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Madhavi
Apte
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Madhavi
Apte was born on August the 5th 1949. She
is currently teaching Linguistics and Applied
Linguistics to post graduate students at Dr.
Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University,
Aurangabad, India. |
She
was trained for her PGDTE and M.Litt. in Linguistics,
Phonetics and English Language Teaching at
the Central Institute of English and Foreign
Languages, Hyderabad, India. Her M.Litt. and
PhD projects were studies in English as a
Second Language (Acquisition of English as
a non-native language) in the Indian context.
She has travelled widely in India and abroad
- USA and UK. Her interests comprise creative
writing as well as translation from Marathi
(her mother tongue) to English and vice-versa.
Besides her research and journalistic publications
(several papers plus edited books) she has,
to her credit, several creative writings including
a short story, several poetic and short story
translations, including a book, Goodharamya
Emily (translated poems of Emily Dickinson).
She writes both in English and Marathi. At
present, she is busy with a project on translating
short stories of Nobel Prize winners from
English into Marathi. |
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ranslating poetry, successfully, is considered
difficult, or even impossible (George Steiner). There have
been innumerable theories coming up every now and then. Translators
have taken up this task for
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about 2000 years, each age with its own theories, and yet, there is no clear-cut 'prescription'
as to how to translate poetry. Researchers and scholars, of
late, however, do not think in terms of "prescriptive/normative"
theories (Crisafulli, (2000)), but in terms of descriptive/empirical
methods, and an eclectic approach to translation. Views on
the translation of poetry have ranged from translating poems
into prosaic paraphrases (Vladimir Nabokov) to 'verse to verse'
poetic translations. Absolute fidelity to the source text,
in every aspect, is the other extreme and any translation
less than that is considered a compromise. "Poetry
translation has been called the art of compromise and its
success will always be a question of degree." (Connolly,
1998).
However, translation as transfer Pym (1992) from language
to language, text to text, and culture to culture, and even
from "existential state to state" as Boylan, (2000)
puts it, will continue to engage people and give them the
pleasure of experiencing a new creation. They will also offer
readers and critics of translation food for thought.
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The activity of translation occurs through
an interface, the translator, whose interpretation (Beaugrande,
1978) also matters a lot, in poetic translations. All the
translations do not get compared with the source texts,
at least not microscopically, as it usually happens with
poetry, because poems are small in size, and compact in
expression. Nobody tries to compare the translation of a
novel line by line. This is only the business of scholars
of translation studies, as the target language readers would
just continue to enjoy translated poetry as if it was a
new poetic experience in their own language.
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As for the prescriptive nature of translation
theory, I would be inclined to subscribe to the view expressed
by Pym (1992) about theorization as an integral part of
translational competence. "Although every translator
needs to know a good deal about grammar, rhetoric, terminology,
world knowledge, common sense, and strategies for getting
paid correctly, the specifically translational part of their
practice is strictly neither linguistic, commonsense, nor
commercial. It is a process of generating and selecting
alternative texts."
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This definition recognizes that there is
a mode of implicit theorization within translational practice,
since the generation of the alternative translation theories
depends on a series of at least intuitively applied hypotheses.
The theorization may or may not become explicit but the
ability to develop and manipulate hypothetical translation
theories is an essential part of translational competence.
Robert de Beaugrande, in press), calls this competence,
translatability: "both theory and practice of translation
might profit by centring upon the conception of translatability,
defined as the dialectical interaction between what would
be required of translators and what actually gets achieved…a
bi-directional vision of translator ability: the ways in
which competent translators can perform and do perform,
as well as how their performance can affect and develop
their competencies". This same bi-directional vision
and activity of the translator can be seen as the "interface".
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