His motivation, of course, is to explain – perhaps even justify – his own approach to translating Tagore’s poetry. He attributes this etiolation – this feebleness, this loss of vigour – to the English language’s global spread and its status as the world’s language of commerce and communication. In the introduction to a book of his English translations of Tagore’s Bengali poetry, William Radice speaks of the “ etiolation” of the English language. The specific context of this effort is this poem’s title and its cultural connotations, both implicit and explicit. Nonetheless, I will attempt to answer them – in no other capacity than as a keen translator-and-transcreator of Bendre’s Kannada poetry into English. There are, of course, no easy answers to these questions. What meaning do these two (intrinsic) characteristics of a language take on when they need to ‘transferred’ to another language? That is to say, what must a translation (or a transcreation) do in the context of the transfer of these twin characteristics? Is a transfer even possible? ![]() This is especially true of a language’s poetry. ![]() Like I say in my essay for ‘The Hindu’, a language is both a cultural and an aural vehicle. ![]() Poem Details: From the collection “ನಾದಲೀಲೆ”, first published in 1938. *Yama - the god of death in Hindu mythology
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |