The institution of the individual translator is inadequate to bring out the cultural nuances of the parent work. It is high time the individual translator is declared dead, Kannada writer and poet H.S. Shivaprakash has said.
Mr. Shivaprakash, who was speaking at a panel on ‘The Personal and the universal: tackling nationhood and translations’ here on Saturday, said the time had come to move on to collaborative translation projects, with writers from two languages working with resource persons. He said a project he headed to translate the vachanas into all south Indian languages taken up as a collaborative effort had yielded better results than A.K. Ramanujan’s translation of Basaveshwara’s vachanas. He said that Mr. Ramanujan had translated the dialogic vachanas into a monologic poetry, thus losing the essence of the original text.
Sitanshu Yashashchandra, a well-known Gujarati poet, said the need of the hour was for the bhashas to speak to each other rather than with English or foreign languages. While Volga, a prominent Telugu writer, recounted her early influences of Soviet literature translated into Telugu, T.P. Rajeevan, a Malayalam writer, explored the politics of choice of a work to be translated.
(The Hindu)
