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The Dialectics of Human Intellection and the Semiotics of Translation: A Comparative Reading of Rabindranath Tagore's 'KarNakuntiisambaada' in Bangla and English

Anuradha Ghosh teaches English in the Dept. of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. She got her Ph.D in 2000 (JNU, New Delhi) for her thesis titled 'Ideological Discourse on Indian Cinema. Bengal of the '60s & 70s: The Genre of Protest'. It is partly published under the title Signification in Image and Space, in the book Signification in Language and Culture, edited by H.S. Gill. Her fields of specialization are Film & Media, Culture Studies and Literary Theory. She co-edited the book The Politics of Imperialism and Counterstrategies (2004, Aakar Books).

Abstract

The paper attempts to examine certain key issues addressed by the theoretical corpus of writings on the 'translation paradox' by engaging in a semiotic reading of Tagore's KarNakuntiisambaada written originally in Bengali and translated by the poet into English for a wider audience. Aware of the difficulties involved, the poet himself admits in a letter to Ajit Kumar Chakravarti (13 March 1913) written from Illinois, USA: 'What I try to capture in my English translation is the heart and core of my original Bengali. That is bound to make for a fairly wide deviation. If I were not there to help you out, you might probably find it impossible to identify the original in translation.' (Translated by Kshitish Ray, Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, Vol. 9, P. 124).The question of the authenticity of a translation was the chief concern in early translation studies and no matter what position we might be taking now, it continues to concern translation scholars. The cultural and linguistic contours of different communities at different historical conjunctures make the act of translation a very challenging task not only to the scholar engaged in the process but also to the outsider to the domain as it reveals, within the process, the dialectics of human intellection.

I. Introduction

The domain of Translation Studies focuses on a whole range of theoretical issues that engage scholars in the academia. An ideological discourse leads one to focus on the dialectics of the twin forces of hegemonization and disempowerment on the one hand and resistance on the other, forces that are continuously at work in a given ideological field. I have chosen a micro-level comparative analysis of a text which was written by one of the first generation Indian English writers who, their individuality and brilliance notwithstanding, were undoubtedly the children of a renaissance that came to Bengal by virtue of it being the capital city of colonial India via the western dialectic of Enlightenment. The crisis within that enlightenment movement in Europe had its impact on the intellectual movements within the country too and the call for independence and the movements woven around it were not completely independent, indigenous, or home-grown. We thus come to the fundamental question that leads us to investigate the dialectics of human intellection and how the individual subjectivity is constituted within the ideological structures that are in a continuous state of becoming in order to have a being of their own.

As the title suggests, the paper is divided into two parts: the first part aims to study the process of human intellection involved in the act of translation of a literary text from one cultural/lingual situation to that of another and how that leads to a situation of paradox as the semantic import of the narrative text undergoes transmission changes when this act of transaction or negotiation happens, bound as it is to the ideological hegemony of the two socio-literary domains which are under consideration at a specific historical conjuncture. The second part of the paper is at the level of praxis. It focuses on the analysis of a literary narrative to understand how bi-lingualism imposes an identity that changes the contours of the process of signification making the translation an act of intellection that has a potential autonomy relative to the hegemony inherent in the major/minor language dichotomy resulting in a complete transmutation even when the creative subjectivity is the same and yet not the same.

The aforesaid purpose drove my selection of Rabindranath Tagore's KarNakuntiisambaada from the corpus of his works.The narrative was published in a compilation titled Kahini in the Bengali year 1306 which is approximately 1819-1900 C.E. and the English translation was first published in Calcutta in a collection titled The Fugitive in 1919, and then two years later in London by Macmillan.

The complexity of the situation is evident from the fact that, unlike in the typical situation of translation, the author himself is the translator here. And his competence in the languages, viz. Bengali and English - the two language situations that we are concerned with here - can hardly be questioned. Again, the author/translator in question is undoubtedly a poet par excellence and my attempt in the paper is not a mechanical inquiry into whether the translated narrative is an authentic version of the original or not. The authenticity debate is central to translation practitioners and is crucial for translation theory. When however it is the same creative subjectivity, in this case the bi-lingual identity of Tagore, engaged in the twin acts of generation and translation, one can possibly take one of two stands: first, the author/translator's will or intention was to transmute the narrative to make it more communicable and communicative to the western audience and he is thereby justified in doing what he does. Secondly, the author/translator's pragmatic choice for the transmutation of KarNakuntiisambaada to Karna and Kunti is the articulation of the unconscious that finds an expression that is not free from the ideological hegemony within which he tries to negotiate and thus the difference poses a theoretical problematic, warranting the study that I propose to do. The question therefore that becomes central here is: why does the KarNakuntiisambaada of the Bengali version become Karna and Kunti in English and what implications does this process have in understanding the dynamics of the dialectics of human intellection?

The method of inquiry that I adopt falls within the Aberlardian tradition of semiotics that proposes the theory of mental images for communication to be possible between two thinking beings and consequently language is a system of signs that allows for the correspondence between the "word" and the "thing". The significative function is therefore a matter of intellection through the dual mental operations of abstraction and synthesis of conceptually re-constituted mental realities. Accordingly, Abelard argues that there are three degrees of knowledge in Peri Hermeneias: sensus or sensation, imaginatio or imagination and intellectus or intellection - the dialectical relation of which helps in comprehension and analysis and thereby articulation through the individual psychic/cognitive apparatus conditioned by existential experience (parole in the Saussurian sense) following the norm of the social order in which the subject is situated (langue). But the conditioning is never absolute and should not be considered as a fixed state of being but rather as a dynamic one, as the process of exchange becomes possible through a continuous intervention and contestation of the thematic system of an ideological field. Human intellection is based on the senses whereby the apprehension of a thing is abstracted from the material/physical domain to the realm of the imagination and it is the synthesis of the word and the image through intellection that creates a concept which is communicable through the medium of language between the speaker and the hearer. But the subject under consideration is the constitution of a literary discourse and the problematic at hand is not the semiotics of the creative process but that of translation not within the same semiotic system but that of another and the parameters involved are embedded within the material historical processes that posit the possibility of exchange from one domain to the other. If we agree that language itself is a system of signs no matter what cultural domain it is embedded in, translation of a discourse becomes possible because despite all specificity, the human condition is universal in terms of man's biological equipment and ability to cognise and conceptualise the universe. But yet there are processes that impede the transaction and whenever this happens, certain concepts become untranslatable because of the differences that inhere as a function of the relation between experience and cognition in the anthropological cosmos of a speech community that operates within a specific cultural-ideological unit and the subjective engagement of the intellective/creative being.

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