Translation As Literary Criticism-Text and Sub-text in Literary Translation

E.V.RAMAKRISHNAN*

A general theory of literary translation between two or morelanguages that can explain or anticipate the problems of linguisticand cultural transfer of meanings and set standards of 'evaluation,appears a near impossibility, given the large number of variablesthe process of translation has to contend with. However, certainprinciples for evaluating the nature and function of translations inthe Indian context between Indian languages and English need to beformulated. During the last decade, a large number of literarytranslations from modern Indian languages into English haveappeared. Do they constitute the national archives of 'IndianLiterature'? Do the translations emphasize the local, the regional orthe national? Do the processes of translation into trans-regionallanguages like English reconstitute a literary work from a modernIndian language? When a European or Latin American text istranslated into a modern Indian language, does its 'truth value'suffer erosion? Do separate strategies of translation producedifferent texts?

I shall confine myself largely to translations between Malayalamand English, though some examples would come from othersources. If one examines the role played by translation in theMalayalam literary history, one is struck by its critical function inthe projection of new horizons of expectations. The standardizationof literary language itself took place through translation. Thepublication of original novels in Malayalam was preceded bytranslations of various prose narratives. Realistic fiction as well asmodernist poetry was accompanied by a large number oftranslations from various European, African, American and LatinAmerican languages. During the period between 1900 and 1975, ofthe 3367 novels published in Malayalam, 344 were translations.That works out to be 11.5%. In the last decades this figure must

* E.V. Ramakrishnan is currently Professor of English in the Dept. ofEnglish, South Gujarat University, Surat, Gujarat.

'Iranslation Todau Volume (1) No (1) Mar. 2004 © CIIL 2004.

Translation As Literary Criticism 37

have marginally grown, as there is growing demand for translatedfiction. Of the 2031 books translated under the category of literature909 are from foreign languages, while 1122 are from Indianlanguages. The break-up for foreign languages is as follows:English (401), Russian (229), French (115) and German (30). Thebulk of translations from Indian languages are from Sanskrit (540),Bengali (266) and Hindi (157). Of late, translations ofcontemporary writings from Kannada and Tamil have begun toappear in large numbers.

A careful examination of these translations suggests a deeperpattern. Translations from foreign languages are dictated by theshifts in literary sensibility. Often a new literary sensibility usestranslations as a means of breaching the hegemony of the prevailingorthodoxies. The translation of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables in1925 marked a breakthrough in fiction as it prepared the readers forrepresentation of lower class life and social conflicts. The largernumber of translations from Maupassant, Anatole France, Chekhov,Dostoevsky and other European masters of fiction made noconcession to the prevailing literary taste. In fact, they could bedescribed as foreignizing translations as they disrupted the culturalcodes that prevailed in Malayalam in the 30s and the 40s. Thefunction of these translations was to make available to the societyalternate models of thinking and imagining the world. It issignificant that very little is translated from Anglo-Americanliterature into Malayalam. English serves as source language ormedium for translation as it has large number of translations fromother European languages and also from African or Latin-Americanliterature. The literary translations that intervene in culture andproject alternative strategies of reading and writing, in effect,function as literary criticism as they force open the very boundariesof what is considered 'literary'.

Here, it may be instructive to distinguish translation as literarycriticism from literary translations that reinforce prevailing literarytaste. Novels from Bengali, and to lesser extent from some otherIndian languages, appear regularly in Malayalam translation. Thefirst Bangia novel to appear in Malayalam was Anand Math byBankim Chandra Chatterjee, in 1909. This was followed by

38 E. V .Ramakrishnan

Durgeshnandini in 1911. Most of the BangIa authors are availablein Malayalam translations: Tagore (50 books), Sharat ChandraChatterjee (48 books), Divijendralal Roy (40 books), BankimChandra Chatterjee (30 books). Several of these novels wereserialized in Malayalam periodicals, something not done from otherIndian languages. While Hindi serves as a medium or sourcelanguage for many of these Indian languages including Bangia,Hindi literature has not really attracted the imagination ofMalayalam readers. Translations from Sanskrit have increased inrecent years, as there is a revival of interest on classical heritage.This kind of translation cannot be described as literary as a largenumber of texts such as the Upanishads or the Vedas are not chosenfor their literary value alone. Here I would like to argue thattranslations from other Indian languages into Malayalam do notfunction as literary criticism. With the possible exception ofTagore, these translations have not resulted in a revision of tasteand model for writing in the literary field. The large number ofBangla novels that appear in Malayalam fulfill the demand forpopular reading material for the middle class readers. The reasonwhy these translations read like Malayalam may have something todo with the shared values and commonness of perceptions. Here theBangla texts are reconstituted in the target language of Malayalamin accordance with 'values, beliefs and representations that pre-exist' in Malayalam. What they confirm is the world-views that areobtained in the social novels of Malayalam. The Bangla text doesnot become a means of destabilizing existing literary value systems.

Domesticating translations become ways of reinforcing certainsubject positions already available in a speech community. A goodexample of this is Malayalam translation of Shivaji Savant'sMrityunjaya with the title Kaman in 1995. The context of thistranslation was the extraordinary popularity of M.T.VasudevanNair's Randamoozham (The Second Turn), which revisits theMahabharat from Bhim's perspective. Mrityunjaya, and this is alsotrue of Khandekar's Yayaati, is not received as a Marathi novel butas one of the possible rewritings of the epic story. The translationwas not done from Marathi original but from its Hindi translation.The poetics of Malayalam already constituted by indigenouscultural history, reading habits and works like Bharataparyatanam,

Translation As Literary Criticism 39

Eni Jnanuraangatte, Karnabhooshanam is reactivated andconfirmed by these translations. They result in validating anexciting poetics. Since the Mahabharat has already been incirculation in various versions and is a cultural text of greatsignificance any subversive rewriting will be resisted by theexisting value systems. In this sense Kaman is not a new text but anendorsement of the canonical status of the Mahabharat as a culturaltext. As far as I am aware play like Andha-Yug by DharmavirBharati has not been translated into Malayalam. Its translation is notlikely to enjoy wide readership.

In the light of the above discussion we are in a position to saythat all literary translations do not have a critical function. Fortranslation to perform the role of literary criticism, the languageshould already have a clearly defined literary field with its owninternal dynamics. To use Pierre Bourdieu's term, only when a fieldof cultural production is well established in a speech community,translated texts can accomplish the critical function which, to agreat extent, may be subversive in its orientation. Bourdieu writes:

..the social microcosm that I call the literary field is a spaceof objective relationships among positions ... and one can onlyunderstand what happens there if one locates each agent oreach institution in its relationships with all the others. It isthis peculiar universe, this 'Republic of Letters', with itsrelations of power and its struggles for the preservation or thetransformation of the established order, that is the basis forthe strategies of producers, for the form of the art theydefend, for the alliances they form, for the schools theyfound, in short, for their specific interests.

We shall come back to this inclusive view of literary field to reviewtranslation as cultural production.

In his study of the German reading public, A. Ward suggeststhat the average middle class reader prefers works which are 'withinhis own experience and range of emotion, reflecting his owninterests and not conflicting with the demands of his morality'. Theidea of foreignizing translation implies certain translating strategies.These strategies operate in a culture where various centres of power

40 E.V.Ramakrishnan

exist simultaneously. These centres of power organize discoursesby canonizing or marginalizing them. Schleiermacher who in 1813advocated foreignizing translation recognized the fact that this kindof literary translation could flourish only in languages which were"freer, in which innovations and deviations are tolerated to a greaterextent, in such a way that their accumulation may, under certaincircumstances, generate a certain characteristic mode ofexpression" .

Lawrence Venuti has commented tha Schleiermacher'sconcept of foreignizing translation is marl 1 by 'bourgeoisindividualism, cultural elitism, Prussian Nation., .•..sm and Germanuniversalism'. What is pertinent to our discussion is that what isforeign in a foreignizing translation performs a revisionary actwithin the target language. Since these translation strategies recoveror reassemble discourses from within' the target language, theyreconstitute literary discourse. It was pointed out above thatMalayalam rarely translates texts from Anglo-American culture.The foreignizing translations in Malayalam can be seen to make acareful selection of foreign texts. Is there an attempt to resist thehegemony of English or at least the cultural values embroidered inAnglo-American texts? The literary discourses favoured by themiddle-class and the working class reproduce the hegemony of theprevailing value system. In the choice of foreign texts and in theirrendering into Malayalam in a manner which resists the hegemonyof prevailing or popular taste, the elitist literary translation inMalayalam clearly address a chosen few, largely the creativewriters in the language and those whose sensibility finds theexisting cultural products limited and limiting.

(2)

One could make use of Pierre Bourdieu's idea of 'symboliccapital' for a clearer understanding of the critical function oftranslation. He argues that symbolic forms or symbolic systems ofexchange cannot be set apart from other modes of practice in asociety. Writers and translators are part of a complex institutionalframework, which authorizes, enables, empowers and legitimizesthem. Literary or artistic value is not the prerogative of everycultural product in a society. What Bourdieu describes as the field

Translation As Literary Criticism

of restricted cultural production, by virtue of its greater autonomyfrom the field of economic capital, is able to achieve greatersymbolic value. The production of literary texts cannot beunderstood in terms of its internal structure alone. This applies totranslated texts in a culture too. We need a larget view of culturalproduction that regulates and organizes texts in a literary field. Asshown above, the choice of foreign texts for translation as well asthe strategies of translation in Malayalam is dictated by theprevailing systems of power in its culture. In the case of Malayalamforeignizing translation deliberately restricts its addressivity toexclude the middle class readership, thus taking literary translationout of the orbit of mass culture. The organization of the field ofculture into such segments is to be seen in the context of relationsbetween culture and capital. The world of social differences isinstitutionalized in the fragmentation of cultural products.Translation as a cultural process cannot escape this larger fate ofsocial hierarchies and divisions.

Translation is a contributing factor in the process ofconsecration and legitimation. Products of popular culture do notseek consecration as artistic products as they are mass-produced foreconomic gain. It is significant that novels, poetry or drama that arecommercially successful in the west are not translated intoMalayalam. The recent Nobel Prize for Naipaul lias not resulted inany excitement about Naipaul's works. However, a well-knownLatin American novel Experanto by Maria has appeared inMalayalam translation with great publicity and fanfare. A recenttravelogue that describes Brazil, with special reference to its peopleand literature has been received very well. Most of the novels byMarquez are available in Malayalam. A volume of Latin Americanstories has just been published. This interest in Latin Americanliterature does not extend to the common middle class reader. It islargely used to consecrate and legitimate a particular modernist orpost-modern style that is yet to gain wide acceptability. In thissense, it is a part of cultural struggle between the marginal avant-garde and the entrenched elitist or highbrow writers. The space forsymbolic goods is highly limited in any literary field and it is herethat the conflict between heresy and orthodoxy is most intense.Translation is employed as a strategy to project a new writing style

42 E.V.Ramakrishnan

or to legitimate a new avant-garde view of art. Andre Leffevere'sdistinction between conceptual grid and linguistic grid may berelevant here. When translation acts as literary criticism, itintervenes in the conceptual grid of a speech community.

(3)

The value or the meaning of translation thus can only beascertained with reference to the entire field of literary production.The internal dialectic of its divisions directs and determines thereception of translation. The translated text is not only constitutedby the strategies of translation from inside but also by the dialecticbetween the economic and the symbolic capital in the culture of thetarget culture. We have seen above that the entire field of culturalproduction that is fragmented into the elitist and the populardetermines the translation of the creative literature into Malayalam.Does such a situation obtain for Indian Writing in EnglishTranslation? How are the literary works born of the historical andsocial context of a particular region received in Indian Englishcontext? I shall briefly discuss some of the questions by comparingthe well-known Malayalam novel Khassakkinte Itihasam (1969) byO.V.Vijayan with its translation The Legends of Khasak (1991) bythe author himself. While the original in Malayalam has gonethrough 28 reprints in the last 32 years, the translation in Englishhas had only two impressions. In his 'Author's Note', O.V.Vijayansays:

It has been difficult translating this book. It is full of denseimages of nature, old folk customs, evocations of castedifferences, the rich play of dialects, all of which are difficultto render into English.

The nature of addressivity in the fictional text of Khasakundergoes a complete change in its translation. The Malayalamoriginal uses a large number of speech genres that may be traced tothe caste differences in the lively sub-culture of a rural localitysituated in the interiors of Palghat that borders on Tamil Nadu. Inhis translation these dialects are rendered opaque and the castedifferences are projected on to religious differences. In the secondchapter titled "The Return" in the original, while describing thefounding myth of Khasak, Vijayan writes:

Translation As Literary Criticism 43

The Ravuthars and the Ezhavas of Khasak offered regular prayersto the spirit of Sheikh living there.

(<m<>ru16)S nJoroarrm &CnJocm 6) n9:HrV6lJ16)crgQlnJ<ID61mTID 6lJ(T'UOc86)16) eJ COOOJ~arrIDOrmoro ~0~'D~OJm~O @nJOm.>l-?dl anJocmJ)

(Pg 18. Avide parthuponna Sheikhinde prethatte KhasakkileRavuttanmarum lizhavarum upaasichhu ponnu.)

Vijayan's translation reads like this:

Both the Muslims and the Hindus of Khasak look upon the Sheikhas their protecting deity. (Legends, p 11)

The question of religious identity is not central to Khasakwhere the magic of legends, fables and myths weave a sacred realmof shared belief. Khasak's consciousness can accommodatecontradictions without allowing them to erupt into violent conflict.What makes the original text polyphonous is not merely thepresence of proliferating dialects but the enactment of multi-voicedness of this community. In the sixth chapter titled "TheSchools" (Vidyaalayangal) we have a scene where the villagersdebate the conflicting positions of the Mullah who is opposed to theschool and the young Khazi who is in favour of it. In theirconversation we have these dialogues:

"The Sheikh's is the truth," they said.""Then, is the Mollacka a lie?" they asked again."Mollacka is also truth.""How can that be?""Truths are many."

This passage is crucial for the entire novel as it denies anessentialist view of reality. However, in translation this passage isrendered as follows:

"The Khazi's truth" they told themselves, "is the Sheikh's truth"

44 E. V .Ramakrishnan

"If that be so," troubled minds were in search of certitude, "is theMollacka the untruth?""He is the truth too""How is it so?""Many truths make the big truth"

The references to the 'troubled minds being in search ofcertitude' and 'many truths making the big truth' completely falsifythe original. The dialogic nature of the original is turned into themonologic assertion of the translated text. This amounts to anideological corruption of the original narrative. In his review of thetranslation N.S. Madhavan points out:

Vijayan not only rewrote the novel but did some writing also. Hewrote the novel afresh in parts, selectively, choosing those areaswhere the authority of the day's political correctness is mostdomineering, namely sex and politics.

It is not merely a question of political correctness. By the timeVijayan came to translate Khasak, he was a changed person whohad turned deeply spiritual. The transgressions of Khasak whichmade it a radical text in Malayalam could have well appearedpedantic and trivial in English where the realm of restrictedproduction is largely occupied by apolitical, pan-Indian texts. Thisalso brings a deeper problem of the subtexts here. The historicalcontext of Khasak is Vijayan's own disenchantment with ideologiesin general and communism in particular. The verbal energy of theoriginal came from a celebration of the transient, the carnal and thephysical. Vijayan radicalised the discourse of Malayalam fiction byproblematizing. the normative. The symbolic value of Khasakderives from its heretic function in Malayalam fiction. Now theproblem with the translation into English is that no such slot in therealm of restricted cultural production exists in Indian Englishfiction for works translated from modern Indian languages. IndianWritings in English Translation do not constitute symbolic capitalthat can reconstitute what is literary. In the absence of such criticalfunction, Vijayan's avant-garde text slides into a nameless limbowhere its function is not critical but celebratory. It consecratesVijayan as an Indian writer. Khasak becomes an Indian Macindawhere everything happens in another time and place. In the absence

Translation As Literary Criticism 45

of social and political sub-texts, the translated text becomes theother of the original something which Vijayan would not haveanticipated or even endorsed.

References

Venuti, Lawrence. (ed) 1999 L'invisibilita del traduttore: unastoria della traduzione. Translated by M. Guglielmi, Roma: ..Armando Editore.

Venuti, Lawrence.1995 The Translator's Invisibility: A History ofTranslation, London and New York: Routledge.

Ward, A. 1974 Book Production, Fiction and the German ReadingPublic 1740-1800, OUP. .