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Following is an attempt at tracing the contours of translational mode, and the three stages or versions through which a passage, for instance, reached its final articulation, i.e., the Symbolic.

Variant A: When will there be peace
for this fire which once before
quenched itself only in Khandav fire?
How many lives with holy water held in hand
will help to quench this fire?

Variant B: Whence peace?
Once before this fire gratified itself
only with the Khandav fire.
How many lives held in hand
sacrificed to holy fire
help to satisfy this wild fire?

Variant C: Whence peace?
Once before this digestive fire
gratified itself with Khandav fire alone.
How calm this wild fire?
How many, lives held in hand
sacrificed to holy fire?

(Jayalakshmi and Rao 2003:45)

It may be noticed that the problematics of translation of the above passage revolved around words such as fire employed twice in Variant-A above, consisting two very different connotative referents, and gratified mistakenly finds identity in the word quenching. However, quenching semantically goes with thirst, meaning also to put out the flame as well as slake while in actuality the passage refers to Agni the god of fire asking to satisfy his hunger. In variant-B hunger, then, gains referentiality of meaning to one form of fire - a digestive fire - hungering for gratification. At this stage as Kristeva maintains in her Interview, patterns appear but which do not have any stable identity: they are blurred and fluctuating (Kristeva 1996:129). Besides, the whatness of the problem of finding an appropriate word for the ritual of symbolic offering of food as oblation to Agni, i.e. taking water in hand as avaposana - in this instance fire - is a minor irritant. This in turn relates to warlords setting afire cities of life to satisfy their hunger for power. Extending the complexity of the problem further, there is a mytho-culture-specific reference to the forest at Khandavprastha that needs to be set afire if Agni's voracious digestive fire is to be gratified.

The translational resolution for the tangle in the above passage, in fact, lies elsewhere. The word wild offers the final link in resolving all the allusive complexities of meaning. The hunger of Agni and the hunger of war-lords both being 'wild', ironically require sacrifice - the former calls for Khandav fire alone and the latter life itself as a ritual offering. Accentuating the irony further is the fact that ritual sacrifice is normally offered to holy fire, and the wild of the digestive fire and wildness of the competitors in war find a synonymy in gratification, a better word to use than quench. Besides, in the case of the warlords it amounts to being violent. Moreover, Khandav fire when gratified calms itself, but the hunger of the power-hungry defies gratification. The war hunger in today's world defies reason. Hence is the exasperating question "How calm this wild fire?" Similarly, the drawn out interrogative in Variant-A sounds prosaic, in contrast to the short and pointed "Whence peace?" that carries in its tonal quality a sense of urgency and immediacy.

Requisite to arriving at a final shaping of the translation it required, hence, beside a nodding superficial awareness of the original, also a corresponding acquaintance with cultural referents that went into the composition of the ST. The sacrificial ritual and the mythic allusion to Khandav fire from The Mahabharata are a case in point. This knowledge of the cultural referents takes us into the second stage of the three-phased approach to empowerment as enunciated by Serghei G. Nikolayev - a deep awareness of the original. Imperative to it is knowledge of the semantic and syntactical peculiarities of the Telugu language. At the first two stages the meanings float freely, jostle with each other, freely transgressing beyond their denoted meanings. They are rule-transcending signifiers, not yet ready to have a finality or fixed identity of meaning. These two stages are the initial making available to oneself a range of possible meanings and their corresponding words, until the translators strike at the right word associative of right sound. Limiting themselves to overcoming the linguistic hurdle and cultural referents at this point, the translators desisted from indulging in unhealthy imitation of words and their meanings, word constructions and structures in the SL. Care is also being taken, to compress and decompress language, to match ST's tone and mood swings. So much so, in the end creation of a new utterance, an aesthesis, a dynamic equivalence is reached. Venessa Leonardi, in this context, quoting Eugene A. Nida and C.R. Taber's The Theory and Practice of Translation, (Leonardi 2003) maintains, TL wording will trigger the same impact on the TC audience as the original wording did upon ST audience. Thus, in variant C the implicit and the explicit coalesce to present a unified coherent completeness of meaning to the passage. This translational process finds a more precise echo in Kristeva's quotation of Vladimir Mayakovsky from his, How Are Verses Made? (Mayakovsky 1970)

'… rhythm is the basis of any poetic work ... When the fundamentals are already there, one has a sudden sensation that the rhythm is strained: there's some little syllable or sound missing. You begin to shape all the words anew … It's like having a tooth crowned. A hundred times (or so it seems) the dentist tries a crown on the tooth, and it's the wrong size; but at last, after a hundred attempts, he presses one down, and it fits … Where this basic dull roar of a rhythm comes from is a mystery'

(EL 234)

The translator's task like that of a dentist is to try words in TL like crowns over words in the ST till the right sized crown feigning the original is discovered. Once pressed down, the little syllable and sound found wanting till then is fixed to its sticking place. Thus, the translation gives in to creation of a new utterance, a near approximation to the rhythm of the poetic work in the SL. What we have here is an evolving process of a translational transfer of words unstable in meaning at the Semiotic stage, to begin with, to stability of meaning at the Symbolic. This is not to say, however, that the Semiotic is unstable in principle, but innate to it is a roaring energy, a creative force that needs/awaits discharge. The translator is merely a witness to a display of transfer of this energy from the Semiotic to the Symbolic, from one text to another, when she can exclaim: "it fits"!

Implicit to this problematic of translation of War a Heart's Ravage is the translators' individual style and conceptual culture perspective which is Telugu at one level and Indian at another, and English at the level of translation calling for focussed attention. At the same time, collaborative exchange demanded that a balanced perspective was necessary for the TT in order to attain a viable final meaningful shape, that is, adopt the style and choice of words in the TL while yet accommodating the writer's perspective.

The awareness at this stage is of untranslatable syntactic constructions and idiomatic expressions in the ST, which no dictionary would help to explain. It is an awareness that linguistic equivalence cannot exist between two languages since the fact that languages are structured the way they ares does not allow linguistic fidelity. This is all the more so when they belong to diametrically opposing cultures and linguistic genealogies, like Telugu and English. There is no linguistic and cultural commonality, sameness or parity. Such expressions were translated and reproduced literally and explained in the Glossary, as for instance, quaffing cities and cities by handfuls (43), a culture-specific expression, or Piercing finger may be anyone's; but eye belongs to us all (6). Meanings in such idiomatic expressions can neither be detachable nor translatable. Tonal equivalence alone is something that a translation can hope to achieve, however. Restructuring constructions in the TL English is constitutive of this stage, since overcoming this hurdle would offer a smooth passage to the third and final stage of creation of new utterance. In compliance with the translational transfer of rhythmic meanings that are unstable at the Semiotic to the Symbolic stability of meaning at the final stage, the temptation of employing grammatically correct constructions or indulgence in a mechanical imitation of English word structures or unjustified use of excessive Latinisms, as is wont with teachers of English, is avoided. Perhaps, no translation has a finality of determinable fixed identity of meaning resembling the ST. The translational process moving through the three Variants is at best a series of readings, merely illusory steps leading to near approximate meaning in the ST. Each Variant merely accentuates meaning to a seemingly fuller understanding of the semiotic creative process underlying creation of the ST having its creative origin in the Unconscious.

Nevertheless, the question of excessive dependence on the linguistic peculiarities of SL viz.Telugu remains. Any such indulgence viewed skeptically is a violation that could lower the quality of the translation itself. For instance, the semantic distortion that occurs at the stage of Variant A due to misunderstanding the meaning of the source utterance appears in English as faulty and wrong syntax. Hence moving through the three levels from one Variant to another, the translators felt how essential an acquaintance with the syntactical and semantic specificities in both SL as well as TL is, besides being woefully conscious of the limitations of their own position. In consequence, it is felt that no translation can offer a satisfying reading unless the TT like the ST lays claim to being a literary aesthetic creation, a work of creative force on display. A translated poem in the receptor language has to exist in its own right as an aesthetic work, and read as a poem in TL as a creative utterance. In translating the long poem, meanings got significantly reinvested and reconstituted, revealing new and meaningful relationships since meanings as essences are present in subjectivity of both the writer and the translators, essentially not identical.

The last idea takes one to the question of the involvement of the translator's own subjectivity in the process of translation. An objective distancing may merely succeed in generating an objective response from the translator. Such a translation would be scientific and rational but would suffer by failing to carry the creative force of the ST to the TT. The translation of a poem, in fact any translation, necessarily and inescapably presupposes an involvement of the subjectivity of the translator. The success of a translation, hence, lies in the translator's subjective mediation between the ST and the TT, as well as in the objective distancing from both the ST and the TL in giving a conscious expression using stable sign system. The subjective self as always has a way of making its presence felt in the conscious mode in an unambiguous manner. The subjective mediation would evoke a better emotional, aesthetic and appreciative response to TT through which a translator hopes to achieve "a creative utterance", bringing to mind A.K. Ramanujan's words in his Poems of Love and War that "only poems can translate poems" (A.K. Ramanujan 1985: 296).

REFERENCES

Bhattacharya, Amalesh (1992) --- Kalyan Kumar Chaudhuri (Trans.) The Lore of Mahabharata, Calcutta: Aryabharati.

Joseph, Ammu et al (2003) Storylines: Conversations with Women Writers. Delhi:Women's WORLD.

Kraft, Julia and Andreas Speck (11, 2000) Non-violence and Social Empowerment, Trans. Fr. Gewalteie, action, Vol. 32, no. 123, WRI Swadhina NVSE 2001, 1st July 2003, <koi.www.uic .tula /ru/ccp/1/ win/document /publish/India.htm-10k>

Kristeva, Julia (1996) A Question of Subjectivity-an Interview, Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh, (ed.) Modern Literary Theory: A Reader, (3rd ed.), New York: Arnold.

Kristeva, Julia (1988) The Ethics of Linguistics, David Lodge (ed.), Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, London, Longman.

Law, Bryan (2001) From Power to Empowerment, (First pub.) in Xy: Men, Sex, Politics. 5 (4), (Summer 1995-1996), Australia, WRI Swadhina, NISE, 1st July 2003, <http://www.swadhina.org/nvse/article 3 eng. htm>

Leonardo, Venessa (2000) Equivalence in Translation: Between Myth and Reality, Translation Journal, Volume 4, No. 4, 1 July 2003, <http://accurapid.com/journal/14 equiv.htm >

Nikoloyev, Serghei (2000) Poor Results in Foreign>Native Translation: Reasons and Ways of Avoidance, 1st July 2003, <http://accurapid.com/journal/14 equi.htm>

Ramanujan, A. K. ed. and trans. (1985) Poems of Love and War: From the Eight Anthologies and the Ten Long Poems of Classical Tamil. New York: Columbia  University Press.

Subhadra Devi, Seela (2003) Yudham Oka Gunde Kotha P. Jayalakshmi and Bhargavi  P. Rao, (Trans.) War, a Heart's Ravage. Hyderabad: Panchajanya Publications.

Subramanyam, Kamala (2001) Mahabharatha Mumbai: Bharathiya Vidya Bhavan.

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