Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of Modernist Poetics Discourse in Indian poetry by E.V.Ramkrishinan

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I am Riddhi Bhatt. Today I want to talk about "Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of Modernist Poetics Discourse in Indian poetry" by E.V.Ramkrishinan This article is from 'Indigenous Imaginaries: Literature, Region, Modernity'.   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 :

This article 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 translation of modern Western poets were used to breach the hegemony of prevailing literary sensibilities and poetics modes. Many Indian poets such as Buddhadeb Bose, Agyeya,Gopalakrishna Adiga, Dilip Chitre and Ayyappa Paniker were also translators.Translation from Africa and Latin America poetry played a significant role in this phase of modernism. Neruda and Parra were widely translated into India languages during this phase.

In this context, translation enacted a critical act of evaluation, a creative act of intervention, and performative act of legitimation,in evolving a new poetic during the modernist phase of Indian poetry. The term ‘translation ‘ to suggest a range of cultural practices, from critical commentary to creation of intertextual text. Andre Lefevere’s concept of translation as reflections/ rewriting , the chapter argues that ‘rewritings’ and ‘reflections’ found in the ‘less obvious form of criticism…,commentary, historiography , teaching, the collection of works in anthologies, the production of playshare also instance of translation. An essay on T.S. Eliot in Bengali by Sudhindranayh Dutt, or scathing critique in Malayalam on the poetic practices of Vallathol Narayana Menon by Ayyappa Paniker, can also described as ‘ translational’ writing as they have elements of translation embedded in them. 

📌Key Points :

• Modernity and Modernism
• The project of Modernism in India
• Literary/ artistic movement 
• Postcolonial contex
• The reception of Western modernist discourses in India
• Translation 
• Indigenous roots/ routes ofmodernity and modernism
• Western modernity
• The metaphor of the mice
• The surreal image
  

📌Key Arguments :

It has been argued that the Idea of a ‘Self-reflection or Self-validating’ literary text, which is central to modernist poetic, is rooted in an ideology of the aesthetic that was complicated with colonialism. D.R.Nagaraj has pointed out that as nationalism became the ideology of the nation state. How are we to evaluate the modernisms that emerged in the postcolonial phase in India? Critics such as Simon Gikandi,Susan Friedman, Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, and Aparna Dharwadker have argued that Non-Western modernism are not mere derivate versions of European hegemonic practice.In the context of Bengali, as Amiya Dev has observed, ‘It was not

because they imbibed modernism that the adbunik Bengali writers turned away from Rabindranath Tagore.

In ‘The Necessity of poetry’, Dutta argues that the persistence of poetry through the ages in all societies ,particularly among the unsophisticated and the primitive, attest to its necessity. 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.

📌Analysis :

The relation between ‘Modernity’ and ‘Modernism’ in Indian context , the purpose of discussion it may be broadly stated that Modernity designates an epochal period of wide-ranging transformation brought about by the advent of colonialism, capitalist economy, industrial mode of production. Colonial Modernity informed literary and cultural movements, beginning from the reformist movement of the nineteenth century to the modernist movement of the mid-twentieth century.The term ‘Modernism’ implies a literary/artistic movement that was characterized by experimentation, conscious rejection of the nationalist/ Romantic as well as popular. The pistcolonial context adds a complex political dimension to the aesthetic of Indian Modernism. 

The reception of Western modernist discourses in India was mediated by  the dynamics of socio-political upheavals related to the formation of the nation state and the realignment of power structures in society. Translation enables us to delineate the complex artistic and ideological undercurrents that shaped the course of modernism in Indian literature. The three representative modernist authors from three separate Indian literary traditions-Sudhindranath Dutta(1901-60) from Bengali, ,B.S.Mardhekar(1909-56) from marathi,and Ayyappa Paniker(1936-2004) from Malayalam. These three authors was bilingual and wrote essay in English as well as their own languages. Bengali emerged in 1930s an continued into the 40s and 50s, Marathi from 1950s to the 60s. Dutta's discussion of Aristotle, Plato, Voltaire, Byron, Mallarmé and Yeats prove his mastery over Western thought.

As a modernist poem, "The Camel-Bird' moves beyond the personal by embodying the condition of inertia that a colonised community is condemned to.B. S. Mardhekar transformed Marathi poetry and its dire 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 traditionIn 'Mice in the Wet Barrel Died', which became the iconic modernist poem of Marathi. The metaphor of the mice is meant to evoke the morbid and the malevolent in modern life. When this poem was originally published in Marathi, in Abhiruchi, it was met with several disapproving comments, leading to long discussions and even parodies of the poem in Marathi.

Ayyappa Paniker was a poet, critic and translator, who, apart from introducing world poetry to Malayalam readers. The title, 'Kurukshetram', signifies the place where the epic battle that forms the central theme of the Mahabharata took place. The poem progresses through broken images from contemporary life, but there are also redemptive memories of forgotten harmonies that recur through the metaphor of the dream. The evocative rhythms of the poem provoke a profound disquiet that cannot be particularised. The self is seen as a site of struggle and conflict, but the modern men and women are denied the tragic dignity of epic heroes. It is important to understand the indigenous roots/routes of modernity and modernism in all the three writers discussed above. They partake of the logic of a postcolonial society which had already developed internal critiques of Western modernity.

📌Conclusion :

Thus, language became, for the modernists, the only reality that they could relate to. Their moment of recognition. enabled by the discourses of 'Western' modernism, was postcolonial in its essence. 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.

📌Work Cited :

• Ramkrishinan, E V. “ Indigenous Imaginaries: Literature, Region, Modernity.” Shifting Centres And Emerging Margins: Translation And the Shaping Of Modernist Poetics Discourse In Indian Poetry , 2017.

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