Assignment :- Comparative and translation studies

 Q-1 Write your comments on G N Devy’s essay ‘Translation Theory from an Indian Perspective’.

Ans:-

Introduction:-

‘Translation is the wandering existence of a text in a perpetual exile,’ says J. Hillis 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."Western literary criticism provides for the guilt of translations for coming into being after the original; the temporal sequentiality is held as proof of diminution of literary authenticity of translations. 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 capable of grasping the origins of literary traditions.

‘Translation Theory from an Indian Perspective’:-

One of the most revolutionary events in the history of the English style has been the authorized 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. During the last two centuries, the role of translation in communicating literary movements across linguistic borders has 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.

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’ 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.

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

Historical linguistics has some useful premises in this regard. In order to explain the linguistic change, historical linguistics employs the concept of semantic differentiation as well as that of phonetic glides. While the linguistic changes within a single language occur more predominantly due to semantic differentiation, they also show marked phonetic glides. However, the degree of such glides is more pronounced when a new language comes into existence. In other words, whereas linguistic changes within a single language are predominantly of a semantic nature, the linguistic differences between two closely related languages are predominantly phonetic Technically speaking, then, if synonymy within one language is a near impossibility, it is not so when we consider two related languages together.

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. This theory naturally looks askance at a translation which is an attempt to rescue/ abstract significance from one system of signs and towed it with another such system. But language is an open system. It keeps admitting new signs as well as new significance in its fold. It is also open in the socio-linguistic sense that it allows an individual speaker or writer to use as much of it as he can or likes to do.

In most Third World countries, where a dominating colonial language has acquired a privileged place, such communities do exist. In India, several languages are simultaneously used by language communities as if these languages formed a continuous spectrum of signs and significance. The use of two or more different languages in translation activity cannot be understood properly through studies of foreign-language acquisition. Such theories work around the premise that there inevitably is a chronological gap and an order or a priority of scale in language-learning situations.

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’

Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss. During the nineteenth century, Europe had distributed various fields of humanistic knowledge into a threefold hierarchy: comparative studies for Europe, Orientalism for the Orient, and anthropology for the rest of the world. In its various phases of development, modern Western linguistics has connections with all these. After the ‘discovery of Sanskrit by Sir William Jones, historical linguistics in Europe depended heavily on Orientalism. For a long time, afterward, linguistics followed the path of comparative philology.

Saussure and Lévi-Strauss, linguistics started treating language with an anthropological curiosity. When linguistics branched off to its monolingual structuralist path, comparative literature still persisted in its faith in the translatability of literary texts. 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. 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 language. All translations operate within this shared area of significance.

The problems in translation study are, therefore, very much like those in literary history. They are the problems of the relationship between origins and sequentiality. 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’.

We began our discussion by alluding to the Christian metaphysics that conditions the reception of translation in the Western world.  

Translation and Indian Literature: Some Reflections 

Moments of significant change in the history and civilization of any people can be seen to be characterized by increased activity in the field of translation. The European Renaissance was made possible through the massive translation by Arab Muslims from the work of the Hellenic tradition. In the case of India, though there is no consensus about the originary moment of the Indian Renaissance – whether there was an Indian Renaissance at all in the European sense, and if there was one, whether it happened simultaneously in different languages and literature of India or at different times, there is no disagreement about the fact that there was a kind of general awakening throughout India in the nineteenth century and that was made possible through the extensive translation of European and mainly English works in different languages, not only of literature but also of social sciences, philosophy, ethics, and morality, etc. Translation has a special meaning for the people of north-east India because, in some literature of the northeast, the original moment of literature is the moment of translation too. For example, in the case of Mizo, it did not have a script before the European missionaries devised a script to translate evangelical literature into Mizo. Raymond Schwab (1984) in his book, The Oriental Renaissance, has shown how a new kind of awareness took place and curiosity about the Orient aroused in the West through the translation of Persian texts from Sadi, Rumi, Omar Khayyam, and others on the one hand, and Vedic and Sanskrit texts from India on the other.

Translation into English sometimes acts as an instrument of empowerment of the marginalized sections of society – Dalits,  tribals, women -- giving writers who deal with the struggle of the 

disenfranchised in society greater visibility and creating solidarities across the multi-lingual and multi-cultural Indian society. Foremost among such writers in India is, of course, Mahasweta Devi, who has been well-served by her translators in English. But there are others who have been writing with consistency and commitment for several decades but were not known outside their linguistic borders because of the paucity of translations.

conclusion:-

Indian metaphysics believes in an unhindered migration of the soul from one body to another. Repeated birth is the very substance of all animate creations. When the soul passes from one body to another, it does not lose any of its essential significance. Indian philosophies of the relationship between form and essence, structure and significance are guided by this metaphysics. The soul, or significance, is not subject to the laws of temporality; and therefore significance, even literary significance, is ahistorical in Indian view. Elements of plot, stories, characters, can be used again and again by new generations of writers because Indian literary theory does not lay undue emphasis on originality. If originality were made a criterion of literary excellence, a majority of Indian classics would fail the test. The true test is the writer’s capacity to transform, to translate, to restate, to revitalize the original. And in that sense, Indian literary traditions are essentially traditions of translation.

Work cited:-

Asaduddin, M. "Translation And Indian Literature: Translation And Indian Literature: Some Reflections". Ntm.Org.In, https://www.ntm.org.in/download/ttvol/volume3/ARTICLES/01%20-%20Translation%20and%20Indian%20Literature%20-%20%20Some%20Reflections%20-%20M.%20Asaduddin.pdf. Accessed 18 Mar 2022.

Catford, J. C. A Linguistic Theory of Translation: An Essay in Applied Linguistics. Oxford University Press, 1965.

Devy, Ganesh . "“Translation and literary history: An Indian view”." Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice 42.2 (2002): 395-406. web. 18 March 2022.