Article On Translating a Tamil Poem
Abstract
The subject of this paper is not the fascinating external history of this literature, but 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. Once we accept that as a premise of this art, we can proceed to practice it, or learn (endlessly) todo so. As often as not, this love, like other loves, seems to be begotten by Despair upon Impossibility, in Marvell's phrase. Let me try to define this 'impossibility' a little more precisely.
Key points
The sound system of Tamil is very different from English.Tamil has long and short vowels, but English (or most English dialects) have diphthongs and glides. Tamil has double consonants that occur in English only across phrases like 'hot tin' and 'sit tight.' Such features are well illustrated by the above poem in Tamil. Tamil has no initial consonant clusters, but English abounds in them: 'school, scratch, splash, strike', etc. English words may end in stops, as in 'cut, cup, tuck,' etc.
Tamil meter depends on the presence of long vowels and double consonants, andon closed and open syllables defined by such vowels and consonants. For instance, In The first word of the above poem, a~ay, the first syllable is heavy because it is closed (an-), the second is heavy because it has a long vowel (-~Zly). 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.
The constraints of French require you to choose a gender for every noun, but English does not. The lies and ambiguities of one language are not those of another.
When we attend to syntax, we see that 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':
michigan-irundu var~d-a manidarl.
The Tamil sentence is the mirror image of the English one: what is A B C D E in the one would be (by and large) ED C B A 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.
Even when the elements of a system may be similar in two languages, like father. mother, brother, mother-in-law, etc., in kin Ship, 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 about each relative (e.g.,through mother-in-law jokes.step mother tales ,incest taboos) are all culturally sensitive and therefore part of the expressive repertoire of poets and novelists.
The five landscapes of the Tamil area, characterized by hills. seashores, agricultural areas, wastelands, and pastoral fields. each with its forms of life, both natural and cultural.
Every landscape, with all its contents, is associated with a mood or phase of love or war. The landscapes provide the signifiers. The five real landscapes of the Tamil country become. through this system. the interior landscapes of Tamil poetry.
The love poems and war poems are somewhat similarly classified (though the war poems use the landscapes differently and less strictly)
His phrase in 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.
Both the love poems and the war poems provide models and motifs for religious poems. Gods like Krsna are both lovers and warriors. Human love as well as human politics and conflict become metaphors for man's relations with the divine.
If attempting a translation means attempting such an impossibly intricate task, foredoomed to failure. What makes it possible at all? At least four things, maybe even four articles of faith, help the translator.
1. Universals. If there were no universals in which languages partic- ipate and of which all particular languages were selections and combinations, no language learning, translation, comparative studies or cross-cultural understanding of even the most meagre kind would be possible. If such universals did not exist, as Voltaire said of God, we would have had to invent them. They are at least the basic explanatory fictions of both linguistics and the study of literature. Universals of structure, in both signifiers (e.g.. sound systems, grammar, semantics. rhetoric, and poetics) and the signifieds (e.g.. what poems are about, such as love or war, and what they mean within and across cultures). are neces- sary fictions. the indispensable as ifs of our fallible enterprise.
2. Interiorised contexts.
However culture-specific the details of a poem are, poems like the ones I have been discussing interiorise the entire culture. Indeed, we know about the culture of the ancient Tamils only through a careful study of these poems Later colophons and commentaries explore and explicate this knowledge carried by the poems. setting them in context, using them to make lexicons and chatting the fauna and flora of landscapes,
3. Systematicity.
The systematicity of such bodies of poetry, the way figures, genres, personae, etc., intermesh in a master-code, is a great help in entering this intricate yet lucid world of words. One translates not single poems but bodies of poetry that create and contain their original world. Even 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, re-presenting it. Here intertextuality is not the problem, but the solution.
4. Structural mimicry.
Yet, against all this background, the work of translating single poems in their particularity is the chief work of the translator. In this task, I believe, the structures of individual poerns, the unique figures they make out of all the given codes of their language, rhetoric, and poetics, become the points of entry. The poetry and the significance reside in these figures and structures as much as in the un- translatable verbal textures. So one attempts a structural mimicry, to translate relations, not items-not single words but phrases, sequences, sentences; not metrical units but rhythms; not morphology but syntactic patterns.
Conclusion
A Chinese emperor ordered a tunnel to be bored through a great mountain. The engineers decided that the best and quickest way to do it would be to begin work on both sides of the mountain, after precise measurements. If the measurements were pre- cise enough, the two tunnels would meet in the middle, making a single one. 'But what happens if they don't meet?' asked the emperor. The coun- sellors, in their wisdom, answered, '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.
ppt
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