This document summarizes A.K. Ramanujan's essay "On Translating a Tamil Poem". It discusses the challenges of translating poetry from one language and culture to another. Specifically, it outlines differences between Tamil and English in terms of phonology, syntax, and poetic structures. It also analyzes Ramanujan's translation of two Tamil poems dealing with love and war. The document identifies four factors that make translation possible: universals, interiorized contexts, systematicity, and structural mimicry. However, it notes that perfect representation is impossible and some elements will be lost, such as precise sounds and metrics. The conclusion states that the goal of translation is to re-present the original poem in another language through close

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

2. Group Task
2
Latta Baraiya
Sneha Agravat

3. Table of Content
3
❖ Abstract
❖ Comparison of Tamil and English Language
❖ Key Arguments
❖ Analysis
❖ Four things making translation possible
❖ Problems in translation
❖ Conclusion

4. Abstract
4
'How does one translate a poem from another time,
another culture,another language? Ramanujan
translated poems from Tamil were written two
thousand years ago in a comer of south India, in a
Dravidian language relatively untouched by the
other classical language of India, Sanskrit. 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 by passes.The chief
difficulty of translation is its impossibility. Frost
once even identified poetry as that which is lost in
translation.

5. Abstract
5
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.What is
everyday in one language must be translated by what
is everyday in the 'target' language also, and what is
eccentric must find equally eccentric equivalents. In
this article Ramanujan took various examples of
Tamil poems that he translated into English and he
described difficulties that he faced during
translation.

6. Comparison of Tamil and English Language
6
● 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.
● 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.
● 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 words do not.

7. Comparison of Tamil and English Language
7
● So it is impossible to translate the phonology of one language
into that of another even in a related, culturally neighbouring
language.
● Tamil metre depends on the presence of long vowels and double
consonants,can map one system on to another, but never
reproduce it.
● English has a long tradition of end-rhymes-but Tamil has a
long tradition of second syllable consonant-rhymes.
● End-rhymes in Tamil are a modern innovation, just as second
syllable rhymes in Engljsh would be considered quite
experimental. The 'tradition of one poetry would be the
innovation of another.
● 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) E D C B A in
Tamil.
● Tamil syntax is mostly left-branching. English syntax is, by

8. 8
Key Arguments
❖ 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 suggests that English does not have left-
branching possibilities, but they are a bit abnormal.
❖ Hopkins and Dylan Thomas used those possibilities
stunningly, as we see in Thomas's 'A Refusal to Moum the
Death, by Fire, of a Child in London; both were Welshmen,
and Welsh is a left-branching language.

9. 9
Key Arguments
❖ 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.
❖ One could not use Dylanese to translate Tamil, even
though many of the above phrases from Thomas can
be translated comfortably with the same word order
in Tamil.

10. Analysis
10
❖ The collocations and paradigms make for metonymies
and metaphors, multiple contextual meanings clusters
special to each language, quile untranslatable into another
language like Tamil. Even when the elements of a system
may be similar in two languages, like father, mother,
brother, mother-in-law, etc., in kinShip, the system of
relations and the feelings traditionally encouraged each
relative are ali culturally sensitive and therefore part of
the expressive repertoire of poets and novelists.
❖ Ramanujan took two different poems about love (What
She Said) and war ( A Young Warrior ) and made point that,
when we move from one to the other we are struck by the
associations across them forming a web not only of the
akam and puram genres. But also of the five landscape.;
with all their contents signifying moods. And the themes
and motifs 0f love and war.

11. Analysis
11
❖ Love and war become metaphors for one another. In
the poem “A Leaf In Love And War” we see entwines
the two themes of love and war - in an ironic
juxtaposition. A wreath of nocci is worn by warrior
in war poems a nocci leafskirt is given by a lover to
his woman in love poem.
❖ Example God Krishna: both lovers and warriors
❖ Ramanujan take a closer look at the original of
Kapilar’s poem Ainkurunuru 203. And he point out
that The word annay (in spoken Tamil, ammo),
literally 'mother', is a familiar term of address for
any woman, here a 'girl friend'. So I have translated
it as 'friend', to make clear that the poem is not
addressed to a mother (as some other poems are) but
to a girl friend.

12. 12
Structural
Mimicry Systematic
ity
Interiorise
d
contexts
Universals
Four things that makes translation possible

13. 13
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Systematicity: One translates not single poems but bodies of poetry
that create and contain their original world.
4. 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.

14. ✘ To translate is to 'metaphor', to 'carry across'.
Translations are trans-positions, re-
enactments, interpretations. Some elements of
the original cannot be transposed at all. One
can often convey a sense of the original
rhythm. but not the language-bound metre:
one can mimic levels of diction, but not the
actual sound of the original words.
Problems in translation
14

15. Conclusion
➢ 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'.
➢ Sometimes one may succeed only in re-presenting a
poem, not in closely representing it. At such times one
draws consolation from parables like the following.
➢ 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.
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16. 16
Thank You