Translating Others Volume IT Edited by Theo Hermans Taylor & Francis Group i Routledge LONDON AND NEW YORKFirst published 2006 by St. Jerome Publishing Published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OXL44RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © Theo Hermans 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or repreduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hemeafier invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retcieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notices Knowledge and best prectice in this field are constantly changing. As new research and experience broaden our understanding, changes in research methods, profestional practices, or medical tweatment may become necessary. 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ISBN 13: 978-1-900650-84-7 (pbk) ‘Typeset by Print-tech India British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Litrary Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Translating others / edited by Theo Hermans, p.cm, Includes bibliographical references and index, ISBN 1-900650-84-3 (pbk. :v. 1 : all, paper) -- ISBN 1-900650-85-1 (pbk. : v. 2; alk, paper) 1. Translating and interpreting. 2. Language and culture. 3. Intercul- tural communication, I. Hermans, Theo. 306.6795 2006 418".02—de22 2006012443Contents Volume 1 Acknowledgements Introduction ‘Theo Hermans 1 Grounding Theory Reconceptualizing Westem Translation Theory ssn. Integrating Non-Western Thought about Translation Maria Tymoezko Meanings of Translation in Cultural Anthropology. Doris Bachmann-Medick Misquoted Others Locating Newness and Authority in Cultural Transl Ovidi Carbonell Cortés 2 Mapping Concepts Translation and the Language(s) of Historiography... Understanding Ancient Greek and Chinese Ideas ef History Alexandra Lianeri From ‘Theory’ to ‘Discourse’ The Making of a Translation Anthology Martha Cheung In Our Own Time, On Our Own Terms ‘Translation’ in India Harish Trivedi ‘Translation into Arabic in the “Classical Age” When the Pandora's Box of Transmission Opens, Myriam Salama-Carr Gained in Translation .. Tibetan Science between Dharamsala and Lhasa Audrey Prost “And the Translator Is —°.scsssnensnnenetennanenennn senna ‘Translators in Chinese History Eva Hung 43 102 120 wed AS3 Reflexive Praxis ‘The Translator as Thedros 163 Thoughts on Cogitation, Figuration and Current Creative Writing Carol Maier Pscudotranslations, Authorship and Novelists in Eighteenth-Century Ttaly.... 181 Paolo Rambelli To Be or Not to Be a Gutter Flea... Writing from Beyond the Edge Christi Ann Merrill English-Chinese, Chinese-Chimese .....uessssen 1219 On Reading Literature through Translation Cosima Bruno ‘Translation, Transcreation and Culture. 236 Theories of Translation in Indian Languages G. Gopinathan ‘Translation, Transcreation, Travesty sisson . AT ‘Two Models of Translation in Bengali Literature Sukenta Chaudhuri Volume 2 4 Memory and Emergence Translation Choices across Five Thousand Years, 265 Egyptian, Greek and Arabic Libraries in a Land of Many Languages Stephen Quirke Invisible Translation . 283 Reading Chinese Texts in Ancient Japan Yukino Semizu Vulgar Eloquence? ..... 1296 Cultural Models and Practices of Translation in Late Medieval Europe Ruth Evans ‘Translation and the Creation of Genre.. W314 ‘The Theatre in Ninetcenth-Century Egypt Myriam Salama-Carr Ottoman Conceptions of Translation and its Practice 305 ‘The 1897 *Classics Debate’ as a Focus for Examining Change Saliha PakerMeanings of Translation in Cultural Anthropology DORIS BACHMANN-MEDICK Goettingen Berlin, Germany Translated by Kate Sturge Abstract: Translation between cultures can be considered a central prac- tice and aim of cultural anthropology: But are the meanings of cultural transation confined 10 ‘cultural understanding’? A hermeneutic position seems to imply a commitment to a traditional ‘single-sited anthropology and does not correspond to the challenges of globalization. A ‘multi- sited,” transnational anthropology is developing an alternative type of translation, Following a brief account of the different meanings of iranslation in the history of cultural anthropology, my essay locates the emergence ofa postcotonial challenge 10 this new anthropological translation concept in an epistemological break: the crisis of representation and the questioning of a unilateral Western translation authority. Translation of and between cultures is no longer the central concept, but culture itself is now being conceptualized as a process of translation. As a result, translation can be defined as a dynamic term of cultural encounter, as a negotiation of differ- ences as well as a difficult process of transformation, In this respect, the novels of Salman Rushdie are eye-openers for a new metaphor of migration as translation, which renders translation into a medium of displacement and hybrid self-transiation. The category of translation thus offers for anthropology not only an important alternative to dichotomous concepis like ‘the clash of civilizations’, but it is also a seismographie indicator for a changing anthropology under the conditions of « globalization of cultures It is reported that when Pepsi-Cola entered the soft drinks market in Thailand, it keyed its advertising campaign to its well-known American slogan, ‘Come alive, you're in the Pepsi generation’, The company only later traced its slow initial sales to the problematical Thai translation of that slogan; “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead’, The incident is a graphic reminder that translation across languages is translation across cultures. It is the act of translation as a commit- ment to cultural understanding that is at the heart of the discipline of anthropology. (www.yale.edw/anthropology/about) These sentences on the Yale anthropology department's website (2003) introduce the promotion of its anthropology programme. The website uses the embarrassing mistranslation of an advertizing slogan to place ‘translation across cultures’ at the34 Translating Others Fol. 1 heart of the anthropological discipline. Yet in its substance, this quotation actually says very little about the meanings of translation in anthropology. Even more sur- prisingly, the translation example is drawn from the context of globally networked consumption, and not from the traditional anthropology of located area studies, a sphere surely much closer to a hermeneutics of cultural understanding. Nevertheless, that traditional anthropology is what is being evoked by the allusion to “translation as a commitment to cultural understanding”. The reference also uncritically carries with it the whole, problematic history of the translation of other cultures through the interpretive power of Western anthropology. This relapse into a simple, harmony-based notion of translation is peculiar, especially since the current conditions of globalization, with their transnational connections and hybrid creolizations, throw down quite other translational challenges ~ challenges that require not so much ‘cultural understanding’ as strategies of cultural encounter or the negotiation of differences. Isthis to say that Yale's anthropology department is not at the forefront of reflection on transtation in cultural anthropology? Certainly, it does not seem to be pursuing an active, agency-oriented reinterpretation ar a local sppropriation of global phenomena, It does not place translation within the field of tension of cultural differences, yet it is precisely those differences, of course, that trigger eritical counter-movements 10 the dominant, marketing-oriented translational strategies or — as in the case of Peps Cola — prompt translational resistance to a seamless local assimilation of global goods, Through its contradictory positioning of translation, the Yale introduction thus casts its own conception of anthropology into doubt: while that conception exemplifies global opening, its reductionist view of translation is also a closing down, of translation that looks unlikely to manage the leap to a ‘multi-sited”, transnational anthropology of the world system (Marcus 1995). On the contrary, reverting to the tradition of a ‘single-sited’ anthropology can only mean that the illusion of cultural understanding is perpetuated. In this essay | hope to show that, in faet, cultural under- standing is only one ofthe many meanings or *commitments’ of translation in cultural anthropology — and not even the one that’s most relevant to present-day conditi I will focus here on a paradigm shift and its preconditions: the move from the anthropological critique of representation towards a more comprehensive cultural critique. That is, a change from the questioning of translational authority — which still depends on a bipolar notion of translation — towards 4 more dynamic, multi-layered and subversive understanding of ‘eulture as translation’, In other words, | am inter- ested in an epistemological rupture which seems to be crucial for the reorientation of cultural anthropology and its opening up to a eritical study of globalization, We might adapt the well-known question asked by Clifford Geertz, “What happens to verstehen when einfiihlen disappears”? (Geertz 1983: 56) — in other words, what happens to the anthropological ideal of empathetic understanding, “from the native’s point of view’, once we have abandoned the notion of a close, transcultural identification with the people studied? “What happens to verstehen when einfithlen disappears”? Well, what happens to translation when cultural understanding disappears? Even looking at the background to the recent ‘global turn’ in anthropology (Inda and Rosaldo 2002), it is clearly misleading (o narrow translation down to ‘cultural understanding’. If cultural anthropology embodies knowledge of translation of and isa view ns.Bachmann-Medick: Meanings of Translation in Culiural Anthropology 35 between cultures (without necessarily having reflected on the fact), that is certainly not simply a matter of ‘cultural understanding’. Instead, we know that a major prob: lem for translation in cultural anthropology is the way the languages and, even more importantly, the ways of thinking of other cultures — especially those outside Europe have to be ‘translated’ into the languages, the categories and the conceptual world of a Western audience. The difficulty also arises from the fact that oral discourses and actions are transported into a fixed, written form — as James Clifford has put it, ethnographic “writing includes, minimally, a translation of experience into textual form” (1988: 25) Added to that, anthropology, as a science of cultural comparison, works with comparative terms and analytic concepts such as kinship, ritual, power, social con- flict, hierarchy, religion and many more. The problem is that the translation of other cultures may be further distorted by describing indigenous conceptualizations within a Wester conceptual system. And on yet another level, anthropological translation must itselfbe viewed asa specific cultural practice, bound up with specific discursive and epistemological environments such as colonialism and orientalism. Translating cultures is closely intermeshed with power relations, and thus in most cases with rela. tionships of cultural inequality (see Tymoezko and Gentzler 2002; Niranjana 1992), Considering this extremely broad horizon, it was only a very first step when, from the 1920s onwards, American cultural anthropology began to carry out empirical studies and translations of other languages, especially Native American languages (Werner and Campbell 1973: 398). This is also the case with Malinowski’s “transla. tion of whole contexts” (1966: IIff.), Faced with the problem of translating magic Malinowski responded by calling fora far greater contextualization of cultural mean- ings — in terms both of moral or aesthetic values and of specific situational contexts, the functions of words, activities, interests and speech acts, From the 1950s on, this notion of a comprehensive translation of cultures took up an increasingly central position in British social anthropology (see Asad 1986). It is no coincidence that the 1971 jestschrift for Edward Evans-Pritchard is entitled The Translation of Culture (Beidelman |971). This ‘translational turn’ was set in motion by Evans-Pritchard’s paradigmatic translation dilemma: the Nuer claim that “a twin is a bird” (1957 13 Lff.), How ean this be translated into European languages and their incompatible notions of rationality? The issue prompted a debate on the epistemological founda- tions of translation in anthropology, and on the intelligibility and translatability of other ways of thinking in general. [tis a debate that questions the assumption of an objective, language-independent reality and implicitly criticizes universalist eriteria of rationality (see Winch 1964), These examples should be enough to indicate that anthropological translation ex- tends far beyond just ‘cultural understanding’ (for more historical and contemporary examples concerning the role of translation in anthropology see Bachmann-Medick 2004); instead, it directs critical attention to the cultural universalization of Western standards of rationality, objectivity and logic. From there, it is not a very large step to call into question the dominance of European translational authority. Arising trom the critique of representation in what has become known as the ‘writing culture’ debate since the 1980s (see Clifford and Marcus 1986), the move has also opened up36 Translating Others Vol. 1 translation studies and cultural theory to the factor of power and interpretive authority. This discourse on the relationship between cultural translation and representation of the Other (Bachmann-Medick 1997) deserves a brief mention here, since it offers important basic principles for contemporary concerns around cultural globalization with its world-wide circulation of symbols and images — and, of course, also con- froniations of symbols and images. Thus, as part of the linguistic and rhetorical turn in ethnology and in the ‘writing culture’ debate, translation was no longer considered merely under the category of ‘faithfulness’ to an ‘original’. Instead, it took on the value of a medium through which specific representational conventions and a specific authority in cultural mediation establish themselves. Ethnographic descriptions are themselves interpreting translations with the status of independent texts ~ texts that make use of rhetorical strategies, tropes, metaphors and so on. Here, the category of translation gains a new emphasis, inasmuch as anthropologieal practice itself ean be understood as @ creative process of translation that synthesizes, and thus virtually ‘invents’, unified cultural entities (Sperber 1993), As a result, cultural translation is toa large extent cultural construction ‘The insight has prompted whet has often been called a ‘erisis of representation” a crisis that also opens up new analytical perspectives. On the one hand, criticizing the rhetoric of representation brings us to the phenomenon of a ‘translation without an original’, This is something that arises when signs and symbols take on a life of their own in the global circulation of representations, so that translation now appears as just a representation of representations, On the other hand, this kind of focus also presents the opportunity to reflect on the limitations of a holisti¢ understanding of culture, and to work towards replacing a territorially defined notion of culture with a more dynamic version. A new, transnational ethnography is clearly characterized by what Gisli Pélsson (1993) calls a “going beyond boundaries”. It cannot help raising questions about power relationships and cultural hierarchies, thus shifting our interest to the “politics of translating (Third World) cultures” (Dingwaney 1995: 3). At this crucial moment of epistemological rupture, the idea of ‘cultural understand ing’ as translation’s central commitment will have begun to seem far too harmanious. Firstly, that is because of the inevitable — and I think often productive ~ misunderstand- ing between cultures, where we need to ask much more insistently about the role of translation in resolving such situations, It is not cultural translation’s success but its failures that offer the greater and more interesting challenge for cultural anthropology — which applies to the Pepsi case as well, by the way. Secondly, ‘translation as cultural understanding’ has to be radically questioned in view of the repression of minority cultures and marginalized languages, and of the asymmetries and one-sidedness of ethnography’s elaim to translate in a culturally understanding w: A postcolonial anthropology can no longer do without a politicisation of the meta- phor of cultural translation, Its epistemological doubts are embedded in the fact that translation usually takes place between unequal societies. Even a critically distanced translation is subject to the inequality of languages, that is, to the global hierarchy between orality and literacy and the power gap between languages of the First and the Third World. To do justice to this state of affairs in a global, post-national world, onlyBachmann-Medick. Meanings of Transtation in Cultural Anthropology 37 4 polyphony of translation would be enough, Here, atiention is turning more and more to the forms of cultural resistance to transnational translating and being-translated, forms that are located in culturally specific practices and regional resistances. To quote Homi Bhabha: “Any transnational cultural study must ‘translate’, each time locally and specifically, what decentres and subverts this transnational globality” (1994: 241), Influenced by postcolonial theory, today’s anthropology, too, has learned to use new concepts and new notions of translation as a way of engaging not only with the globalized world of relations of consumption, but also with ‘entangled histories’ (Shalini Randeria) between cultures. An ethnography of cultural encounter might, for example, investigate how Western concepts, ideas of society, or even models of pra tice are translated into the modernization and transformation process of non-European cultures. An example would be Shingo Shimada’s exploration of the translation- intensive process of national identity construction in Japanese society (Shimada 2000). In cases like these, translation becomes an entrance ticket ~ often a more than dubious one — into global culture. However, cultural negotiation may come into play from quite other directions, such as the recent opening up of cultural anthropology to indigenous reception ~ to a critical back-translation of ethnographic texts by the indigenous people themselves. This is occurring on the basis ofa discourse with the indigenous population, not a discourse about them (Gottowik 1998). Central to all these variations on the theme of translation is the insight into the multi-layeredness and overlapping of different cultures, affiliations and identities. This forces us to expand the notion of culture beyond holistic restrictions: hence ‘culture as translation’, The formulation alone indicates how, in cultural anthropology, the tegory of translation is becoming increasingly metaphorical, But { would like (0 argue that this is precisely what gives it such political momentum. Ever more doubt seems to be cast on the long-lived anthropological idea of culture as a complete and unified entity, responsible for securing tradition and identity, Especially in the light of postcolonial and global configurations, culture is coming to be understood as a hybrid field of translation processes. It is not just that cultures are translatable — an idea that managed to survive for a very long time with the help of cultural semiotics, Rather, cultures constitute themselves in translation and as translation. That is to say, they should be viewed as the components or results of translation processes. In thi sense Homi Bhabha notes that culture is “both transnational and translational” (199: 438), Fora transnational cultural anthropology, cultural translation can thus act as an anti-essentialist and anti-holistic metaphor that aims to uncover counter-discourses, discursive forms and resistant actions within a culture, heterogeneous discursive spaces Within a society. This translatedness of cultures, ofien referred to as *hybridity’, shits the notion of culture towards a dynamic concept of culture as a practice of negotiating cultural differences, and of cultural overlap. syneretism and ereolization ‘These are the new key terms of contemporary, posteolonially informed cultural theory. They help conceptually to process oscillating relationships in a kind of “third space’ (“by exploring this Third Space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves”, Bhabha 1994: 39), themselves only emerging through the experience of multiple cultura! affiliation and layered — if not broken identity. In view of all this, cultural anthropology should be taking up a more38 Translating Others Vol. i concrete translational task, which I would like to outline in three points, Firstly, by tailoring the category of translation to the global conditions associated with the world order, migration and the networking of consumption — what Arjun Ap- padurai calls “global ethnoscapes” and “the transnational cultural flows” (1991; (92) cultural anthropology ean address itself to global symbolic worlds, to a circulation of meanings and products that has long ceased to be territorially anchored. Secondly, this new approach directs attention to translation as a form of existential action and a life practice which becomes effective especially in contexts of migration Irefer here to translations not just of slogans, but of people, in the sense of an insight by Salman Rushdie: “Having been borne across the world, we are translated men” (1991; 17) ~ ‘rendered’, or pulled to and fro, between one culture and another. But translation as a characteristic of pivotal life situations has nowadays become even more complex: translation becomes ‘displacement’, The work of Arjun Appadurai has shown how the global circulation of goods, imag- es and slogans ~ and, especially, of people and identities ~ has led to a new conception of anthropology. It is a conception that relates to the new world-wide relationships of communication, and the transnational networks and imagined communities whose formation is fostered by communication technologies. But Appadurai’s concept of “transnational imagination” also hints at the possible translation of anthropological research into literary texts and vice versa; “Like the myths of small-scale society, as rendered in the anthropological classies of the past, contemporary literary fantasies tell us something about displacement, disorientation, and agency in the contempo- rary world” (1991: 202), This kind of translation between disciplines and genres has not received enough attention within cultural anthropology ~ and yet it is clear how much anthropology’s endeavour can be enriched by postcolonial novels like Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999). Novels like these are eye-openers on the way translation is experienced by its subjects as a quite existential process Rushdie’s novel traces the translation career of the Indian rock singers Ormus Cama and Vina Apsara. Both leave India and emigrate via Britain to America. Their migration becomes an act of translation, which the novel describes like a ritual sequence, full of liminal spaces for action, transitional stages and disconcertment. Here, translation oceurs literally by “passing through the membrane” (ibid.: 253) of air resistance during the flight trom Bombay to the States ~ a telling image of translation as a resistance- laden, transformatory act. This brings into play a cultural anthropology of translation that’s currently being spearheaded by literature. In Rushdie’s novels, at least, the process of translation’s metaphorization is elaborated with seismographie subtlety — in particular by the radical use of the earthquake metaphor to portray the intercultural translation experience of migrants, No talk of“cultural understanding” here instead, it is shock, displacement and transformation. In this, “our migrant century”, says Rushdie, we have entered “a transit zone: the condition of transformation” (ibid.: 461). Such ambivalent metamor- phoses via displacement are embodied in the protagonist Ormus, who lives “in — or rather with ~ two worlds at once” (ibid.: 347). They go far beyond cultural transfer, breaking apart the very bipolarity of the traditional concept of translation, This has enormous consequences for cultural polities, For when “the windows to the otherBachmann-Medick: Meanings of Translation in Cultural Anthropology 39 quiddity now have blurry edges” (ibi self and other cease to be an option. Now to my third point. These issues open up another perspective on a changed cultural anthropology, in that the reorientation of anthropological translation is closely associated with an epistemological rupture. | refer to the break with the dominant principle of dichotomy in perceptions of the Other ~ a principle that took shape within the history of colonialism and its complicity with the emergence of modem anthropology. To see that this principle still holds today, we need only look at the prognoses of a “clash of civilizations’ (Huntington 1996) and the associated bipolarity and dichotomy of the USA’s world-order ideologies, further reinforced by the events of September 1 Ith, 2001. I would just mention here the trend, currently predominant in the United States, towards an imperial translation where all forms of violence, and of opposition prepared to contemplate violence, are translated as ‘terrorism’! This kind of hegemonic translation practice is part of the challenge faced by cultural anthropology, In line with its understanding of ‘hybrid’ cultural configurations and interconnections, anthropology can pit its insights on the multi-polar character of cultural translation against the fossilized dichotomy of ‘us’ and the enemies, of the good and the evil; it ean use concrete analyses to uncover the cultural ascriptions that underlie this Manichean construction, That includes making greater use of the state of being ‘in-between’ as a special source of anthropological knowledge. It opens up wider spaces fora reciprocity in translation processes, by paying attention to rel ships between translations and to back-translation — or ‘writing back’ (Asheroft et al. 1989) — and, especially, by alerting us to the ambivalent acts of self-translation that permeate the life-world practices of migration. ‘This is akind of perspective that cannot be generated by the Yale example | quoted at the start, It addressed only a one-dimensional axis of translation — an approach still in thrall to the eredo of bipolarity. If the Yale website had drawn on the example of Rushdie rather than Pepsi, it would not havereduced the project of cultural translation to a marketing-oriented strategy of cultural adaptation that, in the end, amounts to nothing other than a homogenization, a ‘MeDonaldization’, of the world, Rather, it would have been able to expand the translational project to both analyse and promote active, conflict-conscious cultural self-translation. The ‘commitment of translation” would then be something akin to cultural negotiation of eultural transformation, L would like to close by summarizing and looking forward. The recent, more con- ceptually oriented positions of anthropological translation may seem utopian if we weigh up their chances of being realized in the light of the world system and today’s hegemonized global polities. But the accusation of utopianism applies even more if we cling (o the old model of cultural translation as ‘cultural understanding’. So, once again: What happens (o translation in anthropology when cultural understanding disappears? 388), easy borders and exclusions between ion ! See Draper's contribution to the 2002 Duke University colloquium on ‘Problems of Translation: age within Global Capital’, Hi lation is developed against the dominant imperial mode of translation “used by the media to translate geopolitical events into an American framework” (Draper 2002), Violence as Lan, an anti-imperial or fragmented mode of trans- te and major40 Translating Others Vol. 1 The category of translation offers profoundly sensitive indicator of anthropology’s own transformation into an anthropology of global relations. Translation serves more and more to generate celations; less and less to essentialize and ‘close off” cultures and cultural differences by means of understanding: The function of translation is enhanced since it is no longer practiced in the primary, dualistic “them — us" frame of conventional ethnography but requires considerably more nuaneing and shading as the practice of translation connects the several sites that the of sovial research explores along unexpected and even dissonant fractur location (Marcus 1995: 100). ‘Translation is now becoming a concept of relationship and movement, in a way that takes palpable, spatial shape in Rushdic’s metaphor of the migrantas ‘traveller between worlds’, Here, Rushdie is illustrating a notion of translation as travel ~ or travel as translation ~to which James Clifford gave theoretical form in his original 1997 study Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. This re-conception is yet another product of the new paths of enquiry opened up by cultural anthropology’s increasingly dynamic view of culture. It’s a view that privileges cultural contacts and border crossings by ‘people in transit’ above the investigation and understanding of scaled-off, unified cultural entities. Here, the moment of articulation I discussed earlier in this article, between representation (or construction) and cultural eritique, becomes especially productive. James Clifford locates his own work “on the border between an anthropology in crisis and an emerging transnational cultural studies” (ibid.: 8), Itis precisely here that « fruitful ‘intermediate space’ seems to emerge, hand in hand with a new understanding of —even a paradigm shift in — translation: the traditional hermeneutic claim is being replaced by a pragmatic attention to cultural networks and entanglements. Cultural translation is bound to appear within the horizon of what Emily Apter calls a “translational transnationalism” (2001: 5) Yet one fundamental question remains: what is there, in the end, “at the heart of the discipline of anthropology”? Presumably no longer the “act of translation as com- mitment to cultural understanding”; perhaps instead — so George Marcus ~ “the work of comparative translation and tracing among sites, which I suggested were basic 0 the methodology of multi-sited ethnography” (1995: 111). Or might there be even further-reaching, pragmatic acts of translation as cultural encounters in intercultural contact zones, as cultural critique and as a conerete management of cultural diifer- ences that is ready to accept conflict? References Appadurai, Arjun (1991) ‘Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology’ in Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, Richard G. 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Zurindigenen Rezeption ethnographischer ‘Texte’, in Figuren der/des Dritten: Erkundungen kultureller Zwischeardume, Claudia Breger and Tobias Docring (eds.), Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 65-85 Huntington, Samuel P. (1996) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York: Simon and Schuster, Inda, Jonathan Xavier and Renato Rosaldo (eds.) (2002) The Anthology of Globalization A Reader, Malden (Mass,) and Oxford: Blackwell. Malinowski, Bronislaw (1966) Coro! Gardens and Their Magic. Vol 2: The Language of#2 Translating Others Vol. Magic and Gardening, London: Allen and Unwin. Marcus, George E. (1995) ‘Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography’, Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95-117. Niranjana, Tejaswini (1992) Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context, Berkeley: University of California Press, Palsson, Gisli (ed.) (1993) Beyond Boundaries: Understanding, Translation and Anthro- pological Discourse, Oxford and Providence: Berg. Rushdie, Salman (1991) Joraginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-2991. Lon~ don: Granta (1999) The Ground Beneath Her Feet. London: Jonathan Cape. Shimada, Shingo (2000) Die Erfindung Japans. Kulturelle Weehsclwirkung und nationale Identitetskonstruktion, Frankfurt and New York: Campus. Sperber, Dan (1993) “Interpreting and Explaining Cultural Representations’, in Beyond Boundaries: Understanding, Translation and Anthropological Discourse, G. Palsson (ed.), Oxford and Providence: Berg, 162-83. Tymoezko, Maria and Edwin Gentzter (eds.) (2002) Translation and Power, Aruherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. Werner, 0. and D.T, Campbell (1973) ‘Translating, Working Through Interpret the Problem of Decentering’, in 4 Handbook of Method in Cultural Anthropology, R. Naroll and R, Cohen (eds.), New York and London: Columbia University Press, 398-420. Winch, Peter (1964) ‘Understanding a Primitive Society’, American Philosophical Quar- terly 1: 307-24 and238 Translating Others Vol. 1 2. The nationalistic theory of translation During the freedom movement in India, the spirit of nationalism was kindled by the renaissance of Indian culture and literature, The translation of the Bible into Indian languages proved to be a good model for modern prose. At the same time it posed a challenge to the nationalist Indians who wanted to regenerate the cultural values of ancient India. Many of the translations made by India’s social reformers and national- ist leaders should be interpreted in the light of this cultural crisis, Ram Mohan Roy (1774-1833) was perhaps the first writer in India to create a revolution by translating two vedanta treatises (1815) and the Upanishads into simple moder Bangla prose. Afterwards, Dayananda Saraswathy wrote Sotyarth Prakash (‘The Light of Truth’, 1874) asa summary translation and interpretation of the vedie truth for the common man This trend ean be seen throughout India, The Bhagavad Gita was translated with 4 political orientation by leaders like Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Gandhi. Literary and sovial leaders like Harish Chandra Bharatendu in Hindi and Mahakavi Subramania Bharati in Tamil wanted to develop their mother tongues by translating the best works from other languages. Bharatendu translated from Sanskrit, Prakeit, Bangla and English, while Bharati translated from Sanskrit and English. These translations are meant to enrich the language concerned. Bharati advocated thoroughly Tamilizing the foreign works, and Bharatendu, while translating The Merchant of Venice inio Hindi, radically changed the cultural atmosphere by Indianizing the proper names and place names. As a practical procedure, Bharati suggested: “First of all you read out your sentence to a Tamil who does not know English. If he understands it with- out any difficulty, you use that sentence. Then only your writings will be of use to Tamilnadu. Otherwise it simply means that you are troubling yourself as well as the readers” (Jeya 1988: 111). A good example of creating the national spirit by changing the atmosphere of a poem can be seen in the Hindi translation, by Kamta Prasad Guru, of Thomas Gray's “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, Where Gray has: Some village Hampden, that with dawnless breast ‘The little tyrant in his fields withsicad, Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, Some Cromwell, guiltless of his country’s blood ‘The translation brings Indians heroes in the place of Hampden, Milton and Cromwell: Koyi Ayodhyanath Sadrsa Nijdesupasi Siva Prasad Sam Koyi des adhikar udasi* Tnme hote vir koyi Rana Pratap Sam? Athava koyi Magan Singh hi se bhupadham. (Gramina vilap, Sareswati, 1908: 46).Translation, Transcreation and Culture Theories of Translation in Indian Languages G. GOPINATHAN Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtriya Hindi Vishwavidyalaya, Wardha, India Abstract: was recorded, ered as two separate processes, Many modern translators however have recorded their experiences and reflections. The development of theoreti- cal literature as part of translator waining, as well as further studies in translation introduced in academic instivutions afier the 1970s, have also contributed to a change in attitude. The present essay, while proposing the model of ‘wanscreation' and exploring Sri Aurobindo’ psycho-spiritual theory of translation, locates a disjuncture between Indian and Western 1 the ancient period in India, no specific theory of translation ince creative writing and translation were never consid- approaches The absence of translation from foreign into Indian languages in ancient India is the most likely reason for the absence of theoretical discussion about translation. That does not mean translation did not take place, but it happened from one Indian language to another. In the ancient period, there was much translating between al- lied classical languages like Sanskrit and Prakrit. In the Sanskrit dramas, the women characters and the characters from the lower social strata usually spoke Prakrit, and the convention was that the dramatist himself supplied a Sanskrit version of the text along with the Prakrit original. These translations were called chava. The word originally meant ‘shadow’ and was the name for the Sanskrit gloss of a Prakrit text (Monier-Williams 1889; 406), The idea of translation as ‘shadow’ means not only that a translation should follow its original but also that, like a shadow, depending on the intensity and angle of the light falling on it, a translation may assume a form different from that of the original in accordance with changing circumstances and the translator's interpretation. 1. The tradition of transcreation The creative translations of the ancient Sanskrit spiritual texts into modem Indian languages are generally termed ‘transereations’. The term ‘transereation’, originally used by contemporary writers like P. Lal for his English translation of the Shakuntala and Brhadaranyaka Upanishad (1974), is applicable to the whole tradition of creative translation of great elassies like the Ramayana, Bhagavrata and Mahabharata from Sanskrit into the regional languages of India, Sujit Mukherjee (1981) prefers to speak of ‘Translation as New Writing’, but ‘transereation” seems a better word to me to express this literary tradition of India. ‘Transcreation, understood in this context as a rebirth or incarnation (avatar) of the original work, can offer a solution for the problems of culturally oriented literaryGopinathan; Translation, Transcreation and Culture 237 texts, Ina general sense, the practice can be defined as an aesthetic re-interpretation of the original work suited to a new target-language audience. The re-interpretation is done with a certain social purpose and is performed with suitable interpolations, explanations, expansions, summaries and innovations in style and technique. Usually such texts, such as the Ramayana of Goswami Tulsidas, in Hindi, and that of Kamba in Tamil, are used as metatexts in the religious and spiritual ficlds, The translators had the aim of spiritually educating the people of their time who were separated from the ancient age, not only by time, but also by language, since they were ignorant of Sanskrit, According to the traditional Indian concept of word or veda as Brahman or God (‘Sabda Brahman’), these texts, being the revelation of vedic truth through stages like Valmiki and Vrasa, reincarnate in the regional languages to emancipate the common folk who were deprived of direct access to the vedic texts. Since they were the Vedas intended for the common man speakiag their local languages, they became their books for everyday reading and spiritual discourse. Hence the theory behind these transereations possesses great sociological import. In fact, the tradition of transcreation in India goes back to performers like the Chakyars of Kerala who creatively interpreted the ancient texts for their audience ina most effective and aesthetic manner, They continue to do 0 to this day, typically offer ing first a prose rendering of the Sanskrit dialogue or poem in the local language and states then proceeding to an aesthetic elaboration. Tulsidas, a medieval transereator, in the introduction of his Ramayana that he is writing in the regional language on the basis of Valmiki’s famous Sanskrit Ramayana and taking materials from elsewhere for his own gratification and pleasure. Thunchattu Ezhuthachan, in his introductory statements of the A1yaima Ramayanam in Malayalam, sys that he wrote his Ramayana tocenlighten the people who are ignorant about the great Ramayana, the repository of Vedic knowledge (1997; 22). In the modern period poets like Rabindranath Tagore, Sri Aurobindo, A. K, Ramanujan, Haribaresh Rai Bachan, Agneya, Vallathol Narayana Menon and many others have adopted the technique of transcreation, The moder poet Vennikulam Gopala Kurup has again transcreated Tulsidas’ Ramayana from Hindi to Malayalam using the traditional poetic style called *K lippattu’ (parrot song) ‘The appeal of transcreation is broad, since it can serve as a device to break the myth of untranslatability. It is a holistic approach in which a range of techniques including elaboration, interpolation, explaining the cultural value of the original text, image change, image recreation, translative explanation and elucidation, are all possible. In such texts, the translator enters into the soul of the original author and, rogencrating the original work, becomes its re-ereator. The translator performs an act of parakayapravesa or entering the body and soul of the original text and thus of the original author in order to bring the spirit to life in a new form. In the postcolonial dispensation, Haribaresh Rai Bachan, Agneya and Dharamvir Bharati have used transereation techniques for rendering both Western and Easiem poetry into Hindi, The approach demands an intuitive and aesthetic recreation and the application of the creative imagination, Transcreation does not result in an altogether new creation, because a logical relationship between the original and the translated text is always retained. Nonetheless, transcreations read like a new creations.Gopinathan: Translation, Transcreutionand Culture 239 The motive informing these translations is the promotion of the Swadesi idea: to bring out the merits of the land by importing the best from other literatures while resisting the cultural infiltration from the West : Si 3. The psycho-spiritual theories of translatio Aurobindo The psycho-spiritual theories of translation developed by Sri Aurobindo are of paramount importance in the context of modem Indian languages. Sri Aurobindo (1892-1950), a philosopher, poet, spiritualist and one of the greatest translators of modern India, has recorded the theoretical framework of his own translations in a number of articles with titles like ‘On Translating Kalidasa’, ‘On Translating the Bhagavad Gita’ , ‘On Translating the Upanishads’, ‘The interpretation of Scripture’, ‘Freedom in Translation’, ‘The Importance of the Turn of Language in Translation’ “Translation of Prose into Poetry’, and ‘Remarks on Bengali Translations’ (all in Sri Aurobindo 1972), While these theories have emerged from his own practice of trars- lation, they are rooted in cognitive philosophy and psychology. Sri Aurobindo’s own philosophy is based on psycho-spiritual interpretations of the ancient Indian thinking in the Upanishads. He seems to have been especially influenced by the cognitive philosophy of ancient India, the tradition of which goes back to the Buddhist period and beyond, Some of the theories he has expounded may be outlined as follows: 3.1 Translation and the levels of consciousness As regards the cognitive processes of translation such as anslysis and comprehension of the literal and connoted meanings of the target text and finding suitable equivalents for them in the target language, Sri Aurobindo (1972, 3:115) mentions three basic categories in his essay ‘The interpretation of Scripture’. They are: ‘name’ (nama), ‘form of meaning’ (rypa) and the image of the ‘essential figure of truth’ (svarupa}. The terms indicate the different levels of consciousness and the role of intuition in grasping meaning at the higher levels. They correspond with three levels of the text, which are comparable to the three levels of language mentioned by the fifth-century philosopher-grammarian Bhartrhari in his work “akyapadiyam. These levels or stages of the speech principle in the course of its manifestation are pasyanti, the highest or the deepest level of consciousness, madhyama or the intermediate common mental level of the linguistic form, and vaithari, the level of the spoken-linguistic of the sound uttered and heard (Raja 1977: 147-8). Sri Aurobindo made a further psycho-spiritual division of the levels of consciousness at the physical, mental and the supra-mental levels. In this view, as Eva Olsson has put it, “our ordinary human mind is only a fraction of our entire consciousness, which ranges from the mind levels to the superconscience above and the subconscience below [.. .]. Our mind is only a middle term in a long series of ascending consciousness” (Olsson, 1959; 12), Consequently, a text ean de analyzed linguistically and intellectually at the two levels of the word and its form of meaning, but at the highest level the analysis can be conducted only intuitively, and perhaps it is at this level that the actual translation takes place240 Translating Others Vol. 1 Some cognitive linguists consider that translation equivalence is possible at the level of imagery (Vor example, Tabakowska 1993: 30). This idea comes close to the “essential figure of truth’ mentioned by Sri Aurobindo, His concept of ‘superconscious- hess’ can be interpreted as follows. In translation, the process of text analysis involves comprehension of the literal as well as the suggested meaning, and the process of deci- sion-making will also have several levels, The flashes from the ‘Supermind” through the medium of intuition will help the translator, Reliance on the mechanical mind will produce only a mechanical type of translation, whereas a translator making proper use of intuition will produce better results. In the seareh for effective equivalents the translator goes through an inner struggle, like the seientist conducting an experiment. Inthe same way as the discovery which often comes to the scientist in a flash and not as a result of a merely intellectual search, a translator is also often afforded insights into possible equivalence coming to him as aa intuitive flash from his ‘Supermind’ According (o Sri Aurobindo, consciousness can ascend or descend at the various levels and can integrate the lower level into the higher. The lower stages do not disappear in this process, but are transformed and continue under altered conditions, This he calls the ‘principle of integration’ (Olsson 1959: 14), In light of this view, we can say that the decision-making process in translation starts ftom the superconscious level of the image or the “essential figure of truth’. Then the mental level of the figure of meaning, or rua, and the physical or material level of the word, or nama, are also integrated. It is the finding of the appropriate expression at the surface level which can suggest the meaning, This extends its dimensions towards the third level of consciousness. There, translation becomes more communicative, especially when the higher meaning of the textis significant, About this kind of cogni- tive process, the ancient Indian thinkers held divergent views. Some, like Bhartrhari, believed that all cognition, including perception, is linguistic at all levels, but according to the so-called Nyaya theories, perceptual cognition is initially non-linguistic and non-conceptual, and this initial phase is soon replaced by a linguistic and conceptual cognition, which nonetheless remains perceptual (Mohanty 1994: 197) The latter view seems more relevant in the context of translation. Sri Aurobindo indicates that the translation of any text may then be said to take place at all three levels, At the supra-conscious level, it may not be purely linguistic, but at the mental and the physical levels it becomes linguistic and conceptual. Sri Aurobindo refers to the supreme level by the ancient term Sabdabrahman, the word as God, which Monier-Williams’ Sanskrit-English dictionary defines as “the Veda considered as a revealed sound or word and identified with the Supreme” (1899: 1053). Translation scholars like Hans G. Hénig (1991: 78) call this level the “uncontrolled workspace in the mental mapping of translation, If we adopt this view we ean say that while analyzing and comprehending the meaning ofa text, the translator starts out from the surface linguistic level to reach the mental level (or the ‘deep’ level of modern linguistics) and, beyond that, the highest (or the deepest) level where the text exists in a Janguage-without-language form, While finding equivalents, the translator will have to access this /anguage-without-language form first and then select the appropriate ‘name’ and form in the receptor language. Hence the process of translation can be understood as being linguistic, intellectualGopinathan. Translation, Transcreation and Culture 241 and intuitive at the same time, Comparison also will be going on in the translator's human translating machine, consciously and unconsciously, at all three levels. The empirical methods for analyzing and evaluating these processes should therefore also be three-dimensional: linguistic, intellectual and intuitive. 3.2 The problem of the knower, of knowledge and the known in transtation Sri Aurobindo writes that in the interpretation of the Scriptures, the standards of truth are three: the knower, knowledge and the known (1972, 3: 118), He explains that the known is the text itself that we intend to interpret (or translate). The knower in the case of texts like the Upanishads is the original drasta or ‘seer’ of the hymn. In the case of other key texts, this will be the author. The ancient Indian scholars of cogni- live philosophy discussed the basic problem of the unity of “the knower, knowledge and the known’ under the technical name of triputi or “triad” According to Sri Aurobindo, the translator ought to be in spiritual contact with the original scer or author. He establishes the logical basis of the empathy of the translator with the author, arguing that if knowledge isa perishable thing in a perishable instrament, such contact is impossible, but in that case the scripture itself must be false and not worth considering, If there is any truth in what the scripture says, knowledge is etemal and inherent in all of us, and what another says I can see, what another real- ized I can realize. The drasta was a soul in relation with the infinite spirit and Tam also a soul in relation with the infinite spirit. We have a meeting-plac 4 possibility of communication, (ibid.) ‘The communion between the original author, the translator and the knowledge which is revealed by the text forms the triangular cognitive basis of translation, It will continue as the triad of translator (who through the perceptive process identifies with the original author), the knowledge revealed by the translation and the reader of the translation, who will have communion with both. According to Sri Aurobindo, knowledge is the eternal truth, part of which the author conveys to us. He says that not only words, but also ideas are merely symbols af a knowledge which is beyond ideas and words (ibid.: 115). Therefore he urges the translator to transgress limits and penetrate to the knowledge behind the text, This knowledge must be experienced before it can be known, and the realization in the self of things is the only knowledge The text alone should be the guiding factor for the translator, The translator of the Vedas should seek to know what the Veda has to say for itself (ibid.: 117). At the same time, out of the two main instruments of cognition suggested by the ancient Indian philosophers, namely the authority of the word and direct perception, Sri Aurobindo prefers perception in understanding the true meaning of the text (ibid.: 116). In his essay ‘The Foundations of a Psychological Theory” he stresses the need to identify the “right psychological function” of symbols, which should have a sound philosophi- cal justification and fit naturally into the context wherever they occur (ibid, 10: 31). Elsewhere he says that the translator should exceed the scriptures (texts) in order to be master of their knowledge (ibid., 3: 118).242 Translating Others Vol. 1 In a broader context, Sri Aurobindo holds that man’s capacity is unlimited, and if we can get rid of our ahankara or ‘ego’; if we can put ourselves at the Service of the infinite without any reservation or predilection or opinion, then there is no reason why our awareness should be limited, To understand the scriptures, it is not enough to be a scholar, one must be a ‘soul’, The suggestion here concerns the ideal nature of the impersonality of the translator, on which Sri Aurobindo has commented on various occasions. He himself practised this impersonality as a translator in the translations of numerous spiritual texts and great authors. In the light of the above discussion it can be concluded that through such an identity of the original author, translator and text, the unification of ‘knower, known and knowledge’ becomes possible. This can be the cognitive basis, not only of serip- ture translation, but of any kind of translation of literature or of works of a spiritual nature. 3.3 The problem of communicating new concepts through translation In his preface to the translation of the Upanishads Sri Aurobindo writes: ‘The mind of man demands, and that demand is legitimate, that new ideas shall be presented to him in words which convey to him some associations with which he should not feel like a foreigner in a strange country where no one knows his language, nor he theirs. The new must be presented to him in terms of the old, new wine must be put to some extent in old bottles, (1972, 12: $8) ‘The statement is of great cognitive significance, since translators all over the world have struggled with the problem of translating cultural terms from other cultures Sri Aurobindo does not advocate total replacement of foreign cultural terms by the available target terms. On the basis of cognitive philosophy and psychology, and of his own experience as a translator, he suggests a more natural and psychological way of approaching the problem, The Nyaya philosophers of ancient India had accepted ‘analogy’ (upamana) as one of the valid sources of cognition. The concept involves. associating a thing unknown before by its name by virtue of its similarity with some other known thing (Dasgupta 1951: 354). A famous example given by them concerns 4 man of the city who has never seen a wild ox; when he goes to the forest, he asks a forester ~ “What is a wild ox?”, and the forester replies — “Oh, you don’t know? Well, it’s just like a cow”, Afterwards, when the city dweller comes across a wild ox he compares it with a cow and understands what it is, In the same way, a new concept or new cultural term which is unknown to readers of the target language can be made familiar to them through existing terms, although there are of course limitations, This is in fact a psychological method of making use of images already existing in the minds of the target readers. For example, in the translation of the Upanishads, Sti Aurobindo claims that the use of the word *God" is, to be preferred in the target text even though the Sanskrit language always employs the neuter gender when referring to the Supreme Being. He is of the opinion that ifnew ideas are presented with force and power through already existing similar terms, theGopinathan: Translation, Transcreation and Culture 243 intelligent reader will soon come to understand that something different is meant by * god’ (1972, 12: 58). The approach can be tested by coraparing two different versions in which the terms have been translated using familiar terms in one and unfamiliar new terms in the other. The empirical basis of Sri Autobindo’s suggestion seems to be quite sound. 3.4 The problem of word value and image transformation In his essay ‘On Translating Kalidasa’, Sri Aurobindo suggests that the translator of aesthetically important texts must give preference to “closeness of word value” rather than closeness of meaning (1972, 3: 241). The problem discussed here is of the utmost importance in the context of the cognition of culturally dissimilar items in translation, Sri Aurobindo is of the opinion that what is perfectly familiar in the original language must not seem entirely alien to the forcign audience, There must be some toning down of strangeness, an attempt to bring home the association to the foreign intelligence, to give at least some idea to a cultured, but not orientally erudite mind (ibid.: 237) In this context he suggests two techniques which he himself adopted in his transla- tions, One is to discard the original image and, if it is incispensable, to replace it with a more intelligible image in the receiving language (ibid.: 240). This is a creative device, which calls for the application of the translator's creative intelligence. In replacing the original image, its aesthetic and cultural value will be taken into account. The second technique that he suggests consists in replacing the werd or image with a neologism which will help to convey the relevant characteristic ef the idea associated with the thing it expresses, For instance, ‘blossom of ruby’ may replace bandhoula, a flower associated with its redness; or else a word itself may bedropped and the characteristic may be brought into prominence. Instead of saying thet a woman has lips like a ripe bimba fruit, it will be a fair translation to write that “her scarlet mouth is ripe fruit and red” (ibid.: 237). Such a device expressly states the characteristics which the source text only indicates. The process at work in these two devices involves a kind of de-metaphorization or decoding of the images and then finding a suitable equiva- lent whieh can communicate their value, Sri Aurobindo’s theories of translation and philosophy have influenced translators like Sumitranandan Pant, Vyohar Rajendra Singh and Vidyapati Kokil in Hindi, and Subramania Bharati in Tamil. 4, Indian poetic theories and their application In the contemporary period, Indian poetic concepts such as dhvani: “suggestive meaning’, and auchitya: ‘appropriateness’, have been applied as critical yardsticks of translation In the Western world there have been continual con-roversies over whether words are to be translated literally or according to their sense (word for word versus sense for sense, literal versus free translation). The notion prevailing in India from Vedic times was that, over and above a word’s literal meaning, there is a suggestive meaning in a244 Translating Others Vol. I word used in a text. In the Rgveda Samhita (687), itis said that a man who sees only the literal meaning of a poem sees, but does not sce; he hears but does not hear. For the one who goes beyond and looks into the inner meaning, the poem reveals itselt” completely as a loving wife does to her husband. Anandavardhana, a ninth-century critic, calls this theory of poetic suggestion dhvani, He defines dhvani as the capacity of a Word (o suggest a charming sense other than its literal and expressed meanin| This suggested sense is like the grace or charm ofa beautiful maiden, whieh is differ- ent from the beauty of her limbs. On this basis Anandavardhana develops the theory that divani is the soul of poetry, although he adds that he only systematized the ideas of others before him (1965) The fundamental problem of translation can then be seen as the problem of how to communicate the suggestive meaning of a text. If, as Anandavardhana says, suggestive meaning is the soul of poetry, the literal translation of poetry becomes impossible. The difficulty is intensified by the fact that we can reach the suggestive meaning only through the literal meaning. The type of poetry in which the words and their literal meaning occupy a subordinate position and suggest some charming sense ~ an idea, a figure of speech or an emotion ~ is also called dhvani (Raja 1977; 284), The sug- gestive meaning depends mainly on three factors: the peculiar expression of the word in the text said with a particular motive, its shades of meaning and its sociocultural context. Whenever only literal translation is needed, a translator can follow a me- chanical method, but where communicating the suggestive meaning is at stake, the translator will need to adopt a more creative technique by using his imagination, The significance of the theory of suggestive meaning in translation has been an important subject of discussion in recent years (Gopinathan 2000; Gopinathan and Kandaswamy 1993; Mohanty 1994), In the introduction to Translation, Its Theories and Practices, Avadhesh K. Singh (1996) has focussed on the relevance of auchitya for translation, According to him, auchitya in translation, without moving too far from its meaning in Indian poetics, should mean propriety in the selection of a text for translation, in the methodology and strategy used for translation, and in placing the translated text in its proper per- spective, so that the original writer's or the original text's intended, and not merely the articulated meaning, finds its proper expression in the target text. He has related auchitya to the translator’s social and ethical responsibility and expressed the view that its negligence may lead to misinterpretation, distortion, over- or under-interpretation and even to a social disservice. In his opinion, Western poeties has remained silent on this social appropriateness or propriety in translation. 5. The synthesis of western and eastern ideas Contemporary theory written in Hindi and other Indian languages presents a syn- thesis of Western and Indian ideas. The Western linguistic models of Catford, Nida, Jakobson and others have influenced writers in Hindi like Bholanath Tiwari (1972); Ravindranath Shrivastava (1985); Suresh Kumar (1986); Bhatia KailashchandraGopinathan: Translation, Transcreation and Culture 245 (1985) and others. Gopinathan (1985, 1993) has interpreted the translation process as metempsychosis (parakdyapravesa), effectuating a synthesis of Indian and Westem ideas, The model of the process of translation is then as in Figure J: ‘ORIGINAL. TRANSLATION REPLACEMENT SVE STYLE (Body) fr a (Body) Phonology Phonology Morphology MEANING: MEANING: Morphology Word (Soul) (Soul) Word Syntax Syntax. Discourse Discourse LINGUISTIC TRANSFERENCE LINGUISTIC LEVELS OF LEVELS OF STYLE STYLE Figure 1: Translation as metempsychosis In this view, meaning, or the soul of the text, is wansferred, whereas the style or body of the text is replaced at various linguistic levels. Conclusion The theories of translation in Hindi and other modern Indian languages are gradually evolving through a process of critical analysis and evaluation which started only re- cently. The tradition of transcreation has its roots in India’s ancient culcure but itis still influential among writers, The nationalist theory of enriching the regional languages through translation and the idea of swadeshi and *Indianization’ is part of the vibrant historical consciousness, The psycho-spiritual theories of Sri Aurobindo have madea dcep impact on many modem Indian writers and translators and is futuristic in nature. Dhvani, or the theory of suggestive meaning, and auchitya, or appropriateness, are often applied as yardsticks for translation, No doubt Indian poetics and linguistics can contribute much to the development of translation theory. This synthesis will be the more useful as Indian theories of translation develop in a global context246 Translating Others VoL. I References Anandavardhana (1965) DAvanyaloka, Bishnupad Bhattacharya (ed.), Caleutta: Firma K.L, Mukhopadhyaya, Bholanath, Tiwari (1972) Anuvad vigyan, Delhi: Kitab Ghat. Dasgupta, Surendranath (1951) A History of Indian Phi‘osophy, Vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres Ezhuthachan, Thunchakku (1997) Addhyatma Ramanayan. Kottayam: D.C. Books Gopinathan, G. (1985) Anuwad Siddhani Anuprayog, Allahabad: Lokbharati Prakashan. (2006) ‘Ancient Indien Theories of Translation’, in Beyond the Western Tradition, Translation Perspectives XJ, Rose Marilyn Gaddis (c4.), Binghamton, New York: Centre of Research in Translation, State University of New York, 165-74, and S. Kandaswamy (cds.) (1993 } The Problems of Translation, Allahabad: Lok Bharati Prakashan. Honig, Hans (1991) ‘Holmes’ “Mapping Theory” and the Landscape of Mental Transla- tion Processes’, in Translation Studies: the State of the Art, Kitty van Leuven-Zwart and Ton Naaijkens (eds.), Amsterdam: Radopi, 77-90. Jeya, ¥, (1988 ) "Bharathi’s Concept of Translation from the Point of View of Language and Social Development’, in Translation As Synthesis, X. Karunakaran and M. Jaya- kumar (eds.), New Delhi: Bahri Publications, 106-19. Lal, P. (1974) Brhadaranyaka Upanishad, Kolkatta: Writers Workshop. Mohanty, LL. (1994) ‘Indion Epi Daney and Ernest Sosa (eds.), London: Blackwell. Monier-Williams, Monier (1889) The Sanskrit-English Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon, Mukherjee, Sujit (1981) Translation as Discovery, New Delhi: Allied Publishers. Olsson, Eva (1959) The Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo in the Light of the Gospel, Madras: ‘The Christian Literature Society. Raja, Kunjunni (1977) Indian Theories of Meaning, Madras: The Adayar Library and Research Centre Singh, Avadhesh K. (ed.) (1996) Translation, lis theory ard Practice, New Delhi: Cre- ative Books. Sti Aurobindo (1972) Collected Works, Volumes 3, 9, 10, 12, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Srivastava, Ravindranath and Goswami Krishnakumar (eds.) (1985) Anuvad Siddhant Aur Praridhi, Dethi: Alekh Prakashan, Suresh, Kumar (1986) Anuvad Siddhant ki Roop Rekha, New Delhi: Vani Prakashan, Tabakowska, Elzbieta (1973) Cognitive Linguistics and Poetics of Translation, Tubingen: Gunter Nart. iemology’, in A Companion to Epistemology, Jonathan