Mad Woman in the Attic

India is a country of immense linguistic diversity and, thus, a country of many literatures. Many of the 221 language groups are small according to the latest census, and it is only the eighteen listed in the Indian Constitution as major languages that comprise the bulk of the population's speakers. In addition to the eighteen languages listed in the Constitution, four more are recognized by the Sahitya Akademi (National Academy of Letters) for reasons of their significance in literature (Assamese, Bengali, Dogri, Indian English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kankani, Kashmiri, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Panjabi, Rajasthani, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu). But in general, the perspective of India as a hegemonic language and literature area is ubiquitous. A writer in any one is counted as much Indian by the Sahitya Akademi as a writer in any other and no distinction is made between one literature prize and another. Thus, while we have a pl...

"Comparative literature," Earl Miner writes, "clearly involves something more than comparing two great German poets, and something different from a Chinese studying French literature or a Russian studying Italian literature." PRE-HISTORY… Comparative Literature is defined as "the study of literatures of different languages, nations, and periods with a view to examining and analyzing their relationships.  “In the Middle Ages the literatures of Western Europe were generally considered to be parts of a unified whole, mostly because they were frequently written in a common language, Latin.  In the nineteenth century, concurrently with the beginnings of the comparative study of religion and mythology, various European scholars began to develop theories and methods for the comparative study of the literatures of different languages and nationalities...Several different approaches to the examination of comparative literatures have developed:  the stu...

Welcome to my Wonderland! What has it got for you? Giving you respite from the heat, this place is snowy, fluffy, cool, even cold, and yet cosy. This cosiness gives me the feeling of comfort. The time to think, to reflect, to meditate, to enjoy, to develop new paradigm, to learn and create new things. This is very me. This whiteness reflects peace, comfort, serenity and yet a world of fancy. On the slide of library, I engage in learning, imagining and creating new things and ideas. This balances with the “Rose Mary” structure that inspires me to innovate constantly.  The waves in the background depict movement. So the imagery is that of constant balance between making and doing, thinking and being, creativity and enjoyment- amidst the purity of white, perked and spiced with the chillies at the top of the “Rose Mary” symbolic of the spiced fun and bliss that emerges out of the space.

The web of Technology encompasses me, takes me in it’s stride. It makes me what I am, what I think, what I represent. And when I look back I see the past glorious culture, traditions and technological innovations that my country stands for. I am here ,in the present and I am there too .The vivid colors ,the simplistic ,yet evolved processes of architectural rituals and materials tell me that I belong to a strong rich cultural entity and yet move beyond the past .These architectural structure and pots signify the ever evolving nature of technology and yet remain stood in time. The constant negotiations between traditional and modernity make the what I am -the essential Indian, symbolized by the turban on the clay pot.

George Steiner characterized the history of translation until Jakobson/structuralism, as “a constant rehashing of the same formal versus free theoretical distinction. Early translation theories used concepts like “literariness”, “primary”, “secondary”, “estrangement”, which reveal the hierarchical nature of a culture. Thus, translation always has been a device in the hands of the canon and victimized by the canon for its own purposes (post colonial theory critiques in the same manner). It is imperative to remember that all theories of translation evolved reflected the political and social turmoil of the age. The ages have reflected theories of translation. It was not until the 60’s that translation as a scientific activity was thought of. Translation was a marginal activity. But with the North American Translation Workshop, the practice of literary translation got recognition as alternate value systems. Scholars as Ted Hughes and Jonas Zydnas, the propagators of the workshop m...

Literature has always been indebted to translation throughout history; most of the classics have had to be translated from their original language into major European languages. A brief history of the evolution of the translation studies and its theories helps to widen the scope of linguistic studies and exert tremendous influences. The Romans translated the well-known Greek classics, with Cicero and Horace as the first theorists. The Romans permitted the use of new words in translations, because they too aimed at enriching their own literary tradition. They did made a significant distinction between ‘word for word’ translation and ‘sense for sense’ translation. The Bible was translated into vernacular languages in Europe in the sixteenth century. The translators of Bible aimed at both intelligibility and a gratifying style. The renaissance style was that of creative appropriation. Wyatt’s translations of Petrarch’s sonnets have an immediate impact on the readers with a very con...

Philosophy of translation: The process of translation is very well equated to the process of transmigration of the soul, the Indian traditional concept of “Parakaya Pravesha” (entering of the soul into another body) or the ‘metempsychosis’ of Pythagoras. Schopenhauer maintained that in translation no less labor is needed that the ‘transference of the soul’. Here, the meaning is the inner content or the soul often text, and style as the outer aspect, its clothing. This would be an all-inclusive and most apt paraphrasing for TRANSLATION. This embraces varied ideas such as “translation is the unification of cultural contexts”, “translation is an interpretation”, “translation is the communication of meaning”, and “translation is about equivalence in meaning and style”, as G. Gopinathan in his essay ‘The Nature and Problems of Translation’ points out. PSYCHOLOGY OF TRANSLATION: Translation theories, from antiquity to date have been ‘product-oriented’. Nevertheless, it will also be ...

Communication of meaning: The first ever view is that translation is the communication of meaning from one language to another. Quoting Dr. Johnson, “ to translate is to change into another language, retaining the sense”. In the study of meaning word is often considered as the symbol or the sign. So Leonard Forster considers translation as the transference of symbols and signs of source language to target language. But words are not independent entities, they have associations and connotations. From among the many possible symbols, the translator will have to choose an appropriate symbol for encoding the meaning. The semiotic and the symbolic views only suggest the complexities of meaning in translation. Process and product: We tend to look at the translation as the product rather than the process. The theory of translation in last century was mostly ‘product oriented’; it was only the end product that was the essential, not the process. A very naïve way to look at the translated ...

The development of theory literature as part of the translators' training and higher studies in translation introduced in some of the academic institutions in India after the Seventies have also contributed for a change in the attitude. The evolution of translation theory in Hindi and other modern Indian languages can be traced as follows: 1. The Tradition of Transcreation : Transcreation has been the general mode of translation in modern Indian languages from the olden days. This was mainly practiced in the translation of great classics like Ramayana, Bhagavata and Mahabharata in the regional languages from Sanskrit. Transcreation in this context is a sort of rebirth or incarnation (Avatar) of the original work. In a general sense, it can be understood as an aesthetic re-interpretation of the original work suited to the readers/audience of the target language in the particular time and space. This re-interpretation is done with certain social purpose and is pe...

Translation is a kind of activity which inevitably involves at least two languages and two cultural traditions." (Toury 1978). As this statement implies, translators are permanently faced with the problem of how to treat the cultural aspects implicit in a source text (ST) and of finding the most appropriate technique of successfully conveying these aspects in the target language (TL). These problems may vary in scope depending on the cultural and linguistic gap between the two (or more) languages concerned (Nida 1964). Translation studies-relating both to questions of theory and practice-represent a growing body of work which, in recent times, has received insightful inputs from scholars working within different disciplines- linguistics, semiotics, culture studies, literary theory, psychology, etc. this confluence and convergence on translation has not only elevated it form a second rate activity to a ‘high pedestal’ of a discipline, but also brought into sharp focus the ‘tra...

What began as a mere observance, and then nostalgia for the films that I watched in my childhood, the good old VCR days, led to curiosity to inquisitiveness, and I began searching for ways to quench that thirst, to connect the threads that I had left behind. The first impressions of the place reminded me of 80s, the time I began to see the world for the first time. While the world around has changed, things seem to be on a stand-still here; it looks like a microcosm of any North Indian space, a construct that I belong to. What began as a means to understand the buildings, architecture, films, halls, became an effort to understand myself in newer contexts, to understand my extended family members, to understand the space and construct that I come from. The issues broadly focused were: · The history of the neighbourhood and the cinema halls · The economics in and around the cinema halls · How films get continually rearticulated within specific historical conj...