The Author – Translator relationship

Problems of cultural and linguistic incommensurability create barriers to translation. Besides this is the relationship between the author and translator which Ramanujan saw as essentially conflict-ridden. The translator might wish to create a poem out of the original but has to bow to the reader's wish for a literal translation; or the translator might want to create a poem of his own from the original which is in conflict with the reader's desire to see a replication of the original. The translator is thus caught between “transmission and expression”. But Ramanujan says that a translator is “an artist on oath …caught between the need to express himself and the need to represent another, moving between the two halves of one brain, he has to use both to get close to ‘the originals'” (120).

The reader is also important in this process. The reader of a translated poem expects the translation to be a reliable representation of the original text in terms of language and structure as well as its various cultural connotations. It also has to provide aesthetic pleasure. These are demands that can be met by various translation strategies at the translator's disposal, but how can he convey the vast network of cultural relationships? Dharwadker points out that Ramanjuan “argued that even as a translator carries over a particular text from one culture into another, he has to translate the reader from the second culture into the first one” (121). He thought this can be achieved through notes and prefaces written by the translator. His extensive commentaries that are the prefaces to his translations of Sangam poetry or Kannada vacanas are in fact the core of Ramanujan's translation theory. He notes in his Translator's Note to U. R. Ananthamurthy’s Kannada novel Samskara:“A translator hopes not only to translate a text, but hopes (against all odds) to translate a non-native reader into a native one. The Notes and Afterword in this book are part of that effort” (122).

By acquainting the foreign reader with the cultural context of a different language, Ramanujan was also focusing on the vast intertextual network of which that text was only a part. The ancient poets had no idea that they would be read centuries later in languages and cultures unknown to them. But through translations and renditions in other art forms like dance, they become the living tradition of modern Tamil culture. Thus the translation of a Tamil poem of four lines “evolves into an open-ended, multi-track process, in which translator, author, poem and reader move back and forth between two different sets of languages, cultures, historical situations and traditions” (Dharwadker 123). Translation then becomes a process of cultural transmission that energises everybody concerned.

Vinay Dharwadker who is himself a poet and translator synthesizes Ramanujan's principles with his own to come up with a guideline for translations in India .