post-colonial_translation

Ramanujan’s theory and practice 125
Niranjana’s respective source-texts becomes crucial when she
compares his English translation to, and evaluates it against, the
Kannada ‘original’ she has chosen for it. She does not consider it
necessary to tell her readers whether the text of Allama’s poem is
exactly the same in the Nandimath Sunyasampadane volume and the
Basavaraju Candrike, or whether the two sources vary, as such
editions and variants of bhakti texts so often do in all the major
Indian languages. Instead, she fudges the question of textual
variation in the ‘original’ Kannada, both in the main body of her
discussion and in footnotes that do not provide the needed
documentation. On the basis of her comparison of Ramanujan’s
translation and a Kannada source he did not translate, Niranjana
asserts confidently that he makes errors in reading the original, thus
suggesting that he was incompetent with premodem Kannada. To
justify her own unproblematic access to the language, however, she
states that ‘Medieval Kannada is comprehensible to a speaker of
modern Kannada’ (ST, 180, f.n. 38) – a claim that ought to have
applied more aptly to Ramanujan since, unlike her, he was a writer
with four published books in that language, a practising linguist with
a doctoral dissertation on it, and a widely published translator of its
premodern and modern literatures. She then goes on to suggest that
Ramanujan deliberately introduced ideological distortions in his
rendering of the vacana, in order to incorporate in it his own hidden,
reprehensible political agendas.
Obviously, if Ramanujan made a real mistake (for instance, in
reading hora [sic] or hera [‘outside’] for here [‘back’]), and
systematically skewed the structure and semantics of the Allama
vacana in question, then Niranjana ought to have been able to clinch
her case simply by juxtaposing Ramanujan’s version and the text he
actually translated, and by methodically documenting each
transparent error and wilful distortion. While I am sure that
Ramanujan, like everyone else, was quite capable of making
mistakes and even of twisting a text to fit his own biases, he never
claimed to be free of shortcomings or prejudices. In fact, as I have
already noted, he reminded his readers that a translator cannot jump
off his own shadow, and that a translation is ‘a betrayal of what
answers to one’s needs, one’s envies’ (SS, 12–13). In contrast,
Niranjana visibly plays fast and loose with facts, as if her readers as
well as Ramanujan’s would never know, or even need to know, the
difference: in a casual footnote on this particular ‘mistake’ she tells
us that ‘One of the Kannada versions available has herasari for