Name : Anjali M. Rathod
Enrollment no. : 4069206420220024
Roll no. : 02
Batch : M.A. Sem. 4 (2022-24)
Paper no. : 208 - Comparative Literature & Translation Studies
Email Address: rathodanjali20022002ui@gmail.com
Submitted to : Smt. S.B. Gardi, Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University, Bhavnagar - 364002
Assignment Topic :
On Translating a Tamil Poem By A.K. Ramanujan
From collected essays of A.K Ramanujan ed. Vijay Dharwadkar
The article is divided into three parts and its trajectory moves from the history of Tamil Literature to its attempts of translation, problems of translation and also gives solutions for it.
Part 1 :
Translating poetry from one language and culture to another is an immense challenge. Ramanujan begins by questioning how one can translate the over Two thousand surviving classical Tamil poems by over four hundred poets from nine anthologies into modern English.
The translation and the transporting of these poems from classical Tamil into modern English. The chief difficulty identified is the impossibility of translation itself. As Frost once stated, poetry is precisely that which gets lost in translation. However, if we accept this premise about the art of translation, we can still proceed to practise and learn from it.
Ramanujan then asks: How shall we delineate and translate a given poem? What are the fundamental units of translation?
He begins by examining sound. The sound systems of Tamil and English are vastly different. For example, old Tamil had 6 nasal consonants while English has only 3. Tamil has distinct long and short vowels, whereas English relies on diphthongs and glides.
It is impossible to translate the phonology - the sound system of one language directly into another, even if the two languages share cultural roots. If we try to even partially mimic the Tamil sounds in English, we may lose everything else: the syntax, meanings, and the essence of the poem itself.
Ramanujan further discusses metre, which is a higherlevel organization derived from a language's sound system. Tamil metre relies on elements like the presence of long vowels, double consonants, and the openness or closedness of syllables defined by those vowels and consonants.
For example, in the first word of the poem being discussed "annay" the first syllable is considered heavy because it is closed "an-", while the second is heavy due to the long vowel "-nay". In contrast, English has a long tradition of end rhymes, whereas Tamil poetry employs a tradition of consonant rhymes on the second syllable.
Turning briefly to grammar, Tamil lacks certain features found in English. It has no copula verbs for equational sentences in the present tense (e.g. "Tom is a teacher" in English). It also lacks degrees of adjectives (e.g. "sweet, sweeter, sweetest") and articles like "a, an, the."
However, Tamil employs various other means to express the semantic equivalents of these grammatical devices that English uses. The lies and ambiguities inherent in one language are simply not the same as those in another language.
No translation can be 'literal,' or 'word for word'. That is where the impossibility lies. The only possible translation is a 'free' one.
Tamil syntax is predominantly left branching, while English syntax is largely right branching. This difference leads to mirror-image sentence structures between the two languages. Even something as simple as a date like "the 19th of June, 1988" would appear in the reversed order "1988, June, 19" when translated into Tamil.
The Tamil sentence structure is effectively a mirror image of the English one, a phenomenon that holds true when comparing Tamil to other English-like languages as well. Tamil employs postpositions instead of prepositions, positions adjectival clauses before noun phrases, and places verbs at the end rather than in the middle of sentences.
When elements that are ordinary in one language need to be translated, they must find their ordinary counterparts in the target language. And where one language expresses something eccentric, the translation must locate equally eccentric equivalents in the other tongue. If poetry arises partly from "the best words in the best order," and the notion of "best order" is a mirror image across these two languages, what is a translator to do?
Frequently cited as utterly untranslatable are a language's lexicon and the semantics of its words. The lexicon is deeply embedded in culture terms for flora, fauna, caste distinctions, kinship relations, body parts, even numbers, are all culturally loaded. Even when two languages share similar systemic elements, like kinship terms for father, mother, brother, mother-in-law, etc., the culturally-specific system of relations and emotions traditionally associated with each relative makes them part of the expressive repertoire unique to the poets and novelists of that culture. Add to this the entire rhetoric of the poetic tradition itself - the ordering of genres serving different cultural functions, which through its system of distinctions defines this particular poem.
The classical Tamil poetic canon employs an entire taxonomy, a classification of reality into five symbolic landscapes of the Tamil area - the hills, seashores, agricultural zones, wastelands, and pastoral fields. Each landscape contains its own forms of life, both natural (trees, animals) and cultural (tribes, customs, arts, instruments). All these elements become part of the symbolic code undergirding Tamil poetry. Every landscape, with its entire contents, is associated with particular moods or phases of love and war. The five actual geographical landscapes of the Tamil country are transformed, through this systemic framework, into the interior metaphysical landscapes of Tamil poetry itself, with all their constituent elements signifying certain moods, themes and motifs related to love and war.
Thus, an entire language within a language emerges as the "second language" of Tamil poetry. To translate this poetry is to translate not just the Tamil language itself - its phonology, grammar and semantics - but this entire intricate yet lucid intertextual web: a "second language" of symbolic landscapes that weaves together the natural and cultural worlds into an ingenious code, a unique grammar, rhetoric and poetics.
Part 2 :
Ramanujan takes a closer look at the original Tamil poem "Ainkurunuru 203" by Kapilar, titled "What She Said", and his own translation of it discussed earlier in the essay. The word "annay" - or "ammo" in spoken Tamil literally means "mother", but is used as a familiar term of address for any woman, in this case a "girlfriend". Ramanujan translated it as "friend" to make clear the poem is addressed to a girlfriend, not a mother as some other Tamil poems are.
He points out the long, crucially left-branching phrase in the original Tamil: "...his land's / [in-leaf-holes low / animals-having-drunk- / and]-leftover, muddied water". In his English translation it becomes: "the leftover water in his land, low in the water holes / covered with leaves and muddied by animals."
His phrasing in English tries to preserve the ordering of themes, not individual words: (1) his land's water, followed by (2) leaf-covered waterholes, and (3) muddied by animals.
The poem belongs to the "kurinci" genre, about lovers' first union set in a hillside landscape. Ramanujan's title "What she said to her girlfriend, when she returned from the hills" summarizes the whole context speaker, listener, occasion from the ancient commentary accompanying the original. Preserving the natural left-branching thematic order of Tamil is important, otherwise the progression is lost. More could be extrapolated from the old commentaries' perspective.
Love poems were often parodied, subverted and played with in comic "poems about poems". Over centuries, both the love poems and war poems provided models and motives for religious poems, where gods like Krishna are portrayed as both lovers and warriors.
Thus, any single poem exists as part of a wider set, family of sets, landscape and genre. The intertextuality is layered concentrically based on patterns of membership as well as neighborhoods of similarities and differences. Somehow a translator must translate each poem in ways that suggest these interests, dialogues and networks.
Part 3 :
Ramanujan highlights four key points about translating poetry across languages:
Universals : If there were no universal elements that languages share and build upon, no language learning, translation, cross-cultural understanding, or comparative studies would be possible at all. Since such universals must exist, we rely on them even if we have to consciously identify and leverage them.
Interiorized Contexts : Poems encapsulate and interiorize the entire culture from which they emerge. Our knowledge of ancient Tamil culture comes only through carefully studying these poems. Later commentaries and notes explicate the cultural knowledge embedded in the poems, using them to construct lexicons and catalogue the flora, fauna and landscapes referenced.
Systematicity : The systematicity of these poetic bodies, the way figures, genres, personae etc. are interwoven into an overarching master code, greatly aids our ability to enter and navigate this intricate world of words. When translating, choosing poems that cluster together and illuminate each other allows suggesting their allusions, contrasts and collective designs that represent their world. Here, intertextuality becomes the solution rather than a problem.
Structural Mimicry : In translating individual poems, the unique structural figures they create out of the given codes of language, rhetoric and poetics become entry points. The poetry and significance reside as much in these figures and structures as the untranslatable textures. So one attempts structural mimicry - translating relations over single items, phrases and sequences over words, rhythms over metrical units, syntactic patterns over morphology.
Translations are transpositions, re-enactments, interpretations. One can often convey the original's rhythm if not its language specific meter; mimic diction levels if not actual word sounds. Textures are harder to translate than structures, linear order trickier than syntax, lines harder than larger patterns. Poetry inherits at all these levels - and so must its translation.
Words : 1594
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