Sahitya Akademi

Translating the Millennium: Indian Literature in the Global Market

Author(s): Vinay Dharwadker
Source: Indian Literature, Vol. 52, No. 4 (246) (July-August 2008), pp. 133-146
Published by: Sahitya Akademi
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23347959
Accessed: 10-08-2020 03:02 UTC

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 TEXT INTO TEXT

Translating the Millennium:

Indian Literature in the Global Market

Vinay Dharwadker

I. Representing Indian Literature

In its basic sense, translation—anuvädin Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi, and othe

Indian languages, and tarjumäin Arabic, Farsi and Urdu—is the representation
of a text in one language with a parallel verbal composition in another
language. As a shared, collective enterprise, translation involves the
representation of large selections of texts, or even entire literatures, in
languages other than the original. In a national context, translation often
becomes the general process of rendering literatures into a lingua franc
or a world language, in order to represent who we are as a nation
what we have been in history, how we think and feel as a people, how
our imaginations work, what we value or believe, how we perceive
ourselves, and how we construe the world.
On any of these planes, and on all of them together, translation
is implicated in both representation and self-representation. Representation
and self-representation are part of the structure of consciousness and
self-consciousness, the 'double consciousness' that, in G. W. F. Hegel's
account, distinguishes human beings from all other creatures. In this
structure, there is no human consciousness without self-consciousness
embedded in it (which generates an infinite regress); and the outward
movement of representation, in which we represent objects to and for
others, is inseparable from its inward movement, in which we represent
objects to and for ourselves. 1 The 'dialectic' of representation is thus
integral to understanding itself, and hence to reason and knowledge. An
essential component of understanding is the capacity of reason and
consciousness to engage in detailed analyses and assessments of objects

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of consciousness and representation, detached from their subjective
significance. This is our capacity for what Immanuel Kant called 'critique',
and given the double structure of consciousness, critique is inextricable
from self-critique. In its most generalized form, then, translation is not
only a process of representation and self-representation, but also a mode
of critique and self-critique, and hence a constitutive element of knowledge
and self-knowledge.2
At this moment of historic transformation, we are poised to take
up, a new role in the cosmo-political order of nations. Our economic
and political empowerment under globalization is necessarily mediated
by our culture, even as our cultural practices and institutions are already
mediated by the transformation of our material existence. We cannot
play our new role on the global stage without a concomitant cultural
rejuvenation, without critically analysing and reassessing who we are, and
without circumspectly representing ourselves to the world. As the historical
examples of England, France, and Germany remind us, the representation
of national literatures in the international public sphere is a vital correlate
of economic and political empowerment. The present moment is an
ideal one to consolidate our resources—as individuals, as groups, and
as a nation—in order to create a satisfactory space for Indian literatures
in the global marketplace.
Although I am a poet in English, I do not hesitate to say that
Indian-English literature by itself is inadequate to represent who we are
to the rest of the world. Only a broad representation of the full range
of Indian literatures, translated into a world language such as English,
can do what is needed. Among these, the languages and literatures of
our antiquity and classical period are now too remote to take centre
stage. Who we are, here and now, resonates on a continuum with the
languages, literatures, histories, and cultures that have evolved over the
past one thousand years or so. Under the circumstances, our immediate
task should be to invent ways of translating the past millennium that
are commensurate with our cultural needs in the twenty-first century.
But the representation of the 'millennium' as such is an abstract
ideal, not a practical goal. Literary translation proceeds word by word,
sentence by sentence, text by text and author by author, and the concrete
particularity of this process has two consequences. On the one hand,
the rendering of a thousand years or so in the 'space-time' of dozens
of languages can only be the cumulative effect of numerous individual
acts of translation. On the other hand, a good translation of a single
major author or text—whether Nammalvar or Lalla, Kabir or Ghalib,
Tagore or Premchand, Vijay Tendulkar or Chandrashekhar Kambar,

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Mahashweta Devi or Amrita Pritam, Dhoomil or Namdeo Dhasal—already
involves the translation of a significant portion of the past millennium.
It is therefore far more useful to reflect on techniques and strategies that
streamline the actual labour of translation, than to pursue an abstract
blueprint. Here I would like to think about what it takes to produce
a translation—an anuväd or a tarjuma—that can represent us satisfactorily
in the global market today. Although much of what I shall say is inevitably
in the didactic and imperative mode, the road-map I offer is partial and
tentative, a sketch of the path ahead that each of us can redraw as we
move forward.

II. Ten Principles of Translation

Some of the practical principles of translation that I wish to spell out

in this context are based on a series of prior assumptions. I assume
that a text, any text, has multiple facets and multiple meanings. Only some
of a literary work's meanings are explicit; the rest remain implicit. In
Euro-American poetics, a word signifies at two levels: its primary signification
is its denotation (the literal or lexical meaning), whereas its secondary
signification is its connotation (an associative or figurative sense). In classical
Sanskrit grammar and poetics, a word has three 'powers' of meaning:
abhidhä (the literal sense, inherent from the root); lakshanä (a figurative
sense); and vyanjanä(a suggested sense). Dhvani or resonance is what emerges
when a word's powers of signification operate within the enclosure of
an utterance.3 In both the Western and the Indian systems, a literary text
is therefore open to interpretation, and generates multiple, valid interpretations.
These assumptions are applicable to translation between any two languages
and are equally applicable to the translation of poetry, fiction and drama
as to other genres of composition. Against the backdrop of these
assumptions, the following guidelines may prove to be the most practical
and useful in the translation of Indian literatures today.
First: Our translations should conform rigorously to international
standards of translation and publication. In a global economy, we cannot
predict where a book will find its readers, at home or abroad. The audience
for Indian literary works in translation is now scattered worldwide and
includes Indians diasporic Indians and non-Indians of every variety
interested in India. Our representations of Indian literature will succeed
in the global market as they ought to only if they conform to international
standards of production, form and content. The material quality and
appearance of many Indian books is now comparable to that of the

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best books in the world, but their organisation and content are often
below par. We ought to render our texts consistently into international
standard English (and not 'Indian' English), unless we have an exceptional
literary reason for deviating from it; we should understand what information
to present and how to present it; and we need to use prefaces, introductions,
notes, citations, bibliographies, glossaries, and indexes skilfully. Twentieth
century British and American translations of European and non-European
literary works into English do all this as a matter of course. The translations
of Aeschylus and Dante, Flaubert and Dostoevskey, Ibsen and Sartre,
García Márquez and Neruda, Orhan Pamuk and Assia Djebar that we
absorb and admire are as impeccable as original works in English. Many
of our translations—even of our classics—are not. Indian literary works
individually, and Indian literatures in ensemble, will not have a lasting impact
comparable to that of European and other literatures (such as Chinese
and Japanese) in the global market until and unless we represent them
in English translations of the first order.
Second: A translation should maximize its reliability. In his preface
to his version of Ovid in 1680, John Dryden distinguished among three
types of translation: a metaphrase, a paraphrase, and an imitation. A
metaphrase is as literal a rendering as possible; it is often 'word by word,
and line by line', or an 'interlinear' version of the original, which omits
nothing and adds nothing. A paraphrase, 'a translation with latitude', is
a more approximate rendering of the general meaning of the text, which
often omits specifics and details. An imitation offers a rendering with
an overall resemblance to the original, without being bound to its form
or content. Dryden himself favoured paraphrase at one point in his career
and then tried to steer between the 'slavishness' of metaphrase and the
'freedom' of paraphrase.4 Vladimir Nabokov gave us a distinctive version
of the ideal of metaphrase: for him, the translator is like a witness on
oath in a modern court of law, sworn to convey 'the text, the whole
text, and nothing but the text'.5 Ezra Pound's advice to translators also
followed the same principle: when you find a line of poetry hard to
understand in the original, translate it as literally as possible, and leave
it up to the reader to make sense of it.6 In our context, producing a
metaphrase maximises the reliability of a translation. Drydan's three genres
of translation parallel the three categories of translation in Sanskrit and
the Sanskritic and Sanskritized modern Indian languages. In one critical
perspective on our tradition, a bhashäntara is a metaphrase; a rüpäntara
changes the outward markers, surface structures, or sound-shape of a
text, but preserves its general content and meaning, along the lines of
a paraphrase; and an anukarana is, more broadly, an imitation or mimicry

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of the original. Here, too, a bhäshäntara—which produces a chhäyä or
verbal 'shadow' of the original—maximises the reliability of the translation,
an ideal worth keeping in mind constantly.7
Third: The proper unit of translation is not the word but the phrase.
In the case of the post-classical Indian languages, producing a word
for-word metaphrase of the original often proves to be an aesthetic disaster
for the translation. An English version of an Indian text does not need
to and cannot, reproduce the word-order and grammar of the original.
As A. K. Ramanujan put it, the best strategy is to render the text 'phrase
by phrase', 'stepwise', structural unit by structural unit.8 Even if the chosen
structural unit is as large as a clause, a line, or a sentence (depending
on the language and the text on hand), this method still produces a reliable
chhäyä or metaphrase. Sanskrit poetics also provides a powerful justification
for such an approach. As I mentioned earlier, Sanskrit theory distinguishes
among three 'powers' of signification, of which abhidhä (the literal sense
or denotation) inheres in a word by itself; but both lakshanä (the figurative
sense, a connotation) and yyanjanä (suggestion), which are essential for
dhvani or resonance, emerge only at the structural level, in phrases and
sentences. It therefore follows that we can produce a reliable metaphrase
only when we treat combinations of words as the building-blocks of
meaning, or when we focus on the väkyärtha rather than the shabdärtha
of the text. A structural rendering will be free to conform to the grammar
and aesthetics of international standard English without sacrificing its close
correspondence to the meanings of the original.
Fourth: The relation between translation and original is not equivalence
but parallelism. We often assume that 'faithfulness to the letter of the
original' means a word-to-word equation or equivalence between the
translation and the original. But no two languages correspond to each
other word-for-word—that is not how words or languages or significations
work. A single word in Hindi or Marathi or Bengali may need a clause
to capture its meanings in English, and a whole phrase in the same language
may be translatable as a single word in English. If we render a text
structurally, phrase by phrase, producing a metaphrase of its väkyärtha,
then each sentence in the original will generate a parallel sentence in the
translation. In any language, a 'sentence' is usually the representation of
one complete thought (which in itself may be a combination of several
thoughts), and for any sentence in one language it is possible to construct
a sentence in another language that articulates the 'same' thought. But
the relation between two such sentences is best described as a 'parallelism',
rather than as an 'equation' or 'equivalence', because each articulates the
thought in accordance with the distinctive codes of its own medium.

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 Fifth: The translator should convey the original's diction, style, voice,
and tone as precisely as possible. 'Diction' refers to both the choice of
words and the order of words in a text; in a commonplace perspective,
an author's diction may be 'high', 'middle' or 'low'. The translator's
adjustment of the diction of his or her own version is vital to the success
of the translation: it ought to be a selection and sequencing of words
that most aptly parallels the diction of the original. Some Indian translators
attempt to elevate all poetry by rendering it persistently in what they think
is a lofty diction; others mix high, middle and low dictions in a single
passage, even when the original does no such thing; and still others use
an informal vocabulary or syntax without being fully in control of colloquial
English. In contemporary world English, it is best to avoid a high diction,
even for epics; a relaxed middle diction, which is neither too formal
nor too informal, is often the most versatile for the widest range of
literary effects; and a low diction, used selectively, will sometimes do
wonders, but mainly for special effects.
An author's 'style' refers, on aggregate, to his or her distinctive choice
of words or vocabulary, distinctive way of combining words into sentences,
distinctive manner of constructing larger units of discourse and text and
distinctive use of texts for expression and communication. A style can
be represented in translation only with sensitive attention to rhythm, pattern
and detail and with a painstaking construction of consistency. It is a major
literary achievement in itself when a translator invents an entire style in
English that parallels an author's signature style in the original. In all honesty,
we have to admit that we still have not done for our major writers
what Gregory Rabassa, for example, has accomplished for García Márquez,
or Maureen Freely has created for Orhan Pamuk.9
To a great extent, diction and style can be analysed and translated
as surface features of language and textuality. In contrast, 'voice' and 'tone'
seem to be encoded inside a text, and hence are aspects of its 'inner
form'. Voice and tone are both characteristic of a writer and are vital

to the meaning and impact of a specific work: they should be 'hear

clearly when a translation combines the best phrases in the best order
to represent its effects. Tagore's English translations of his poetry, fictio
and drama fail because they are atonal, his English was not supple enoug
to capture the nuances of his own voice or the voices of his characters
which are vivid in the original Bengali.10 Without fine modulations of
diction, style, voice, and tone, it is impossible to render a poem, a novel
or a play in one language as an artefact of comparable aesthetic o
imaginative value in another medium.
Sixth: A translation's prime responsibility is to represent the 'inner

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logic' of the original. Much of a translator's time and energy is consumed
by a struggle with the surface qualities of a text. And yet the most important
elements that make a verbal composition a work of art lie beneath its
surface, at the level of 'implicit' components and meanings. Maureen Freely
mentions that the hardest part of her work as Orhan Pamuk's translator
has been to draw out and represent in English the 'inner logic' of the
Turkish language and of Pamuk's prose." This 'inner logic' is buried not
only in the original language but also in its literary tradition and ambient
culture; it is part of what we call bhävärtha (implied meaning), dhvani (the
resonance of suggestions), and sandarbha (context). Without this 'inner logic',
even the explicit words and sentences of a text may not make much
sense. A crucial portion of the translator's labour therefore has to be
directed towards explicating that logic, incorporating as much of it as
possible in the translation itself, and inventing a format in which it can
be made explicit for the translation's reader without disrupting the integrity
of the text.

Seventh: Only a poem can translate a poem. This principle is A.

K. Ramanujan's, but behind it is Dryden's formulation that anyone who
wishes to be a 'thorough translator' of poetry (for example) also 'must
be a thorough poet'.12 A novel has to be rendered as a novel, a play
ji translation has to com e ali/e as dram a on the stage.13 If we combine
the preceding six principles, we can now say that, ideally, an English
translation of a poem has to be a poem in English that parallels the
original metaphrastically and structurally, in diction and style and in voice
and tone, and in its inner form and logic. The practical question tb ask
while preparing such a translation is: How would the original poet have
written this poem, if he or she were a poet in English here and now,
and had the same skills and qualities in English that he or she displays
in the original? To echo Paul Valéry distantly, translation is not just a
rendering of 'the letter of the text' but a construction or reconstruction
of its effects in a different medium.14
Eighth: A translator's job is to translate a text and its readers
simultaneously. A literary translation has to carry over a text from one
language into another, while at the same time carrying over the reader
of the translation from the second language back into the literary tradition
and culture of the first language. This is a double movement in which
the text and its reader move in opposite directions simultaneously, with
both starting in their native habitats and ending up in unfamiliar environments.
Nabokov dreamt of a mountain of footnotes surrounding the translated
text of Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin as the principal mechanism for
transporting the reader from the world of mid-twentieth-century English

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to that of nineteenth-century Russian.15 Ramanujan conceived of prefaces,
introductions, afterwords, endnotes, appendices, and bibliographies, as well
as charts, tables, and diagrams, as the array of devices needed to transpose
English readers imaginatively into the world of Tamil cankam poetry or
of contemporary Kannada fiction.16 The metaphorical double movement
of text and reader is one of the most complex dimensions of translation,
because—beyond the parallelism of the original and its version—it
establishes connections and correspondences between entire literatures,
cultures, histories, and societies.
Ninth: A translation is not only a door or a window but also
a mirror. An anuväd may be said to open a door through which readers
in one language enter the world of another language. Or, a tarjumä or
translation may be imagined as a window through which we peer into
the world of an alien tongue. But a translation is not only for others
to see us or to enter our world. It is, equally importantly, a mirror for
ourselves, in which we see what our literature looks like in the unfamiliar
guise of a different medium.17 Translation de-familiarizes the familiar. When
one reads a first-rate English translation of a poem written originally
one's mother tongue, one sees the poem's strengths and weaknesses in
a new light, experiences its beauty afresh, discovers meanings that one
had missed due to over-familiarity, acquires a basis for comparing it with
poems in other languages that have also been translated into English,
and begins to get a sense of how others perceive it (and why they do
so) in a global frame of reference. As a mode of de-familiarization,
translation mobilizes the dialectic of representation as well as the dialectic
of knowledge: it enables us to represent ourselves to others as well as
to ourselves, even as it enables both critique and self-critique.18 Without
this representation and critique, directed outward at others and inward
at ourselves, we cannot arrive at a mature understanding of who we
are, how we see ourselves, and especially how others see us.
Tenth: For every original, there are several valid translations, though
some are more valid than others. Even at the level of metaphrase, most
sentences in most Indian languages can be rendered in more than one
way into English. This translatory 'heteroglossia' is due as much to the
properties of Indian languages as to the distinctive qualities of English,
and is a systemic (and not merely a contingent) effect. A single text may
therefore have several valid translations that differ significantly from each
other. The validity of multiple—or contested and contesting—renderings"
of an original ought to be a keystone of our core conception of translation.
More broadly, the classical distinctions among a bhäshdntara, a rüpäntara,
and an anukarana acknowledge that a text is open to different translations,

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not only because it has multiple meanings, but also because it can be
rendered in conceptually different ways—without a change of form and
content, with a change of form but not of content, and with a change
of both form and content. To put it differently, both the classical Indian
and early modern European traditions have long recognized that bhäshäntara,
rüpäntara, and anukarana, or metaphrase, paraphrase, and imitation, represent
a continuum of possibilities, which means that a text may undergo a
variety of transformations as we render it from one medium to another.
In a global market, it is essential that we represent Indian literary
works, especially our classics, in as many ways as possible, because no
one translation will fully parallel all the qualities of the original. Even
though some translations are likely to be more valid than others, a healthy
competition among different translators and translations is vital for our
self-knowledge and self-critique, and for our representation of ourselves
to the world. 19

III. The Paradigm in Practice

The ten guidelines I have proposed here comprise one of several possible
paradigms for the practice of literary translation. Keeping in mind the
various qualifications spelt out above, we can now enunciate the paradigm
in a compact form, as follows.

Ten Guidelines for Translation:

1. Our translations should conform rigorously to internatinoal standards.

2. A translation should maximize its reliability.
3. The proper unit of translation is not the word but the phrase.
4. The relation between translation and original is not equivalence but
parallelism.
5. The translator should capture the original's dictin, style, voice, and
tone precisely.
6. A translation's prime responsibility is to represent the 'inner logic' of
the original.
7. Only a poem can translate a poem.
8. A translator's job is to translate a text and its readers simultaneously.
9. A translation is not only a door or a window but also a mirror.
10. For every original, there are several valid translations.

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As in any paradigm of translation, these principles do not constitute a
linear order of procedures. Most of the imperatives, in fact, stand in
tension with the other principles around them, pushing us in different
directions as we try to cope with the unruly multifariousness of literature,
textuality, and representation. Nevertheless, it is possible to pursue these
ideals simultaneously, even if the outcome is not always the ideal we
seek.

As an example of what happens when we put this paradigm into

practice, let me offer my own translation of an early, little-known ghazal
by Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797—1869). Ghalib composed this
poem in a highly Persianized form of what he called Rekhta (which
we now identify as 'Urdu5), probably when he was in his early twenties,
before he left Delhi for his long sojourn in Kolkata. It is one of his
'prayers' in an ongoing private conversation with God, whom he sometimes
addressed as Khudä, but whom he invokes here only as 'You'. The poem
was discovered in the Ghalib archives in 1969, and begins with the couplet
Gadä-e-tükat-e-taknr hai %abän tujh se / ki khämusht ko hai pairäyah-e-bayän
tujh se.~° My measured English rendering runs as follows.

My Tongue Begs fot the Power of Speech

My tongue begs
for the power of speech
that is Your gift to us;
for silence gets
its style of representation
from Your gift to us.

The melancholic weeping

of those who live with disappointment
is Your gift to us;
daybreak's smothered lamp
and autumn's wilted bloom

are Your gifts to us.

The blossoming of wonder

at the sights we see
is tough Love's gift:
the henna on the feet of death,
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the blood of slaughter's victims
are Your gifts to us.
The pre-dawn hour's concupiscence,
the contrivance of effects
that follow later—
the flood of tears,
the colours of grief—
are all Your gifts to us.

Garden after garden

multiplies the mirrors
that fill desire's lap;
the hope that flowers there,
immersed in spring's displays,
is Your gift to us.

Devotion is the veil

that keeps our hubris hidden,

held in check;
the brow that scrapes the ground,
the square prayer mat,
are Your gifts to us.

Our farce-like search for mercy,

our secretive retreat
behind a festival's facade—

the firmness of our courage,

our sorrow at the tests we fail—

are all Your gifts to us.

Asad, in the season of roses,

in an arbour that enchants us

with its overarching latticework,

the winding walk, the bracing easterly,
the flowerbed in bloom
are all Your gifts to us.

This is a metaphrastic structural translation of Ghalib's poem in its entirety,

and is designed to represent the recursive form of the ghazal as well
as his distinctive diction, style, and tone. It also aims to reproduce the

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quality of his unique imagery, even as it (re) traces the explicit and implicit
logic of his dense poetic argument in precise detail. At the same time,
its metrical texture seeks to translate the reader of contemporary English
into the hybrid imaginative world of Urdu, Farsi, and Muslim poetry
as it had emerged in north India by the early nineteenth century. It is
a particularly apt poem to end with, because it is about our 'power
of speech' (täkat-e-taknr) and our 'style[s] of representation' [pairayah
e-bajän), their astonishing origins and their even more astonishing reach
in the domain of articulation in the face of everything that life has to
offer—violence and war, the disappointment of desire, the persistence
of longing, the failure of courage and love, the vulnerability of women,
the weakness of the human will, the effects of time and mortality, the
transience of flowers, the beauty of the seasons, and the enchantments
of beauty—all of which ought to be central concerns for any poet or
translator, 'past, passing, or to come'.

Notes

1. See A. V. Miller, trans., Hegel's Science of Logic (1969; Amherst, New

York: Humanity Books, 1998), pp. 67—90; and G. W F. Hegel,
The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie, 2nd ed. (1910 and
1931; New York: Dover, 2003), Pp. 97-130.
2. See the preface and opening sections of Immanuel Kant, Critique
of Pure Reason (any edition and translation).
3. Besides anuväd, I have used the following twelve terms from Sanskrit
in this paper, which are explained parenthetically in the main text:
abhidhä, lakshanä, vyanjanä, dhvani, bhäshäntara, rüpäntara, anukarana,
chhayä, shabdärtha, väkfärtha, bhävärtha, and sandarbha. Basic definitions
can be found in advanced dictionaries of Sanskrit as well as of
Hindi and Marathi, and of most other Indian languages influenced
by Sanskrit.
4. See John Dryden, 'On Translation', in Rainer Schulte and John
Biguenet, ed., Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essaysfrom Dryden
and Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), Pp. 17—
31.

5. See Vladimir Nabokov, Troblems of Translation: Onegin in English',

in Schulte and Biguenet, Theories of Translation, Pp. 127—43.
6. Pound's broader account of translation is provided in his 'Guido's
Relations', in Schulte and Biguenet, Theories of Translation, Pp. 83
92.

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7. I have deliberately placed the three Indian terms on a continuum
matching Dryden's. In an alternative perspective, anukarana ('doing
in accordance with', imitation, mimicry) is a general process that
parallels anuväd ('speech' or discourse that 'follows after'); bhäshäntara
and rüpäntara then comprise a tighdy-bound binary that defines the
two main modes of anuväd, namely, the metaphrastic rendering
of both form and content, and the paraphrastic rendering of content
but not form. In Indian dramatic and theatrical practice, this binary
also represents the distinction between a 'translation' proper (bhäshäntara)
and an 'adaptation' (rüpäntara) of a play.
8. A.K. Ramanujan, The Interior handscape: hove Poems from a Classical
Tamil Anthology (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press,
1967), pp. 11-12.
9. My reference, in particular, is to Rabassa's renderings of One Hundred
Years of Solitude and Autumn of the Patriarch, and to Freely's versions
of Snow and Istanbul.

10. The atonality of Tagore's English translations, and of the translations

he authorized (such as Surendranath Tagore's), adversely affected
key works such as Gitanjali and Home and the World, and led to
the eclipse of his literary reputation in the Anglophone West after
World War I. Compare the Tagores' collaborative translation of
Ghare Baire with Nivedita Sen's new version, The Home and the World
(New Delhi: shti, 2004); and see Sen's Introduction and Translator's
Note in the latter.

11. See the translator's Afterword to Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book,
trans. Maureen Freely (New York: Vintage, 2006).
12. A. K. Ramanujan, Poems of hove and War: from the Bright Anthologies
and the Ten hong Poems of Classical Tamil (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1985) p. 296; and Dryden, 'On Translation', p.
24.

13. Too many English translations of Indian plays are unperformable,

and many of them are even unreadable. Most of the plays of
the major twentieth-century Marathi playwrights, for example, need
to be translated afresh, with the objective of producing play-texts
in English that meet the same international literary and performance
standards as the translations of, say, Henrik Ibsen, Bertolt Brecht,
Jean Genet, Luigi Pirandello, and Dario Fo.
14. See the quotation from Valéry in A. K. Ramanujan, Speaking of
Siva (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 13.
15. Nabokov, 'Problems of Translation', p. 143.
16. Ramanujan, Interior handscape, p. 11; and the Translator's Note in
U. R. Anantha Murthy, Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man, trans. A.

Vi nay Dharwadker / 145

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 K. Ramanujan, corrected ed. (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978),
p. viii.
17. I have borrowed my mixed metaphor of 'door/window/mirror'
in part from Ramanujan's 'Where Mirrors Are Windows: Toward
an Anthology of Reflections', the opening essay in Vinay Dharwadker,
gen. ed., The Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1999).
18. The Russian formalists decisively identified de-familiarization as 'the
basic function of all [stylistic and compositional] devices', which
I have extended here to translation. See, for example, the discussion
in Uri. Margolin, 'Russian Formalism', in The Johns Hopkins Guide
to Literary Theory and Criticism, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2005).
19 Translation thrives in the Anglo-American tradition for two main
reasons: on the one hand, the tradition encourages multiple translations
of every major author and text; and, on the other hand, it also
encourages each generation to produce its own versions of the
European classics.
20. The text of this ghazal appears in Ali Sardar Jafri, ed., Dwan-e
ghälib (1958, 1988; New Delhi: Rajkamal, 2001), p. 179. The material
on Ghalib is drawn from my Ghalib: Selected Poetty and Prose,
forthcoming from Penguin Classics.

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