Bengaluru: “India reads things in original. By translating, I am violating a tradition,” said Prof. Velcheru Narayana Rao, who was named the first Visweswara Rao and Sita Koppaka professor in Telugu Culture, Literature and History at Emory University.
It was this tradition that never allowed Prof Rao to translate poems. “The Indian languages are syntactically, semantically and culturally so close that there was no need for translation. In fact, there is no equivalent word for ‘translation’ in Indian languages. If an equivalent exists, then it must be a borrowed word. India has always been multilinguistic. However, with the introduction of English, we have lost multilingualism,” he said.
He explained how the texts can be divided into three kinds sound primary, meaning primary and sound-meaning primary. The Vedas are sound primary and are not translated because the essence of the text lies in the way it is spoken. Epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata are meaning primary and get narrated in different words as long as the meaning is retained. The Kavyas are sound-meaning primary making them difficult to translate.
He said that while translating, he develops a new protocol to understand the syntactical, semantical and cultural differences between the languages involved. “Telugu has larger compounds than Sanskrit. It is not possible to translate those words them into a single compound in English. In such cases, these compounds have to be broken down while translating,” Prof Rao said.
On untranslatable texts, he said, “Picture poetry can only be explained and not translated. Here, readers follow a specific pattern and it is not possible to translate those texts into other languages.”
He said, “The ideal way to go about reading Indian classics is to read the originals. So we should learn instead of translating them. However, since we are not doing the learning at the moment, we must also continue to translate. Since English has opened Indian literature to the world outside, translation is relevant in our times.”
