Now for the task of the translator. Instead of proposing my theory of translation adopted in my translation of DR Nagaraj’s Allama Prabhu and the Shaiva Imagination, I would like to narrate the way this translation progressed – for, as Nietzsche has it, all theory is autobiography (or, more accurately, autobiographical). Before that, a short detour into the history of translating the vachanakaras and Allama is in order.
Translating Nagaraj, translating Allama Prabhu
The translation of vachanas began with European officers in the subcontinent. It continued in works by Indian scholars like Fa Gu Halakatti. With these precedents, AK Ramanujan’s translation of vachanas in Speaking of Siva (1973) was a breakthrough which introduced vachanas to a global audience. Following Ramanujan, many attempts have been made to translate the vachanas. As far as Allama is concerned, there are three exclusive works of translation. More recently, there has been a surge in translating premodern Kannada texts: for example, classics like Kavirajamarga, Vaddaradhane, Gadayuddha, Harischandra Kavya, and Kumaravyasa Bharatha have been published in English translation.
As part of this, two anthologies of medieval Kannada literature include English translations of the vachanas. While these translations have brought literary works in Kannada to English, the present book is the translation of a theoretical and scholarly work. This presents different challenges and makes different demands on the translator. As Nagaraj shows in its first chapter, historians of Indian philosophy get it wrong when they read desi discourse (such as vachanas and Virashaiva compositions) rendered in Sanskrit because the Kannada nuances are lost in translation. He calls this the problem of translating desi. The same observation applies to translating Nagaraj’s Kannada work into English. I have tried to address this problem.
I began enthusiastically, without much thought and preparation, being in a hurry to complete the translation of the text because of a deadline by the New India Foundation (NIF)’s translation fellowship. I had previously translated from English into Kannada, strictly following the bilingual critic (Kannada and English) GS Amur’s conviction that one should translate from other languages into one’s own language. However, this conviction weakened as I began to understand the new ecosystem of translation over the recent past. I was impressed by the translation project of the Murty Classical Library of India, especially Vanamala Viswanatha’s translation of the premodern Kannada poet Raghavanka’s Harishchandra Kavya. Above all, the NIF’s translation fellowship inspired me to push myself into translating Nagaraj’s Allama into English, which is my second language, picked up in an academic milieu after my matriculation.
My only preparation for this task was my reading in English as an academic. Teaching translation theory and practice has helped me understand the nuances of translation. This understanding has been shaped by the ideas and reflections of various critics and thinkers, including Kirtinath Kurtkoti, OL Nagabhushana Swamy, Sundar Sarukkai, Rita Kothari, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricoeur, Edith Grossman, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Though I have not yet entirely digested most of their arguments, their insights are indirectly evident in my translation.
The translation has gone through at least nine rounds, maybe more. In the first round, my concentration was on the Kannada text, getting it right and staying as close to it as possible. At this juncture, I wanted to remain unfailingly faithful to the source text, even translating the ambiguities in it. The idea was not to leave a single word untranslated. However, I was not happy with the result, and in the second round, I realised that translation does not just require mastery over two languages, but also the registers of domain knowledge. So I tried to familiarise myself with the major registers or discourses that constituted the source text. In this regard, I identified three main registers in Nagaraj’s book – the register of medieval darshanas, primarily the Virashaiva and vachana idiom, besides other Shaiva and medieval Indian darshanas; the register of social and literary theorisation; and finally, the register of Nagaraj’s distinctive writing style.
Then I began to read the vachanas in Kannada sources and English translations, scholarly books on Virashaivism, Kannada literary history, and primers on Indian darshanas. While making myself familiar with these domains of knowledge, I went back and forth making amendments to my translation. As someone who taught literary and social theory, I was at home with the theoretical proclivities of Nagaraj’s writing, but his writing style posed a problem: the prose often presented ambiguities and made the meaning of various sentences imprecise or insufficiently clear to me. Translation thus became a kind of puzzle-solving activity and some of the sentences I read repeatedly to reach clarity. To familiarise myself with Nagaraj’s style and vocabulary, I also read his other works and consulted “Nagaraj experts” and his former students. Re-armed, I went back to my text and improved it – or so I think.
A translator at work
I also sought feedback from my own students and friends. Some of them, whose labour I detail in the acknowledgements, sat with me and read both Kannada and English versions. Group reading and feedback have refined my translation. My reading of Ricoeur’s idea of translation as an ethical act of interlinguistic hospitality was a revelation to me. As he puts it, “[T]ranslation sets us not only intellectual work, theoretical or practical, but also an ethical problem. Bringing the reader to the author, bringing the author to the reader, at the risk of serving and of betraying two masters: this is to practice what I like to call linguistic hospitality.” Though it might sound like a big claim, I understood his notion of translation ethics as taking care of the Other, my reader. While in the early drafts I stayed close to the author, in the later ones I began to shift my focus to the reader. Considering my implied readers as my guests, I concentrated on serving them.
I became aware of the problem of what Bakhtin calls “addressivity”; Kannada words are addressed to Kannada readers, while my task was to translate them so that they addressed English readers. When the addressivity – the ecosystem of words and readers – changes, the words and their environment and their context need to change as well. Therefore, I needed to change the text at several levels, from changing the syntax to inserting additional words and sentences (besides supplying necessary information in additional footnotes to address English readers). Literalism is, in any event, the bane of translation, and the best translators have often pointed out that each language has its own way of saying things, so that what is by broad consensus an admirable idiomatic equivalence must be the translator’s aspiration. Apart from trying to reach this virtually impossible ideal, the work demanded independent research on my part, and I have appended to the footnotes found in Nagaraj’s original, to distinguish mine from his. Beyond that, I developed the confidence to rearrange Nagaraj’s paragraphs, or to move around one or two lines within a paragraph, to delete repetitive phrases or sentences.
It remains for me to mention a couple of other ways in which I have taken a liberty with the source text. Given the assumption that discourse and sentence patterns work differently in different languages, I have tried to look for semblance, changing the patterns of sentences. For example, Kannada syntax will do without a subject, but in translation, I have used the first-person pronouns “I” and “we”. However, I have always kept discourse, the larger unit beyond the sentence, in mind. The individual words or sentences I use make sense as part of the paragraph, text, and discourse.
Nagaraj is known for using metaphors in critical writings, and I have retained these metaphors in my translation, except when a particular metaphor didn’t suit the flow in English translation. Whenever the Kannada metaphors work in English, I have translated them. My choice is clear: I have focused on translating what has seemed apparent to me as the meaning of Nagaraj’s text – a text which, though focused on a poetic figure, is itself classifiable as shastra, where meaning must prevail over emotive utterance and effusion. Likewise, in some places, when Nagaraj’s manner of expression (dense language and too many ideas packed into a single sentence) came in the way of clear communication, I have intervened in the interest of comprehension and readability.
Coming to the translation of ninety-odd vachanas quoted by Nagaraj in this book, I had a good deal of material to help me. In the beginning, I used already available translations, especially my teacher CR Yaravintelimath’s. In my later editing rounds, however, I felt the need to retranslate the vachanas myself to suit Nagaraj’s interpretation and analysis.
Working on this book has helped me gain a deeper understanding of the worlds I inhabit – of Kannada, the Lingayat way of life, the English-speaking world, and others. It has profoundly affected my reading of Kannada literary and cultural history, especially that relating to vachanas and Virashaivism, besides the fulfilment of engaging with premodern Kannada literary texts. My immersion in this text has changed my sensibility and deepened my understanding of the Lingayat way of life – the work has translated me too. Meanwhile, my wrestling with the English language was frustrating, fun, and revealing at the same time, and made me dwell in the language. It has broadened my horizons, resulting in what the Germans call Bildung, which I understand as the growth and formation of the self. I can only hope reading it will be as enjoyable an experience for the reader as making it has been for me.
NS Gundur is a professor at the Department of Studies and Research in English at Tumkur University, Tumakuru. He received a New India Foundation translation fellowship to translate DR Nagaraj’s Allamaprabhu Mattu Shaiva Pratibhe from the Kannada.
