On Translating a Tamil Poem by A. K. Ramanujan

Hello Monks...
I am Riddhi Bhatt. Today I want to talk about "On Translating a Tamil Poem"  by A. K. Ramanujan . This article is from 'Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan, ed Vinay Dharwadkar'.  This task is assigned by Prof. Dr.Dilip Barad sir, Head of the English Department of Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavsinhji Bhavnagar University (MKBU). As a part of the syllabus, students of the English Department are learning the paper called Comparative Literature & Translation Studies. So, let’s start friends. But before we start I want to give short information about what kind of things we see here…

📌Abstract : 

'How does one translate a poem from another time, another culture,another language? Ramanujan translated poems from Tamil were written two thousand years ago in a comer of south India, in a Dravidian language relatively untouched by the other classical language of India, Sanskrit. The subject of this paper is not the fascinating external history of this literature, but translation, the transport of poems from classical Tamil to modem English; the hazards, the damages in transit, the secret paths, and the lucky by passes.The chief difficulty of translation is its impossibility. Frost once even identified poetry as that which is lost in translation. We know now that no translation can be 'literal,' or 'word for word'. That is where the impossibility lies. The only possible translation is a 'free' one.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. In this article Ramanujan took various examples of Tamil poems that he translated into English and he described difficulties that he faced during translation.

📌Comparison of Tamil and English Language :

While translating Tamil poem Ainkurunuru 203, He begin with the sounds. He find that the sound system of Tamil is very different from English. For instance, Old Tamil has six nasal consonants: a labial, a dental, an alveolar, a retroflex, a palatal and a velar-m, n, n, ñ, n, n-three of which are not distinctive in English. How shall we translate a six-way system into a three-way English system (m, n, n)? Tamil has long and short vowels, but English (or most English dialects) have diphthongs and glides. Tamil has no initial consonant clusters, but English abounds in them: 'school, scratch, splash, strike', etc. English words may end in stops, as in 'cut, cup, tuck,' etc.; Tamil words do not.

So it is impossible to translate the phonology of one language into that of another even in a related, culturally neighbouring language.Tamil metre depends on the presence of long vowels and double consonants,can map one system on to another, but never reproduce it. English has a long tradition of end-rhymes-but Tamil has a long tradition of second syllable consonant-rhymes. End-rhymes in Tamil are a modern innovation, just as second syllable rhymes in Engljsh would be considered quite experimental. The 'tradition of one poetry would be the innovation of another. The Tamil sentence is the mirror image of the English one: what is A B C D E in the one would be (by and large) E D C B A in Tamil. Tamil syntax is mostly left-branching. English syntax is.

📌Key Arguments :

Evans-Pritchard, the anthropologist, used to say: If you translate all the European arguments for atheism into Azande, they would come out as arguments for God in Azande. Such observations certainly disabuseus of the commonly-held notion of 'literal' translation. Woollcott suggests that English does not have left- branching possibilities, but they are a bit abnormal. Hopkins and Dylan Thomas used those possibilities stunningly, as we see in Thomas's 'A Refusal to Moum the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London; both were Welshmen, and Welsh is a left-branching language.

Hopkins's and Thomas's poetry the leftward syntax is employed for special poetic effects-it alternates with other, more 'normal', types of English sentences. In Tamil poetry the leftward syntax is not eccentric, literary or offbeat. but part of everyday 'natural' speech. One could not use Dylanese to translate Tamil, even though many of the above phrases from Thomas can be translated comfortably with the same word order in Tamil.

📌Analysis :

The collocations and paradigms make for metonymies and metaphors, multiple contextual meanings clusters special to each language, quile untranslatable into another language like Tamil. 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 each relative are ali culturally sensitive and therefore part of the expressive repertoire of poets and novelists. Ramanujan took two different poems about love (What She Said) and war ( A Young Warrior ) and made point that, when we move from one to the other we are struck by the associations across them forming a web not only of the akam and puram genres. But also of the five landscape.; with all their contents signifying moods. And the themes and motifs 0f love and war.

Love and war become metaphors for one another. In the poem “A Leaf In Love And War” we see entwines the two themes of love and war - in an ironic juxtaposition. A wreath of nocci is worn by warrior in war poems a nocci leafskirt is given by a lover to his woman in love poem. Example God Krishna: both lovers and warriors. Ramanujan take a closer look at the original of Kapilar’s poem Ainkurunuru 203. And he point out that The word annay (in spoken Tamil, ammo), literally 'mother', is a familiar term of address for any woman, here a 'girl friend'. So I 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.

Four things that makes translation possible...

• Structural Mimicry
• Systematicity 
• Interiorized contexts 
• Universals

1) Universals: 

It such universals did not exist, as Voltaire said of God, we would have had to invent them. Universals of structure in both signifiers and signifieds are necessary fictions. The indispensable as ifs of our fallible enterprise. 

2) Interiorised Contexts: 

One is translating also this kind of intertextual web, the meaning- making web of colophons and commentaries that surround and contextualise the poem. 

3) Systematicity: 

One translates not single poems but bodies of poetry that create and contain their original world. 

4) Structural mimicry: 

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. 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.

📌Problems in translation :

To translate is to 'metaphor', to 'carry across'. Translations are trans-positions, re- enactments, interpretations. Some elements of the original cannot be transposed at all. 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.

📌Conclusion : 

The translation must not only represent,, but re- present, the original. One walks a tightrope between the To-language and the From-language, in a double loyalty. A translator is an 'artist on oath'. Sometimes one may succeed only in re-presenting a poem, not in closely representing it. At such times one draws consolation from parables like the following.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. 

📌Work Cited :

• Ramanujan, A K. “Collected Essays Of A.K. Ramanujan, Ed Vinay Dharwadkar.” On Translating a Tamil Poem, 1999.

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