post-colonial_translation

Srikantaiah and Kannada translation 179
1944, 1955, 1957, 1959), Gogol 1957, Turgenev 1957, Tolstoy 1946,
1951, 1959, 1961, Pushkin 1956, Chekhov 1962. However, the 1960s
offer a more heterogeneous picture which includes the all-time
favourites Wordsworth, Shelley and Byron, but also American writers
(Poe, 1961, and Whitman, 1966) and Jane Austen 1961, Shaw 1963,
Dickens 1960 and Hardy 1959. From: Bibliography of Translations
into Kannada (Mysore, 1984).
17 S. Chandrashekar, Srinidhi (Bangalore: B.M. Shri, 1985), pp. 129–42.
Chandrashekar points out that BMS was probably too close to the royalty
to partake of the spirit of Indian nationalism led by Gandhi which inspired
every other major writer of the time.
18 For the central creative role of imitation in the European Classical period,
see Joel Weinsheimer, Imitation (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984).
19 A.K. Ramanujan’s role within the development of Kannada literature
is at once marginal and decisive. As a writer in the Kannada language,
his influence is rather limited. AKR wrote poetry and short stories
in Kannada, and remained an active participant on the Kannada
writing scene – even if he spent much of his time in the USA. But it
was not this writing which was decisive in establishing him as an
important figure, nor the poetry that he wrote in English. Rather, it
was his translations from Kannada and Tamil into English. These
translations were from the medieval Kannada tradition (the Vacanas)
in Speaking of Siva (1973) and from the Tamil Poems of Love and
War (1986), but also from contemporary Kannada literature,
Samskara by Ananthamurthy (1975), Rotti by Lankesh (1973), Song
of the Earth by Adiga (1968).
20 Niranjana 1992. Niranjana has translated a number of works from
Kannada including the novel Phaniyamma.
21 As a minority language in North America, as a culturally weak
language within the Canadian confederation (until the great
nationalist revival beginning in the 1960s), French was for a long
time very much the dominated partner in this national dialogue.
Translational relations were therefore asymmetrical, and this
difference of perspective was reflected in the way translators
understood their mandate. Historically, prefaces to translations
of French-Canadian literature into English tend to emphasize the
humanistic functions of translation, the political desirability of
increased cultural interchange between the peoples of Canada;
discourse on translation in Quebec has been concerned with the
importance of defending the French language against the
interferences of an all-powerful English-language culture.
22 Yet other kinds of considerations come into play in the translation of
English-language literature into French. See Annie Brisset, Sociocriticism
of Translation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996).
23 Edward Said: ‘some notion of literature and indeed all culture as
hybrid . . . and encumbered, or entangled and overlapping with
what used to be regarded as extraneous elements – this strikes me
as the essential idea for the revolutionary realities’ (Culture and
Imperialism, p. 317).