Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of Modernist Poetic Discourse in Indian Poetry
-E. V. Ramkrishnan
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 twentieth century, between 1950 and 1970.
The chapter will study examples from Bengali, Malayalam and Marathi, to understand how such translations of modern Western poets were used to breach the hegemony of prevailing literary sensibilities and poetic modes. Many of the major Indian poets - such as Buddhadeb Bose, Agyeya, Gopalakrishna Adiga, Dilip Chitre and Ayyappa Paniker - were also translators Their translations were 'foreignising' translations that disrupted cultural codes that legislated regimes of reading and writing poetry. Also, translations during the early phase of modernism in major Indian languages appeared in little magazines that played a critical role in opening up the poetic discourse.
Poets such as 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 a performative act of legitimation, in evolving a new poetic style during the modernist phase of Indian poetry.
Translation was integral to the project of modernism in Indian languages, in assimilating a new poetic into the horizon of the 'native' reader's expectations as well as in contesting the claims of prevailing aesthetic norms by breaching its autonomy and authority.
Communal riots and killings that followed the Partition, the perceived failure of the Nehruvian project of modernity and the consequent erosion of idealism which had inspired an earlier generation of writers committed to socialist realism and Romantic nationalism.
André Lefevere's concept of translation as refraction/ writing, the chapter argues that 'rewritings' or 'refractions' found in the less obvious form of criticism..., commentary, historiography (of the plot summary of famous works cum evaluation type, in which the evaluation is unabashedly based on the current concept of what "good" literature should be), teaching, the collection of works in anthologies, the production of plays' (2000, 235) are also instances of translation. Hence, an essay on T. S. Eliot in Bengali by Sudhindranath Dutta, or a scathing critique in Malayalam on the poetic practices of Vallathol Narayana Menon by Ayyappa Paniker, can also be described as 'translational' writings as they have elements of translation embedded in them.
Modernist writers were responding to the internal dynamics of their own traditions in selectively assimilating an alien poetic that could be regressive or subversive depending on the context and the content.
'Modernity' and 'modernism in the Indian context will need a separate chapter. For the purpose of our 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 rationalized temper, resurgence of nationalist spirit and emergence of social, political, legal, juridical and educational institutions that constituted a normative subjectivity embodied with cosmopolitan and individualist world views.
The project of modernity in India was implicated in colonialism and imperialism. This colonial modernity informed literary and cultural movements, beginning from the reformist movement of the nineteenth century to the modernist movement of the mid-twentieth century.
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'
The term 'modernism' implies a literary/artistic movement that was characterised by experimentation, conscious rejection of the nationalist/ Romantic as well as the popular, and the cultivation of an individualist, cosmopolitan and insular world view.
The aesthetics of modernism in the West had a transnational, metropolitan world view that excluded the claims of the local and the national and made no concession to the popular taste. While the modernism that emerged in Indian literatures shared many of these defining features, its political affiliations and ideological orientations were markedly different.
postcolonial location, the Indian modernism did not share the imperial or metropolitan aspirations of its European counterpart. It invested heavily in regional cosmopolitan traditions. It was oppositional in content and questioned the colonial legacies of the nationalist discourse. It was elitist and formalistic and deeply distrustful of the popular domain.
How are we evaluate the modernisms that emerged in the postcolonial phase in India? Critics such as Simon Gikandi, Susan Friedman, Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, and Aparna Dharwadker have argued that non Western modernisms are not mere derivative versions of a European hegemonic practice.
The Eurocentric nature of the discourse on modernism can be laid bare only by documenting the 'modernisms' that emerged in non-Western societies. This will enable us to reimagine the centre-periphery dialectic in terms of a dialogic between peripheries.
Western modernism and the Indian one, the different trajectories they traversed as a result of the difference in socio- political terrains and the dynamics of the relations between the past and the present in the subcontinent, which has a documented history of more than five thousand years! The problematic that informs this argument is manifest in the critiques of Eurocentric accounts of modernism by Gikandi, Friedman, Doyle and Winkiel, and Rebecca L. Walkonwitz. in different ways.
In the context of Bengali, as Amiya Dev has observed, 'It was not because they imbibed modernism that the adhunik [modernist] Bengali writers turned away from Rabindranath; on the contrary, Modernism was the means by which they turned away Rabindranath and they had to turn away, for their history demanded it
(in Ananthamurthy et al 1992, 7). Commenting on the role of Kannada modernists, R. Sasidhar writes,
If European modernism was drawn between the euphoric and the reactive, in Kannada the precipitate modernism was drawn between the Brahminical and the non-Brahminical. Just as the cuphoric 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 modernism that came as a reaction to the Nehruvian environment. (in Satchidanandan 2001, 34)
Translation enables us to delineate the complex artistic and ideological undercurrents that shaped the course of modernism in Indian literatures. To discuss this, we will look at 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 These authors help us see the chronological trajectory of modernism across Indian literatures.
Translation is central to the modernist poetic as it unfolded in these literary traditions. Each of these three authors was bilingual and wrote essays in English as well as their own languages, outlining their new, poetic, thus preparing the reader for new poetic modes.
Buddhadeb Bose, another Bengali modernist, rendered 112 poems of Charles Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil into Bengali, apart from translating Rainer Maria Rilke, Friedrich Hölderlin, Ezra Pound, e. e. cummings, Wallace Stevens and Boris Pasternak Ayyappa Paniker translated European poets into Malayalam,) while B. S. Mardhekar's Arts and the Man (which was published in England in 1937) was a treatise on formalist aesthetic that legitimated modernist practice.
Their profound understanding of Western philosophy and artistic/literary traditions equipped these three writers with the critical capacity to see the significance and limitations of the West.
modernist poetic is argued in a persuasive manner in the context of the everyday world and its needs. In another essay, 'The Highbrow he observes, 'I agree with Virginia Woolf that creative artists must from time to time seek shelter within the much maligned Ivory Tower (9).'
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 oases that may escape destruction it may be cherished through the interregnum'
Modernism in India was part of a larger decolonising project.It was not a mindless celebration of Western values and the European, avant-garde.
Kurkshetram is a poem of 294 lines in five sections. The opening lines of the Bhagavad Gita are cited as the epigraph of the poem, thus setting a high moral and critical tone in relation to contemporary life and society. As in Eliot's The Waste Land, Kurukshetram's opening lines communicate a pervasive decline of moral values and a disruption of the organic rhythms of society:
The eyes suck and sip
The nerves drink up the coursing blood,
The tears that spurt.
And it is the bones that
Eat the marrow here
While the skin preys on the bones
The roots turn carnivore As they prey on the flowers
Clutches and tears at the roots. (Paniker 1985, 14-15)
While the earth in bloom
The title, 'Kurukshetram', signifies the place where the epic battle that forms the central theme of the Mahabharata took place. The poem progresses through broken images from contemporary life, but there are also redemptive memories of forgotten harmonies that recur through the metaphor of the dream. The evocative rhythms of the poem provoke a profound disquiet that cannot be particularised.
The second section of the poem retreats into a private space, away from these public images. The inner movement of the poetic structure signifies the undercurrents of a conflict that cannot be paraphrased in moral terms.
The third section returns to the public world of conflicts. The mythical characters of Sugriva, Vibhishana, Vashistha, Lord Ram, Arjuna and Oedipus are invoked in this section. The wisdom encoded in myths is now inaccessible to modern men and women, who are diminished into fragmented dehumanised figures. Since the self inhabits a violated space, it lacks the power to know itself.
It is important to understand the indigenous roots/routes of modernity and modernism in all the three writers discussed above. They partake of the logic of a postcolonial society which had already developed internal critiques of Western modernity.
The modernist subject was fragmented and fractured in the Indian context, but not for reasons that constituted fragmented selves in the Western context. Colonial modernity operated within the Indian context as a realm of desire which brought into being a new social imaginary. The formalist poetic of modernist poetry corresponded to an inner world of desire that produced a language bristling with disquiet and angst. 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 stays against confusion' (Ramanan 1996, 56). Thus, language became, for the modernists, the only reality that they could relate to. Their moment of re-cognition, enabled by the discourses of 'Western' modernism, was postcolonial in its essence. The self-reflexive mo(ve)ment 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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