This document provides an overview of A.K. Ramanujan's article "On Translating a Tamil Poem". It discusses Ramanujan's conception of translation as dealing with multiple levels simultaneously, including the translator's material, means, and objectives. It also summarizes Ramanujan's distinction between outer and inner poetic forms, and some of the key challenges he faced in translating Tamil poetry into English, such as differences in sound systems and syntax between the languages. The document analyzes Ramanujan's approach to structural mimicry in translation and concludes by discussing universals in translation and the balance between representing and re-presenting the original work.

1. On Translating a Tamil
Poem
By A. K. Ramanujan
Prepared by
Sneha Agravat
Latta Baraiya

2. Table of Content
● Introduction
● A. K. Ramanujan
● Abstract of article
● Key Arguments
● Analysis
● Outcome of Article
● Conclusion

3. Introduction

4. ● Article starts with the talk of world literature
● Ramanujan ask the question,
'How does one translate a poem from another time,
another culture,another language?
● subject of this paper is not the fascinating external
history of this literature, but translation, the transport
of poems from classical Tamil to modem English; the
hazards, the damages in transit, the secret paths, and
the lucky bypasses.
● Ramanujan took various examples of Tamil poems that
he translated into English and he described difficulties
that he faced during translation.

5. A. K.
Ramanujan

6. ● Attipate Krishnaswami Ramanujan
● Born : 16 March 1929
● Notable works :
● The Striders; Second Sight
● Notable awards :-
● MacArthur Fellowship, Sahitya Akademi
Award and Padma Shree
● Ramanujan was a poet, scholar, professor,
philologist, folklorist, translator, and
playwright.
● His academic research ranged across five
languages: English, Kannada, Tamil,
Telugu, and Sanskrit.
● He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi
Award posthumously in 1999 for The
Collected Poems.

7. RAMANUJAN’S
CONCEPTION OF
TRANSLATION

8. ➢ Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi said in the article that,
❏ In his published work Ramanujan reflected on translation most often
in the context of poetry, and conceived of it as a multi- dimensional
process in which the translator has to deal with his or her material,
means, resources and objectives at several levels simultaneously.
❏ Ramanujan was acutely conscious that even the most scrupulous
translator’s care and craftsmanship cannot solve the problems of
attempting what John Dryden, in 1680, had called metaphrase, the
method of ‘turning an author word by word, and line by line, from one
language into another’.
❏ Ramanujan developed his conceptions of ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ poetic
form from two culturally incommensurate sources. On the one hand,
he owed the distinction in part to Noam Chomsky’s analysis of surface
and deep structure in discourse, and to Roman Jakobson’s rather
different structuralist analysis of the grammar of poetry, especially the
latter’s distinction between ‘verse instance’ and ‘verse design’.

9. ❏ Ramanujan also applied the distinction between outer and inner form to
his own practice as a scholar and poet when, in a rare and therefore
frequently quoted comment, he said that English and my disciplines
(linguistics, anthropology) give me my ‘outer’ forms –linguistic, metrical,
logical and other such ways of shaping experience; and my first thirty
years in India, my frequent visits and fieldtrips, my personal and
professional preoccupations .
❏ with Kannada, Tamil, the classics, and folklore give me my substance, my
‘inner’ forms,images and symbols. They are continuous with each other,
and I no longer can tell what comes from where.
❏ To a remarkable extent Ramanujan’s differentiation between outer and
inner form, which he formulated in the late 1960s or early 1970s,
parallels the distinction between ‘phenotext’ and ‘genotext’ which Julia
Kristeva developed around the same time from the same structural-
linguistic sources, but which she deployed in a post- structuralist
psychoanalytical theory of signifying practices.
(Bassnett, Susan, and Harish Trivedi)

10. Key
Arguments

11. ● Frost once said “poetry as that which is lost in translation”.
● 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. Such observations certainly disabuseus of the
commonly-held notion of 'literal' translation.
● Woollcott argued that English does not have left-
branching possibilities, but they are a bit abnormal.
● Hopkins's and Thomas's poetry the leftward syntax is
employed for special poetic effects-it alternates with other,
more 'normal', types of English sentences. In Tamil poetry
the leftward syntax is not eccentric, literary or offbeat. but
part of everyday 'natural' speech.

12. Analysis

13. ❏ Translation is not only about text it's about
translation of time, other culture, other language.
❏ Problems in translation.
❏ Any single poem is part of a set, a family of sets, a
landscape, a genre.
❏ While translating Tamil poem Ainkurunuru 203,
He begin with the sounds. He find that the sound
system of Tamil is very different from English.
For instance, Old Tamil has six nasal consonants:
a labial, a dental, an alveolar, a retroflex, a palatal
and a velar-m, n, n, ñ, n, n-three of which are not
distinctive in English.

14. ❏ 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.
❏ For example : in Gujarati there are 13 vowels
and 34 consonants (Holmes, Jonathan) & in
English 5 vowels and 21 consonants.(Questions
on Vowels and Consonants)
❏ The language within a language becomes the
second language of Tamil poetry.

15. ● You have to readjust the structure while
translation
● For example :
➔ Rama killed Ravana.
➔ રામે રાવણ માર્યો.
● You have to done addition in target
language. Because the source language have
that absence.
● Lexicon - semantics words are not
translated; Gujrati -Sanakrit word :Dharma.

16. Outcome of
Article

17. ❏ Universals: It such universals did not exist, as
Voltaire said of God, we would have had to
invent them. Universals of structure in both
signifiers and signifieds are necessary fictions.
The indispensable as ifs of our fallible enterprise.
❏ Interiorised Contexts: One is translating also this
kind of intertextual web, the meaning- making
web of colophons and commentaries that
surround and contextualise the poem.

18. ❏ Systematicity: One translates not single poems but
bodies of poetry that create and contain their
original world.
❏ Structural mimicry: The structures of individual
poems, the unique figures they make out of all the
given codes of their language, rhetoric , and poetics,
become the points of entry. 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.

19. Conclusion

20. ● The translation must not only represent,, but re-
present, the original. One walks a tightrope between
the To-language and the From-language, in a double
loyalty.
● A translator is an 'artist on oath'.
● Argument against the Frost.
● Example of a Chinese emperor - tunnel - work from
both side of mountain - meet in the middle - what if
they don't meet ? - counsellor answered - ‘if they don't
meet, we will have two tunnels instead of one’.
● If the representation in another language is not close
enough, but still succeed in ’carrying’ the poem in
some sense, we will have two poems instead of one.

21. Citations
.
● Bassnett, Susan, and Trivedi, Harish. “‘A.K. Ramanujan’s Theory and
Practice of Translation.’” Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice,
Routledge, London, 2005.
● Holmes, Jonathan. “How Many Vowels and Consonants Are There in
Gujarati?” Cement Answers, 5 March, 2022.
https://cementanswers.com/how-many-vowels-and-consonants-are-there-
in-gujarati/.
● “Questions on Vowels and Consonants .” BYJUS, BYJU'S, 8 Oct. 2021,
https://byjus.com/kids-learning/vowels-consonants-
questions/#:~:text=In%20the%20simplest%20categorization%2C%20English,
breath%20out%20of%20the%20mouth.
● Ramanujan, A.K. “On Translating a Tamil Poem.” The Collected Essays of
A. K. Ramanujan, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2013, pp. 219–231.

22. Thank you