On Translating a Tamil Poem - A. K. Ramanujan.

1. On Translating a Tamil Poem
~ A. K. Ramanujan
Department of English,
Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
Presented by
Nirav Amreliya
Roll Number - 18
Himanshi Parmar
RollNumber - 8
Semester - 4 (Batch 2021-23)

2. The article or an excerpt - if to say so with reference to the book titled as 'The
Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan' (1999) - titled as 'On Translating a Tamil Poem'
discusses the difficulties in translating one literary text having its origin in native or
particular language into the foreign language on grounds of the diverse nature of
phonetics, linguistics, and grammatical aspects of the selected languages which are
tabled for translating the text into them. The essay gives meticulous accounts of
difficulties and variation with ample examples from Tamil Poetry and English Rhymes
while translating selected text of one language into the another one/s. It serves as the
pre-reading piece for any translator of the world working within or without the
boundaries of academics or is a freelancer translator. The author has objectively put the
practical exertion of translation and become the part of the vast field of Translation
Studies.
Abstract

3. Content
Part - 1 Part - 2
Part - 3 Abstract
01 02
03 04
Conclusion

4. ~ How does one translate a poem from another time, another culture, another language?
~ The 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.
~ 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 practise it, or learn (endlessly) to do so. As
often as not, this love, like other loves, seems to be begotten by Despair upon
Impossibility, in Marvell's phrase.
Part - 1

5. INTRODUCTION
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01

6. Muslims follow dietary laws found in the
Qur'an, the holy book of Islam. There are
"lawful" foods or halāl, and unlawful or
harām
INTRODUCTION

7. Part - 1
~ How shall we divide up and translate poem? What are the units of translation? We may begin with
the sounds.
~ We find at once that the sound system of Tamil is very different from English.
~ For example, old Tamil has six nasal consonants : a labial, a dental, an alveolar, a retroflex, a palatal,
and a velar - m, n, n, ñ, ṅ, n - three of which are not distinctive in English.
~ How shall we translate a six-way system into a three-way English system (m, n, ṅ)?
~ Tamil has no initial consonat-clusters, but English abounds in them : 'school,' 'scratch,' 'splash,'
'strike,' etc.

8. Part - 1
~ English words may end in stops, as in 'cut,' 'cup,' 'tuck,' etc. Tamil
words do not.
~ When we add up these myriad systematic differences, we cannot escape
the fact that phonologies are systems unto themselves (even as
grammatical, syntactic, lexical, semantics systems too are, as we shall
see.)
~ Any unit we pick is defined by its relations to other units. So it is
impossible to translate the phonology of one language into that of another
- even in a related, culturally neighbouring language.
~ We can map one system on to another, but never reproduce it. A poem
is identical only with itself - if that.

9. Part - 1
~ If we try and even partially succeed in mimicking the sounds, we may loose everything else, the
syntax, the meanings, the poem itself, as in this delightful example of a French phonological
translation of an English nursery rhyme :
Humpty Dumpty
Sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty
Had a great fall
And all the king's horses
And all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty Dumpty
Together again.
Un petit d 'un petit
S' etonne aux Halles
Un petit d'un petit
Ah! degres te fallent
Indolent qui ne sort cesse
Indolent qui ne se mene
Qu 'importe un peti d' un petit
Tout Gai de Reguennes.

10. Part - 1
~ Sometimes it is said that we should translate metrical systems. Metre is a second-order organisation
of the sound system of a language, and partkes of all the above problems and some more.
~ Tamil metre depends on the presence of long vowels and double consonants, and on closed and open
syllables defined by such vowels and consonants...There is nothing comparable in English to this way of
counting feet and combinations.
~ English has a long tradition of end-rhymes - but Tamil has a long tradition of second syllable
consonant-rhymes.
~ End-rhymes in Tamil is a modern innovation, just as second-syllable rhymes in English would be
considered quite experimental.

11. Part - 1
The tradition of one poetry would be the innovation of the another.
- Tamil has no copula verbs for equational sentences in the present tense, as in English, e.g.,
'Tom is a teacher;' no degrees of comparison in adjectives as in English, e.g., 'sweet, sweeter,
sweetest;' no articles like 'a, an, the;' and so on.
- The constraints of French require you to chose a gender for every noun, but English does not.
- The lies and ambiguities of one language are not those of another.

12. Part - 1
~ 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 disabuse us of the
commonly-held notion of 'literal' translation. We know now that no
translation can be 'literal,' or 'word for word'. That is where the
impossibility lies. The only possible translation is a 'free' one.
~ 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.'

13. ~ 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.
~ Tamil classical poetry would call the poem an 'interior' or 'akam' poem, a poem about love and its
different phases. Contrasted to it are 'exterior' or 'puram' poems which are usually public poems
about war, society, the poverty of poets, the death of heroes, and so on. An example would be
'Purananuru 310,' a poem by Ponmutiyar.

14. Part - 1
~ The classical Tamil poetic tradition uses an entire taxonomy, a
classification of reality, as part if its stock-in-trade.
~ The five landscapes of the Tamil area, characterised by hills, seashores,
agricultural areas, wastelands, and pastoral fields, each with its forms of life,
both natural and cultural.
~ Love and war become metaphors for one another, enmesh one another l, in
poems like 'A Young Warrior' :
~ 'What Her Mother Said'
~ If a calving cow chewed up her purslane creeper growing near the house,

15. Continue..
~ She'd throw the ball away to the ground, push away the doll, and beat herself on her pretty
tummy, my little girl, who knows now how to do things.
~ Thus a language within a language becomes the second language of Tamil poetry.
~ Like ordinary language, this art-language too makes possible (in Wilhelm Humboldt's phrase)
'an infinite use of finite means.'
~ When one translates, one is translating not only Tamil, its phonology, grammar and semantics,
but this entire intertextual web, this intricate yet lucid second language of landscapes which
holds together natural forms with cultural ones in a code, a grammar, a rhetoric, and a poetics.
Content

16. Part - 2
~ Closer look at the original of Kapilar’s poem, ‘Ainkurunuru 203’
(What she said)

17. Part - 2
~ The word ‘annay’ (In spoken Tamil, amma), literally ‘mother’, is a familiar term of
adress for any woman, here a ‘Girl Friend’. Ramanujan translated it as ‘friend’.
~ Ramanujan’s Phrase order in English tries to preserve the order and syntax of
themes, not single words.
~ He still could not bring the word ‘Sweeter’ (iniya) into the middle of the poem as
the original does.

18. Part - 2
~ The presence of nineteen nasals in the Tamil poem foreground the n in this central
word iniya — quite untranslatable. Since it is such an important word for the poem's
themes, I put it at the head of the sentence in my translation, preferring the inversion
(which i usually avoid) to the weaker placing of ‘Sweeter than’ in the middle of the
poem.
~ The poem is a Kurinci piece, about the lovers’ first Union, set in the Landscape.
~ The poem speaks of the innocent young woman’s discovery of sex, in the hills, with
her man.

19. Part-2
Different Mood and purpose of
poem.
~ Mood of first translated
poem is ‘great Woder’ and the
purpose is ‘to speak of life’s
goodness’.
~ The poem on lovers’ first
Union is part of a series of ten
with different speakers, moods,
and purposes. Here is very next
poem in the series.

20. Continue..
~ The mood in this companion poem is ‘sadness’, the purpose is to ‘presuade the lover to marry
her’. The title of the poem suggests that the poem is often addressed to one person but meant for
someone eles within earshot.
~ Ten poems in the anthology, Ainkurunuru, are part of hundred on the theme of Kurinci
(lover’s Union) by a single great poet, Kapilar.
~ All the poems of a Landscape share the same set of images and Themes, but use them to make
truly individual designs and meanings.
~ Any single poem is part of a set, a family of sets, a landscape (One of five) , a genre (akam,
Puram, comic or religious).
~Translator has to translate each poem in ways that suggest these interests, dilogues, and
networks.
Content

21. Part - 3
Attempting a translation means attempting such an impossibly intricate task.
~ Four articles of faith help the translator.
1 ~ Universals
~ Without universals, no language learning, translation, comparative studies or cross -
cultural understanding of even most meagre kind would be possible.
~ If universals did not exist, we would have had to invent them.

22. Part - 3
~ Universal of structure in both signifiers and the signifieds are necessary fictions.
2 ~ Interiorised Contexts
~ Poem that A.K. Ramanujan discussing interiorise the entire culture. We know about the
culture of the ancient Tamil only through study of these poems.
~ The diagrams and charts that Ramanujan used, are to explicate classical Tamil poetry are
based on the earliest grammar of Tamil, Tolkappiyam,the oldest parts of which are
perhaps as old as the third century.
~

23. ~ such Grammars draw on the poems themselves and codify their dramatispersonae, an
alphabet of themes, a set of situations that define where who may say what to whom, a
list of favoured figures of thought and figures of speech, and so on.
~ When one translates a classical Tamil poem, one is translating also this kind of
intertextual web, the meaning - making web of colophons and commentaries that
surround and contextualise the poem.
3 ~ Systematicity
~ one translates not single poema but bodies of poetry that creat and contain their
original world. Even if one choose 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.
Part - 3

24. ~ Intertextuality is not the problem, but the solution. One learns one's lessons
here not only from the Tamil arrangements but from Yeats, Blake, and
Baudelaire, who all used arrangement as a poetic device.
4 ~ Structural mimicry
~ The work of of translating single poems in their particularity is the chief
work of the translator.
~ One attempts a structural mimicry, to translate relations, not iteams — not
single words but phrases, sequences, sentences; not metrical units but rhythms;
not morphology but Syntactic pattern.
Part - 3
Content

25. ~ Translation is to ‘metaphor’, to ‘Carry Across’.
~ Translations are transposition, re - enactments, interpretations.
~ Some elements of original cannot be transposed at all.
~Textures are harder to translate than structures, linear order more difficult than
syntax, lines more difficult than larger patterns.
~ The Translation must not only represent, but re - present, the original.
~ A translator is an ‘artist on oath’.
Conclusion

26. ~ 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.
Thank you.
Content