post-colonial_translation

Srikantaiah and Kannada translation 173
ignored the pan-Indian Gandhian nationalism which was so
important during this time. 17
That the success of his work was linked to the hierarchy of caste
and class in Karnataka is by no means irrelevant. BMS’s own struggle
with English sets off, in its wake, another level of struggle within
Kannada culture. That is, his translations impose within Kannada
culture a hierarchy of idioms. A new field of divisions, inequalities
and oppositional forces is at once created and revealed by these
translations. Evidence for this can be seen in the Bandaya (‘Protest’)
literary movement of 1975 which radically questioned the dominance
of forms of writing favoured by the upper-caste and English-educated
elite. As a result, the marginalized voices of Muslim, Dalith, women
and tribal writers have become increasingly audible in Kannada
writing. Translations of these writers promote the emergence of new
versions of Kannada cultural identity.
SOME MODELS OF CULTURAL DIFFERENCE
IN TRANSLATION
The dissymmetries between Kannada and English exist today, as they
did for BMS. But the sites at which translators can express their
political engagement have shifted.
BMS’s story is that of the first significant encounters between
Kannada and English literature in the pre-independence state of
Mysore. The example of BMS underlines the paradoxal effects of
imitation and mimicry, of the perverse homage which allows for a
transfer of powers from the source into the receiving language. 18
For modern Kannada literature, then, translation is a truly
foundational act, providing a new idiom which was immediately
taken up by a new generation of writers. At the same time, this
move was grounded in one primordial reality, one absolute given:
the superiority of English over Kannada.
The work of the poet and immensely influential translator A.K.
Ramanujan, in contrast, tells of a later constellation of cultural
relations between post-independence India and the West. 19 He also
used the power of English to legitimate the literary value of Kannada,
but he did so by translating into English, participating in a
configuration of influences which involved a new set of intents and
suspicions. For AKR, working within an understanding of cultural
worlds as potentially equivalent, translatability, the distance between
unlike realities, was not an issue that his readers were to be constantly