Tejaswini Niranjana on translation

Translation means taking something in one language and rendering it in another. Suppose a number of different translations are assembled in one place- for example on a website which gives all the famous translations of a Biblical text into English- then we could say 'the translation of such and such text in X language has a site with respect to language Y.'

On the other hand, if various different people at different times translate a given text into a particular language, such translations have no site- unless someone takes the trouble to curate one.

Thus, when I translate a couplet from Bhratrhari or Ghalib or Horace into English, such translations have no site other than in my own oeuvre.

It doesn't matter that Horace's Rome once colonised England or that the English once colonised Ghalib's India. My translations must stand or fall on their own merits.

Tejaswini Niranjana, who has translated English into Kannada and vice versa, takes a different view.

In a book written some fifteen years ago, she says-

The British had left India long before Tejaswini learnt their language. By the Nineties, after the death of Rajiv Gandhi, no major political figure could be said to have had English as their first language.
Yet Tejaswini herself did some translations. What 'problematic of translation' was raised thereby?  Her own background was not very different from that of the people she translated. She had studied English in the US- not a colonial power- and so her English was better. But what intractable problem of 'representation, power and historicity' did her modest success represent? U.R. Ananthamurthy, it is true, was an insufferable snob and deeply patronising in his treatment of Vaidehi. But that was because he had a penis and Vaidehi didn't. Tejaswini doesn't have a penis. Sociologically, she is pretty much on a par with Vaidehi.

Why does she say 'conventionally, translation depends on' Western philosophical notions? Is she utterly mad? Does she think Muslims or Hindus or Buddhists- who think 'Western philosophical notions' are silly (as indeed do most Westerners)- can't translate Kannada into Telugu or English?

What on earth would Tejaswini know about a 'colonial subject'? She never met one- unless her parents, who were Communists, were secretly colonial subjects of the Kremlin. The truth is Tejaswini was telling lies to advance her academic career. But this was a case of 'monkey see, monkey do'- she was imitating older Indian academics.

Translation was not used to keep the native down. Why? It has no such magic power. Bullets and Battleships do have power. But, they cost money. So everything comes down to whether Colonialism can make a profit or not. That's all that matters.

Tejaswani wrote derivative nonsense to get ahead in her career. Why? The answer is that she was an academic in a worthless Department. She had to repeat stupid lies because that was what was required of her by, not White people, but Brown shitheads like herself who expected her to regurgitate their careerist shite.

Suppose she had had some talent or was part of a worthwhile Research Program. Then she could have written truthfully and in consonance with her own lived experience. In the short run, her career may have suffered. Long term, she would have prevailed.

The following is extracted from an interview Tejaswini gave Scroll.In

You’ve also thought a lot about the politics of translation in your academic work. In 1992, you edited a volume titled Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context.I know this is an impossible request, but could you tell us what the argument of that book was?Very very broadly, the book was among the first to point out that though it is often seen as a transparent medium by which you transport one culture into another, translation is mobilised as a way of enforcing colonial domination.

Why would a book which came out in 1992 point out anything so false and so stupid? There was no colonialism anywhere by then. Yet the volume of translation was increasing exponentially. If you wish to dominate a culture or a people you don't permit them to learn their own language or to translate books into it. That's what the Turks did to the Armenians and, later, the Kurds. China was not promoting translations from Tibetan or Uighur when it was clamping down on those regions.

Translation has never been 'mobilised as a way of enforcing colonial domination'. It either pays for itself or is subsidised for some administrative or proselytising purpose. But, the spread of literacy- more particularly if they feature translations of alethic, Scientific, Technological, texts- itself undermines such domination.

Tejaswini knew this very well. She could see for herself that people like her Mom, who studied Medicine in later life, had greatly benefited from Translation. Indeed, so had all the dominant castes of the Indian sub-continent and the rest of the New Commonwealth.

Yet Tejaswini is continuing to tell us stupid lies. The question is- why?

I look in detail at some major texts and at the ideas of translation that were circulating in colonial times, how it worked through the missionary activity and through administrators like William Jones.

Tejaswini knows very well that people like William Jones became celebrities, they gained a European fame, by translating novel texts of intrinsic literary and value and great antiquity. They gained money and reputation. They could sell their manuscript collections at a good price on returning home.

In the 1780s, in the early colonial period, there was a great curiosity and romanticism about the East – and the whole understanding of translation was informed by that, by a desire not to interfere in the lives of the natives.

Is this woman completely off her rocker? Does she really not know that the East India Company made a lot of money not just by interfering in the lives of the natives but also by killing them and robbing them?

But by the 1820s, under the East India Company, with the Utilitarian influence, the whole understanding of India changed – from seeing it as an advanced civilisation to a barbaric place.

WTF?! William Jones was part of the East India Company. During the 1820's people like H.H Wilson were still going strong. The only thing which had changed was that Missionaries and comprador arrivistes like Raja Ramohan Roy were directly lobbying Westminster and influencing the reception of Indian texts. These guys- just like Tejaswini and her mentors- derived a rent by pretending India was a shit-hole populated by stupid cunts.

What kind of conceptual and political labour did translation do, to help colonial domination? In a literal way, too: even someone like John Mill’s understanding of India is informed by translations.

What's so special about Mill? Few English people remember his name. After he quit the India Office, he was Liberal. But he had no influence or power.

Translations didn't matter at all.  Novels did. Queen  Victoria loved 'Confessions of a Thug' and demanded that the proofs be brought to her straight from the printing press. Why? The thing was quite gripping. But, unlike 'Uncle Tom's Cabin', it changed nothing. Colonialism remained a project wholly determined by Balance Sheets and the Balance of Power.

I end the book by looking at an 18th century translation of a 12th century vachana, a very Orientalist translation, and at AK Ramanujan’s translation of the same text, which is a very modernist translation. My point was not that they were good or bad, but that the discursive space they came from informed the actual translations that they did. And I offered my own translation of the vachana.
The book is 25 years old, and I don’t talk about it any more. But without my having been a translator, I would not have written that book.

This is Tejaswani's translation of Allama Prabhu's vacana-

Drawing back to look at your radiance
 I saw the dawning of a hundred million suns
 I gazed in wonder at the lightning's creepers playing.
Guhesvara, if you are become the linga of light
Who can find your figuration.

This is shit. Why? The dawning of a hundred million suns, is still something very dim. It isn't radiant at all. There is Night- that is darkness- then a little light gets refracted in a diffuse manner- that is dawning. It  doesn't yield enough radiance to read by or to make things out distinctly. No one steps back as one sun or one billion suns start dawning. Rather, one steps forward. The full sun-rise of a hundred million suns would be very bright. But their dawning can't be. It is an almost imperceptible diffraction of light into the night-time sky.

AK Ramanujan did not make this mistake in his translation-

Looking for your light,

I went out:

It was like the sudden dawn

 Of a million million suns

This makes sense. A sudden dawn- not a dawning- of a billion suns would indeed be dazzling.

What is this shite about 'lightning's creepers playing'? Is there a dawn or is this a thunder storm? or is this just a shite poem? What is Guhesvara? Clearly someone or something this shite poet is enthusiastic about. The idiot thought the dawning, not the actual dawn, of a hundred million suns would be more radiant than that of just one. Then he started babbling about lightning as being a creeper which plays. Now the poet is into the linga or bazinga of light. Why? Because the guy is a shite poet. He doesn't know who can find this the figuration- which means allegorical representation- of the thing or person he's been talking about. In other words the poet is confessing that he is a shite poet who just now failed to give an ornamental or allegorical representation of the person of thing he is into.

Once again, AK gives a reasonable translation-

a ganglion of lightnings for my wonder.
 O Lord of Caves,
 if you are light there can be no metaphor

The English speaking reader understands that this is a mystical verse. It isn't the ramblings of a shite poet who is into lingas or bazinga or Gushas or Mushas.

Tejaswani is a shit translator.  Why? It is because of colonialism.

The British had run away without bothering to translate Kannada literature. Tejaswanutty, because the Nehru dynasty reproduced colonial relations of power, sometimes hungered for 'English books' as avidly as her ancestors. Unfortunately the ones she read were by shite Indians. So she herself wrote a shite English book hoping to satisfy this supposed insatiable hunger for the 'English book' which disfigured her countrymen.

What did Tejaswini hope to achieve by this act of vandalism? Did she wish to show a great Kannada mystic and saint to have been a bad poet? But AK Ramanujan, who had some literary talent, had already shown the reverse. In any case, Whitey didn't give a toss about Kannada or, indeed, very much about even Canada. Nobody wants to colonise an overpopulated shithole. Even natives of the place only want money and power so as to accumulate property abroad and gain nicer passports for their progeny.