post-colonial_translation

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Vanamala Viswanatha and Sherry Simon
reminded of. Questions of translation were to be dealt with in the
prefaces and introductions of his works, letting the reader then cross
over into the pleasurable order of aesthetics. The hand of the translator
is the heavy but invisible presence that smoothes over the unruly shapes
of the original. The problems of translation could be solved through
rigour, sensitivity and craftsmanship.
The contemporary translator of Kannada literature faces yet
another configuration of cultural relationships, one in which the very
notion of alterity is troubled. The poles which regulate translation
are unstable, the categories of East and West always crumbling into
fragments and yet continuing to dominate, direct and interpret
activities of transfer and exchange. The work of Tejaswini Niranjana,
translator and post-colonial critic, privileges the critical aim of
translation, with the intention of distancing the reader. 20 Niranjana,
much like Gayatri Spivak, will propose a ‘tentative’ and ‘disruptive’
text, in contrast to Ramanujan’s finely crafted poem. This
‘interventionist’ mode of translation is an expression of the
contemporary difficulty in conceptualizing cultural relations, of the
crisis in modes of cultural exchange. Translation comes to play a
crucial cognitive role in drawing attention to the problematic nature
of transmission and transfer.
Each of these translating projects enacts a relationship of difference.
Each responds to a historical and political conjuncture, embodying
this response within the aesthetics of the translated text. It is tempting
to see these moments as steps in a historical progression, moving from
a situation of absolute hierarchy towards a more fluid and hybridized
cultural relationship between Kannada and English. The translations
of BMS reflect the ambiguities of the first moments of significant
cultural encounter between English and Kannada, those of AKR a
modernist confidence in civilizational equivalence, and the work of
Niranjana a critical and oppositional understanding of cultural
relations. It is less important, however, to see these projects as coming
progressively closer to the truth of alterity than to be attentive to these
different shapings of cultural difference – and the way they are
mobilized and activated through translation.
KANNADA AND CANADA
Although the historical determinants affecting translation in
Canada are very different from those in India, it is possible to
observe similarities in the way translation crystallizes