This blog is a response to a task assigned by Dr. Dilip Barad Sir. The syllabus of the Department of English, MKBU includes paper no.- 208 Comparative Literature and Translation studies which includes around 9 articles. We (students) are assigned a task of classroom presentation of assigned articles in a pair. In this blog we are supposed to write abstract, key points / arguments and concluding remarks on all two articles of Unit 3 of paper Comparative Literatures and Translation Studies. It also includes the recording of class presentations presented by respective students. Blogger and her partner have made a presentation on the third article, presentation and a video of a particular article is embedded (as per the task).
ARTICLE 2
On Translating a Tamil Poem
-A.K. Ramanujan
(From collected essays of A.K Ramanujan ed. Vijay Dharwadkar)
The article is divided into three parts and its trajectory moves from the history of Tamil Literature to its attempts of translation, problems of translation and also gives solutions for it.
Part I
Ramanujan begins his article with a question: How does one translate a poem from another time, another culture, another language? Over two thousand Tamil poems of different lengths, by over four hundred poets, arranged in nine anthologies, have survived through politics, wars, poverty, nature and all dangers. The subject of this paper is translation, the transport of poems from classical Tamil to modem English.
The chief difficulty of translation is its impossibility. Frost once even identified poetry as that which is lost in translation. Once we accept that as a premise of this art, we can proceed to practice it, or learn.
Ramanujan questions: How shall we divide up and translate this poem? What are the units of Translation?
He begins with sound. The sound system of Tamil is very different from English.
E.g.: Old Tamil has 6 nasal Consonants while English has 3.
Tamils have long and short vowels while English has diphthongs and glides. Etc
It is impossible to translate the phonology of one language into another even if it is a culturally related language. If we try and even partially succeed in mimicking the sounds we may lose everything else, the syntax, meanings, and the poem itself.
Further he talks about metre, as metre is a second-order organization of the sound system of a language. Tamil metre depends on the presence of long vowels and double consonants, and on closed and open syllables defined by such vowels and consonants.
For instance, in The first word of the above poem, annay, the first syllable is heavy because it is closed (an-), the second is heavy because it has a long vowel (-nay). English has a long tradition of end-rhymes-but Tamil has a long tradition of second syllable consonant-rhymes.
Looking at the Grammar briefly, Tamil has no copula verbs for equational sentences in the present tense, as in English, e.g., 'Tom is a teacher'; no degrees of adjectives as in English, e.g., 'sweet, sweeter, sweetest’;
no articles like 'a, an, the': and So on.
Tamil expresses the semantic equivalents of these grammatical devices by various other means. The lies and ambiguities of one language are not those of another.
No translation can be 'literal,' or 'word for word'. That is where the impossibility lies. The only possible translation is a 'free' one.
Remarkably, Tamil syntax is mostly left- branching. English syntax is, by and large, rightward. Even a date like 'the 19th of June, 1988,' when translated into Tamil, would look like '1988, June, 19.' The Tamil sentence is the mirror image of the English one and will also be true for English Languages. Postpositions instead of prepositions, adjectival clauses before nominal phrases, verbs at the end rather than in the middle of sentences.
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. If Poetry is made out of, among other things, 'the best words in the best order', and the best orders of the two languages are the mirror images of each other, what is a translator to do?
The most obvious parts of language cited frequently for their utter untranslatability are the lexicon and the semantics of words. For lexicon are culture-specific. Terms for fauna, flora, caste distinctions, kinship systems, body parts, even the words that denote numbers, are culturally Loaded. 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 other each relative are culturally sensitive and therefore part of the expressive repertoire of poets and novelists.
Add to this the entire poetic tradition, its rhetoric. the ordering of different[ genres with different Functions in the culture, which by its system of differences, distinguishes this particular poem.
The classical Tamil poetic tradition uses an entire taxonomy. A classification of reality, The five landscapes of the Tamil area, characterized by hills. seashores, agricultural areas, wastelands, and pastoral fields; each with its forms of life, both natural and cultural. trees, animals, tribes, customs. arts and instruments- all these become part of the symbolic code for the poetry. Every landscape, with all its contents, is associated with a mood or phase of love or war. The landscapes provide the signifiers. The five real landscapes of the Tamil country become, through this system, the interior landscapes of Tamil poetry. The five landscapes with all their contents signifying moods, and the themes and motifs of love and war.
Thus a language within a language becomes the second language of Tamil poetry. When one translates, one is translating not only Tamil, its phonology, grammar and semantics, but this entire intertextual web, this intricate yet lucid second language of landscapes which holds together natural forms with cultural ones in a code, a grammar, a rhetoric, and a poetics.
Part II
Ramanujan takes a closer look at the original of Kapilar's poem, Ainkurunuru 203, 'What She Said', and his translation, quoted earlier in this essay. The word annay (in spoken Tamil, ammo), literally 'mother', is a familiar term of address for any woman, here a 'girlfriend'. So he 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.
Note the long, crucial, left-branching phrase in Tamil: '. . . hisland's / [in- leaf-holes low /animals- having- drunk- / and]- leftover, muddied water’(in a piece-by-piece translation). In his English, it becomes 'the leftover water in his land, low in the water holes / covered with leaves and muddied by animals.' His phrase order in English tries to preserve the order and syntax of : themes, not of single words: (I) his land's waler, followed by (2) leaf– covered waterholes, and (3) muddied by animals.
The poem is a kurinci piece, about the lovers' first union, set in the hillside landscape. My title ('What she said to her girl friend, when she returned from the hills') summarizes the whole context (speaker, listener, occasion) from the old colophon that accompanies the poem. The progression is lost if we do not preserve the order of themes so naturally carried by the left-branching syntax of Tamil. More could be said about it from the point of view of the old commentaries.
The love poems get parodied, subverted and played with in comic poems about poems. In a few Centuries, both the love poems and the war poems provide models and motives for religious poems. God like Krsna the are both lovers and Warriors.
Thus any single poem is part of a set, a family of sets, a landscape, a genre. The intertextuality is concentric on a pattern of membership as well as neighborhoods of likenesses and unlikenesses. Somehow a translator has to translate each poem in ways that suggest these interest, dialogue and network.
Part III
If attempting a translation means attempting an impossibly intricate task, foredoomed to failure. what makes it possible at all'? At least four things-
1.Universals-
If there were no Universals in which languages participate and of which all particular languages were selections and combinations, no language learning, translation, comparative studies or cross-cultural understanding of even the most meager kind would be possible. if such universals did not exist we would have had to invent them
2.Interiorised contexts-
Poems interiorize the entire culture. Indeed we know the culture of the ancient Tamils only through a careful study of these poems. Later colophons and commentaries explore and explicate this knowledge carried by the poems setting them in context using them to make lexicons and charming the fauna and flora of landscape .
3. Systematicity-
Systematicity of such bodies of poetry, the way figures, genres, personae etc., intermesh in a master-code, is a great help in entering this intricate yet world of words. Even if one chooses not to translate all the poems, one chooses poems that cluster together, that illuminate one another so that allusions, contrasts and collective designs are suggested, of their world, re-presenting it. Here intertextuality is not the problem, but the solution .
4. Structural mimicry-
In translating poems 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. The poetry and the significance reside in these figures and structures as much as in untranslatable verbal textures. 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 transpositions, re-enactments, interpretations. 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. Textures are harder to translate than structures, linear order more difficult than syntax, lines more difficult than larger patterns. Poetry is made at all these levels- and so is translation.
The translation must not only represent, but re-present, the original. loyalty. A translator is an 'artist on oath'. Sometimes one may succeed only in re-presenting a poem, not in closely representing it.
With the anecdote of Chinese emperor, Ramanujan say even if the representation in another language is not close enough, but still succeeds in 'carrying' the poem in some sense, we will have two poems instead of one.
Video recording of this article's presentation, presented by my classmates Himanshi Parmar and Nirav Amreliya
Presentation of the article by Himanshi Parmar and Nirav Amreliya
It is common to find it challenging to read original articles and summarize them. As a result, I have simplified this article through my understanding and with the help of ChatGPT. Simplifying articles is helpful in achieving a better and clearer understanding of the concept, which will make reading the original article easier. The main aim is to help students or readers understand the concept so that they can read the original article with ease. CLICK HERE FOR A LAYMANISED ARTICLE.
I hope this blog is useful.
[words- 1600]
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