LANGUAGE IN INDIA

PRACTICING LITERARY TRANSLATION - ROUND 8
A SYMPOSIUM BY MAIL
Moderator: V. V. B. Rama Rao, Ph.D

One’s relationship to the original on one hand and to the language into which one translates on the other is in fact asymmetrical. Even reversed in mirror image, the left hand is not the opposite of the right hand: they are not identical. Thus, I attempt to make something in English that is no reflection of the original: nor is it a facsimile or copy. Roman copies of Greek statues are notoriously lifeless. Jascha Kessler

RELATIONSHIP TO THE ORIGINAL

I start this round with an epigraph from Kessler. Now, I quote, again, from Kessler’s article in a periodical. Kessler is an American poet who has been translating poetry and fiction since 1972, working with Hungarian, Persian, Bulgarian and Finnish. About the nature of the translator’s relationship to the original, he stated that the only relationship one can have is a disinterested fidelity to the poem or the story that opens itself to one in an English wording. He concludes his essay with this insightful observation:

(But) if translation entails the enlargement of some aspects of our language, its vulgarization, distortion, even its transformation on occasion a strange and bizarre sounds, that is a risk one takes in the interest of ever larger accommodations, much as musicians have taken on other musics throughout history. English is still an expansive language, its possibilities various, open in so many ways that it is a wonderful instrument for translation. And translation is in fact the way we communicate with the hosts of exotics who make up the rest of the world, those foreigners who are both living and the historic dead. It is a way not merely of coming to know them intimately but of bringing everyone home – home to the future, towards which all of us have always headed. Translating Exotic Poetry -Art and Poetry Today, Jan 2006, New Delhi.

IS LITERARY TRANSLATION A FORMIDABLE TASK AS IT IS MADE OUT TO BE?

Kessler’s practice is slightly different from that of the people I have known and that of the practitioners who have enriched this first-ever kind of a thing I braved to call A Symposium by Mail. He has been dealing in, as he rightly stated in the caption of his essay, "exotic’ languages. Our practitioners have been dealing with Indian languages, now come to fashionably being referred to bhashas. But, for native speakers of English a translation from an exotic language (for them) like Telugu, requires a special skill to infuse life into ‘the Roman copies of a Greek statue’. The wonderful fact is that our practitioners too are succeeding as my friend Kessler has always been. Now, I reiterate with a good deal of confidence what I have been saying all along: literary translation is not as formidable as it is made out to be by some applied linguisticians who are not themselves practitioners of this generally slighted art.

PERFORMING A UNIQUE FUNCTION

Down the ages literary translation has been performing a unique function in the world of books comparable to archaeological surveys and protection of monuments, historical, spiritual and cultural. Scriptures, national epics and hoary literary artifacts are great treasures not just in the respective countries they were produced but for the entire civilized world. Indian scriptures are not scriptures for Indians alone once they went beyond the boundaries of states and continents to become the treasures of human civilization and thinking.

WHAT DO WE AGREE UPON?

Literary translations of these texts are necessitated by the emergence of new readerships and the need to re-convey the texts to contemporary readership placed in changing milieus. Situations may demand rephrasing to bring the texts nearer to contemporary reality. New discoveries of critics/commentators may warrant a revision of existing, older translations. The limitations faced by earlier translators may have disappeared in the new situation of authorship and writing. Taboos may have disappeared or may have come in. To all the distinguished participants I stand beholden for their generous support and participation. We are generally agreed on some points:

1. Literary translation is necessary and would be appreciated by those, though few, who have no access to the original language of an artifact.
2. Enthusiasm, sincerity and a reasonably good knowledge of any two languages would be he minimum requisite to embark on this practice.
3. No translation could be perfect to the extent of displacing the original.
4. No translation could be permanent and the best would recede when a better than ‘best’ appears.
5. Evaluating translated texts needs a good deal of sahridya on the part of the evaluator, more so if he is not himself a practitioner.

PRACTITIONERS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES

In this ROUND 8 SYMPOSIUM, leading practitioners of literary translation in India present some of their insights.

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V. V. B. Rama Rao
Moderator

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