Englishing Indulekha - part II

III

As both Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida point out, Benjamin's essay demanded, and continue to demand, a complete transformation of the way we commonly think translation. Benjamin seems to be arguing that the genius of translation as a mode is obscured when the problem is restrictively  posed as one of  the transmission or reproduction of meaning. Instead of simply transporting the meaning of the original, a translation must "lovingly and in detail, incorporate the original's mode of signification, thus making the original and the translation recognisable as fragments of a greater language..."(B 78). In translation, the mode of  signification of one language comes into engagement with that of the other, and in the process shows "in the original a mobility, an instability, which first one did not notice" because the original presents itself as univocal, complete, identical to itself. Benjamin’s metaphor teases the question open. He writes (and we cite the passage here in Derrida' s translation): "While content and language form a certain unity in the original, like a fruit and its skin, the language of translation envelops its tenor like a royal cape with large folds. For it is the signifier of a language superior to itself and so remains, in relation to its own tenor, inadequate, forced, foreign" (D 193 -4) This is why, Benjamin writes "a real translation is transparent: it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium,  to shine upon the original all the more fully"(B 79)

           A translation can never be, nor should it aspire for, mere repetition. It represents  the "afterlife" (Uberleben, Fortleben) of the work: in it the original finds new life; it grows, matures, is supplemented. 'Nacbreife' is the term he uses for the process. Post-maturation. Benjamin cautions us against domesticating the idea of life by reading the metaphor in a secondary sense, as biological or psychological, and demands that we read the term in the "only way life can be understood,” as denoting history. ”The concept of life is given its due only if everything that has a history of its own, and is not merely the setting for history, is credited with life. In the final analysis the range of life must be determined by history rather than by nature, least of all by such tenuous factors as sensation and soul. The philosopher’ s task consists of comprehending all of natural life through the more encompassing life of history(B 73) " What is this life of history that constitutes this  afterlife or survival of a text in translation? A brief discussion of what Benjamin terms ” pure language"will help us search the answer in Chandumenon's experiments with translation.

Derrida leads us into his reading of Benjamin through a discussion of the Babel story, which, we cannot forget, is central also to his own enterprise -that of critiquing a metaphysics based on the notion of a "transcendental signified," a concept, he writes elsewhere, that is formed "within the horizon of an absolutely pure, transparent, an equivocal translatability" . Liewise in the Babel story the dream of a unified language and of universal transparency is interrupted by ”the inadequation of one tong ue to the other. . 【and】the need for figuration, for myths, for tropes, for twists and turns for translation inadequate to compensate that  which multiplicity denies us"(D 165); interrupted, in other words, by Babel. Babel forbids and imposes translation. It compels us into the domain and the Iogic/ law of (pure) language which Derrida aligns with the realm of what he calls writing and the logic of difference. "The pure untranslatable and the pure transferable here pass one in to the other. . ”(D 190). To translate is necessarily to shift away from the idea of transfer.

A series of questions follow: What happens when the "transfer of a truth from one language to another without any essential harm being done", is no longer available as the ground on which we may think translation? On what ground can translation take place "if the restitution of meaning given is for it no onger the rule?(D 178). Does it recede with unquestionable finality? Posed thus, the questions exude an aura of loss around what Benjamin (and Derrida) clearly do not regard as loss but as gain: ”if the task of the translator appears in this (transcendental) light, the paths of its accomplishment risk becoming obscure in an all the more impenetrable way"(D 177) Released from the burden of the transmission of meaning (an impossibility), the translator can attend to a mode, the mode of signification or representation; attend, in other words, to the text as writing and therefore as difference and history. This is the genius/genus of translation, for it is a mode in which difference is thematic. The language of the original is most likely to appear transparent, for a familiar signifier is experienced as fitting the signified like the skin on a fruit. In a translation the signifier drapes, rich and loose. It has the grandeur of a royal robe.

It is this idea of translation as ex-change in the currency of signification, representation and differance that Benjamin elaborates in the other important concept that runs through the essay, that of the "afterlife,” the ”living-on," of the original in translation. The task of the translator, which arrives as an imperative from the original: a call , a debt ( Derrida) a claim Niranjana), is to create, or rather, find the right after-life for the text. Derrida chooses to explore the notion ”in communication,” he writes, with the concept-metaphors of filiation and dissemination.He suggests that the translator is an heir, a survivor with an obligation to decipher the original and make its writing legible(again); that translations represent successive stages in the "maturation" of the original seed; that the translation contract is an alliance between two foreign (different) languages "with the promise to produce a child whose seed will give rise to history and growth"(D 191)

Tejaswini Niranjana takes issue with Derrida' s restriction of afterlife or sur-vival to the scene of kinship and inheritance in a manner that renders the translator a , “survivor in a genealogy. ” She chooses instead to link “survival to historiography, " in order to open up the correspondence between the task of the translator and that of another figure who transits through the Benjamin oeuvre: the critical historian. In the hands of the critical historian the concern with the past is a concern with its revolutionary potential (148). According to Benjamin, the historian creates a configuration or constellation of past and present when s/he catches sight of  "a revolutionary change in the fight for an oppressed past.” The notion of afterlife, Niranjana argues, can be read as setting up a similar constellation between the original and the translation. As it  takes measure of and signifies the original , the translation displaces both itself and the original in the realm of history. Consequently translation is an act of history. Why is it, she asks, that Derrida who has often "spoken of the need to reinscribe the notion of history by revealing its discontinuous and heterogeneous nature." swerves away "from the statements that modify Benjamin’s existentialist positions in the direction of the later writings on materialist historiography” (161)?

Niranjana reads pure language as a necessary fiction. Translations, she writes, are aimed at the domain of pure language, but that is only a posited redemptive horizon in which the ”fragments of the amphora" are pieced together, since -and here too she cites Benjamin - our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption" (157). It is a reconciliation posited but never attained, indeed never attainable. It might be useful, we suggest, to retrieve the idea of pure language also for a critical historiography. The result would be a history  mapped as initiatives and struggles in the field of representation; history as translation. Indulekha will serve us as gloss for that claim.

Englishing Indulekha complete text- part I

Englishing Indulekha  

Translation, the Novel and History

Anitha Devasia and Susie Tharu

I

           It is a commonplace of contemporary criticism that prefaces stake out the border-line between work and world, granting the author momentary respite from the discipline of the text. In a brief appearance frontage before the curtain is raised, authors may appear uncostumed to play their everyday selves and engage readers in a direct and autobiographical mode of address. The ambience is informal, the information provided often circumstantial or confessional; this is the place in which reminders- claims, debts, promises, intentions, failures, and incidental affairs, the trivial and chancy beginnings of grand projects, their envisaged ends- are acknowledged. Not surprisingly therefore, prefaces announce themselves apologetically, as texts that are temporally “not-yet” and formally “not-quite”. Author and reader are consenting partners in this dissemblement, for prefaces neither precede nor are subordinate to the “main” text. Post-hoc statements designed to regulate the waywardness of the text and ensure safe arrival at projected destinations, prefaces frame and cite the “main” text for historical readers. New prefaces are new frames in which the text is re-cited as its life is renegotiated in/as history. They mark what we might call, citing Benjamin, the ……………literally, the post-maturation- or in Derrida’s translation of the term, the “sur-vival” of the book. Today, in search of protocols that will help us re-think a cultural history of Kerala, we re-read the 1889 and 1890 prefaces to the first and second editions of Indulekha( a woman’s name; the crescent line of a new moon; an initial scripting),the 1890 preface to the first translation of the novel and the 1965 preface to the most recent edition of the translation, it is because they form a hollow in which text and region can be figured anew, and history, pleasure and translation made to emerge as questions for our times. 

II 

      Faithful to its generic promise, the 1889 avatharika to the first edition of Indulekha, provides a account of the personal involvements (now acknowledged and celebrated in public as of public import) that led up to the writing of the novel and expresses authorial anxiety over the reception of the work. Its twin, the avatharika to the second edition which appeared five months after, is a glowing report on the success of an ethicopolitical initiative. The prefatory material of the first English translation (which appeared later in the same year) assesses the merit of the book as literature and as resource for colonial ethnography, linguistics and administration. 

      Though the constituencies addressed are different, we have no reason to suspect that author and translator did not regard their efforts as overlapping, and indeed complementary. What strikes us, however, as reader translators today is the critical divergence in their projects. We hope you will bear with us as we recount what must be one of the best-known autobiographical sketches in Malayalam literature at a pace leisurely enough to raise further questions of novelistic narrative, translation and power. 

Chandumenon’s story of the origin of Indulekha proceeds through five stages, opening as is proper for a well-made narrative, with a “lack”-here a fascination and a demand1. 

(1) Fascinated by English fiction and absorbed in reading, the author spends increasingly less time with his intimate friends/friend. The ambiguity of number made possible by the respectful plural in Malayalam allows Chandumenon to draw a playful veil of decorum, over the “romance” here. Conventions of pronominal reference in English obscure the power and allure of the Nair woman at the centre, apparent to the reader of the Malayalam text, but invisible in English-without supplementary comment such as this about the asymmetry of the two languages that would interrupt the fluency of translation. The original displays a performative force which functions both as a gloss on translation and as an ironic comment on the blindness to cultural difference that marked the colonial assessments of Nair women and Nair marriage. In a note of dissent appended to the report of the 1891 Malabar Marriage Commission, Chandu Menon protested against the violence of this ethnocentricity and its theory of translation and accused the British of contemplating reforms that would destroy Nair society.2 

(2) His lover/wife/friends resent his distraction and demand a share in his pleasure. In order to make amends without compromising his own enjoyment, Chandumenon attempts pithy plot summaries (Kathayude Saaram) of the novels he reads, but they fail to evoke interest. 

(3) He stumbles accidentally on success with an extempore translation of Henrietta Temple. The appetite he has whetted rapidly develops into a passion whose claims threaten to devour him. His interlocutor suspects that everything he reads in English is fiction and insists that he translate for her. He unwittingly brings upon himself considerable inconvenience yet has no choice but to collaborate. Like the translator whose “task” Benjamin reflects on in his famous essay, Chandumenon is obliged to respond. The claim is historical as much as it is personal, more accurately, the personal desire here is a historical demand and is meshed in with the demand for an “after life”4 for English fiction in a Nair society that is searching out a modernity. 

(4) This success is not however the end of the journey either for the author-translator or for the reader. Lakshmikuttyamma desires more than this oral rendition and asks for a novel in a script that is legible to her, a novel that she can read for herself. Chandumenon begins work on a full-scale translation of Henrietta Temple, but abandons the effort because it is “of no use at all”. The difficulty, he explains, is that in the written mode the translator is restricted to the words actually on the words, in such a translation it is much more difficult to engage with what we might today designate as inter-textuality, outwork (not to be conflated with what commonly passes for context) and performative force in order to render a text intelligible/ legible in the new context. In an oral rendering the translator can supplement the words on the "original" page. He or she might do this by providing additional information, commentary, explanation, tone, gesture, and so on, that can create a passage for the text to travel into its new frame. How are we to understand  this supplement? Bourgeois/ realistic theories of translation, focused as they are on meaning transfer, encourage us to think of the process as an elaborate glossing, necessitated by the differences between the culture depicted in the novel and the target culture; in other words, as a process in which the strangeness of the source text is domesticated as it is rendered familiar in the target language. Chandumenon's project, we suggest, might be better appreciated as we bring it to alignment with the emphasis in the prefatory account of the beginnings of his novel: the creation of a new kind of pleasure for his listener-reader. The question of the supplement that constitute this passage -out in Chandumenon's project of translating the English novel into Malayalam and its difference in the return journey of Dumergue's translation is central to our discussion in this paper

Readers of Indulekha encounter what is entailed in such translation in the polemical Chapter 18 of the novel. Here Chandumenon slips in an episode that exemplifies the complex scope of an oral rendering. The translation features as part of an after-dinner discussion on English education and atheism between three Nair men and is first framed by the narrator. Other frames within this governing frame are presented as part of the story. The character who undertakes the translation, Govindankuttymenon turns to a book written by Charles Bradlaugh for support as he argues against doctrinaire forms of religious belief and their feudal assumptions. His renderings of Bradlaugh's 5 English into Malayalam is prefaced by a gloss on European skepticism that sets it within the context of the life-and-death debate in which the original text appeared as part of a struggle between contending classes, contending humanisms and contending philosophies of governance and punishment. The  context in which the text is translated into Malayalam is strikingly different. In the leisurely after dinner argument between three men of the same class the conflict is intergenerational and involves no more than an updating and modernisation of their traditional beliefs, a modernisation that would seemingly lead only to a consolidation of their interests.5 The translation is interspersed with the discussion and is therefore done in sections, each section framed by the turns in the debate. The sequence in which sections of the original are translated, their length and elaboration of source and target settings, is determined by the target context and not by the structure of the original. Finally, we are presented with two separate "passages" into Malayalam for Bradlaugh's text. The first- involving Govindankuttymenon's more or less literal espousal of Bradlaugh, results in failure. Not only does he fail to convince an increasingly hostile Govindapanikkar, who can see no reason in what appears to be nothing but an excess of rationality, he also fails to carry along the reader who finds his arguments immoderate and pointlessly radical.The authorial framing of the discussion is more  successful in effecting a translation that will mobilise the reader. In that voice, both sides: the stubbornly traditional and the inconsiderately radical lock into battle only to make way for a moderation- involving not the abandoning of religious faith, but a rational critique of religious practices, and a modernisation of belief. It is the third and mostly silent figure of the hero, Madhavan, who is identified with this as yet mute, but confidently emerging, mode.

(5) Taking all these problems into account, Chandumenon decides that the only effective way to fulfill the desire he has aroused is to write a Malayalam novel "more or less after the English fashion" and extends that decision as a promise to his wife. The problem set up by the prefatory narrative finds resolution in the writing of Indulckha. Spurred on as much by his quarrel with initiatives that were being taken around that time to regulate and "normalise" Nair marriage, sexuality and their matrilineal inheritance laws, he fulfills the promise -to his wife, but also to his community --in record time. The protagonist is a young,  beautiful and intelligent Nair girl whose English education brihgs out an “inner glow” that seduces Chandumenon's society and Chandumenon’s readers. Through her the  narrative attempts to loosen the hold of the old-style sambandham (and the caste alliances it represented) and introduces  a new man-woman relationship based on a rounded sense of attraction between consenting individuals. In contrast to colonial programmes for the regulation of Nair marriage and inheritance, the novel proposes protocols for modernity that consolidates Nair society and connects it with an India of national scope.

             We are not told whether Lashmikuttyamma is pleased with the result, but this reticence is more suggestive of her pleasure than any explicit statement could be. What is however   placed quite extensively on record is the author's anxiety about the reception of the book. Wouid there be a large enough group of non-English knowing readers who would enjoy such stories? Would the author be successful in creating readers with a taste for novels? Would the book be "relished?” Would the "new departure" he had made be appreciated? These fears are belied by the undreamt-of response that the first edition received and which Chandumenon proudly and gratefully records in the preface to the second edition. A final comment on how he gauges this success before we lay aside our framing of his narrative: Chandumenon is pleased with the fact that the first edition sold out, pleased with the reviews, pleased with the publicity. However, what seems to convince him that his initial fears were unfounded is the fact that some readers identified so closely with the logic of the noxel that they took it upon themselves to argue in its defense. 

         If the story of this story began with a lack-a desire that had to be fulfilled- the author's "undreamt-of " satisfaction is an index of the resolution which speaks not only of a desire fulfilled, but also of the concurrent creation of reader-subjects so effectively interpellated that they will autonomously, of their own desire, for their own pleasure, defend the novel and its logic.  We begin to close in on the quarries that the author has relentlessly pursued through the spiralling projects of translation recounted in the preface: ”success, "and "pleasure," only to find that they transform themselves into an enigmatic new series.

         There are several important issues yet untouched in this story of the writing of the story. These include issues raised by the English translation which appeared hot on the heels of the new original and promised its readers literary and linguistic evidence which British scholars ahd historians would find indispensable, and by the 1965 edition of that translation which announced: "Indulekiza...is a  good story, with a very simple plot,  of true love which does not run smooth, but where in the end , the jewel of a girl is united to the hero of her choice, and they live happily ever after. The theme may be as ancient as love and youth, but it is set in the framework of contemporary social life in Malabar and hence its fascinating novelty"(DM v) . We plan a return to these and other questions raised in the prefaces by way of detour through Derrid's  gloss on Benjamin ’s  "The Task of Translator" 6 and  Tejaswini Niranjana’s reading of Derrida and Benjamin, to arrive, needless to say, at our reading of Chandumenon's extension of the problematic.7.  This is a move made somewhat reluctantly since on our roads Derrida can throw up dust clouds that could well bring the journey to a halt. But through the dust, darkly, we will perhaps grope our way into a new feeling for the many projects of translation at work in Indulekha and its several prefaces and arrive through that route at the task of the translator and a history of region scanned as subaltern: a task and a history perhaps for our time.