Translation as Catalyst: Forging Indian Modernist Poetics

 Hello!

This blog is a direct response to an assignment given by Dr. Dilip Barad, Where I have written an assignment of my selected topic.

Name: Dangar Rinkal Nathabhai 

Batch: M.A (Fourth semester) 2022-24

Roll No.: 18

Enrollment number :4069206420220007

Paper Name: Comparative Literature & Translation Studies

Assignment Topic: Translation as Catalyst: Forging Indian Modernist Poetics

Paper Number : 208

Paper code : 22415

Introduction

Translation has played in shaping the modernist poetic sensibility in major Indian literary traditions like Bengali, Malayalam, and Marathi between 1950-1970. The author argues that translations of seminal European modernist poets like Baudelaire, Rilke, Eliot, and Yeats helped create a space for the modernist discourse to emerge and thrive in Indian poetry. Many pioneering Indian modernist poets like Buddhadeb Bose, Agyeya, Dilip Chitre, and Ayyappa Paniker were also prolific translators whose "foreignizing" translations disrupted existing cultural codes and poetic norms.

The Modernist Movement in Indian Poetry

The modernist phase in Indian literary traditions has largely been excluded from global narratives of modernism, which remain heavily centered on late 19th/early 20th century Western writers. However, scholars like Simon Gikandi and Laura Doyle have argued for re-evaluating non-Western modernisms as not just derivative but as distinctive movements shaped by their specific socio-cultural and political contexts.

Indian modernism arose in response to the disruptions and crises precipitated by colonial modernity. Unlike its Western counterpart, it was oppositional in nature, questioning nationalist/romantic discourses and ideologies that had become apparatuses of the nascent nation-state. Experimental modernist writing in Indian languages ranged from the avant-garde and anarchic to the formalist and conventional.

While sharing some defining features of European modernism like experimentation, cosmopolitanism and insularity, Indian modernist poetry was markedly different in its political affiliations and ideological orientations due to its postcolonial location. It did not share the imperial and metropolitan aspirations of Western modernism but was rooted in regional cosmopolitan traditions.

Translation as Catalyst

Translation has enabled Indian modernist poets to engage in a complex negotiation with Western modernity and modernism on their own terms, selectively assimilating certain aspects while resisting its ideological baggage. Translation enacted "a critical act of evaluation, a creative act of intervention and a performative act of legitimation" in evolving a new modernist poetic.

Many pioneering modernist figures were bilingual and laid out the foundational principles of their new aesthetic in essays written in English as well as their native languages. Poets like Sudhindranath Dutta (Bengali), B.S. Mardhekar (Marathi) and Ayyappa Paniker (Malayalam) produced incisive critiques of prevailing poetic traditions while also translating major Western poets.

For instance, Dutta's translations of Mallarmé and Valéry, and Buddhadeb Bose's renderings of Baudelaire, Rilke, Pound and others opened up new modes of thinking and writing poetry in Bengali. Mardhekar, in his treatise "Arts and the Man", made a powerful case for modernist formalism in Marathi poetry. Paniker translated Eliot and published scathing criticisms of canonical Malayalam poets like Vallathol to clear the ground for an altered poetic sensibility.

These "translational" writings performed the pivotal function of interrogating and destabilizing the autonomy and authority of established aesthetic norms. At the same time, translations provided alternative models for Indian poets to imagine their art and the world differently.

Negotiating Modernity and Tradition

A key challenge for Indian modernists was how to negotiate their relationship with tradition even as they sought to transcend it. While the modernist mode in Europe could be seen as a complete break from the past, Indian poets could not simply abandon their own rich literary heritage stretching back millennia.

Poets like Mardhekar and the Bengali poets consciously revisited medieval Bhakti/Sufi poets and reworked them to forge a distinctly contemporary Indian modernist idiom. Their "foreignizing" translations disrupted prevailing modes and cultural assumptions, but also served to reconnect poets with their indigenous roots.

Figures like Sudhindranath Dutta emphasized the need to evolve a poetic authentically rooted in native traditions while also being truly universal and cosmopolitan in outlook - a complex negotiation that translations enabled. Their poetry represents an intertwining of the local and the global, the modern and the traditional in an organic synthesis specific to the Indian context.

Modernism, Form and the Self

Apart from thematic concerns, the article examines how Indian modernist poetry radically reinvented poetic form and craft in line with its ruptured vision of modernity and fragmented sense of selfhood. Form and content were seen as organically linked, with the modernist text rejecting allegorical and didactic tendencies in favor of open, fluid, evocative free verse forms.

The dense, allusive and self-reflexive styles developed by poets like Mardhekar embodied the psychological disorientation and alienation of colonial modernity. Translating modernist techniques opened up new formal possibilities for expressing the fissured, destabilized modern self.

Ayyappa Paniker's landmark long poem "Kurukshetram" is a characteristic example, with its fragmented images, fractured rhythms and lack of cohesive narrative mirroring the moral and social collapse experienced subjectively by the poet. Images and metaphors drawn from Indian mythology and folklore are fused with distinctly modernist techniques to forge a powerful new idiom.

Translation as a Mode of Being

Ultimately, the article suggests that translation became for the Indian modernists a fundamental "mode of being" that defined their ambivalent relationship with colonial modernity. As displaced, marginalized subjects, they inhabited an uncomfortable space between their own speech communities and an alienating modern world.

Their bilingual sensibilities and complex negotiation of seemingly contradictory cultural codes found expression through a poetic language that could transit fluidly between native and Western traditions. Translation offered a way to be both within their own cultures and outside them simultaneously.

For these poets grappling with the epistemic violence of colonial modernity, language became the only stable reality to relate to. Their self-reflexive modernist idiom, forged through acts of translation, embodied an existential striving for self-knowledge and autonomy in a world experienced as profoundly disorientating.

Conclusion

The practice of translation was absolutely central to the evolution and flourishing of modernist poetic sensibilities across multiple Indian literary traditions in the mid-20th century. By "carrying across" not just content but interior modes of being and perception, translation enabled Indian poets to reinvent their art in response to the disruptive turbulence of colonial and postcolonial modernity.

The case studies of pioneering figures reveal how translations facilitated a complex cross-pollination - dismantling older aesthetic regimes while also clearing a space for radically experimental forms consonant with the modern fragmented self's quest for authenticity. Ultimately, translation emerged as a potent means for marginalized poets to stake out a distinctive Indian modernist vision resonant with the region's heterogenous traditions yet conversant with global currents.

References

Ramakrishnan, E.V. "Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of Modernist Poetic Discourse in Indian Poetry." Indigenous Imaginaries - Literature, Region, Modernity, Orient Blackswan, 2017, pp. 239-253.