A.K Ramanujan

   A.K. Ramanujan as a Translator and/or Translation Theorist

Name: Gausvami Surbhi A.

SEM: 4 M.A English.

Smt. S. B. Gardi, Department of English

Maharaja Krishnkumarsinhji Bhavnagar University.

Email: gausvamisurbhi17@gmail.com

Mobile: 7490920184

# Abstract:  

An attempt has been made in this paper to investigate the theory and methods that A.K Ramanujan used in Translation. A.K. Ramanujan was remarkable translator who helped foreign readers to appreciate the beauty of ancient Indian texts other than the Sanskrit ones. A.K. Ramanujan occupies a unique position among Indian and postcolonial theorists and practitioners of translation.  This paper explores how Ramanujan was well aware of his responsibilities of having to convey the original to the target reader and also of having to strike a balance between the author's interest and his own interest. His task was made all the more difficult when it came to the translation of ancient Tamil or Kannada poetry into English, because there were differences in culture, language and temporal framework between the source and target languages. Ramanujan says that a translator is “an artist on oath …caught between the need to express himself and the need to represent another, moving between the two halves of one brain, he has to use both to get close to ‘the originals'” According to A.K Ramanujan translator has to achieve a communicative intersection between the two sets of languages and discourses. And to construct parallels between the two cultures and the two histories or traditions that it brings together. This paper deals with Ramanujam’s translation of poems and the theory that he applied to translate those poems. Such as metaphrase, ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ poetic form, intertextual encounter. When two languages are as startlingly different from each other as modern English and medieval Tamil, one despairs between loyalty and betrayal, commitment and freedom, reflection and refraction or, in one of Ramanujan’s own late metaphors, mirrors and windows Ramanujam efforts to bring the Tamil poems faithfully to an English reader. This paper exemplifies one Tamil poem that is translated into English by Ramanujam. It explores brevity that is shining illustration of intertextuality that paves way for hermeneutics with multiple connotations. The quaintness of the inner and figural landscape of Tamil text and the way Ramanujam conveys it succinctly.

This paper examined two Hindi poems translated into English. That is “Sadharan Kamij” by Mohan Rana and “ Kanjika Kuch Vilap: 3” by Gagan Gill. As great philosopher ‘Plato’ firmly stated that “ imitation is twice removed from reality”. In the same way these poem once removed from nature then second time it is translated from original poem. This paper analyzed literal and final translation, subjectivity of translator, language, change of meanings due to metaphors, rhythm and intertextuality. It explores advantages and limitations of translation. One who is multilingual will find that translated poems lack originality.

Key Words: Metaphrase, Method of translation, intertexual encounter, reliable to original text.

# A.K Ramanujam as a Translator:

Attipate Krishnaswami Ramanujan (16 March 1929 – 13 July 1993) also known as A. K. Ramanujam was an Indian poet and scholar of Indian literature who wrote in both English and Kannada. Ramanujan was a poet, scholar, a philologist, folklorist, translator, and playwright. His academic research ranged across five languages: English, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit. A.K Ramanujam is the distinguished translator. His independent work focuses on the underrepresented language-combination of English, Kannada and Tamil, and his work in collaboration with other scholars enlarges the combination to include Indian languages like Telugu, Malayalam and Marathi that continue to be marginalized in world literature. His output as a translator is distinguished not only by its quantity, quality and variety, but also by the body of prefaces, textual and interpretive notes and scholarly commentary that frame it, reflecting on particular materials and cultures as well as the general process of translation. Over nearly forty years he transcribed, translated and commented on more than 3,000 individual poems and narratives as well as scores of larger works composed originally in half a dozen rather different languages.

Ramanujam’s contribution to the art of translation and his influence as modern translator cannot only be understood by criticism and therefore this paper tries to examine the theory and methods that he used for translation. Such a perspective enables us to understand his pragmatic goals as a translator in relation to his strategies for attaining them, as well as the limitation of translation.

# RAMANUJAN’S CONCEPTION OF TRANSLATION:

Translational works of Ramanujan most often reflected in the context of poetry. He considers the act of translation as multiple process in which translator has to deal with original text, inner thoughts, his objectives, recourses simultaneously. According to A.K Ramanujam translator is kept between freedom and constrains. Translator has genuine responsibility to transpose structure, syntax, form, meaning from one language to another. In this way translator plays a role of communicative intersection. It is the loyal duty of translator to construct parallel between two languages, two cultures and two histories that it brings together. Translator has to strike a balance between interest of author and interest of translator. As ‘T.S Eliot’ has rightly put in his theory of “Impersonality of Poet” that poet should be impersonal while writing the poetry. In the same way translator should have impersonality while translating the piece of literary work into entirely different language.

According to A.K Ramanujam translator has to be as ‘Accurate’ as possible. This leads towards deep and close reading of original. It will help him for correcting and polishing the translation.

Rajeev S. Patke, National University of Singapore considers Ramanujan as a type of the diasporic poet. Whose poems evokes the sense of loss, longing, alienation, remembrance etc. At that time translation of Indian poems serves as “Bridge”. The activity of translating is antidotal to the negative effects of migration because it restores continuity with the past; reciprocally, migration enlarges the life of the past by giving the solitary self the need-as-opportunity to revive and sustain its transmissibility through translation. Thus translation helps the individual cope with Diaspora.    

# Theory and Method of Translation:

A.K Ramanujam refers the method given by 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 Ramanujam two difficulties prevent translator to translate poem:

(1) The words in the text ‘are always figurative’ and therefore cannot be rendered literally;

(2) A truly literal version can never capture the poetry of the original, for ‘only poems can translate poems’.

While translating the poem translator has to render into the second language the syntax, structure or design of the original text. Syntax, which Ramanujam treats as a synecdoche for structure, represents the site of textual organization where individual constitutive elements (such as words, images, symbols and figures) combine with each other to produce a larger unit, an ensemble of effects or a whole. He is concerned not only with metaphrasable meaning but also, equally importantly, its formal principles, its modulations of voice and tone, and its combination of effects on the reader. He attempted to translate a text ‘phrase by phrase as each phrase articulates the total poem’.

Ramanujan developed his conceptions of ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ poetic form from two culturally incommensurate sources. On the one hand, he owed the distinction in part to Noam Chomsky’s analysis of surface and deep structure in discourse and to Roman Jakobson’s rather different structuralist analysis of the grammar of poetry, especially the latter’s distinction between ‘verse instance’ and ‘verse design’.  It parallels the distinction between ‘phenotext’ and ‘genotext’ which Julia Kristeva developed. In Tamil he refers it as the akam, ‘interior, heart, household’, and the puram, ‘exterior, public’. A.K Ramanujan said,

“English and my disciplines (linguistics, anthropology) give me my ‘outer’ forms – linguistic, metrical, logical and other such ways of shaping experience; and my first thirty years in India, my frequent visits and fieldtrips, my personal and professional preoccupations with Kannada, Tamil, the classics, and folklore give me my substance, my ‘inner’ forms, images and symbols. They are continuous with each other, and I no longer can tell what comes from where.”

Here is one example of Tamil poem that is translated into English by AKR.

Tamil Poem:

“Nilathinum peridhe; vaninum uyardhanru;

Neerinum aar alavindre saaral

Karunkal kurinji puukondu

Perundhaen laikkum naadanoda natpae”

# English Translation by AKR:

“Bigger than earth certainly,

Higher than the sky,

More unfathomable than the waters,

Is this love for this man?

                                                  Of the mountain slopes

                                                  Where bees make rich honey

                                                  From the flowers of the kurinji

                                                  That has such black stalks”

-         “The Vakulathaar’s

Kurinji – Thogai”

This Tamil poem has the elements of brevity. It integrates the exterior analogy ( Bees gathering honey from Kurinji flowers at the mountain slopes and taking it to the mountain top) with interior thought ( the union of two hearts coming from two different places and merging into one).

The translation done by AKR in terms of conceptualization style and presentation, similar to that in original poem. It presents the exterior world moves from the earth, sky, and water through the slopes, bees and flowers of the mountain. And the inner thought, namely the lady’s love as ‘Bigger than the earth and higher than the sky’. This is conveyed by AKR very succinctly.

In this way it is directly connected with the “Ferdinand de Saussure’s” concept of “Sign, Signifier and Signified”. If we apply this theory then we can judge  ‘Poem’ as sign, ‘Words, rhythm, tone’ as signifier and ‘meaning of poem’ as signified. Thus, outer and inner world of poetry and translator are certainly different.

If we consider Discourse as ‘Parole’ and language as ‘Langue’ in Saussure’s sense, then each language differs from each other. English and Kannada, for example, use two rather different finite sets of means – sounds, scripts, alphabets, lexicons, grammars, syntactic rules, stylistic conventions, formal and generic principles and so forth – to generate their respective infinite bodies of discourse, including poetry. Ramanujan felt that the systemic differences between two languages ensure that Benjamin’s norm of a ‘literal rendering of the syntax’ of one is impossible in the other. Thus it creates conflict within translator. Translator despairs when two system of languages are quite different. For example English and Tamil are very much different. Medieval Tamil is written with no punctuation and no spaces between words; it has neither articles nor prepositions, and the words are ‘agglutinative,’ layered with suffixes. At this point it’s very difficult for translator to translate poem.

Apart from the difference between language-system, there are several other kinds of conflict that one has to face while translating the poetry. That is the “Conflict between ‘author and translator’. It may possible that translator’s subjectivity may become hindrance in translating the poem. He may create new poem out of original. But readers wish for faithful translation conflicts with translator’s desire to make his own poem. Thus translator caught between self-effacement and self-articulation, or between transmission and expression, Ramanujan argued that,

“An artist on oath …caught between the need to express himself and the need to represent another, moving between the two halves of one brain, he has to use both to get close to ‘the originals'”

What potentially saves the translator from the seemingly inescapable subjectivity of his or her relationship with the author of the original is the dynamics of a binding series of ‘several double Allegiances’. He has to perform polyphonic functions. It means the ability of producing many sounds simultaneously. In this case translator may label as “Traitor”. One who betrayed original. But he or she can succeed by working through three sets of conflicting allegiances: to the reader, to the culture of the original text, and to the text’s historical context or tradition. Translator faces conflicting norms: textual fidelity, aesthetic satisfaction and pedagogic utility. While the translator can satisfy the demands of verbal faithfulness and poetic pleasure when he or she negotiates the difficulties of metaphrase, the search for inner and outer forms, subjectivity and conflict between representation and appropriation. , he or she can fulfill the norm of pedagogic utility only by stepping beyond the immediate constraints of textual transmission, and invoking his or her allegiances to a phenomenon that stands outside the text and beyond its reader in translation.

But it’s very difficult for individual to separate himself from inner and outer world. Subconsciously inner world gets reflected into translation. And it’s almost impossible to escape from subjectivity. 

No matter what else the translator does, he or she has to be true to the reader of the translation. This reader, both ‘real’ and ‘imagined’, expects the translator to be faithful to the source-text, at the level of metaphrase and at that of outer and inner form. Reader further expects the poem, as translated, to be a reliable representation of the original text, its language, its poetics and tradition, its historical and cultural contexts and so on.

‘How translation affects Culture?’

This is very pertinent question in the field of translation studies.  In fact, the translation of an individual text or a selection of texts is already a part of the effort to translate that culture. Ramanujan argued, therefore, that even as a translator carries over a particular text from one culture into another, he has to translate the reader from the second culture into the first one. As he puts it in The Interior Landscape,

“Anyone translating a poem into a foreign language is, at the same time, trying to translate a foreign reader into a native one.”

Echoing T.S. Eliot’s argument that a tradition has to be acquired with great labor, Ramanujan acknowledges that ‘Even one’s own tradition is not one’s birthright; it has to be earned, repossessed. The old bards earned it by apprenticing themselves to the masters. One chooses and translates a part of one’s past to make it present to oneself and maybe to others.

#A THEORETICAL CRITIQUE OF RAMANUJAN’S PRACTICE:

Ramanujan’s differences with other theorists of translation, particularly the post-structuralists, reached a friction-point the year before he died, when Tejaswini Niranjana attacked him in the last chapter of her book “Siting Translation”.

Niranjana formulates her critique on two basic levels, finds fault with translation of a single short poem by Allamaprabhu, a twelfth century Virasaiva vacanakara in Kannada, which stands at the very end of Speaking of Siva (SS, 168). 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. To substantiate her assessments, Niranjana reproduces a Kannada text in English transliteration, comments extensively on its individual constitutive elements, and offers her own translation of Allama’s vacana as a superior alternative to Ramanujan’s.  She charges that Ramanujan’s representation of bhakti somehow ‘essentializes Hinduism’ and ‘condones communal violence’. 

Vinay Dharwadker one renowned theorist agrees with Niranjana by saying that “I am sure that Ramanujan, like everyone else, was quite capable of making mistakes and even of twisting a text to fit his own biases, he never claimed to be free of shortcomings or prejudices. In fact, as I have already noted, he reminded his readers that a translator cannot jump off his own shadow, and that a translation is ‘a betrayal of what answers to one’s needs, one’s envies”.

# Comparison of Ramanujan with Benjamin, Derrida and Homi Bhabha:

Ramanujan differs from Derrida and Benjamin in many ways. It is grounded in Benjamin’s debatable arguments about translatability and the so-called law of translation in ‘The Task of the Translator’, and in their appropriation in Derrida’s ‘Des Tours de Babel’. Benjamin’s theory allows Niranjana to assert that Ramanujan fails ‘to comprehend the economy of translation in this poem’ because he does not ‘understand “the specific significance inherent in the original which manifests itself in its translatability”. It also enables her to ‘privilege the word over the sentence, marking thereby what Derrida calls in “Des Tours de Babel”.

Ramanujan accepted some of Benjamin’s ideas but rejected others, especially the latter’s view that the reader was of no importance in the process of translation. At the same time, however, there are obvious theoretical differences between Ramanujan and Benjamin on several other points. Thus, while Benjamin argues that ‘In the appreciation of a work of art or an art form, consideration of the receiver never proves fruitful’, Ramanujan, himself an exemplary self-conscious reader– response critic in many respects, 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. Benjamin was of the opinion that trainability of any work is determined by inside the original text. While Ramanujan asserts that outside world is most affecting feature on translation. Such as the pair of languages actually involved in the intertextual transfer, the translator’s peculiar bilingual sensibility and skill, the interests of the potential readers of the rendering, and so on.

Unlike Homi Bhabha, for instance, who is concerned with demonstrating that all identities are ineluctably 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.

Niranjana used Derrida’s theory of ‘Displacement’. It also enables her to ‘privilege the word over the sentence, marking thereby what Derrida calls in “Des Tours de Babel” a “displacement”.  In Ramanujan theory 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.

# Study of translated poems:

(1) साधारण कमीज़ – MOHAN RANA

दोपहर और शाम के बीच
आता है एक अंतराल
जब थक चुकी होती हैं
आवाजें क्रियाएँ

जैसे अब
समाप्त हो गई सभी इच्छाएँ,
बैठ जाता हूँ किसी भी
खाली कुर्सी पर

पीली कमीज़ पहने
एक लड़का अभी गुजरा
मुझे याद आई
अपनी कमीज़
उन साधारण से दिनों में

यह संभव था
हाँ यह जीवन संभव था
मैं पहने हूँ अब भी
वैसी ही कमीज़

# English Translation:

A Standard Shirt

Between midday and nightfall
there comes a time
when the day's noise and actions
are already done with,

just as now,
all desires quenched,
I am ready to sit down
on any chair.

A boy in a yellow shirt
has just passed by
and made me think
of a shirt of mine
in those old ordinary days.

So it was possible.
Yes, this life was possible.
And here I am, still wearing
a shirt just like that.

-         By Bernard O’Donoghue

# Analysis of translation:

This is very appealing poem written on “Sadharan Kamij” by Mohan Rana in Hindi. And that is translated into English by Bernard O’Donoghue. Here one can analyze language, rhythm, and ‘Interior’ and ‘Exterior’ term given by Ramanujan. There is a change of rhythm in the poem due to translation. When we consider literal translation at that time we find that it is very faithful to original. But final translation has some changes extracted from translator. Exterior and interior worlds of poet are beautifully portrayed in the poem. Such as midday and nightfall, day's noise and actions, A boy in a yellow shirt etc. interior world is also aptly carved in the poem such as all desires quenched, made me think etc.

(2) Poem: 2 by Gagan Gill

# Translated Poem:

Kanjika: Some Lamentations 3

This is the first night

Dry flour is scattered
on the ground

She will come
she will come
she will put her foot down
she will go

We will sleep
we will sleep
even in grief we will sleep

She will see
she will see
she will never see us again

We will tear
we will tear
we will tear out our hair in the morning

She will stop
she will stop
halfway down the road she will stop

We will forget
we will forget
in this very grief we will forget

-         Jane Duran

# Analysis of translated poem:

This is very remarkable poem. One can examine the poem as a literal translation. Rhythm is well managed and translated by translator. But distortion of meaning happened due to subjectivity of translator. In the fifth stanza meaning is quite different than original that is ‘We will tear, we will tear’.

# Conclusion:

Thus, the translator is engaged in carrying over not only texts but also readers, cultures, traditions and himself or herself in radically metamorphic ways. It evolves into an open-ended, multi-track process, in which translator, author, poem and reader move back and forth between two different sets of languages, cultures, historical situations and traditions. the translations that succeed best are those capable of making the most imaginative connections between widely separated people, places and times. The poems and stories Ramanujan himself chose to translate over four decades had the power to make precisely such connections, and they continue to energize his readers’ heterotopic worlds.

Works Cited

DHARWADKER, VINAY. "Post Colonial Translation." DHARWADKER, VINAY. Post Colonial Translation. Ed. Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi. London, 1999.

Discerning the intimacies of intertextuality: A.K Ramanujaam's Hyphenated cosmopolitan Approach to translation theory and practice. 14 january 2018 <http://www.ntm.org.in/download/ttvol/volume8-2/paper_6.pdf>.

Gill, Gagan. Poetry Translation center. 14 January 2018 <http://www.poetrytranslation.org/poems/kanjika-some-lamentations-3/notes>.

rana, Mohan. Poetry Transaltion Center. 3 November 1988. 18 January 2018 <http://www.poetrytranslation.org/poems/a-standard-shirt>.