post-colonial_translation

166
Vanamala Viswanatha and Sherry Simon
of South India, spoken today in the state of Karnataka by nearly 25
million people. Kannada literary production has a history of fifteen
centuries, making it second only to Tamil in the longevity and wealth
of its literary tradition.
We find, in the relations between Kannada and English, strong
models of the kinds of effects which translations have at specific
moments in the interplay between colonizing and colonized cultures.
This reading will concentrate on the work of B.M. Srikantaiah (from
now on BMS) which provides such a model. He played a highly
influential role as teacher, writer and translator into Kannada at the
start of the century, but the source of his enormous reputation as a
pioneering literary personality was his translation of sixty Romantic
and Victorian poems entitled English Geethagalu (1926). Described
as ‘The Lyrical Ballads’ of Kannada literature, this volume has been
considered a ‘guidebook for lyric poetry in Kannada’. 8 Many of the
poems in the volume continue today to be prescribed as obligatory
reading in high schools and colleges in Karnataka, while some are set
to music and have become part of popular culture.
BEFORE BMS
Critics of Kannada literature are unanimous in describing Kannada
literature of the last century as wholly derivative, drawing its
sustenance from the past. There existed a large body of mythological
and religious narratives, biographies of deities and stories for
Yakshagana folk theatre, but there was little that was innovative in
the themes or forms of expression, which had been acquired from old
Sanskrit and old Kannada literature and had very little link to
contemporary life. In addition, there was a gap between the highly
structured nature of old Kannada and the contemporary, spoken idiom
(Havanur, 1974).
Translations served to help Kannada literature break away from
these traditional forms. They were first undertaken by missionaries
and by administrators in the service of colonial rule. Both Ferdinand
Kittel (1832–1903) and B.L. Rice (1837–1927) 9 translated Christian
hymns according to the earlier metrics and the songs of Dasas, but
others attempted to translate Christian texts into Kannada so that
they could be sung to Western melodies. In the latter case, they were
forced to modify the ancient rhyme schemes and metrical patterns in
order to make their poems musically viable. For the first time in
Kannada literature, the ancient rhyme schemes and metrical patterns