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Ravichandra
P. Chittampalli
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Ravichandra
P. Chittampalli was born on February the 25th
1955. He completed his Post Graduate Diploma
in English in 1974, M.A. (English Literature)
in 1976 and PhD in 1985 from the University
of Mysore. |
His
branch of specialization in M.A. was Common
Wealth Literature and his PhD thesis was on
"The Poetry of A.D.Hope: A Study in Modernity
in Australian Poetry". At present he
is the Private Secretary to the Vice-Chancellor,
University of Mysore.
He was awarded the Northrop Frye award, the
Victoria University award and many more. He
has been consistently publishing in journals
like Indian Journal of Canadian Studies, South
Asian Canadiana, The Literary Criterion: Aspects
of Contemporary Canadian Literature, Critical
practice and others. |
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f all act of writing involves a certain
essentialist process, that of an encoding in a specific language,
the act of translation is one that problematizes writing.
All translations are negotiations, and as such the borders of
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translation as a paradigm are amorphous. Translation at
once deconstructs the given of the assumed relationship between
the writer and the work. Translation deals with the other.
It is anthropological at the exploitative end and aesthetic
at the romantic. It is transgression of the unchanging essence
of the original. Each translation, therefore, is popularly
conceived as a minimal release of a word, a historicizing
of the ahistoric meaning. Translation is the meant of the
meaning, and therefore at the point of emergence necessitates
a further othering. Lawrence Venuti sums up the status of
translation today in the following words:
"The hierarchy of cultural practices that ranks translation
lowest is grounded on romantic expressive theory and projects
a platonic metaphysics of the text, distinguishing between
the authorized copy and the simulacrum that deviates from
the author". Venuti (1992)
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Translation in India is perhaps the result
of a constant need to familiarize oneself with the canonical
literature. It is doubtful how many could commonly access
either Pali or Sanskritic texts. Yet again, translations
from Sanskrit into other languages have existed commonly
on Palmyra for a long time. Such translations were necessarily
outside the religious and the ritualistic needs of a society.
One may therefore very well arrive at a conjecture that
in India at least, translation was an activity which secularised
the text, and helped establish distinct linguistic traditions
in a regional context. Nonformal events like Kathakalakshepa
have traditionally resorted to translation as orature. What
is being stressed at this point is the remarkable tentativeness
of the act of translation. It is an intellectual process
where discourses are set in flow. It is, therefore, almost
always meaningless to ask the question what is being translated.
For, the question assumes that there is not only a unitary
text of frozen contour but that there is a tenacious physical
relationship between the author and the text that is being
translated. Such assumption can hardly be tenable in the
face of Derrida's categorical assertion:
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the sign must be the unity of a heterogeneity, since the
signified (sense or thing, noeme or reality) is not in
itself a signifier, a trace…The formal essence of
the signified is presence, and the privilege of its proximity
to the logos as phone is the privilege of essence."
(Derrida, 1994) |
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