post-colonial_translation

Srikantaiah and Kannada translation 177
2 ‘Most modern Indian languages initiated their respective literary
traditions with translations of works from Sanskrit, either the epics –
Ramayana and Mahabharata – or philosophical texts like the Gita. During
the first four centuries of their existence – thirteenth to the sixteenth
centuries – there were numerous translations from one regional language
to another regional language, numerous instances of literary bilingualism
as well as many important translations from Indian languages to Persian
and Arabic, the two languages of political domination during these
centuries’ (G.N. Devy, ‘Indian Literature in English Translation’, in Devy
1993, pp. 117–18).
3 ‘A Sanskrit epic like the Mahabharata contains in its encyclopedic range
much folk material, like tales, beliefs, proverbs, picked obviously from
folk sources, refurbished, Sanskritized, fixed forever in the Sanskritic
artifice of eternity. But in a profoundly oral culture like the Indian, the
Sanskrit Mahabharata itself gets returned to the oral folk-traditions,
contributing the transformed materials back to the “little” traditions
to be further diffused and diffracted. It gets “translated” from the
Sanskrit into the regional languages; in the course of the “translations”,
the regional poet infuses it with his rich local traditions, combining not
only the pan-Indian “great” with the regional “little”, but the regional
“great” with the regional “little” traditions as well. Thus many cycles
of give-and-take are set in motion’ (A.K. Ramanujan 1973, pp. 23–4).
4 Sisir Kumar Das points to the exceptional nature of modern Indian literary
history, which, with the possible exception of the Graeco-Roman
encounter, ‘provides a singular case of co-existence of two literatures,
one of them alien, English, and the other indigenous, an Indian literature.
This co-existence of English and Indian literature became a feature of
intellectual life of the English educated Indian. His political relation with
England, which was becoming more and more hostile every day, did not
alter the situation’ (Das 1995, p. 55).
5 ‘The multilingual, eclectic Hindu spirit, ensconced in the belief in the soul’s
perpetual transition from form to form, may find it difficult to subscribe
to the Western metaphysics of translation . . . . The Indian consciousness,
on the other hand, and in a crude manner of differentiating, is itself a
“translating consciousness”’ (G.N. Devy, ‘Translation Theory: an Indian
Perspective’, in Devy 1993, p. 135).
6 Ahmad also warns against the limits of a purely national framework for
studying translation. In this context it is worth noting that the strong
moments in the history of translation theory seem to be tied to crises in
the concept of the nation – from its ‘birth’ in the Renaissance to its
consolidation during the period of the German Romantics and onward.
As translation theory has served the interests of the nation, today it
accompanies a questioning of national boundaries.
7 This variety is highlighted in the titles of Mukherjee’s chapters: translation
as new writing, as testimony, as patriotism, as perjury, as discovery.
This sensitivity is also integrated into the critical project of Meenakshi
Mukherjee, who sees the birth of the Indian novel in English as an act of
translation, as the result of a dialogue with Western forms involving both
imitation and resistance (Mukherjee 1985). Aijaz Ahmad seems to refute