Translation and World Literature

Susan Bassnett, Susan Bassnett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317246596
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Translation and World Literature offers a variety of international perspectives on the complex role of translation in the dissemination of literatures around the world. Eleven chapters written by multilingual scholars explore issues and themes as diverse as the geopolitics of translation, cosmopolitanism, changing media environments and transdisciplinarity. This book locates translation firmly within current debates about the transcultural movements of texts and challenges the hegemony of English in world literature. Translation and World Literature is an indispensable resource for students and scholars working in the fields of translation studies, comparative literature and world literature.

1 Translation and world literature

The Indian context

Harish Trivedi

Literature, translation and the world

Can there be World Literature without translation? The answer would seem to be an obvious and resounding ‘No’. But this answer would also serve to betray a contradiction and defect at the heart of the current formulations of World Literature, which require Word Literature not simply to exist but also to be available and accessible through translation into a designated language, English. The question, therefore, may be thought to be analogous to the hoary philosophical issue being discussed by some Cambridge undergraduates at the beginning of E. M. Forster’s novel, The Longest Journey (1907): is there a cow in the quad when there is no one to see it? In this long-running philosophical debate between Idealism and Realism, the cow is the symbol ‘for the reality that exists whether we acknowledge it or not’ (Rosenbaum 1979: 49–50). The literatures of the wide world exist whether the First World acknowledges their existence or not, but there is a fair chance that in the self-assured fervour of a Cambridge college quad or its intellectual equivalent, they may well be argued out of existence by some of the interlocutors.

Going by the definitions offered so far, World Literature is identified as such not in terms of production but in terms of consumption, which is, of course, entirely in conformity with our super-consumerist age. All over the world, literature has for centuries and millennia been produced, and continues to be produced, in several thousand languages. The number of living languages in the world is currently estimated to be about 6,000 and it may be a fair surmise to say that regular and substantial literary production in the written form takes place in at least half of them, to say nothing of the corollary corpus of orality. These literatures are constantly being translated from their original versions into many other languages, both neighbouring and distant, but it is not until they appear in an English translation that they begin to be deemed as a part of World Literature, at least in Anglophone discourse.

These literatures have to be, so to say, born again, or at least conducted through a vital rite of passage through translation into English, before they can be seen by the world to begin to exist. Brahmins in India have traditionally been called dvija, the twice-born, for they qualified to be Brahmins in a meaningful sense not by biological birth but only after they had gone through the upanayana ceremony at the age of 9 or 11, when a sacred and exclusive Sanskrit mantra was whispered into their ears, and they set off at the end of the ceremony for Kashi (also called Varanasi), the classic seat of Sanskrit learning, to learn Vedic and secular knowledge there. In an ironic reference to this ceremony (still observed tokenistically even in Brahmin households located thousands of miles away from Varanasi), an early critical study of Indian novels written in English was titled The Twice-Born Fiction (Mukherjee 1971). We may similarly call World Literature the Twice-Born Literature, with the parallel proviso that, in this case, a work of literature in any language except English must leave its native home and travel far away to be re-issued (pardon the pun) by a set of new parents, a translator and a publisher, in the UK or the USA, and thus acquire a new and more visible life.

However, a vital difference between a young Brahmin as described above and a work of literature travelling out to gain admittance to World Literature is that at the end of his studies in Kashi, the young Brahmin returned to his local community to enrich it by serving it for the rest of his life as a scholar, priest and doctor. On the other hand, a work of literature translated into English migrates forever to another cultural world, and exploits it to its own deracinated individual advantage. Such a work is thus not so much like a traditional Brahmin but rather more like a modern ‘techie’, who leaves his Third-World home on an H1-B work visa to contribute to the wealth and prosperity of the USA and correspondingly to the impoverishment of his home country through brain-drain. In the case of a literary work, this would be through relative devaluation and neglect of works not so translated.

The implicit insistence on translation into English as a primary requirement for a literary work to gain entry into the corpus of World Literature inevitably carries colonial and neocolonial overtones. The ‘world’ in ‘World Literature’ is defined and shaped by just those powers which until recently ruled the world and continue to exercise global hegemony in both cultural and commercial terms. Throughout the history of colonialism, countries that were militarily and economically subjugated, such as India, refused to concede that they were culturally inferior to the West and it was precisely such a surge of cultural nationalism that lent ballast to the struggle for decolonization and eventually led to freedom. The emergence and spread of World Literature over the last couple of decades may seem to some of us to be another wave of the Western will to dominate the world in areas not hitherto conquered.

For these and some other reasons, the term ‘World Literature’ is already somewhat contaminated. A projected multi-volume history of World Literature organized by the Stockholm Collegium at Stockholm University, for example, has decided to distance itself from the term by calling itself ‘Literature: A World History’. The nomenclature sounds awkward and may raise other issues but at least it is not ‘World Literature’ – that sweeping, airy-fairy, user-friendly concoction, the main proof of whose worth lies apparently in how widely it can circulate. For as we may recall, in influential early formulations, World Literature was projected as a kind of literature made easy for all comers. Franco Moretti (2000) advocated the mode of ‘distant reading’, especially of the novel, which is seen as a typically Western genre which spread from the West to the rest of the world – as distinct, one may note, from poetry which needs to be close-read and is endemic to all parts of the word without any Western intervention. David Damrosch defined World Literature as encompassing ‘all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language’ (Damrosch 2003: 4) which again accords priority to that which gets translated, for whatever random reason, or to works in a few Western languages, predominantly English, which alone in effect can expect to circulate widely without translation (for a fuller discussion, see Trivedi 2013). In subsequent formulations, both Moretti and Damrosch have refined their initial positions, Moretti for example by admitting of instances of novels which combine ‘a plot from the core [the West] and style from the periphery [the non-West]’ (Moretti 2006: 118; his emphasis), and Damrosch by acknowledging that works of World Literature need to be paid ‘close attention’ with regard to the ‘particular national and regional systems’ from which they originate. (Damrosch 2006: 213)

In his essay cited above, Moretti began by saying, ‘We do not know what world literature is’, and in his conclusion seven pages later he confessed: ‘we still do not know what world literature is’ (Moretti 2006: 113, 120). In the decade and more that has elapsed, World Literature has advanced to be a buzzword and has become increasingly more acceptable and respectable as an idea and as a desideratum. We may still not understand quite what it is, but many more of us seem to want more of it. This development may be ascribable to two broad reasons. The first is that due to ever multiplying migration and virtual connectivity, we impinge on each other more and more on a global scale, and one way of coping with this is through the many shades of translation. As some of us have always maintained, even the worst of translations (and even machine translations are palpably improving) is better than no translation, for translation opens a door to wider knowledge and better understanding as nothing else could have.

Secondly, there is a wide post-socialist acceptance of the fact, after the collapse of the Second World, that we have only one world, however uneven it may be, and that the only way to reduce inequality in it is, paradoxically, to participate in it on its own terms. ‘The world is what it is,’ wrote V. S. Naipaul in the opening sentence of one of his finest and bleakest novels (in a formulation so simple, profound and characteristic that it was adopted as the title of his authorized biography by Patrick French) and all of us have to make our terms and our peace with it. World Literature may not be what anyone seems to want in particular but it is what it is, and we are going to have more of it if we can read effectively in only one language. The term that World Literature has supplanted is not national literature, as is sometimes mistakenly thought, but rather, Comparative Literature, which is now perhaps too dead for anyone even to try and flog it back to life. And the reason it died was because, contrary to its original impulse, it began to be done more and more not in the original languages but in translation. Susan Bassnett prophetically pronounced it dead in 1993 for she said its methodological raison d’être had been appropriated by translation, and Gayatri Spivak in 2003 declared that it was bound to die unless it aligned itself with Area Studies as instituted in the USA, which still insisted on language learning (which may be, as she did not add, for partly nefarious reasons to do with the national security of the USA) (Bassnett 1993; Spivak 2003) Perhaps the best that can be said for World Literature is that even as it encourages monolingualism, it also acknowledges and promotes the essential role of translation in our present world order, and that it seeks to bring together under the same covers literature not only originating from the West but also as outsourced from the rest of the world.

In what follows in this chapter, I shall discuss World Literature as currently constituted in relation to a particularly fertile and various literary field, India. I shall look firstly at what is available in English translation of Indian literature of the last 3,500 years and what is not, and at what precisely and how much of it has been thought suitable to be regarded as and included in a canonical anthology of World Literature. I shall look next at some Indian endeavours to access, in translation, literatures of the world, with their own quite distinct preferences and considerations. These less than systematic configurations of World Literature have been constituted from what has been translated of foreign literatures into the Indian languages. They also offer indications of what the Indian literary ‘world’ comprised before the West ‘discovered’ India, especially in the first millennium of the Common Era when a Sanskrit Cosmopolis was the norm in South Asia and South-East Asia, as well as a presence in Tibet and China in the East, and Afghanistan and the Arab world in the West. In conclusion, I shall revisit the debate on untranslatability as revived in some recent formulations, to attempt to surmise how World Literature may develop in the future and what may become of it.

India in translation and World Literature

Contemporary anthologists of Indian literature often complain that not enough translations, or enough good translations (as judged by some unstated criteria), are available for them to make a fair and representative selection. This may well be so, and in a basic sense will always remain so, but it is not as if Indian literature were not as well served by translation into English as perhaps any non-European literature. Translations from Sanskrit began in the last quarter of the 18th century, in the first excited flush of what later came to be acclaimed as Orientalism – and still later to be denounced as such. It may be remembered that the first few works from Sanskrit to be translated into English were not random finds by Englishmen but among the most canonical works in all of Sanskrit, apparently recommended by Indian pundits to their British pupils. These included the foremost religious text, the Bhagavad-Gita, first translated by Charles Wilkins in 1785 (and estimated to have been re-translated into English about 300 times since then) and probably the best Sanskrit play ever written, the Abhijnana-Shakauntalam (for short called Shakuntala), translated by Sir William Jones in 1789.

There is, of course, much that is palpably oriental and orientalist in the translations that followed, in the sense of them being selected and projected as arcane, exotic or just different. Many of the classic Sanskrit texts were, and still are, translated through grand collective enterprises that were founded in the Victorian era and published with the academic authority of the best of the university presses. Max Mueller, a German Sanskritist (after whom a road was named in central Delhi after Indian independence), edited a 50-volume series of The Sacred Books of the East which was published between 1879 and 1910 by the Oxford University Press. In this eclectic assemblage, 21 of the texts were Hindu, 10 Buddhist, 8 Zoroastrian, 6 Chinese, 2 Islamic and 2 Jain (with the 50th volume being the Index). The ongoing Harvard Oriental Series under successive editors has published from 1891 up to January 2018 a total of 86 titles, of which nearly every one relates to Indian religions and literature, including some recent ones about oral literature, though some of the volumes are not translations, but rather editions or concordances.

The latest and the most ambitious of such series of volumes is the Murty Classical Library of India, also published by the Harvard University Press and named after a young Indian alumnus, Rohan Narayana Murty. While doing a PhD at Harvard in computer science, Murty realized that he knew very little about India’s literary and cultural heritage and, as the scion of the family that owns the Indian software company Infosys, he decided to make a gift of $5.2 million to found this library of Indian classics in translation in 2010 (see www.murtylibrary.com; also Kuruvilla 2015). The Library began publication in 2015, had brought out 18 volumes by January 2018, and proposes to issue, on the pattern of the Loeb Classical Library, five volumes per year until the number 500 is reached in due course. In a significant advance on the previous two series, the Murty Library publishes translations of classics not only from Sanskrit but also from the ‘vernaculars’, i.e., the modern Indian languages, though it stipulates that it will not consider translations of texts composed after the year 1800. However, this limitation is more than compensated for by many commercial presses, such as Penguin India, Orient Blackswan or HarperCollins India, as well as the Oxford University Press India, preferring to publish newer works. The OUP India alone has a list of over 40 Indian novels in translation by contemporary writers.

Indian literature, then, would seem to be quite as well served by translations into English as say Chinese literature or Arabic-Persian literature. It perhaps has no works which proved to be such spectacular successes in translation as The Thousand and One Nights, or The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (the latter having been in fact substantially reconceptualised and rearranged in translation by Edward Fitzgerald). The Indian title with a comparable worldwide recognition would probably be the Kama-Sutra, with the difference that this gnomic taxonomical text is often translated with its standard commentary merged with the short text, and it is hardly ever printed or bought without a whole array of erotic illustrations often taken from sculptures in Indian temples which were, of course, no part of the original text. Altogether, it may be correct to say that so far as classical Indian literature in concerned, i.e. literature written between 1200 BCE and 1500 CE, there is hardly any canonical work which has not been translated into English at least once, even though many of the translations may have been by and for erudite Orientalist scholars.

In contrast, a substantial proportion of the translations of Indian works published in the twentieth century have been rendered into English not by Western translators but by Indians themselves. This has come about due to two main reasons. Firstly, there was the unique example of the Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore who translated into English some of his own mystical-devotional lyrics in a slim volume under the untranslated title Gitanjali: Song Offerings in 1912, and promptly went on to win the Nobel prize the following year. The lightning of the Nobel, which of course is a hallowed short cut to instant entry into World Literature, has not struck an Indian self-translator again in the one hundred years and more that have elapsed since then (nor any other Indian writer for that matter), but that has not deterred Indian self-translators from persisting and hoping against hope. Sujit Mukherjee in his book Translation as Discovery devoted two chapters to this complex phenomenon, each pointing out the paradoxical nature of self-translation. In ‘Translation as Perjury’, he took Tagore to task for catering to Western taste by exoticizing his own work in his self-translations, a process that Tagore admitted later was like ‘falsifying my own coins’ (cited in Mukherjee 1981: 123). In another essay titled ‘Translation as Patriotism’, he examined a related phenomenon of works by writers from Indian languages translated into English by fellow Indians and then brought out by Indian publishers with no international reach – which too may be called a form of self-translation, by extension. India is after all the third largest publisher of books in English, and the industry is sustained by the fact that books published in the country are bought and read largely within the country.

Thus, a fair amount of Indian literature, both classical and modern, is available in English translation of varying quality. At the same time, it may be seriously doubted whether it constitutes even 5% of the corpus of works composed in the 24 major languages of India over the last one or two or three millennia (as may be the case for each of the languages.). Indian literature is perhaps like an elephant, and all of us who speak about it in the original or in translation are like the six blind men in the old story, each of whom gets hold of some random part of the beast and thinks it to be the whole.

To change metaphors again, the proof of the pudding of any national literature in English translation is just what and how much of it finds wider circulation and is picked up to be part of the canon of World Literature. Here, only a sample of such a canon will be examined, by looking at the Longman Anthology of World...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: the rocky relationship between translation studies and world literature
• 1. Translation and world literature: the Indian context
• 2. World-literature in French: monolingualism, Francopolyphonie and the dynamics of translation
• 3. Translation studies for a world community of literature
• 4. Translation and cosmopolitanism
• 5. Gualterio Escoto—a writer across world-literatures
• 6. German, translation, and the world in Czernowitz
• 7. Minor translations and the world literature of the masses in Latin America
• 8. Maxim Gorky and world literature: challenging the maxims
• 9. The proliferating paths of Jorge Luis Borges’ work in translation and the resistance to an innovative trait
• 10. Two ages of world literature
• 11. Seeing the Mediterranean again (in and out of translation)
• Index