Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins

Article - 9 Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of Modernist Poetic Discourse in Indian Poetry by E.V. Ramkrishnan 

Introduction 

This chapter examines the role played by translation in shaping a modernist poetic sensibility in some of the major literary traditions of India in the 20th century, between 1950 and 1970.

The chapter will study examples from Bengali, Malayalam and Marathi, to understand how such translation of modern Western poets were used to breach the hegemony of prevailing literary sensibilities and poetics modes.Buddhadeb Bose, Agyeya, Gopalakrishna Adiga, Dilip Chitre and Ayyappa Paniker were Indian poets and translators. Translation from Africa and Latin America poetry played a significant role in the phase of modernism. Neruda and Parra were widely translated into Indian languages during this phase. In this context, translation enacted a critical act of evaluation, a creative act of intervention, and performative act of legitimation, in evolving a new poetic style during the modernist phase of Indian poetry.

The term "translation suggest a range of cultural practices, from critical commentary to creation of intersexual text.Andre Lefevere's concept of translation as reflections/ rewriting, the chapter argues that rewritings and reflections found in the 'less obvious form of criticism...,commentary, historiography, teaching, the collection of works in anthologies, the production of playshare also instance of translation.An essay on T.S. Eliot in Bengali by Sudhindranath Dutt, or scathing critique in Malayalam on the poetic practices of Vallathol Narayana Menon by Ayyappa Paniker, can be described as 'translational' writing. In India, modernism, as a practice, differed from west, but it fulfilled a function in the socio-cultural contexts of Indian languages by transforming the relations between text and reader, and the modes of writing and reading.

Gopalakrishna Adiga or Gain An Madhav Muktibodh larger modernist tradition which accommodated ideologies and innovative experimental styles.

Key points

Modernity and Modernism 

The purpose of discussion it may be broadly stated that Modernity designates an epochal period of wide-ranging transformations brought about by the advent of colonialism, capitalist economy, industrial mode of production, Western models of education, assimilation of rationalist temper, resurgence of rationalist spirit and emergence of social,political, legal,  and educational institutions that constituted a normative subjectivity embodied with cosmopolitan and individualist world views.

It has also been argued that such a modular modernity, as envisaged in Western terms, brought about a rupture in the social and cultural life of India, separating its 'modern period' from what was 'pre-modern'.

The dynamics of literary expression and the apparatus of cultural transmission came to be redefined in the 'modern' period.

The project of modernity in India was implicated in colonialism and imperialism. As Dilip Chitre observes, 'what took nearly a century and half to happen in England, happened within a hurried half century' in Indian literature(1967,2). While introducing works of 8.5. Mardhekar(Marathi modernist), Chitre says 'The poet B.S. Mardhekar was the most remarkable product of the cross-pollination between the deeper, larger native tradition and contemporary world culture'. 

It has been argued that the idea of a referential or self-validating literary text (P.P. Raveendran in Satchidanandan 2001,60-61), which is central to modernist poetry, is rooted in an ideology of the aesthetic that was complicit with colonialism. D.R.Najara) has pointed out that as nationalism became the ideology of the nation state. He adds,

'When ideologies like nationalism and spirituality become apparatuses of the state, a section of the intelligentsia has no option other than to seek refuge in bunkers of individualism'(Nagaraj in Ananthamurthy 1992, 108).

Literary/artistic movement of modernism

The term Modernism implies a literary/artistic movement that was characterized by experimentation, conscious rejection of the nationalist/ Romantic as well as popular.

In the European context, it signified a set of tendencies in artistic expression and writing style of the late 19th and early 20th century through a new aesthetic that was iconoclastic, insular and elitist. The modernism that emerged in Indian literature shared many of these defining features, its political affiliations and ideological orientations were markedly different. its postcolonial location, Indian modernism did not share the imperial or metropolitan aspirations of its European counterpart. The modernist phase in Indian language traditions has not been recognised as part of the global modernist movement.

The postcolonial context adds a complex political dimension to the aesthetic of Indian modernism.

How are we evaluate the modernism that emerged in the postcolonial phase in India? Critics such as Simon Gikandi,Susan Friedman, Laura Doyle

Laura Winkiel, and Aparna Dharwadker have argued that non-Western modernism are not mere derivative versions of European hegemonic practice. The problematic that informs this argument is manifest in the critiques of Eurocentric accounts of modernism.

The reception of Western modernist discourses in India.

The reception of Western modernist discourses in India was mediated by the dynamics of socio-political upheavals related to the formation of the nation state and the realignment of power structures in society. The oppositional content of the modernist sensibility functioned differently in each regional language.

In the Bengall context, as Amiya Dev observed, 'It was not because they imbibed modernism that the  (modernist) Bengali writers turned away from Rabindranath; on the contrary, Modernism was the means by which they turned away from Rabindranath and they had to turn away, for their history demanded it'(in Ananthamurthy et al 1992,7).

R. Sasidhar writes,If European modernism was drawn between the  and the reactive, in Kannada the precipitate modernism was drawn between the Brahmanical and the non-Brahmanical. Just as the euphoric and the reactive modernisms were part of the internal dynamics of modernism itself, so also the Brahmanical and the non-Brahmanical modernisms in Kannada were part and parcel of a  that came as a reaction to the Nehrustan environment. 

Translation the course of modernism in Indian Literature

Translation enables us to delineate the complex artistic and ideological undercurrents that shaped the course of modernism in Indian literature. The three representative modernist authors from three separate Indian literary traditions-Sudhindranath Dutta 1901-60) from Bengali, B.S.Mardhekar(1909-56) from marathi,and Ayyappa Paniker(1936-2004) from Malayalam.

Their essays elaborated the basic feature of a new aesthetic against the prevailing Romantic-nationalist or Romantic-mystical traditions.

Sabindranath Dusta translated Stephanie  and Paul Valery into Bengali.

Buddhadeb Bose, rendered 112 poems of Charles Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil into Bengali, apart from translating Rainer Maria Rilke, Friedrich Holderlin, Ezra Pounds, e.e. cummings., Wallace Stevens and Boris Pasternak. Ayyappa Panikey translated European poets into Malayalam.

Their discursive prose on matters of form in poetry seen as part of attempt to 'translate modernism' into Indian terms.The indigenous roots/routes of modernity and modernism Sudhindranath Dutta (1901-60)

The primacy of the word.In 'The Necessity of Poetry', Dutta argues that the persistence of poetry through the ages in all societies, particularly among the unsophisticated and the primitive, attest to its necessity.

Dutta believes that only the poetic mind, whatever its norm, can intuit associations where reason faces a void.The modernist poetic is argued in a persuasive manner in the context of the everyday world and its needs. "The Highbrow, he observes, agrees with Virginia Woolf that creative artists must from time to time seek shelter within the much maligned Ivory Tower'.

He invokes the art of Jamini Roy for having boldly shown the way forward by evolving a universal mode of representation, using elements of traditional Indian art(Chaudhuri 2008, 24).

Dutta highlights Eliot's commitment to tradition as revolutionary in the fullest sense of the term' He adds, 'But I am convinced that if civilization is to survive the atomic war, Mr. Eliot's ideal must become widely accepted, so that in the cases that may escape destruction it may be cherished through the 'interregnum'.

"The Camel-Bird' poem is about the crisis of perception that can only be remedied by reinventing oneself completely. As a modernist poem, Its voice of anguish is personal and intimate, bearing testimony to a personal crisis, its larger burden is the quest for humanity in a brutalized world, and the recovery of a sense of community in an uprooted world of isolated slaves.

Conclusion:

Translation enabled the displaced self of modernity to locate itself in a language that was intimately private and, also, outspokenly public. The idiom of their expression afforded the possibility of self-knowledge through epiphanies that brought 'momentary stay against confusion'. Thus, language became, for the modernists, the only reality that they could relate to. Their moment of recognition. enabled by the discourses of 'Western' modernism was postcolonial in its essence. The self- reflexive movement was also made possible by the carrying across of not content or form, but an interior mode of being that questioned the prevailing limits of freedom.

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