post-colonial_translation

Srikantaiah and Kannada translation 169
and lecture tours for writers, encouraged students to engage with
Kannada in different capacities. In addition, his own work as a creative
writer, as a critic, and especially as a translator, was decisive. He is
said to have given the Kannada language a ‘way of thinking, a texture
of thought’. 12
His creative writing was limited to one collection of poems,
criticism, and a series of essays on the development of the Kannada
language and literature. His translations include three plays, which
were all stimulated by his acute sense of the absence of tragedy in
Kannada. 13 The first play, Gadayuddha Natakam (1926), is an
adaptation of a tenth-century Kannada epic by Ranna, which, in
contrast to original Vyasa Mahabharata, valorizes Duryodhana as
a tragic hero. In 1927 he wrote Ashwatthaman, using the structure
of Sophocles’ Ajax, to force the immortal character of
Ashwatthaman of the original Mahabharata to become mortal.
Parasikaru was the third play, published in 1935; it is a translation
of Aeschylus’ Persians.
The three plays demonstrate three different translation/rewriting
strategies, for which there are three different Sanskrit terms. The first
play is an example of roopa-antar (changing the shape), in the sense
that BMS has intensified the tragic dimensions of Duryodhana and
transformed the epic form to the dramatic, thereby creating a new genre
of tragic theatre in Kannada. The second is an anu-vada (something
that follows after), in that BMS, by making the conventionally immortal
Ashwattaman die, has subjected the Indian myth to the structures and
intents of Greek tragedy and made the Indian myth subservient to the
dynamics of Sophocles’ play. Parasikaru illustrates a third strategy,
bhashanthara (changing the language), in which BMS offers a literal
translation of Aeschylus’ Persians, choosing to retain all the cultural
elements of the original intact.
Of the three strategies, the first one, the transforming mode, has
become and remained the most influential. The last mode was the
least successful of the three, because it was perceived as excessively
alien to the culture. The second was actively resisted because it was
seen as a conscious and contrived distortion of tradition – devised
only to fulfil what was again perceived as an imported need for tragedy.
However, as a writing strategy which enabled the Kannada literary
tradition to be maintained, while introducing needed changes which
came from outside that tradition – by providing a satisfying match
between new literary forms and indigenous material – the first mode
of translation enjoyed the greatest success.