Englishing Indulekha - part III

IV

         We return, then, to Chandumenon’ s prefaces to ask: Why is translation the chosen metaphor for his project? Why does he experience it as so difficult, so risky? What are the stakes in these translations? How might we relate the "stages, " through which the novel idea develops? How do they come into an alignment, or make a constellation?

       Chandumenon’ s task is defined first, by his "wife’s often expressed desire to read in her own language a novel written after the English fashion, ” and secondly by a desire on his own part  "to create a taste amongst my Malayalee readers, not conversant with English, for that class of literature represented in the English language by novels” (D xvi) The project is double-edged. lt demands resitting of the novel form as we as a translation of the reader of Malayalam literature. For the moment let us proceed from the literary historical truism that the European novel is a genre that arrives with its bourgeoisie; or, more strictly: that the European middle-class subject is manoeuvred into place through metanarratives such as that of realist fiction. Chandumenon’ s task, then, is to create a novel for a Nair reader-subject who aspires to a place in an emerging Indian middle-class; or, changing the emphasise somewhat, to write a novel that will figure into being this Nair-Indian hyphenation and all, as subject for the liberal bourgeois project in colonial Kerala. Crucial to that project is the critical mediation of imperial initiatives and the consolidation of Nair hegemony in the region. His novel must re-fashion and re-organise the codes and subcodes, indeed the whole corpus of philosophical assumptions and juridico- political contracts that constitute the bodies of the Sanskrit-Malayalam reader and of the English novel. But that is only part of the enterprise. In order to conjure into being his new Nair- lndian subject (pleasure and all) Chandumenon must also catch the European novel at work. He must assay the historical movement inaugurated by the original and recreate, appropriate, its performative energy. Only then will he succeed in writing a Malayalam novel that would be, like its model, an inaugural scripting, an indulekha. Wittingly and unwittingly, then, Chandumenon deconstructs/ supplements his “original” to remake his world, his reader, and- we must not forget -himself as a husband-lover. Nair, Malayalee, Malabar, India here are not “living subjects,” or empirical objects exemplary of already existing formations, “but names at the edge of language, or more rigorously, the trait which contracts, the relation of the aforementioned living subject to his. name. . .” (D 185)

     Chandumenon’s task is rendered infinitely more complex by his focus on the reader-listener(s) and the reshaping of their subjectivities. His objects are her pleasure, their taste. He is not addressing a totally new reader here -say from a social stratum brought into prominence in a revolutionary movement - but one who has been shaped by Sanskrit literature. The novel must transform such a reader- rework the structure of her feeling, redefine her tastes, reinscribe her authority. This is the task that is finally discharged when Chandumenon writeser an original Malayalam novel that find readers who are not only delighted by it, but freely and in their own agency defend it against criticismsm. The focus on the readers pleasure suggests that the essential task of the translator is the repositioning of the text (in this case the novel genre) for historical subjects and historical projects. It is an afterlife never imagined by the original, but one demanded by it all the same. We must not overlook the fact that the novelist is careful to distinguish his achievement, which is a mutation from the ‘original, " promising Lakshmikuttyamma a novel more or less after the English manner: ”ekadesham englishnovalbukukalude mathiri. . . ”and finally claiming to have written something like an English novel. Understandably, therefore, Chandumenon is as impatient as Benjamin with translations that aim only at a transfer of “information,” or meaning. He rejects the idea of translation as a recounting of the gist of the story- he dubs it “useless”(for what?)- and locates a model (oral rendering) in which he can actively , and in an ongoing manner, tease open his ‘original’, treat it as plural and as formed out of other cultural and linguistic texts. The demands of translation, in fact, bring out a plurality in the text that even a discerning and knowledgeable reader such as himself might have earlier failed to notice, just as the force of his reader -interlocutor shows up its instability. Chandumenon can only reorient Lord Beaconfield’s original to address the Malayali reader-listener by treating theoriginal itself as meshed-in with its outwork and as engaged in the process of translating several signifying chains into what is presented as a univocal signified.11.  It is in this reverse, deconstructive gear, that Chandumenon shapes an afterlife for Henrietta Temple in which it becomes intelligible for his world; an afterlife in which it effectively addresses an historical reader.1 2. We begin to appreciate why the equivalent of the oral rendering of the English novel with the added deconstructive feature of a reader of writing, not a listener of speech, cannot simply be a written translation. It will have to be an altogether new genre; a genre which is something like, but not exactly, the English novel.
     Understandably, therefore, Chandumenon is as impatient as Benjamin with translations that aim only at a transfer of "information"or meaning. He rejects the idea of translation as a recounting of the gist of the story-he dubs it "useless" (for what?)-and locates a mode (oral rendering) in which he can actively, in an ongoing manner, tease open his 'original', treat it as plural and as  formed out of other cultural and linguistic texts. The demands of translation, in fact, bring out a plurality in the text that even a discerning and knowledgeable reader such as himself might have earlier failed to notice, just as the force of his reader-interlocutor shows up its instability. Chandumenon's can only reorient Lord Beaconfield's original to address the Malayali reader-listener by treating the original itself as meshed-in with its outwork and as engaged in the process of translating several signifying chains into what is presented as a univocal signified.11 it is in this reverse, deconstructive gear, that Chandumenon's shapes an afterlife for Henrietta Temple in which it becomes intelligible for his world; an afterlife in which it effectively addresses an historical reader12. We begin to appreciate why the equivalent of the oral rendering of the English novel with the added deconstructive feature of a reader of writing, not a listener of speech, cannot simply be a written translation. It will have to be an altogether new genre; a genre which is something like, but not exactly, the English novel.