post-colonial_translation

Ramanujan’s theory and practice 123
has to be earned, repossessed. The old bards earned it by apprenticing
themselves to the masters. One chooses and translates a part of one’s
past to make it present to oneself and maybe to others. One comes face
to face with it sometimes in faraway places, as I did’ (LW, xvii). At the
most general level of effort, then, the translator is engaged in carrying
over not only texts but also readers, cultures, traditions and himself or
herself in radically metamorphic ways. Translation – which, in its most
elementary form, appears to be a matter of metaphrasing, say, a single
‘adjective-packed, participle-crowded Tamil poem of four lines’ (IL,
12) – thus no longer hinges upon a product, or even a bundle of relations.
It evolves instead into an open-ended, multi-track process, in which
translator, author, poem and reader move back and forth between two
different sets of languages, cultures, historical situations and traditions.
In a fluid process of this sort, which we attempt to freeze under the
label of ‘intertextuality’, the translations that succeed best are those
capable of making the most imaginative connections between widely
separated people, places and times. The poems and stories Ramanujan
himself chose to translate over four decades had the power to make
precisely such connections, and they continue to energize his readers’
heterotopic worlds.
A THEORETICAL CRITIQUE OF
RAMANUJAN’S PRACTICE
Ramanujan’s differences with other theorists of translation,
particularly the post-structuralists, reached a friction-point the year
before he died, when Tejaswini Niranjana attacked him in the last
chapter of her book, Siting Translation. 14 The attack was surprising
because, as his long-time colleagues Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph
observed in an obituary published in India in July 1993, Ramanujan
characteristically ‘picked friendships, not fights’. 15 Already in
indifferent health when Niranjana’s book reached him, he refused to
retaliate in print with counter-arguments and counter-allegations,
trusting his readers as well as hers to judge the issues reasonably and
fairly. Despite – but also because of – Ramanujan’s public silence on the
subject, it is important to examine Niranjana’s attack in detail for what
it reveals about a style of scholarship and political argumentation that
has become widespread in contemporary criticism.
Niranjana formulates her critique on two basic levels, though
she blurs them when convenient. At the first level, she deals with
inspectable particulars and finds fault with Ramanujan’s