post-colonial_translation

Ramanujan’s theory and practice 127
roughly the second half of his career, from the late 1970s to the early
1990s, including such late examples as ‘Where Mirrors are Windows’
and ‘Three Hundred R am ayanas’, are all structured explicitly as
Benjaminian ‘anthologies of quotations’. 20 Some of Ramanujan’s
statements on translation also seem to agree with several observations
in Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’. In fact, Ramanujan
appears to echo Benjamin’s notions that ‘a translation issues from the
original – not so much from its life as from its afterlife’, and that ‘in its
afterlife – which could not be called that if it were not a transformation
and a renewal of something living – the original undergoes change’
(‘TT’, 71, 73). At the same time, however, there are obvious theoretical
differences between Ramanujan and Benjamin on several other
points. Thus, while Benjamin argues that ‘In the appreciation of a
work of art or an art form, consideration of the receiver never proves
fruitful’, Ramanujan, himself an exemplary self-conscious reader–
response critic in many respects, holds that the translator has to pay a
great deal of attention to, and spend energy translating, the intended
or imagined reader of the translation. So also where Benjamin asserts
that ‘the original . . . contains the law governing the translation: its
translatability’, Ramanujan appears closer to the position that,
outside the closed circuit of modern European languages, the
translatability of a text is determined, not by some code or property
housed inside the text, but by a complex of contingent factors and
chance encounters outside it: the pair of languages actually involved in
the intertextual transfer, the translator’s peculiar bilingual sensibility
and skill, the interests of the potential readers of the rendering, and so
on (‘TT’, 69, 70). A crucial area of disagreement between Ramanujan
and Benjamin surfaces in the latter’s claim that
A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original,
does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though
reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the
more fully. This may be achieved, above all, by a literal
rendering of the syntax which proves words rather than
sentences to be the primary element of the translator. For if the
sentence is the wall before the language of the original,
literalness is the arcade.
(‘TT’, 79)
This may be true for translation from one European language into
another (Benjamin worked mainly between modern French and modern