On Translating a Tamil Poem

Sixth Article:- “Translation and literary history: An Indian view” - Ganesh Devy

Abstract 

The article or an excerpt if to say so with reference to the book titled as 'The Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan' (1999)- titled as 'On Translating a Tamil Poem discusses the difficulties in translating one literary text having its origin in native or particular language into the foreign language on grounds of the diverse nature of phonetics, linguistics, and grammatical aspects of the selected languages which are tabled for translating the text into them. The essay gives meticulous accounts of difficulties and variation with ample examples from Tamil Poetry and English Rhymes while translating selected text of one language into the other one/s. It serves as the pre-reading piece for any translator of the world working within or without the boundaries of academics or is a freelancer translator. The author has objectively put the practical exertion of translation and become the part of the vast field of Translation Studies.

Key points 

'How does one translate a poem from another , another culture, another language? The poems translated from Tamil were written two thousand years ago in a comer of south India, in a Dravidian language relatively untouched by the other classical language of India, Sanskrit.

Hebrew in the Middle East, and Chinese in the Far East were Tamil's contemporaries. Over two thousand Tamil poems of different lengths, by over four hundred poets, arranged in nine anthologies.

Translation, the transport of poems from classical Tamil to modern English; the hazards, the damages in transit, the secret paths, and the lucky bypasses.

The chief difficulty of translation is its impossibility. Frost once even identified poetry as that which is lost in translation. 

Here is a poem from an early Tamil,anthology,Airikuruniiru 203, in modern Tamil script (Ramanujan 1985, 230).

அன்னாய் வாழிவேண் டன்னைநம் படப்பைத் தேமையங்கு பாலினு மினிய வவர்நாட் டுவலைக் கூவற் கீழ

மானுண் டெஞ்சிய கலிழி நீரே.

Transcribed in phonemic Roman script, it looks like this: 

 valiven tannainam patappait tēnmayanku palinu miniya vavarnāt tuvalaik kuvar kila teñciya nirē

How shall we divide up and translate this poem? What are the units of 

translation? We may begin with the sounds.

Tamil has six nasal consonants: a labial, adental, an alveolar, a retroflex, 

a palatal and a velar-m, n, n. ii, n, n-three of which are not distinctive in English. How shall we translate a six-way system into a three-way 

English system (m, n, n)? 

Tamil has long and short vowels, but English (or most English dialects) have diphthongs and glides. 

Tamil has no initial consonant clusters,English words may end in stops .

Phonologies are systems unto themselves (even as grammatical, syntactic, lexical, semantic systems).

It is impossible to translate the phonology of one language into that of another even in a related, culturally neighboring language. 

The syntax, the meanings. the poem itself, as in this delightful example of a French phonological translation of an English nursery rhyme:

Humpty Dumpty Sat on a wall

Humpty Dumpty

Had a great fall

And all the king's horses And all the king's men

Couldn't put Humpty Dumpty

Together again.

French Phonological Translation 

Un petit d'un petit

S'etonne aux Halles

Un petit d'un petit

Ah! degrés te 

Indolent qui ne sort cesse

Indolent qui ne se mène

Qu'importe un petit d'un petit Tout Gai de Regennes.

We should translate the metric system. In the first word of the above poem, The first syllable is heavy because it is closed (an-), the second is heavy because it has a long vowel (-nay). There is nothing comparable in English to this way of counting feet and combinations (marked in the 

'text above by spaces).

English has a long tradition of end-rhymes-but Tamil has a long tradition of second syllable consonant rhymes.

One poetry would be the innovation of another.

Tamil has no copula verbs for equational sentences in the present tense, as in English, e.g., 'Tom is a teacher'; no degrees of in adjectives as in English, e.g., 'sweet, sweeter, sweetest; no articles like 'a, an, the' etc. Tamil expresses the semantic equivalents of these grammatical devices by various other means.

French requires you to choose a gender for every noun, but English does not. The lies and ambiguities of one language are not those of another.

Evans-Pritchard, the anthropologist, used to say: If you translate all the European arguments for atheism into Azande, they would come out as arguments for God in Azande.

No translation can be 'literal,' or 'word for word'. That is where the impossibility lies. The only possible translation is a 'free' one.

Tamil syntax is mostly left branching. English syntax is, by and large, rightward. Even a date like 'the 19th of June, 1988,' when translated into Tamil, would look like 1988, June, 19. A phrase like:-

A B C D E

The man who came from Michigan

would be 'Michigan-from come-[past tense]-who man':

E D C B A

 michigan-irundu v and-a manidan.

The Tamil sentence is the mirror image of the English one: what is A B CDE in the one would be (by and large) EDCBA in Tamil.

If poetry is made out of, among other things, 'the best words in the best order', and the best orders of the two languages are the mirror images of each other, what is a translator to do?

The most obvious parts of language cited frequently for their utter untranslatability are the lexicon and the semantics of words.For lexicons are culture-specific. Terms for fauna, flora, caste distinctions, kinship systems, body parts, even the words that denote numbers, are culturally loaded.

when the elements of a system may be similar in two languages, like father. mother, brother, mother-in-law, etc., in kinship, the system of relations (say. who can be a mother-in-law. who can by law or custom marry whom) and the feelings traditionally encouraged.

The entire poetic tradition, its rhetoric. Entire taxonomy a classification of reality. as part of its stock-in-trade. The five landscapes of the Tamil area, characterized by hills. seashores, agricultural areas, wastelands, and pastoral fields.

Instance. The first poem we cited 1s a poem---kurinci a plant that grows six thousand to eight thousand feet above sea level representing the mountains. [he night. the season of' dew. the mood of first love, and the lovers' first secret sexual union. In the war poems the same landscape is the scene for another kind or clandestine action:a night attack on a fort set in the hills.

'An infinite use of finite means'.When one translates, one is translating not only Tamil, its phonology, grammar and semantics, but this entire intertextual web, this intricate yet lucid second language of landscapes which holds together natural forms with cultural ones in a code, a grammar, a rhetoric, and a poetics.

English tries to preserve the order and syntax of : themes, not of single words: (I) his land's waler, followed by (2) leaf- : covered waterholes, and (3) muddied by animals. I still could not bring the word 'sweeter' (iniya) into the middle of the poem as the original does.

The love poem gets parodied, subverted and played with in comics, poems and poems about poems.

Single poem is part of a set, a family of sets,a landscape (,one of five), a genre (puram,Comic or religious). The intertextuality is concentric on a pattern of memberships as well as neighborhoods, of likenesses and unlikenesses. Somehow a translator has to translate each poem in ways that suggest these interests, dialogues,and networks.

1)Universals:-

If there were no universals in which languages participate and of which all particular languages were selections and combinations, no language learning, translation, comparative studies or cross-cultural understanding of even the most meager kind would be possible.Both signifiers (e.g.. sound systems. grammar, semantics. rhetoric, and poetics) and the signified.

2)Interiorised contexts:-

However culture-specific the details of a poem are. poems like the ones I have been discussing interiorise the entire culture. Lexicons and charting the fauna and flora of landscapes.Tamil poem, is also translating this kind of intertextual web, the meaning-making of colophons and commentaries that surround and contextualize poems.

3)Systematicity:-

If one chooses not to translate all the poems, one chooses poems that cluster together, that illuminate one another, so that allusions, contrasts, and collective designs are suggested. One's selection then be- -comes a metonymy for their world, representing it. Here intertextuality is not the problem, but the solution.

4) Structural mimicry:-

Against all this background, the work of translating single poems in their particularity is the chief work of the translator.A Chinese emperor ordered a tunnel to be bored through a great mountain. 'But what happens if they don't meet?''If they don't meet, we will have two tunnels instead of one. So too, if the representation in another language is not close enough, but still succeeds in 'carrying' the poem in some sense, we will have two poems instead of one.

Conclusion 

Translation is to 'metaphor, to 'Carry Across".Translations are transposition, renactments,interpretations.Some elements of original cannot be transposed at all.Textures are harder to translate than structures, linear order more difficult than syntax, lines more difficult than larger patterns.

The Translation must not only represent, but re- present, the original.

A translator is an ``artist on oath".The representation in another language is not close enough, but still succeeds in 'carrying' the poem in some sense, we will have two poems instead of one.

Word count:- 

1,567