AK Ramanujan's Theory and Practice of Translation By Vinay Dharwadker

A.K. Ramanujan's Theory and Practice of Translation
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Vinay Dharwadker was born in Pune, Maharashtra in 1954. He pursued his B.Sc.(Honors) in Physics from St. Stephen's College, University of Delhi, India in 1974, and M.Sc. in Physics and Astrophysics from the University of Delhi in 1976. He did his PhD in "The Future of the Past: Modernity, Modern Poetry, and the Transformation of Two Indian Traditions" from the University of Chicago, Illinois. He is a professor of English, World Literature, and South Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. He is also a member of the Affiliate Faculty for the Center for South Asia and the Center for Visual Cultures. He was awarded the Translation Prize in English in 2007 in 2008 by Sahitya Akademi for "Kabir: The Weaver's Songs".

Vinay Dharwadker- AK Ramanujan's Theory and Practice of Translation
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"Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice"

The book - 'Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice' edited by Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi, brings together eminent contributors to examine some crucial interconnections between post-colonial theory and translation studies.

The essays in this book, by contributors from Britain, the US, Brazil, India, and Canada, explore new perspectives on the translation of post-colonial societies. The essay includes links between center and margins in the intellectual domain; shifts in translation practice from colonial to post-colonial societies; translation and power relations among Indian languages; and Brazilian cannibalistic theories of literary transfer.

AK Ramanujan's Theory and Practice of Translation was published in this book.
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Chapter - 6: A.K. Ramanujan's Theory and Practice of Translation By Vinay Dharwadker

The essay "A.K. Ramanujan's Theory and Practice of Translation" was published as Chapter 6 of the book- 'Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice' by Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi in the year 1999.

Vinay starts his essay by praising A.K. Ramanujan, he states :

"A.K Ramanujan occupies a unique position among Indian and post-colonial theorists and practitioners of translation."

In "A.K. Ramanujan's Theory and Practice of Translation", Vinay says that Ramanujan's work focuses on the under-presented language - a combination of English, Kannada, and Tamil, and his work in collaboration with other scholars enlarge the combination to include Indian languages like Telugu, Malayalam, and Marathi that continue to be marginalized in world literature.

For almost over 40 years - from mid 1950s and the early 1990s- Ramanujan translated texts in several genres from most of the important periods of Indian literary history, covering classical poetry and Bhakti poetry in Tamil, Virasaiva Vacanas in Kannada, bhakti, and court literature in Telugu, folktales and women's oral narratives recorded in 19th and 20th centuries, and poetry and prose fiction written in the post-independence decades.

Ramanujan usually chose originals of exceptional aesthetic, historical, or cultural significance, and produced a large number of versions that are marked by literary excellence in themselves. His translations are distinguished by their quantity, quality, and variety, and also by the body of prefaces, textual and interpretive notes, and scholarly commentary that frame it.

Dharwadker asserts that his contributions, his influence as a model translator of Indian texts, and his impact on the understanding of India among scholars and readers cannot be judged based on a practical criticism of particular translations.

Thus, Dharwadker examines Ramanujan's work from a wider theoretical and methodological perspective, focusing on his general conception of translation and on the theory of translation in his practice. The author does so as he believes that such a perspective enables him to understand Ramanujan's pragmatic goal as a translator, and his strategies and to clarify his concerns regarding the conditions, outcomes, and limitations of translation. He further divides the essay into three sections:

1. Ramanujan's Conception Of Translation

2. A Theoretical Critique of Ramanujan's Practice

3. Ramanujan's Politics of Translation

Ramanujan's Conception of Translation

In Section 1, "Ramanujan's Conception Of Translation" of the essay - "A.K. Ramanujan's Theory and Practice of Translation", Dharwadker initiates by telling us what Ramanujan thinks about 'Translator's Task'. For Ramanujan, the translator is expected to render textual meanings and qualities 'literally', to successfully ''transpose the syntax, design, structure or form of the original from one language to another'', and to achieve a communicative intersection between the two sets of languages and discourse.

Ramanujan approached the problem of rendering the literal meanings and qualities of a source text by trying to attend closely to the language of the detail of the original by detail. His desire to make his translations 'as accurate and reliable as possible' led him to a close reading of the original, a systematic analysis for himself of its devices and effects, and a time-consuming procedure of drafting, correcting, and polishing the translation.

Ramanujan asserted that even a translator's care and craftmanship can't solve the problems of attempting what John Dryden, in 1680, had called 'metaphrase' - the method of 'turning an author word by word, and line by line, from one language into another'.

According to Ramanujan, two principal difficulties prevent a translator from producing a perfect metaphrase, especially in a poem:

(a) the words in the text are 'always figurative', and therefore can't be rendered literally.

(b) a truly literal version can never capture the poetry of the original, for 'only poems can translate poems', and a poem is always made at several levels, of which the so-called literal level is only one.

He believed that given these obstacles, metaphrase is an 'unachievable ideal'.

'Syntax', according to Ramanujan, is a synecdoche for structure. He sought to carry over not only its metaphrasable meaning, but also, equally importantly, its formal principles, its modulations of voice and tone, and its combination of effects on the reader. Thus, at the level of syntax, he attempted to translate a text 'phrase by phrase' as each phrase articulates the total poem.

In his effort to render the original poem's structure as faithfully as possible, he was concerned with several principles of poetic organization:

1. He identified and tried to convey in his translation the specific order of elements in the source- text so that he 'paid special attention to the images and their placement'.

2. He sought to emphasize the 'relations among the various parts of a poem', which made possible the arrangement of poetic elements as well as the visual form itself.

For Example- when he broke up the lines and arranged them in little blocks and paragraphs, or arranged them step-wise, he used the spacing on the page to suggest the distance or the closeness of the elements in the original syntax.

3. He developed his conceptions of 'outer' and 'inner' poetic form from two culturally incommensurate sources. He owed this distinction to the classical Tamil distinction between two genres of poetic discourse, the 'aka' - interior, heart, household; and the 'Puram' - exterior, public.

Moreover, he believed that, in any given language, the production of discourse (parole) results from "the infinite use of finite means". And this finite means provided by the language or system underlying the actual usage are determinate and characteristic of that language.

In Ramanujan's view, the relationship between translator and author is subject to two pairs of contradictory desires, with the pairs contradictory to each other in turn.

1. One coupling, consists of the translator's desire to make a poem out of the translation, and negation of this desire by the reader's conventionalized demand for the metaphrase or absolute literal fidelity to the original.

2. Other coupling, which conflicts with the first, consists of the translator's desire to make out of poetry of the original, a poem of his or her own, and the negation of this desire by the obligation, conventionally enforced by readers, faithfully to make out of the intertextual encounter someone else' poem.

Ramanujan confesses:

''A Translation has to be true to the translator no less than to the originals."

A translator cannot jump out of his own shadow. Translation is a choice, interpretation, an assertion of taste, a betrayal of what answers to one's needs, one's envies.

Ramanujan says, "A translator hopes not only to translate a text but hopes to translate a non-native reader into a native one."

A Theoretical Critique of Ramanujan's Practice

In Section 2, "A Theoretical Critique of Ramanujan's Practice" of the essay - "A.K. Ramanujan's Theory and Practice of Translation", Dharwadker discusses Ramanujan's differences with other theorists of translation. He mentions a critic- Tejaswini Niranjana (an Indian professor, cultural theorist, translator, and author) who attacked Ramanujan in the last chapter of her book- 'Sitting Translation'. Already in indifferent health when her book reached Ramanujan, he refused to make counter-arguments and counter- allegations trusting his readers as well as hers to judge the issues reasonably and fairly.

Tejaswini Niranjana (Image Source: Google)

Niranjana formulates her critique on two basic levels:

At the First level, she deals with inspectable particulars and finds fault with Ramanujan's translation of a single short poem by Allamaprabhu in Kannada, which stands out at the very end of Speaking of Shiva. She criticizes Ramanujan for his rendering and interpretation of specific words, images, concepts, and structures, arguing that in the original they are not what he, in the translation, misrepresents them to be.

At the Second level of critique, however, Niranjana refuses to engage with the specifics of Ramanujan's work and abandons any pretense of documentation and demonstration. She attributes to Ramanujan a "politics of translation" that is at once colonialist, orientalist, Christian, missionary, utilitarian, modernist, nationalist, and nativist.

Some of Niranjana's charges that Ramanujan's representation of 'bhakti' essentializes Hinduism and condones communal violence, hence Dharwadker thinks that it is necessary to question her method of arriving at such generalizations.

Dharwadker blames Niranjana for manipulating the evidence skillfully. As the 'original' text of Allamaprabhu's Vacana, she reproduces a modernized Kannada version, which she finds in the Nandimath edition of the first volume of the 'Sunyasampadane' published in 1965. And as Ramanujan's introductory note on Allamaprabhu's life and work explicitly states, he uses Basavaraju's 'Candrike' and the Bhoosnurmath volume of the 'Sunyasampadane' for his material and not the Nandimath volume. Niranjana conceals these elementary textual facts from her readers.

Based on her comparison of Ramanujan's translation and a Kannada source he did not translate, Niranjana asserts confidently that he makes errors in reading the original, thus suggesting that he was incompetent with premodern Kannada. She blames him for deliberately introducing ideological distortions in his rendering of the 'Vacana', to incorporate in it his own hidden political agendas.

In the essay, "A.K. Ramanujan's Theory and Practice of Translation" Dharwadker states that Niranjana's attack is problematic as it is based overtly on a theory of translation of Walter Benjamin's and the so-called 'law of translation' in 'The Task of the Translator', and in their appropriation in Derrida's 'Des Tours de Babel'. It also enables her to 'privilege the word over the sentence', marking a 'displacement' from the syntagmatic to paradigmatic level.

On the other hand. Ramanujan's theory and practice emphasize the need to treat language, poetry, and translation as processes that involve multiple levels that cannot be collapsed onto each other, and in which words cannot have priority over sentences, and sentences cannot have priority over larger discursive structures, because we do not use or find words outside sentences or sentences outside discourse.

We can evidently see the problematic nature of Niranjana's theoretical assertions when we place Ramanujan's conception of translation beside Benjamin's and Derrida's conceptions. Benjamin, a Marxist and Frankfurt school critic, was the source of one of Ramanujan's principles as a writer and scholar: the idea that the ideal critical essay would consist entirely of quotations.

For instance, his major essays from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, like- 'Where Mirrors are Windows' and 'Three Hundred Ramanujans', are all structured explicitly as Benjamin's 'anthologies of quotations'.

At the same time, however, there are obvious theoretical differences between Ramanujan and Benjamin, while Benjamin argues that "In the appre3ciation of a work of art or an art form, consideration of the receiver never proves fruitful", whereas Ramanujan holds that the translator has to pay a great deal of attention to and spend energy translating, the intended or imagined reader of the translation.

Ramanujan also diverges from Jacques Derrida's arguments, he thinks that Derrida and his deconstructionist followers discuss translation to a contextualist, theoretical, and ideological extreme from which there is no conceivable return to poems, poetry, or actual poetic translations.

Moreover, unlike Homi Bhabha, who is concerned with demonstrating that all identities are inevitably ambivalent and hybrid in the end, Ramanujan accepted the hybridity of languages and cultures as a starting point and tried to show, instead, how different degrees and kinds of hybridization shape particular languages, and how, despite the universal fact of mongrelization, no two mongrels are actually alike.

Ramanujan's Politics of Translation

In Section 3,'' Ramanujan's Politics of Translation'' of the essay - "A.K. Ramanujan's Theory and Practice of Translation", Dharwadker replies to the accusations laid by Niranjana, that his translations are characteristic of European Protestantism.

She claims that Ramanujan's practice as a translator was neither exploratory nor open-ended, and passively or faithlessly collaborated with colonial, orientalist, and other dominant representations of India and that he sought to represent 'bhakti' and 'virasaivism' as uniform, single-valued phenomena.

Niranjana omits the fact that Ramanujan consistently uses 'experience' to translate two complexes, frequently used quasitechnical terms in Virasaiva discourse in premodern Kannada, 'anubhava' and 'anubhava'. In the last two centuries of constant effort at English translation, no one has yet discovered or invented an equivalent for 'anubhava' other than experience. She, even, does not even remind her readers that Ramanujan explains his sense of the Virasaiva concepts of 'anubhava' and 'anubhava' at length in the 'Introduction to Speaking of Siva', in the section entitled 'The Unmediated Vision'.

Niranjana also conceals the fact that Ramanujan adapts the concepts of 'quest' from European romance narratives and of the 'pilgrim's progress' from Puritan allegories to translate as efficiently as possible the concept in Vira Saivism of a 'satsthala sadhana-a doctrine of six phases, stages, or stations, which constitutes one of the many 'contexts' of these texts.

Dharwadker claims that Ramanujan's references to parallels between Virasaivism (or bhakti) and European Protestantism are part of his effort to provisionally translate the non-Indian reader from a Western - -Christian culture towards the culture of the 13th-century Virasaivism saints.

It is to be noticed that Niranjana articulates her own totalizing critique based on a single translated poem in 'Speaking of Siva', without taking into account even the rest of Ramanujan's work in that book as a whole. Hence, Dharwadker asserts that if we are to criticize Ramanujan's practice, then we are obliged to examine the full range of his work.