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 include 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 abstracts, key points/arguments, and concluding remarks on all two articles of Unit 4 of the 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
Shifting Centers and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of Modernist Poetic Discourse in Indian Poetry.
E.V. Ramakrishnan
This chapter 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 translations of modern Western poets were used to breach the hegemony of prevailing literary sensibilities and poetic modes. Translations during the early phase of modernism in major Indian languages appeared in little magazines that played a critical role in opening up the poetic discourse. Apart from providing alternative models of thinking and imagining the world, these translations also legitimized experimental writing styles that became a defining feature of modernist Indian poetry. Translation enacted a critical act of evaluation, a creative act of intervention, and a performative act of legitimation, in evolving a new poetic style during the modernist phase of Indian poetry. Modernist writers were responding to the internal dynamics of their own traditions by selectively assimilating an alien poetic that could be regressive or subversive depending on the context and the content.
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, Western models of education, assimilation of rationalist temper, the resurgence of nationalist spirit and the emergence of social, political, legal, juridical and educational institutions that constituted a normative subjectivity embodied with cosmopolitan and individualist world views. The modernist revolt in India was a response to the disruptions brought about by colonial modernity. As Dilip Chitre observes, 'what took nearly a century and a half to happen in England, happened within a hurried half century' in Indian literature. Modernist sensibility, as it appeared in Indian languages, was essentially oppositional in content. It countered the prevailing ideology of nationalism. Experimental writings of the modernist period range from the anarchist/avant-garde to the formalist/conventional.
While the modernism that emerged in Indian literature shared many of these defining features, it's political affiliations and ideological orientations were markedly different. Due to its postcolonial location, Indian modernism did not share the imperial or metropolitan aspirations of its European counterpart. The emerging problem will have to contend with issues of ideological differences between Western modernism and Indian one, the different trajectories they traversed as a result of the difference in socio-political terrains, and the dynamics of the relations between the past and the present in the subcontinent.
In the context of Bengali, as Amiya Dev has observed, 'It was not because they imbibed modernism that the adhunik [modernist] Bengali writers turned away from Rabindranath. The presence of a father figure, like that of Tagore in Bengali, is a fact that is not relevant to the development of Kannada or Malayalam modernism.
Translation enables us to delineate the complex artistic and ideological undercurrents that shaped the course of modernism in Indian literature. The translation is central to the modernist poetic as it unfolded in these literary traditions. Each of these three authors was bilingual and wrote essays in English as well as their own languages, outlining their new poetry, thus preparing the reader for new poetic modes. Their profound understanding of Western philosophy and artistic/literary traditions equipped these three writers with the critical capacity to see the significance and limitations of the West. All of them wrote critical studies validating the emergence of new poetry.
Sudhindranath Dutta believes that 'only the poetic mind, whatever its norm, can intuit associations where reason faces a void. Dutta was a formalist committed to a hermetic aesthetic. He constantly invokes the progressive role of the writer in society and underlines the role played by the masses in the creation of a literary tradition. the complex contradictions that beset Indian modernists: their pursuit of cosmopolitan and universal values could not be at the cost of a complete disjunction from tradition. As a modernist poem, "The Camel-Bird' moves beyond the personal by embodying the condition of inertia that a colonized community is condemned to.
B. S. Mardhekar transformed Marathi poetry and its direction and dynamics in terms of its vision, form, and content. Mardhekar intervened in Marathi literary tradition as an insider who had mastered the insights given by an alien tradition. He had to invent a language to articulate this fragmentation. The existential angst, psychological disorientation, and political disillusionment he experienced in the urban turbulence of Bombay may have superficial parallels with what the metropolitan modernists underwent in the West, but Mardhekar's case was more complex. In Mardhekar, both irony and self-reflexivity are ways of constituting a new reader by freeing him or her from his or her habits of viewing the world. 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. The human and the mechanical/artificial intermingle in the subsequent lines suggesting a loss of the human in the urban landscape.
Ayyappa Paniker also began as a Romantic but transformed himself into a modernist with a long poetic sequence titled Kurukshetram published in 1960. Paniker argued that a writer has to integrate his or her personal and public selves into an emotional apprehension of the totality of relative truths about the world bound by time and space. In a seminal essay on modern Malayalam poetry, he argued that the ideology of the poet is embodied in the syntactic structure of the poem. The Romantic poets had made a shift from Sanskritic traditions to folk meters, which was a movement towards open forms. The experimental poetry of the modernists, on the other hand, opened up poetic forms further, by using imagist, a suggestive free verse that affirmed that each poem has its authentic form which cannot be approximated to a meter that functions independently of content. The image of the apocalypse, which animates the poem from the beginning, seems to be held at bay at the end through this desire to redeem oneself through imagination.
It is important to understand the indigenous roots/routes of modernity and modernism in all three writers discussed above. they had access to the intellectual resources of alternative traditions of modernity that were bred in the native context. They translate' modernity/ modernism through the optics of postcolonial 'modernity'. The act of translation answers something deep within their ambivalent existence, as it embodies their complex relationship with a fragmented society. 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 transition 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. Translation enabled the displaced self of modernity to locate itself in a language that was intimately private and, also, outspokenly public. The idiom of their expression afforded the possibility of self-knowledge through epiphanies that brought 'momentary stay against confusion' 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.
Video recording of this article's presentation, presented by my classmates Khushbu Makwana and Nehal Gohil.
Presentation of the article by Khushbu Makwana and Nehal Gohil.
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.
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