Translation and Literary History: An Indian View by Ganesh Devy

Hello Monks...
I am Riddhi Bhatt. Today I want to talk about "Translation and Literary History: An  Indian View" by Ganesh Devy. This article is from 'Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice (Eds.)  Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi'. 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 is about the  role of translation in communicating literary movements across linguistic borders. According to J. Hillis Miller ‘Translation is the wandering existence of a text in a perpetual exile.’Chaucer, Dryden and the Pope used the tool of translation to recover a sense of order. The tradition of Anglo-Irish literature branched out of translating Irish works into English.No critic has taken a well-defined position on the place of translations in literary history. Origins of literary movements and literary traditions inhabit various acts of translation.Translations are popularly perceived as unoriginal, not much thought has been devoted to the aesthetics of translation. 

📌Key Arguments :

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 (Jakobson, 1959, pp. 232– 9).

In Chomsky’s linguistics the concept of semantic universals plays an important role. However, his level of abstraction marks the farthest limits to which the monolingual Saussurean linguistic materialism can be stretched. In actual practice, even in Europe, the translating consciousness treats the SL and TL as parts of a larger and continuous spectrum of various intersecting systems of verbal signs.

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’ (Catford, 1965, p. vii).

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

After the ‘discovery’ of Sanskrit by Sir William Jones, historical linguistics in Europe depended heavily on Orientalism and after Saussure and Lévi-Strauss, linguistics started treating language with an anthropological curiosity.

📌Analysis :

The Problems in Translation Study

The translation is not a transposition of significance or signs. After the act of translation is over, the original work still remains in its original position. Translation is rather an attempted revitalization of the original in another verbal order and temporal space. Like literary texts that continue to belong to their original periods and styles and also exist through successive chronological periods, translation at once approximates the original and transcends it. Problems of the relationship between origins and sequentiality the very foundation of modern Indian literature was laid through acts of translation, whether by Jayadeva, Hemcandra, Michael Madhusudan Dutta, H.N. Apte or Bankim Chandra Chatterjee.

📌Conclusion :

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. 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 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 :

• Devy, G. N. “Literary History and Translation: An Indian View.” Traduction Et Post-Colonialisme En Inde — Translation and Postcolonialism: India, vol. 42, no. 2, 2002, pp. 395–406., https://doi.org/10.7202/002560ar . 

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