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Vanamala Viswanatha and Sherry Simon
this view in reference to the emergence of the novel in Urdu (Ahmad 1992,
p. 116).
8 This, according to the important poet D.R. Bendre, Felicitation volume
for BMS, Mysore, 1941; G.S. Shivarudrappa (ed.) (1985) Shrinidhi, B.M.
Shri centenary volume (Smaraka Prathishtana, Bangalore: B.M. Shri).
9 Ferdinand Kittel (1823–1903) was a German, Protestant priest who
studied at the Basel Mission College in Switzerland and was sent to
Dharwar, Karnataka in 1853. He studied Kannada when he was in
Bangalore and prepared the first Kannada–English dictionary between
1872 and 1892 (70,000 entries). He also published Grammar of the
Kannada Language in English (1903).
B.L. Rice (1837–1927) was born in India, educated in England and
returned to Bangalore in 1860, serving as an education officer, inspector
of schools and then curator, Archaelogy Department, Mysore. He is the
author of Epigraphia Karnatika.
10 S.G. Narasimhacharya (1862–1907) was a well-known Old Kannada
scholar also knowledgeable in the Sanskrit, Tamil and English traditions.
He worked as a translator and textbook writer in the Education
Department, and translated excerpts from Kalidasa’s Raghuvamsa and
epic poetry into Kannada. He also translated simple poems from English
as well as Aesop’s Fables and Gulliver’s Travels into Kannada for teaching
purposes.
11 This volume has been reproduced by Bhartiya Anuvad Parishad, Delhi,
1990, with a preface by Gargi Gupta.
Rao had published a Kannada translation of Aesop’s Fables in 1884
for the use of the girls reading in the Maharani Girls’ School of Mysore.
Rao provides a systematic and intelligent exploration of the problems of
translation, first examining general issues and then providing detailed
commentary on translations of Shakuntala into English, on the one hand,
and Kannada, on the other. He defends free translation as the proper mode
of proceeding when the realities of the two cultures are very different.
12 The following discussion is largely indebted to Kurthakoti 1992.
13 In 1941 BMS wrote a lecture on tragedy in Kannada: ‘How come, in our
culture, we don’t have this kind of a noble picture of the deepest problems
in life which makes for the greatest of literature in the West . . . . Should
literature be only all sweetness The fear of tragedy is childish, like the
child’s fear of darkness. These tragedies are the lode-star that shines
brightly in the sky; they need to be seen only in darkness’ (B.M. Srikantaiah
(1983) ‘Rudra Nataka’, in Nayaka. Ha. Ma. (ed.) Shrisanitya (Mysore:
Kannada Adhyyana Samsthe.)) For a full discussion of BMS’s dramatic
adaptations, see Kurthakoti 1992, pp. 15–20.
14 In ‘Kannada Mathu Thale Ethuva Bage’, Srikantaiah 1983, p. 254.
15 This poetic language is so stylized, in fact, that it has been ‘translated’
into a modern Kannada prose version.
16 For some thirty years after English Geethagalu, translations from
English, in particular, were undertaken assiduously. While the 1930s
and 1940s witnessed a predominant wave of translated Romantic and
Victorian writers (Keats 1931, Arnold 1932, Tennyson 1936, George
Eliot 1946), the 1950s saw a predominance of Russian masters (Gorky