and Practice
Ed. Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi]
● Detailed Points from the article :-
‘Translation is the wandering existence o a text in a perpetual exile.’
-J.Hills Miller
The statement obviously alludes to the Christian myth of the Fall, exile and wandering. In Western metaphysics translation is an exile, a fall from the origin; and the mythical exile is a metaphoric translation, a post-Babel crisis. Given this metaphysical precondition of Western aesthetics, it is not surprising that literary translations are not accorded the same status as original works. Western literary criticism provides for the guilt of translations for coming into being after the original; the temporal sequentiality is held as a proof of diminution of literary authenticity of translations. The strong sense of individuality given to Western individuals through systematic philosophy and the logic of social history makes them view translation as an intrusion of the other's (sometimes pleasurable). This intrusion is desirable to the extent that it helps define one’s own identity, but not beyond that point. It is of course natural for the monolingual European cultures to be acutely conscious of the act of translation.
‘The philosophy of individualism and the metaphysics of guilt, however, render
European literary historiography incapable of grasping the origins of literary traditions.’
One of the most revolutionary events in the history of English style has been the authorised 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.
During the last two centuries the role of translation in communicating literary movements across linguistic borders have become very important. 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.
Indian English Literature too has gathered its conventions of writing from the Indological activity of translation during the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth century. Many of the Anglo-Irish and Indian English writers have been able to translate 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.
Considering the fact that most literary traditions originate in translation and gain substance through repeated acts of translation, it would be useful for a theory of literary history if a supporting theory of literary translation were available. However, since translations are popularly perceived as unoriginal, not much thought has been devoted to the aesthetics of translation. Most of the primary issues relating to ‘form’ and ‘meaning’ too have not been settled in relation to translation. No critic has taken any well-defined position about the exact placement of translations in literary history. This ontological uncertainty which haunts translations has rendered translation study a haphazard activity which devotes too much energy discussing problems of conveying the original meaning in the altered structure.
Unfortunately for translation, the various developments concerning the interdependence between meaning and structure in the field of linguistics have been based on monolingual data and situations. Even the sophisticated and revolutionary theoretical formulation proposed by structural linguistics is not adequate to unravel the intricacies of translation activity. 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.
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. This view finds further support in formalistic poetics, which considers every act of creation as a completely unique event. It is, however, necessary to acknowledge that synonymy within one language system cannot be conceptually identical with synonymy between two different languages. Historical linguistics has some useful premises in this regard. In order to explain linguistic change, historical Linguistics employs the concept of semantic differentiation as well as that of phonetic glides.
Structural linguistics considers language as a system of signs, arbitrarily developed, that tries to cover the entire range of significance available to the culture of that language. The signs do not mean anything by or in themselves; they acquire significance by virtue of their relation to the entire system to which they belong. If translation is defined as some kind of communication of significance, and if we accept the structuralist principle that communication becomes possible because of the nature of signs and their entire system, it follows that translation is a merger of sign systems. Such a merger is possible because systems of signs are open and vulnerable. 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. If we take a lead from phenomenology and conceptualise a whole community of ‘translating consciousness’ it should be possible to develop a theory of interlingual synonymy as well as a more perceptive literary historiography.
The concept of a ‘translating consciousness’ 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. The use of two or more different languages in translation activity cannot be understood properly through studies of foreign-language acquisition. 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’.
Translation can be seen as an attempt to bring a given language system in its entirety as close as possible to the areas of significance that it shares with another given language or languages. All translations operate within this shared area of significance. Such a notion may help us distinguish synonyms within one language and the shared significance between two related languages.
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. Translation is rather an attempted revitalization of the original in another verbal order and temporal space. Like literary texts that continue to belong to their original periods and styles and also exist through successive chronological periods, translation at once approximates the original and transcends it.
The problems in translation study are very much like those in literary history. They are the problems of the relationship between origins and sequentially. 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.’
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. The true test is the writer’s capacity to transform, to translate the original. And in that sense Indian Literary traditions are essentially traditions of Translation.
References :-
Devy, Ganesh. “Translation and Literary History: An Indian View.” https://udrc.lkouniv.ac.in/Content/DepartmentContent/SM_c30be09c-d6c7-4cd2-a95c-a81119f654eb_6.pdf. Accessed 25 April 2024.
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