Dynamics of K. Damodar Rao’s Credo of
Translation-as-Activism
G. Mohana Charyulu
Asso. Prof of English,
Dept of Humanities and Science
Bomma Institute of Tech and Science,
Khammam.
Indian Literature in English translation has become, of late, an indispensable component of literary and cultural studies in
India. It projects the multilingual composition of Indian society with all its multiple facets. A greater impetus to its growing importance comes, however, from certain sociological changes affecting the nation. These changes have propagated the importance of education, awareness of one’s own position in the society, and questioned the validity of dominant structures. As a result, writers from different levels and classes have started producing literary works in their vernaculars. The regional writers some of whose work is available in English translation have created a substantial body of literature, contributing an unprecedented variety of literary subjects and styles. A plethora of Indian myths, epics, and oral forms have been made use of in many regional literatures in
India; in some cases the myths have been subverted and new legends created; variants of folk forms employed and new genres came to be appreciated; diversity of the nation and its implicit unity came to be celebrated.
The voices of anguish, protest, resentment have found a new idiom borrowing from and making use of folk and oral corpus of regional literatures.
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This is the modified version of a paper presented at a National Seminar on “Indian Literature in English Translation” organized by the Department of English, Kakatiya University, Warangal, during March 28-29, 2009, and subsequently published in Kakatiya Journal of English Studies, Vol.28, 2008-09.
English translation has become a bridge between the literature of the past and the literature of the present, between one regional language and another. The mainstreaming of
marginal sections coincided with juxtaposition/subversion of larger and smaller traditions.
The bridging of the gap between the two paved way for the emergence of new literatures in
India which are anti-authoritarian in nature and anti-colonial in tone and temperament, their purpose being decolonizing the min Regional literatures fare well in this respect when compared to Indian writing in English. Writers like Mahasveta Devi, Gopinath Mohanty, Sivasankara Pillai, Ismat Chugthai, Ravi Shastry, O.V Vijayan, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Sri Sri, Girish Karnad, Vijay Tendulkar, Bama, K Siva Reddy and contemporary dalit and feminist poets in different languages demonstrated this through their substantial body of poetics of resistance. Telugu Literature has been in the forefront of foregrounding such liberation movements in fiction and poetry, particularly in the field of poetry through the second half of 20th century, more so in 1980s and 1990s. Translation, in such a scenario, especially in English, becomes a means of empowerment.
In this context, an analysis of K. Damodar Rao’s translations of modern Telugu poetry into English published over a period of fifteen years reveals the significance of cultural transmission, a writing-back to the centre, the postcolonial way. This is on account of the fact that translation-as-regeneration lies beyond the mere linguistic and semantic levels and branch out into cultural, ideological and philosophical domains. An attempt has been made in this paper to examine closely specific areas like sociological dimensions, style, sense of the sound, and cultural nuances reflected in the translations of K. Damodar Rao as part of his cultural activism. He is an intense translator, his area is obviously very vast, and I offer a few glimpses of the impact they have on bi-lingual readers. While translating a poem into another language i.e. from source language to target language, the translator naturally keeps in mind the cultural and social background of the text. Translation is not merely a simple transfer but it is rewriting of the source text with reworking of the meaning. It is not merely a question of linguistics, but in addition, it deals with concepts and contexts. The literary trends and tastes of the period also come into play either for substantiation or interrogation.
In recent Telugu poetry we find a marked change in style, form in tune with content and tone. Various political, social and literary movements of the world influenced Telugu poetry so much that many poems read like poetic manifestoes. Apart from traditional and classical way of writing, one can find abundant ways of writing, themes, styles, oral and revolutionary idiom in Telugu poetry conveying a large scope, but ridden with risks as always, for the translator. Dalit, feminist, progressive, revolutionary, minority strains in Telugu poetry, in particular, dominated the literary scene in the last two decades of the 20th century. The smell of the soil, class struggle, humanistic strain, protest against oppression of all forms, resistance-manifestations became part of poetic expression; poets from different social-economic strata have started giving a shape to their ideas. Some of them acquired world wide popularity in literary circles through the medium of English translations.
K. Damodar Rao, a
Kakatiya University academic and a reputed translator with innovative style and creative touch, has so far translated hundreds of poems of a number of Telugu poets into English and provided them visibility on the national scene publishing their poems in journals of repute. Individual collections like Dr. Banna Ilaiah’s
Fire Spark, Dr. Madiraju Ranga Rao’s
Cease fire and
Crossfire, Prof. Anumandla Bhoomaiah’s
Velugu Nagala Hansa as
Brilliance Jewelled Swan, are all praiseworthy, full fledged translations. Based on his translations published in journals like
Indian Literature,
New Quest and
Kavya Bharati, many poets received invitations to poetry festivals at national and international level. His translations of Vemana, the poet of the people, have a distinct oral flavour in tune with the rhythms and musical intones of the original poems. There are many versions of Vemana’s translations, one even published by the Sahitya Akademi, but Damodar Rao’s translations stand apart as the essence is sought to be captured in a rhythmic fashion. To understand the complexity of words the reader has to move from a linear way of reading the poem to an associative reconstruction of those words and expressions that are linked by a similarity of what they suggest. No reading of a poem can be more intense than that which proceeds through the study of multiple translations. Two translations of the same poem by Vemana are cited below to prove the point:
Translation 1
If an enemy deserving of death
Falls into your hands
You must not harm him.
Help him
And send him off.
That itself is death.1
Translation 2
Don’t think of avenging
your enemy even if caught:
One generous gesture is enough
to let him go
and die.
Vema
you endeared yourself to the Creator,
now listen!2
T1 is prosaic and offers a gist of the original; whereas T2 comes closest to capturing the nuances and rhythms of the original. Besides, T1 does not make use of the refrain, so crucial to the original, essential in translation too. T2 done by K. Damodar Rao proves that alternative paradigms could be created in translations which only add to significance of the melody and meaning of the original. The study of a poem through the medium of various translations displays the complex associations of poetic thinking. After reading K. Damodar Rao’s translation of Vemana the readers formulate their own ways of seeing and interpreting the poem. These kinds of thought provoking translations offer an extraordinary richness of perception, a living-inside-the poem of other language. I quote another poem of Vemana translated by K. Damodar Rao to make this point very clear:
Countless are those who find fault with others
Anyone born on the earth is prone to blunder
Those always engaged in pointing fingers at others
Are not conscious of their very own errors
Vema, you endeared yourself to the creator, now listen!3
The modern Telugu poetry in English translation published in literary journals reflects the creative sensibility and temperament of Damodar Rao as also his panache for mechanics of translation and flair for language and style. The seemingly simple yet profound poetic statements comes naturally in his translations and it must be the reason why the great Telugu poet Gunturu Seshendra Sharma termed him as “the wizard of translation”4 in his Preface to Brilliance Jewelled Swan.
His “Sword–greeting”5 is the translation of “Khadga Chalanam” originally written in Telugu by Tripuraneni Srinivas. The entire poem is in free verse with 16 lines in source language, 29 lines in target language. It is an ‘ought to’ expression. The poet directs the people to fight against exploitation by sword greeting. The translator is sensitive to giving shape to the layers of meaning, besides finding equivalents to the high-sounding words used by the poet. Expressions like ‘Mabbu latha’ as ‘cloud creeper’, ‘Doors of space,’ ‘heart of the sun,’ ‘streak of the blood’ and other figures of speech reflect the intensity of source language superbly captured in translation. The poem suggests the reader to do at least one adventure once in a life which should change the entire world. The poem concludes, as in many other translations of K. Damodar Rao, on a strikingly forceful note:
Each one should shake hands
drawing his own sword,
his own streak of blood.
In another translation, “Broken Plough”6, written in the original by Papineni Sivasankar, the problems and tears of the cotton farmers are traced. The poet expresses his view that the pesticides which fail to kill the pests are prompt in killing the farmers:
Vultures find no fault with
The pesticides that killed farmers
instead of insects.
He goes on finding fault with the people at the helm as well as the ordinary citizens who do not care for the death of the farmers who simply watch the scenes on television sitting relaxed and then coolly forget. The poet blames the rulers of the country who pledged the wealth of the nation at the feet of ‘intercontinental transactions.’ “booju filello vastavalu samadhuloutai” is translated as “facts will be buried in mouldy files.” As the poem reaches its climax, the voice of agony is turned into a voice of protest and curse:
I question the dark money and its watch-dogs
that will earn the wrath of the corpses.
In another translation of Jnanapeeth Awardee, Dr C. Narayana Reddy’s poem, “kadalika” as “Mobility”7 K. Damodar Rao describes multiple layers of relationships between words, meanings and the contextual placement which contributed to the effectiveness and the power of words:
When the duty-minded Vikramarkas
move along carrying corpses of travails
soil kisses their feet with lips of grass.
He concludes the poem by advocating that in a suffocating country agitation is movement. The fond memories of mother are described in the poem “Amma”8 by Allam Narayana, a renowned journalist-poet of Telangana. The problems of the woman as girl child, as wife, as mother are described in the poem. The ending of the poem is quite heart touching even from a linguistic and semantic perspective:
To the witness of the book written by our ancestor
on the duties of chaste women,
my mother was crucified
to the threshold of her kitchen.
In the translation of ‘Valasa’ by Naleswaram Shankaram as “migration”, “siggu, siggu” by Paravati as “Shame”, “Aame Evaraite Maatram” by Siva Reddy as “Whoever She is”, “Manishi Maranam” by Varavara Rao as “Death of a Man”, “nadi na diksuchi” by Ganesh Babu as “Water Compass” and “Sagam Prapancham” by S. Jaya as “Half of the World” and so many other translations9 of K. Damodar Rao clearly show the specific interpretive perspectives of the content and atmosphere that readers can easily re-create. His choice of words used in translation reflects the multiplicity of possible approaches that could be generated in each reader’s understanding of the text. It shows the art and craft of translation. A translator like K. Damodar Rao places the verbal texts inside the word to create a magnetic field, to uncover the streams that flow into the semantic fields of ‘other’ words. It is well known that in translation, as soon as a word is surrounded by other words, it begins to lose some of its clearly defined contours generating new ways of thinking. The translator chooses words that indicate a similar direction of thinking in order to create a particular atmosphere or aesthetic experience within a given work. K Damodar Rao reinforces his experience of reading-as-appreciation in a source text for the reader of target language. In the translation of the poem, “Naa Kosam Eduru chudu” by Sivasagar, one can find the dexterity of Damodar Rao in translating the original local oral idiom by using words in an evocative, incantatory manner:
You look out for me, wait for me.
I will emerge again, come to see you once again
from the song that was hanged
from the waterfall that was imprisoned
from the oath that was wounded.
I will emerge again, come to see you once again
From the breathing-air, from the wafting breeze
You look out for me, wait for me.10
In the source language, in an inspiring tone, the poet pays a tribute to the martyrs of the revolutionary cause mentioning that the hero has no death as such, and he will emerge again from ‘awakened sand particles,’ ‘first rain-drop,’ ‘from the whistling of wind,’ and ‘from the smell of soil.’ Another expression “The fallen trees unravel secrets of life in winter” is a heart touching expression where it competes with the original in capturing the poignant situation.
“Nishidha Charitra” by Challapalli Swarupa Rani translated as “Prohibited History” is another fine example of the translator empathizing with the poet as she voices her anguish, torment and protest at being ‘labeled as untouchable’ even before she took ‘shape in her mother’s womb.’ The poet laments:
I am the one carrying the onus of
age-old rejections
generations of humiliations
as my legacy…
As is Rao’s wont in his selected poems for translation, powerful expressions are reserved at the end as the poem closes on a pointed note with a pertinent question:
In which canto of your country’s famed history
Will you write it down, my story?
This poem published in Indian Literature11 received wide acclaim as Ambai, a noted Tamil writer, quoted it extensively in The Hindu,12 and Sudipta Mukherjee, a physicist by profession, mentioned it as one of the poems that he liked most in recent times.13
An ideal situation for the translator is a balanced and intermediate posture where he is faithful at the linguistic level—syntactic, semantic, and structural, and then to create a framework of references and connections for proper appreciation of the original in the TL. This is best reflected in the translation of one of the most sensitive poems, ‘Aku Ralu Kalam’ by Mahe Jabeen. With simple words the poet builds up a structure of complex emotions. The poet carefully weaves her re-living of the past. The poem’s significance lies in the past becoming her present. The thing actually happened is not known to the readers until the last stanza. The poet maintains irony, anxiety and suspense throughout. Therefore, until the last stanza, it is the presentness of the past that is of significance in the poem.
‘Athaneppudu anthe/Ontariga rammante vasanthanni venta thestadu’
‘Venta thestadu’ is habitual action, a routine—he did it in the past, he is still doing it (the poet is re-living in her memories). Hence the verb form that should be used is present tense, not past tense. If the past form of verb is used here the spirit of the poem is gone, and in literary terms, irony is lost. This is what Prof. Velcheru did by opening the poem with a line of past tense: “He always did that.”14 The original does not support the past tense form of the expression. Instead of maintaining suspense, the translator begins and approaches the poem from the end. The idiom, ‘Athaneppudu anthe’ also substantiates the present tense.
‘Chetlu kavathu chestunnayi’ indicates present continuous or simple present. Prof Velcheru’s “Trees were parading outside” is a different interpretation of the poem. Damodar Rao’s version is like this:
He is always like that.
Even when asked to come alone
he brings spring along. (present tense)
Silent leaves witness,
in the open space,
the march-fast of the trees.15
It is not finding fault with anyone, only thing is, there could be many translations of a poem, but the ones that capture the soul of the poem will survive.
An analysis of the postcolonial dynamics of translation could shed light on the relations of mutual sustenance and nourishment of both the languages. The labour of love of Rao is all the more commendable because the feel and worth of the poem seems to be the sole criterion for his translation enterprise, and that’s how he came to be known as one “mostly dedicated to bringing to limelight the popular and unsung Telugu poets through his translations.”16 A common credo of all his translations is that they are all anti-authoritarian, anti-hegemonic, celebrating values of freedom, dignity, democracy, equality and humanism. Personal gestures are thus converted into political postures in Damodar Rao’s translation activity-as-empowerment.
Notes
1. J.S.R.L. Narayana Moorthy and Elliot Roberts, ed and trans. Selected Verses of
Vemana. (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1995)
2. Vemana, “Second Tradition” Tr. K. Damodar Rao. Indian Literature, 166, (March- April, 1995): 55.
3. Vemana, “Second Tradition,” Indian Literature, 55.
4. Gunturu Seshendra Sharma, “Preface.”
Brilliance Jewelled Swan (
Calcutta:
Writers’ Workshop, 2000) 20.
5. Trupuraneni Srinivas, “Sword-Greeting.” New Quest 104 (March-April 1994) 120.
6. Papineni Sivashankar, “Broken Plough.” Indian Literature, 166, (March-April, 1995) 45-46.
7. C. Narayana Reddy, “Mobility.” Indian Literature, 166 (March-April, 1995) 9.
8. Allam Narayana, “Amma.” Revaluations, 2. 2 (Autumn 1996) 48.
9. Modern Telugu Poetry, Tr. K. Damodar Rao, New Quest Nos. 95, 101, 111, 112, 113. (1994 & 1995)
10. Sivasagar, “Wait for Me.” Indian Literature 166 (March-April 1995) 49-50.
11. Challapalli Swarupa Rani, “Prohibited History.” Indian Literature 200 (November-December, 2000) 91-92.
12. Ambai, “Cantos in History.” The Hindu (Literary Supplement) (11the September, 2004).
14. Velcheru Narayana Rao, An Anthology of Modern Telugu Poetry (
New Delhi,
OUP, 2000)
15. Telugu Women Poets, New Quest 101, (September-October, 1993) 308.
16. Gollapudi Srinivasa Rao, “Introducing Telugu Poets to English Readers.” The Hindu (Monday, July 13, 2009) 2.
