post-colonial_translation

128 Vinay Dharwadker
German) but, as I have already indicated above, it is impracticable when
dealing with, say, classical Tamil (or old Kannada) and contemporary
English. In fact, both the ideal of transparency and the possibility of a
literal rendering of the syntax are imaginable only within the Judaeo-
Christian myth of Babel that Benjamin resurrects in his essay, and the
ghost of an original Ur-Sprache that he mystically intuits within it. As a
descriptive and comparative linguist, Ramanujan did not believe that
there was such a lost transcendental, universal language underlying
the differences between the Germanic, Romance, Indo-Aryan and
Dravidian languages. 21
Ramanujan also diverges from Jacques Derrida’s arguments,
articularly of the kind Niranjana mentions in the quotation
above, where the French philosopher attempts to reverse Roman
Jakobson’s famous statement that ‘The poetic function projects
the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection [the
paradigmatic axis] onto the axis of combination [the
syntagmatic axis]’. 22 From Ramanujan’s perspective, Derrida
and his deconstructionist followers (including his translator
and interpreter Gayatri Spivak) push the discussion of
translation to a contextualist, theoretical and ideological
extreme from which there is no conceivable return to poems,
poetry or actual poetic translations. The kind of deconstructive
argument that seems most inconsistent with Ramanujan’s
theory and practice occurs in ‘Des Tours de Babel’, where
Derrida attacks Jakobson’s distinction between intralingual,
interlingual and intersemiotic transposition (‘DT’, 225–6).
Ironically enough, for Derrida – the aboriginal champion of
difference in a century that can be divided easily, as Judith Butler
observes, between philosophers of identity and philosophers of
difference – there is and can be no difference between these three
types of translation. 23 Differentiation is impossible because,
according to Derrida, Jakobson ‘obviously presupposes that one
can know in the final analysis how to determine rigorously the
unity and identity of a language, the decidable form of its limits’
(‘DT’, 225). In other words, since Derrida cannot distinguish in
a philosophically satisfactory manner between, say, the
boundaries of Kannada and the boundaries of English, any act
of translating a text from Kannada into English is exactly like
any act of rewording an English text in English itself, which is
indistinguishable from any act of rephrasing a Kannada text in
Kannada.