Translating Myth

Ben Pestell, Pietra Palazzolo, Leon Burnett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134862566
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Ever since Odysseus heard tales of his own exploits being retold among strangers, audiences and readers have been alive to the complications and questions arising from the translation of myth. How are myths taken and carried over into new languages, new civilizations, or new media? An international group of scholars is gathered in this volume to present diverse but connected case studies which address the artistic and political implications of the changing condition of myth – this most primal and malleable of forms. 'Translation' is treated broadly to encompass not only literary translation, but also the transfer of myth across cultures and epochs. In an age when the spiritual world is in crisis, Translating Myth constitutes a timely exploration of myth's endurance, and represents a consolidation of the status of myth studies as a discipline in its own right.

PART I
❖
Translation and Myth: Across Languages, Media, and Cultures

CHAPTER 1
❖
Indian Myth: Postcolonial Transmissions

Harish Trivedi

It may seem strange, if not unsettling, to discover that there is apparently no word for ‘myth’ in any of the Indian languages. Nor has the English word ‘myth’ proved amenable to translation, for many modern Indian languages including the largest, Hindi, simply use for it the patent neologism ‘mithak/mythak’, which is, of course, the same word as in English with an apology of a domesticating tail stuck on. The clear implication is that if the word does not exist in India, the concept does not either. What is called ‘myth’ in English must, from an Indian point of view, be thought to be a Western invention. This may be one of the key instances in support of the old (essentialist?) supposition that India and the West are deep down quite incommensurate if not incompatible — ‘and never the twain shall meet’.

Indian Myth: False or True?

Matters are nicely complicated by the introduction into the discourse of an accidental cross-lingual near-homonym. Devdutt Pattanaik, in his book Myth=Mithya: A Handbook of Hindu Mythology (2007), puns in the title on a Sanskrit word, mithya, which is commonly taken to mean ‘false, untrue’. This would seem to confirm the rationalist Western view that a myth is anything but true. However, mithya also has a deeper connotation which is summed up best in a formulation by the foundational Indian philosopher, Adi Shankaracharya (788–820). In his work Vivekachudamani there occurs a key phrase, cited and explained as below in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions:

Brahman [sc. Brahma] satyam, jagat mithya (Skt.). A sentence which summarizes for Hindus the entire teaching of Advaita Vedanta: Brahman is the real reality (cf. SAT), the world is deceptive (because its apparent reality is super-imposed on Brahman).¹

In a twentieth-century English version, the whole verse in which the phrase first occurs in that work is translated as follows:

A firm conviction of the mind to the effect that the Brahman is real and the universe unreal, is designated as the discrimination (Viveka) between the real and the unreal.²

In other words, the only true discrimination to be made is that Brahman, the Eternal Soul or Spirit, is real and the universe is unreal, for the latter is material and transient. We have already moved away from the binary of true and false; what is mithya, it turns out, is the whole created universe — which is taken to be real by those lacking discrimination. Thus, mithya connotes something similar to the more familiar Sanskrit word, maya, defined as ‘illusion, unreality, deception’,³ a sense traceable to the oldest Indian text, the Rig Veda (1500–1200 BCE). The visible material universe is mithya, i.e. false or unreal, though it deceives the benighted among us by causing in us the illusion of its being real and true.

These are deep waters largely uncharted by Western enlightenment and rationalism, and this understanding of what is real and unreal does not seem to have impinged on the Western discourse on myth. Nor is this merely esoteric high Hindu philosophy of ancient times, for the belief that the world is an illusion exists in some spectral way at the back of the mind of any number of Indians even now. The Bhagavad-Gita negotiates a difficult balancing act by arguing that, while knowing that the world is unreal, one must in one’s sojourn in this world engage with it and act in it as if it were real.

The time-honoured Indian understanding of myth thus situates it above or beyond the familiar Western collocation in which ‘myth’ and ‘reality’ stand in direct and irreconcilable contradiction to each other, as in numerous book-titles in English which feature the phrase ‘Myth and Reality’ or, in an interrogative variation, ‘Myth or Reality?’ To name only one of these, which has a special bearing on the present theme, D. D. Kosambi’s Myth and Reality: Studies in the Formation of Indian Culture (1962) is utterly dismissive of Indian mythology and indeed of Indian philosophy as well. ‘Why’, he asked with rhetorical irony at the beginning of his book, ‘should one ignore the beautiful lily of Indian philosophy in order to concentrate upon the dismal swamp of popular superstition?’ And he answered that one must do so in order to ‘discover the physiological process whereby the lily grew out of the mud and filth’.⁴ A little later, he pronounced on the god Ganesha, who is shown with an elephant’s head, that the ‘complex iconography and ridiculously complicated myth cannot be explained by Shiva’s elevation to the highest abstract principle’⁵ and he declared on the following page that Shiva’s tandava, or his dance of destruction which merges into creation as it proceeds, ‘is like a witch-doctor’s primitive fertility dance’.⁶ It could be said in counter-rhetoric that Kosambi is wallowing in the dismal swamp and mud of Marxist materialism; moreover, and worse still, he is here, wittingly or unwittingly, speaking the language of Western orientalism at its zenith.

Indian Myth: Orientalist ‘Translations’

The superiority of Western reason and knowledge over Indian ignorance and myth was nowhere asserted more peremptorily and imperialistically than by Lord Macaulay in 1835, when he was the Law Member of the Council of the Governor-General of India in Calcutta. Arguing against the established practice of the British government in India of paying a small subsidy for the maintenance of traditional forms of education, he suggested that this money would be better utilized in setting up a Western system of education imparted through the English language. In his famous ‘Minute on Education’, he affirmed that Western knowledge was ‘sound’ and ‘true’ while what passed for knowledge in India was so illogical as to be absurd.

[11] It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England.

[…]

[13] The question now before us is simply whether, when it is in our power to teach this language [English], we shall teach languages in which, by universal confession, there are no books on any subject which deserve to be compared to our own, whether, when we can teach European science, we shall teach systems which, by universal confession, wherever they differ from those of Europe differ for the worse, and whether, when we can patronize sound philosophy and true history, we shall countenance, at the public expense, medical doctrines which would disgrace an English farrier, astronomy which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school, history abounding with kings thirty feet high and reigns thirty thousand years long, and geography made of seas of treacle and seas of butter.⁷

Macaulay, by his own plain admission, had ‘no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic’ though he claimed to ‘have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works’, a claim not corroborated by the evidence of his correspondence or other works. Nevertheless, this did not prevent him from passing summary judgment on not only India but also Arabia, a judgment so sweeping as to suggest that not knowledge but ignorance is power: ‘a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’.⁸ In a rhetorical move, he ascribed this opinion not to himself but to the ‘orientalists’ themselves whom he said he had taken the trouble to consult, though here too specific details of any such consultation are lacking.

In any case, what Macaulay staged here was an epistemological mismatch between Western post-Enlightenment logic on the one hand and Indian religious faith and mythic belief on the other, measuring one against the other and predictably enough finding the other wanting. It is not clear if he had met any Indians who actually believed, as a matter of fact, that there were kings in the past who were thirty feet tall and reigned for thousands of years, but it suited him to say so for the sake of argument. In short, he seems to have set up here a deliberate confusion of categories between current notions of Western empirical history and ancient poetic versions of Indian myth as found in the puranas, a set of eighteen major and eighteen minor literary mythopoeic texts composed collectively by anonymous authors, probably between the fifth century and the tenth century. The puranas never made any kind of a ‘truth claim’ in the Western sense but were scriptural texts that treated of gods and kings alike as parts of the same seamless universe, and their obvious exaggerations were literary devices employed to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Contributors
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Part I: Translation and Myth: Across Languages, Media, and Cultures
• Part II: William Blake’s Myth
• Part III: Myth in Early United States Literature
• Part IV: Myth in Modern and Contemporary Poetry
• Part V: Myth in New Political and Cultural Environments
• Index