The Exotic in Aesthetics: A
Case Study of Poïetics as the
« Science and Philosophy of Creation »[i]
Poietics can and may be construed as
the exotic in aesthetics, for the simple reason that aesthetics as a subject is
part and parcel of axiology, the study of values. To be brief then, research
into poietics is not about the study of values, and as such the French School’s
definition of poietics as the « science and philosophy of creation »
which, to the latter, constitutes an integral part of the subject of aesthetics
can be called into question. But, for the sake of argument, we’ll go along with
the examination of the French definition.
If by the term
« exotic » we mean the « unusual » in the sense of
« not native to the place where found », poïetics [or la poïétique, in French, from the
Greek: poïein, to make with the intellect as opposed
to prattein, to make with the hands] is
probably not the exotic element in aesthetics. If by the term exotica [from the Latin singular exoticus] we mean « strikingly
or excitingly different or unusual », we are not far from the idea that
poïetics lies embedded in the general realm of aesthetics. Closer to the notion of a
link between poïetics and aesthetics is the term exostosis in the sense of an
outgrowth, such as, a spur in the heel-bone or the root of a tooth. Quite
frankly, the medical term synarthrosis meaning « an immovable articulation
in which the bones are united by intervening fibrous connective tissue »
describes better the constitution or situation of poïetics within aesthetics.
Such a comparison is likewise appropriate for the simple reason that the recent
history of research into poïetics, at least in France, displays many painful
similarities with the osseous or osteal ailments that many arm-chair athletes or
sybaritic gourmands, if I’m not
mistaken, suffer from.
In the words of René
Passeron who was largely responsible for the research undertaken in poïetics in
the last twenty years in France: « ...poïetics exists from a long time ago
and it conceals itself as a diluted and unavowed element, within [the body of]
general aesthetics. » [Passeron 1976: 11] What would therefore constitute its
« exotic » status as a subject vis-à-vis aesthetics is the ability of
poïeticians to « undilute the
unavowed element » in aesthetics, in theory, a task - if we are to adhere
to Passeron’s admission - which would be tantamount to producing an elephant out
of a magician’s top hat. Passeron’s choice of words here is perhaps at fault,
for he has - as we shall see later on - shown by his deliberations, especially
in his Pour une philosophie de la
création [Passeron 1989: 251]that only rabbits or pigeons may legitimately
be produced from a magician’s top hat, though these latter may be just as, or
infinitely more, productive.
In any case, Passeron
separates poïetic activity, - that
is, according to Lilian Guerry, Passeron’s predecessor at the Sorbonne’s CNRS
research centre, the study of the dynamic
relations of the creator with that of the work of art he or she is in the very
act of creating/producing, - from the receptive and evaluative tasks of
aesthetic judgment, by comparing the study of poïetics to the act of going
upstream (« amont » in
French) from the work of art as opposed to going downstream (« aval » in French) which involves
the reception of the oeuvre, which,
according to him, is the province of aesthetics. From this one could glean that
going upstream is always an exotic act, the act of going into the uncharted
primitive interior, into virgin territory, the land of the unconscious where
everything you encounter is unusually or strangely outlandish.
The French School
The great French poet
Paul Valéry in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France [Valéry 1938: 13]
proposed the study of the genesis of the poem, and though he did not then use
the word poïetics, he made
references to the medical use of its Greek origin: poïea. It then fell to the lot of his
successor Jean Pommier at the venerable institution, during his inaugural
lecture on May 7, 1946, to cite the Valéryian definition of poïetics taken from
Valéry’s paper, « Discours sur l’Esthétique ».
What in effect is
Poetics or rather Poietics? You shall be told. It is
everything
that concerns the
creation of works, of which the language is at once the
substance
and the means. This
consists, on the one hand, of the study of invention
and composition, the
role of chance, that of reflection, that of imitation, that
[those]
of culture and the
environment; and, on the other, the examination and analysis of
techniques, processes,
instruments, materials, means and agents of action.
[Valery 1937: 1311; Pommier 1946: 7-8]
Until then, at least, as far
as the French were/are concerned, poïetics which became later known as la science et la philosophie de la création
(the science and philosophy of creation) was considered part and parcel of
aesthetics, though French accomplishments in the field remain more or less
philosophic but in no way scientific. Apart from René Passeron whose training
was in philosophy, no other member (with the exception of one affiliated member)
of the group of researchers he led has had either a scientific or a
philosophical background.
No one seems to
know, or has even recorded for posterity, whether what Valéry proposed as a line
of investigation took hold of French curiosity and interest, until the early
seventies when the Groupe de Recherches
Esthétiques du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifiques (The Esthetics
Research Group of the National Centre for Scientific Research), under the
overall - but detached - guidance of the eminent French aesthetician, Etienne
Souriau, began to probe into the possibility of working on poïetics as a
separate sphere of activity within the encompassing realm of aesthetics. The
director of this research group, Lilian Brion-Guerry, declared in the first
volume of Recherches Poïétiques, published in 1975, and in which Tzvetan
Todorov, Etienne Souriau and René Passeron, contributed
articles:
Extending a concept that Valéry limited to the literary arts, these
studies
propose to analyse the steps that precede the institution of a work of
art -
the dynamic relations which unite the artist to his work of art while
he
is in the act of creating it - to retrace the stages of the movement
between
genesis and structure; finally, to try to find, through a comparative
methodology,
the relations that can exist between such processes from one [sphere of]
art
to another. [Brion-Guerry 1975: s.p. Preface]
A little later, René
Passeron, a painter with the necessary French philosophical training, took over
the research centre, and although his direction of the centre alienated a good
many members of the group ( Tzvetan Todorov and a few other younger researchers
left to form another research centre at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales), research into the subject has primarily remained within
Passeron’s particularly protective hands. As the theoretician of the group, he
led them through a morass of attempts at defining the subject which hadn’t
really added to one’s knowledge of what was expected of the research at hand;
with the result, the centre was closed down in 1988. In the meantime, however,
the group published five volumes under the title of Recherches Poïétiques though the
contents - primarily grounded in the plastic arts - had not paved the way for
fundamental research in the field.
The achievement, if any, of
Passeron’s group of researchers in the field of poïetics may be relegated to an
attempt at circumscribing the limits of defining - by no means complete however
- the subject. The articles in the five volumes of Recherches Poïétiques and the
proceedings of the First International
Conference on Poïetics (Premier
Colloque International sur la Poïétique), and the now first issue of the
journal: Recherches Poïétiques,
published in 1995, [several more but equally less edifying issues have been
added since] devoted to the proceedings of colloquies, organized by the Société International de la Poïétique,
constitute a variety of academic posturing, a sort of academic beating about the
bush, and which in no way brings the reader closer to a view of what is meant by
the act of creation or how an intimate knowledge of this process may offer
insights into a/any work of art. Typically, they refuse to take into account the
existence or findings of any other school of poïetics, a-frog-in-the-well
attitude that characterizes much of their research. For instance, the group
spent some five years, from 1983 to 1988, postulating détournement or the act of « diverting,
hijacking or rerouting » as a mode of creation, that is, « which consists,
in general, in diverting earlier cultural elements in order to do something new,
more or less to change the ends while retaining the means » [Wignesan
1990/91: 45], wishing by this means to work out what they thought was a new
approach in the study of creation without realizing that it was part of the
usual tasks in comparative literature influence studies, and in which
comparatists sought to trace the influence of one or more forms, styles,
techniques, etc., on another. In this context, though, one has to consider the
German comparatist, Horst Rüdiger’s views on the certainty of establishing the
existence of influence between the
émetteur (emitter) and the récepteur
(receptor) every time there apears a resemblance or similitude in style,
theme or form, etc, in works of art.
... I
would suggest that we avoid the term ‘influence’ altogether and
use
instead,
‘effect’ and ‘reception’, which denote a dynamic attitude on
the
part of
the author rather than a passive one, which makes him a powerless
instrument.
[Rüdiger 1971: 19]
Furthermore, the group
was informed of the existence at the beginning of this century of an entire
series of studies and publications in Russian on heurology (which is yet another word of
Greek origin for poïetics) at the first international meet (that I proposed and
organized as general secretary) from April 28 to May 2, 1989 [Passeron 1991: 284-6], but they have
preferred to dismiss all the work produced by P.Engelmeyer on the subject by
simply claiming that Paul Valéry certainly had not heard of Russian research
into poïetics or, as it was in this case, heurology (from the Greek heuro meaning « discovery »
and logos (science or discourse).
From 1907 to 1921, the Russians published a journal (which did not appear
regularly on account of the war) on heurology, and Engelmeyer is credited
with having produced in 1913, according to those who have read him, a tract on
the act of creation, entitled: Questions
on the theory and psychology of creation. [Engelmeyer 1913 &
1915]
The research group
headed by Passeron also refused to accept the work of other schools of poïetics,
such as, the ancient Indian theory of creation as first mooted in the Natya Sastra of Bharata of the 2nd or
1st century B.C. and developed subsequently by Bhatta-Lollata and Sri Sankuka
(800-840), Bhamaha to Rudrata of the Pracina school (650 -850 A.D.),
Anandavardhana of the Navina school (c.850 A.D.), Bhatta-Nayaka (900-1000 A.D.),
Abhinavagupta (980-1020 A.D.), Pratiharenduraja (900-950 A.D.), Kuntaka
(950-1000), Mahima-Bhatta (1020-1100), Mammata (1050-1100) to Jagannatha (1620
-1660). [Ramachandran 1979 & 1980; Wignesan 1987]
French poïeticians also refuse to recognize the
fact that closer home there already exists a whole theory fashioned by a Spanish
contemporary critic and poet. Carlos Bousono’s Teoria de la expresion poética [Bousono
1970] is without doubt one of the most convincing attempts at working out a
poetical basis for the subject of poïetics, though there may remain some doubts
about the unassailability of his la
ley del asentimiento or the law of
consentment, which is a corner-stone of his theory. From the point of view of
poïetics, few theories of artistic creation could posit a more ingenius and
consummate formulation of the principles underlying any one genre; the theory
works its way back from the surface analytical nature of the language of poetry to its creative sources and
motivations, permitting the legitimate constitution of several
« laws » distinguishing the ordinary use of language from poetic
diction, while applying these distinctions to other related propositions, such
as, the nature of humour and absurdity. Bousono does not stop there: he goes on
to elaborate a whole series of underlying principles for the appreciation of
poetry and literary movements, in general. By contrast, French researchers into poïetics have not even
come up with a mere statement of the possibility of a theory after over half a
century of deliberations.
To take things yet a
step further, Passeron’s followers have turned a blind eye even to the
publication of the first bilingual journal on poietics at their very own
doorstep: the Journal of Comparative
Poïetics/Revue de Poïétique Comparée, [Wignesan 1989-1992] a journal which
has in the first place made known to, at least, the English-speaking world the
very existence of the French group and their efforts in the field. Any study of the nature and evolution
of the subject must take into account these details since French poïeticians
claim that it was they who invented the subject, and which, of course, is no
mean feat, let me assure you.
Let us now examine the
French school’s « findings ». The five volumes of Recherches Poïétiques were devoted to
various aspects of the problem of defining and very probably taking stock of the
possibilities of the subject as a branch of aesthetical
research.
According to Passeron,
the first volume of their publication probed poïetics as
a
way of locating yourself before the work of art is completed in order to be
able
to study the creative processes. Corollary: the aim of poïetics is not the
artist,
is
not the work of art, it’s not necessarily psychology or semiotics, it’s the
moveable
evolutionist bond during a certain time which links the artist to his oeuvre, to his
unfinished work of art. [Wignesan 1990/91:
44]
This, Passeron says, is the
aim of poïetics [compare Brion-Guerry’s definition given above], and that
« with the aid of poïetics, one can nevertheless describe clearly the
structure » of a work of art. [Wignesan 1990/91: 44]
The second volume was
taken up with the question of analysing the materials used in the fashioning of
a work of art, the material of which « is not only a substance, that it is
also cultural, for example, language, or that it is physical: sound », and,
as a corollary, the relations one entertained with Nature since that was where
one obtained one’s materials, and the relations are of a triple nature.
[Wignesan 1990/91: 44-45]
First of
all, it is that which is exterior to us and which is perceived by the senses,
and in
such a case one can’t very well distinguish between works of art and
natural
objects.[...] The second aspect is the world where one takes -
exactly like predators
- the
materials. And, finally, the third aspect [consists] of a world of force
with
which one
is [entangled] in a battle. [...] ...a sort of struggle against the power of
Nature...
[Wignesan 1990/91: 45]
Passeron or rather the
group which he led, believed that Nature sometimes is a useful force
« since you’re going to issue orders to Nature while at the same time [be
seen to be] obeying it, and sometimes Nature refuses to obey us ».
[Wignesan 1990/91: 45]
The third volume
expanded on the version of the individual creator to that of the collectivity:
group, community or species, and that certain « objects », such as,
language and the popular folk dance, was the property of the collectivity, and
the French group « quite fruitfully sampled the types of collectivity. It
could span the smallest possible number up to the entire human species. »
[Wignesan 1990/91: 45]
By the time the French
researchers worked on the fourth volume, they felt that poïetics began to take
shape as a subject, that it began
to
assume consistance, began to demonstrate that it contributed something -
we
wanted to find an antonym, that is to say, the thing which is the
contrary of creation.
One
said to oneself that to repeat was after all not to create, to repeat - it is to
do
something that was already done. [Wignesan 1990/91:
45-46]
According to Passeron, repetition was an
activity hampered by obstacles, and he proposed the image of Sisyphus rolling a
stone uphill which always rolled down as an activity which was both sterile and
punitive. He then relied heavily on the French philosopher Deleuze’s thesis on
repetition which postulated difference as an accompaniment of
repetition, that is, la repetition qui
fait la différence [repetition which makes a difference] in order to be able
to see that
there is a
certain repetition in the interior of the process of a conditioned reflex,
or of the
more complex process of creative behaviour. So there is an integrated
repetition
which permits insistance on the material, thereby forcing it to submit
itself to
creation. You see, we found a sort of a crack inside repetition itself
which
made it
possible for poïetics to pass through. [Wignesan 1990/91:
45-46]
The fifth and last
volume concerned itself with the problem of presentation which, though a
philosophical issue, became grounded in the socially ritualistic act of
presenting a work of art. Here, Passeron and his group clearly contradict
themselves. Whereas in the beginning, they advocated that the object of poïetics
was neither the creator nor the finished product, now they insisted that the
finished product compromised the creator socially - the creator of a work of art
was responsible for his creation even after he had nothing to do with it. Yet,
there is some truth in saying, as Passeron does:
There is in art an activity of presentation. One causes a work of
art to be presented,
a
work of art which has the aspect of a person, and with which one maintains
relations
as
between persons [...] taking into consideration the temporel and social aspects
of
presentation...[...] ... it is to bring to life something which wasn’t
there until then and
which is to be embodied in the work of art, that something which one can
talk about.
[...]
...we concluded that, in fact, in every work of art, one could think that art
presents
the act of
presenting, that art, when one is conscious of it, is the act itself of making
present
something.... [Wignesan 1990/91: 46]
The last volume on détournement, however, for the reasons I
gave you earlier on, never saw the light of day, and it would seem that, despite
the revival of colloquies on poïetics and the proposed publication of the
proceedings, French research into poïetics has stymied itself and wallows in a
sort of play on words and the richly pulpy academic sonorities which recall
high-faluting intellectual imponderables of the past rather than the rigorous
examination of creative processes, that is, les conduites créatrices that Valéry and
Souriau may have expected of their followers to undertake seriously. [Wignesan
1990/91: 46]
The
Indian Classical School of Poïetics
One of the earliest consummate views of
poïetics is that of the Vedanta school of sanskrit Indian thought. Though other
views exist in ancient and medieval Indian philosophy, such as, the popular view
that art procures personal pleasure to the receptor, and the Sankya view that
art is an end in itself, the Vedanta school, which is Brahman-centred, posits
the realisation of the « ultimate reality » through art, that is, the
attainment of moksa or final
liberation from this existence.
The consensus of
opinion among Indian philosophers is that the creative
power
is a native
endowment blossoming without any reason, though a few like
Rudrata also
concede some role to training and learning, or knowledge
and
scholarship (vyutpatti), in the flare-up of creative
(poetic) disposition. They stress
the spontaneity of pratibha, [imagination]but at the same
time acknowledge that
pratibha may be acquired. However, with Jagannatha, pratibha is not a
natural
propensity but
an outcome of unimpeded cultivation (utpadya); and perhaps he
is
alone in this
conviction. [Ramachandran 1979:]
The creator is
considered a seer or muni who has the
skill or kausala to represent in
concrete form his insights into the « ultimate reality »; his skill
lies in his ability to perceive the unity and harmony of the universe which, to
the ancient Indians, signifies « perfect beauty » and then to convey
this unique insight of the Brahman to the receptor. « It is in answer to
this need that we seek works of art. To one who has realized Brahman and has a
synoptic view of nature art is superfluous. » [Ramachandran 1979: 81]
The creator does this
by three stages. First, the perception of cosmic beauty through
« self-forgetful » activity, made possible by the use of his
imagination or pratibha, when
contemplating common experience or observing typical facts; second, the
transformation by pratibha of these
observed facts and experiences into a general idea symbolizing the ultimate
reality or the perfection in perceived beauty; and finally, the conversion of
this general symbol, as the case may be, into concrete material
form.
But Indian aesthetics
postulates that the receptor must be of a similar temperament or trempe as the artist or creator, that
is, sa-hrdaya [in other words, one of
« similar heart »], in order to be able to fully appreciate the work
of art, while insisting on his lack of skill in constructing the concrete form
of the work of art.
The
process of appreciation is, in order, the reverse of the process of
creation.
The
work of art stands midway between the two processes, effecting a
transition
from
the one to the other. [Here, the French School’s postulates of « amont » and
« aval » is worth
drawing attention to.]The transition is rendered possible by the
fact
that the appreciator is of the same nature as the artist. But the appreciator
differs from the artist in the degree of that nature, and this is the
reason why
appreciation waits upon creation. [Ramachandran 1979: 85]
This may be construed
as a contradiction in aesthetic aims (even if the appreciator and creator differ
only « in the degree of that nature »: who is to decide and/or measure
the degree or extent of the difference?) since the aesthete-appreciator - if he
is equally endowed with imagination as the creator - may not need art, like the
muni to enjoy a glimpse of the
« ultimate reality » or Brahman, and the creator may therefore not be
called upon to transform his general idea into concrete form for the
appreciation of the sa-hrdaya
receptor. And since the layman is not
supposed to be capable of consciously reconstructing the creator’s material
manifestation into the general idea symbolizing the perfection in beauty, who
then is the Indian creator creating for? What separates the Indian creator from
the sa-hrdaya receptor is merely his
ability to transform his unique perception into concrete form.
Just as art is a
« science » that is learnt arduously by its practitioners, so may art
appreciation be also learnt, or rather all art appreciation also depends on the
knowledge of art in question and the ability to apply that knowledge. One learns to appreciate, for example, the
« Waste land » by T.S.Eliot, perhaps the most famous poem in the
English language in the twentieth century. One does not simply pretend (even if
Eliot claimed that true poetry
communicates even before it is understood) that the poem has registered with
one simply by the act of reading and reacting to it uncritically. After all,
isn’t it curious, despite the pitfalls to be expected in the critical concept of
intended fallacy, that Eliot himself
had never really intended expressing what the oft-quoted phrases: « the
disillusionment of a
generation » or « the malaise of our time » meant in the
poem, and that, I quote: « To me it was only the relief of a personal and
wholly insignificant growse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical
grumbling. » [Eliot 1971] We all know that he composed the sequence [Eliot
himself called it a series of poems]
when he had had a severe nervous breakdown, due probably to overwork, and while,
and also even before, he was convalescing at Margate; later when he was under medical treatment at Lausanne he
finished with: « What the Thunder said ». We all know that his
marriage of seventeen years to his mentally suffering first wife, Vivien Haigh,
or the boredom of a bank job, or both may have been the cause of much that he
was complaining about or had been discontented with, and so forth. Even if we
did not know the fact - at first reading - that Ezra Pound slashed the poem down
to its bare rhythmic bones, that is, to half its original length, might the poem
make more or less sense had we learned of its drastic revision by another hand
since the original manuscript remained hidden and/or forgotten in a New York
library until after Eliot’s passing in 1965, and that Eliot, himself, the
meticulous banker and critic, was averse to reviewing his own creations once
they were completed. Whether the poem originally was a jumble of
autobiographical reflections, underlaid by echoes from favoured masters Eliot
had read, or whether it was about the Holy Grail, or about the effects of the
anti-boom conditions of post-First World War economic and political chaos on a
sensitive intellectual, or just a Buddhistic meditation, or the sum of all of
these themes and experiences, it is the amplitude of its ambiguities which gives
the poem its particularly challenging qualities. The notes added subsequently by
Eliot in the book form of the poem served to direct the reader further in his
search for meaning which, in this case, is probably, as it is claimed, the lack
of an overall comforting truth, an answer to, and a panacea for, the
perplexities of life in which the individual finds himself in similar conditions
everywhere in the world.
All said and done, it
becomes quite clear that appreciation of art is as artful a task as the creation
of art, and both may be learned, without claiming, like the ancient Indians did,
with the exception of Anandavardhana, Vagbhata, Dandin, Mammata, Vamana and a
few others, that this faculty is a mythically God-given right. Of course, there
may be differences of degrees between appreciators and artists, as there are
between appreciators themselves, but what does this mean? in the light of what
can be learned of art and of the creation of art. Let me quote from Eliot’s 1921
poem, or rather Eliot-and-Pound’s 1922 poem: « You! hypocrite lecteur! -
mon semblable, - mon frère! » (You! hypocrite reader! - my fellow creature,
- my brother! ») [Wain 1986: 333]
It will be interesting to study the reactions
of a « classical » Indian sa-hyrdaya appreciator without the
necessary critical training in Euro-American poetry when confronted by the
« Waste Land » without the notes supplied by Elliot. Eric Mottram, an
equally erudite poet, coined the word « resources » instead of notes,
for these constitute an essential
key to understanding. No less a critic than Ralph Ellison admitted that
the poem moved and intrigued him in 1935 « but defied my powers of analysis
[...] and I wondered why I had never read anything of equal intensity and
sensibility by an American Negro writer » though he somewhat contradicts
himself in the same interview when he says that the understanding of art depends
on the knowledge of human life and the willingness to extend one’s humanity.
[Ellison 1967: 167-68 & 175] Would the Indian reader’s disillusionment at
not experiencing the Ultimate Reality mean that the poem was/is by Indian
aesthetic standards worthless, even if Elliot himself considered his work
« a piece of rhythmical grumbling ».
A
Case in Point- Poetry: Translation as opposed to Trans-creation
If translation constitutes a faithful
reproduction of the SL language creation in the TL, making the necessary
allowances for differences in graphology/alphabet and syntactical structure,
etc., then trans-creation can be
considered an act of diagenesis,
that is, « the recombination or rearrangement of constituents resulting in
a new product ». Translating then from one linguistic family of languages
into an entirely different family, that is, where the source language (SL) of a
poem has no common origin or linguistic parentage, such as, graphology or
alphabet, vocabulary and in some or most of its grammatical structure, with that
of the target language (TL), can only be made possible by an act of diagenesis
which, depending on the competence of the translator, may either be a distortion
of the original, or in varying degrees a not necessarily fresh creation which
may or may not retain some of the elements of the original poem. This is
evidently so because in such a case we are dealing with two essentially
different cultures which produced the languages and poems in the first place.
All what I am saying
may seem self-evident but this proposition is fairly difficult to demonstrate in
practice. I have chosen a tablet
from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and poems from Tamil and Malay classical
literature as examples of diagenetic poïetic processes in English and French
translations. But, first, I would have to explain the structure and conventions
of the poetic genres I have selected for this demonstration in order to have a
frame of reference for evaluating the degree to which the structure and meaning
of the SL poem might be « translated » or be
« transplanted » into the TL. Egyptian hieroglyphs, by the way, being
made up of images or pictorial characters - need I stress the fact - are by the
very nature of their phrasing « poems » in
themselves.
Methodology
Let me also first
define the sort of translation method that may best be suitable in the present
discussion. Without a doubt, the most satisfying translation method must be a
« total translation », the term used by J.C.Catford to mean:
« replacement of SL grammar and lexis by equivalent TL grammar and lexis
with consequential replacement of SL phonology/graphology by (non-equivalent) TL
phonology/graphology. »[Catford 1974: 22], that is, total as against a restricted translation method which is
« performed only at the phonological, or at the graphological level, or at
only one of the two levels of grammar and lexis ».[Catford 1974: 22] Even
in the total translation method, it would be necessary to take into account
certain features of linguistic untranslatability, such as, the ambiguities of
« (i) shared exponence of two or
more SL grammatical or lexical items, [and] (ii) polysemy [or oligosemy] of an SL item
with no corresponding TL polysemy ».[Catford 1974: 94] The other feature of
untranslatability which we must bear in mind is whether the « collocational
abnormality in the TL text is a
symptom of (so-called ‘cultural’) untranslatability only when the original SL
text is collocationally normal. » [Catford 1974: 102-103]
Egyptian
Hieroglyphics
Before coming to grips
with the problem of illustrating the processes involved in the poïetical
examination of translations from Tamil and Malay classical poetry into English
and French, let me tackle another aspect of translation which, in my view, comes
closer to diagenesis as a creative process. Champollion’s work of making
Egyptian hieroglyphics meaningful to us, today, is an act of poïetising which is
quite unique. Egyptian hieroglyphs have been on active record from the end of
the IVth millennium B.C. to - to be
precise - the 24 August 394 A.D. Hieroglyphs simply means in Greek
« sacred images ». Now the question is how does one
« culturally » translate images, whether sacred or not, into written
languages with alphabets and grammars of complex structural relations.
To work this out, we have
first to lay out the particular linguistic features of hieroglyphics which stand
out as being abnormal cultural collocations in the SL in relation to English and
French translations of them. First and foremost, hieroglyphs are read from right
to left and top to bottom like Chinese, and the Egyptian sentence is almost
always preceded by the verb which is then followed by the subject, direct object
and the complements of attribution and circumstance. The Egyptian alphabet is
composed only of consonants like the ancient Semitic languages and like the
Tamil hieroglyphs of some six to ten thousand years ago, first studied at the
Perumukkal Cave in the South Arcot district of Tamil Nadu. Furthermore, very
much like Chinese characters, too, Egyptian hieroglyphics are composed of -
apart from the alphabet - ideograms and phonograms. There are also determinatifs
which qualify other lexèmes. Now let’s take a fragment from the Serapeum of Memphis from the XXVIth
dynasty, which is around the seventh century B.C. and the translation made
of it by Christine Ziegler. [Ziegler 1982: 118-125]
The first three
pictograms on the right translate as « the official of the seal »,
the first two of which being consonants « m » and « r » and
the third an ideogram « htm ». The second column of an oval enclosing
three hieroglyphs translates as « royal proper noun » [hieroglyphs
enclosed within an oval, called a « cartridge » by Egyptologists]
which in this case is OUAHIBRE-OUNNEFER: « w3h-ib-rc ». The third
column consisting of five hieroglyphs, of which one is a phonogram:
« wn », followed by the alphabetical phonogram: « n » and
the rest by alphabetical phonograms: « nfr » and « f »
« r » qualifying one another successively and which mean together
« a being/ perfect ». The final translation of this fragment reads
thus: « The chancellor Ouahibré is a perfect being. » Now how does one
get this sentence from the literal translations of phrases? From the first
column, we get the « official or keeper of the seal » who is the
chancellor; from the second column, the proper noun (which by the way need not
be translated) but translated would mean: « stable is the heart of the Sun
God » which here is Ouahibré-Ounnefer; from the third column, we get
« a being » and « perfect ». Please note that the SL in this
case has no verb, only nouns or noun clusters. By this process of diagenesis
which is fundamental, in my view, to all translation methods between widely
differing languages or languages with non-equivalent graphology and/or
phonology, the poïetics of translation can be laid bare at least in this case
between Egyptian hieroglyphs and English.
I will next treat of
two cases of translations from classical Tamil and Malay poetry into English.
Both the translators were well-known figures in their respective fields:
A.K.Ramanujan, Professor of Dravidian Studies at Chicago University and Sir
Richard Winstedt, Reader in Malay at the London School of Oriental and African
Studies. Unfortunately for them, the translations the former made from the Kuruntokai, an anthology of love poems
from the cankam period in Tamil
literature, put together (or written?) between about the second and the fourth
centuries A.D., and those the latter made of the pantun, dating from the 16th century in
written Malay literature ( I say « written » because the pantun has certainly had an oral
tradition probably dating from centuries earlier) do not hold them up in the
best possible of lights as translators though their knowledge of the source
languages and their literatures cannot be legitimately called into
question.
Cankam Poetry
Any translation of cankam poetry must not ignore two very
strict observances in the original. First, there is the scheme of conventions,
known as aintinai, which Ramanujan
has translated as « five landscapes », and secondly, the prosody which
is a highly organized form of a system of metrics which Ramanujan totally
ignores in his translations, prefering to adopt the free-wheeling
« structures » (if one might call them that) of contemporary free
verse. Classical cankam poetry is
broadly composed in two major divisions of subject matter; one, akam which is largely made up of love in
all its aspects, in other words the interior life, and, the other, puram which treats especially of the
exploits of heroism which « are all other kinds of poems, usually about
good and evil, action, community, kingdom; it is the « public » poetry
of the ancient Tamils, celebrating the ferocity and glory of kings, lamenting
the death of heroes, the poverty of poets. Elegies, panegyrics, invectives,
poems on wars and tragic events... »[Ramanujan 1970: 101] The akam or the interior poems of love are
spoken by a certain number of players in the dramatic life of the ups and downs
of amorous inter(personal)play and situations, given the strict circumstances of
caste ideals in the Tamil community. The speakers of the poems are « the
hero, the heroine, the hero’s friend(s) or messengers, the heroine’s friend and
foster-mother, the concubine, and passers-by. » [Ramanujan 1970: 112] Besides,
as Ramanujan says, « No poet here speaks in his own voice, and no poem is
addressed to a reader. The reader only overhears what the characters say to each
other, to themselves, or to the moon. A poem in this tradition implies, evokes,
enacts a drama in a monologue. » [Ramanujan 1970: 112] As akam poetry aspires to be impersonal and
secular, almost all poems - excepting those deliberately composed as tinai mayakkam poems, that is, as a
mixed variety - fall under one of five stages in the love life of the ancient
Tamils: kurinci ( mountains: lovers’
union), mullai (forest, pasture land:
patient waiting or domesticity), marutam (countryside: unfaithfulness,
including sulking scenes), neytal
(seashore: anxiety in love and separation), and palai (wasteland either mountain or
forest parched by summer: elopement, hardship, separation from lover or
parents). Now to indicate the particular stage of amorous relationships, the
poet has recourse to natural phenomena and other rhetorical objects, such as,
birds, animals, fish, flowers, plants and trees, time of day or season of year,
occupations of people, etc., which fall into one or the other of five
landscapes. This is a discreet or even demure form of affixing feelings and the
informed receptor is supposed to be sensible enough to appreciate it all.
Without going into any further detail and there are quite a few other
conventions to be taken into account for a fuller appreciation even of just akam poems, I will take an example of
Ramanujan’s translation to see how he has gone about conveying the literary
culture of classical Tamil poety.
Talaivi, Kuruntokai - 25 by Kapilar
Ramanujan’s translation
What She Said
yarum illai tane kalvan
Only the thief was there, no one else.
tan atu poyppin yan evan ceyko
And if he should lie, what can I do?
tinait tal anna ciru pacun kala
oluku nir aral parkkum
There was only
kurukum untu tan mananta nanre a
thin-legged heron standing
on legs yellow as millet stems
and
looking
for lampreys
in the running water
when he took me.
[Ramanujan
1970: 30]
P.N.Appuswami’s translation
When he, my secret lover,
Plighted his troth,
No one was there
But the deceiver himself:
And if he prove false -
Alas for me!
What can I do? -
But, there stood a heron
On lanky legs
Green like millet stalks,
-
A heron looking for fish
In the running brook. [Appuswami 1987:
97]
Literal translations
no-one [was there] only [the] thief
he that denies what can I do
millet stalks [like] young yellowish-green
legs
running water lamprey searching
heron present [he] deflowered [me] that
day
personne [était là] seulement [le] voleur
[si] il ment que puis-je faire
milet tiges [comme des] verts jaunatre jambes
coulantes eaux lamproie cherchant
héron présente [il m]’a pris [ce] jour [là]
Ramanujan sins on the colour of the young
girl’s legs, that is, « pacun» (pacumai), which he deems
« yellow », while Appuswami prefers the general to the particular:
« fish » instead of « lamprey » for « aral ».
Appuswami refuses the sexual union for something more demure. Otherwise both the
translators convey the surface meaning of the poem without strictly adhering to
the syntax or order of the images. Ramanujan, however, keeps the dramatic
moment: « when he took me » to the last in consonance with the
original. Otherwise both translators indulge in overspill, which, while their
translations wholly derange the visual and prosodic structure of the original,
nevertheless like Thomas Urquhart’s famous translation of Rabelais, convey more
of the intention of the poet - without however falling into the error of
intentional fallacy - than the original does. But then, neither captures the
terse, laconic juxtaposition of images of cankam poetry, the impersonal laying out
of the objects of the poem as conceptualized by T.S.Eliot’s objective correlative, and as such
deviate from the valued poetical assumptions of Tamil or Indian classical poetry
which praises the profound interior emotional content as attested to by the
theory of dvani or suggestiveness in
poetry. I won’t go into an evaluation of the five landscape conventions in the
translations since both translators have more or less given all the conventional
objects of the original. It only remains to be ascertained if the translations
are faithful to the original. As one Indian critic has observed:
« Translations, too, are like women, never very faithful when very
beautiful, never very beautiful when very faithful ». [Parameswaran 1995:
50] In point of fact, all the translations of this poem in Parameswaran’s
article, including his own, sin in a similar fashion.
Parameswaran also
states mistakenly, I think, that Ramanujan lets «poetry win without allowing
scholarship to lose » [Parameswaran 1995: 134], and it cannot be said that
he lets poetry win in this case, for the original as I have shown in my
translation is made up of a certain order of images without the necessary
connecting morphemes or relative particles, etc., a method by which the poet
Kapilar managed to evoke a particular event in a specific landscape which is
charged with tense and fearful emotions, doubt and anxiety, and the indifference
of nature to the indiscretions and violence in man, where the phrasal cultural
collocations of the original knock into each other successively, building as it
were into a crescendo of feeling which explodes in the last phrase with the
deflowering of a slip of a girl, reinforced by the image of a heron searching
with its beak under running water for lampreys which, as you know, are eels with
large suctorial mouths.
Pantun
What is a pantun? Allow me to quote from:
« The Poïetics of the Pantun ».[Wignesan 1995:
1-15]
« The
pantun is not a lyrical or narrative
poem. [...] The pantun is quite simply
on one
obvious level a riddle. One cannot but be affected by the detached state
of its
expressed objects, be they on the subject of love or erotic titillation, on
moeurs
en vigueur or on customs while making
philosophical declarations or even jokes.
Gently teasing
irony is not by any means the least of its assets. [...] According to
Arena Wati each
line of the pantun should normally
vary between eight to
twelve
syllables. [...] Each syllable makes up a foot. The metre therefore is based
on the accent
...[... which] falls variously on the penultimate syllable, and on the
antepenultimate
when the last syllable ends in kan,
and/or the final syllable when
the penultimate
syllable is made up of an « e » pepet. The most frequent rhyme scheme
is as follows:
ABAB [Arena Wati 1971: 94], but it could also be - as with the sha’ir -
[the scheme of
the Malay narrative structure] AAAA. [Wignesan 1995: 3-5]
Very often each line
of the pantun is made up of four pleremes (noun, verb, adjective and
adverb), with or without the kenemes
(words of syntactic function). And as the majority of the words in Malay
does not exceed two or three syllables, it devolves that each line of the pantun rarely exceeds a dozen syllables,
or rather that the number of syllables in each line normally vary between eight
and twelve syllables, or slightly more occasionally. This observation may be
taken to be a rule of sorts for the pantun line, though by itself it does
not constitute a fundamental principle of composition. Other more intrinsic
factors distinguish the uniqueness of the
pantun.
What really sets the
pantun apart from all other similar
forms, such as, the hainteny, etc.,
is the role of the first distique (or tercet) vis-à-vis the immediately following
second parallel form. The first is the sampiran (clothesline or rack)
containing the kiasan (allusion or
analogy) on which, and through which, the isi (contents or meaning) contained in
the second distique or tercet may be overlaid or hung. The relationship is one
of interdependence. In other words, the first distique or tercet hints at or
foreshadows, by the use of poetic artifices of parallelism - either symmetric or
disymmetric - the maksud (the sense,
meaning or message), if any, in the following second set of lines. The sense of
the pantun may generally be
conceived, given also the anonymity of authorship in most pantun(s) as something impersonal and
purely objective.
On the other hand, if
we applied Samuel R.Levin’s concept of couplings both in a phonological as well
as in a semantic sense [Levin 1973: 30-41], we may see how the first distique or
tercet is intrinsically joined to the second parellel group. [Wignesan 1995:3-5]
Let’s take a pantun quatrain from the Sejarah Melayu or Malay Annals, written down in the
seventeenth century, where the genre was first known to have made its written
appearance and which Richard Winstedt has translated.
Sejarah Melayu
Richard Winstedt’s
translation
Kota Pahang di-makan
api
Ah!
hot I see a fortress burning -
Antara Jati dengan Bentan.
I’d hint not say your heart’s afire:
Bukan ku-larang kamu
berlaki,
‘Tis not that I’d suppress your yearning
Bukan bagitu perjanjian.
Forbid you, lady, wed
your squire.
[Winstedt 1969: 198]
A literal
translation
Fort Pahang consumed by
fire
Between Jati and Bentan.
Not that I forbid you
getting married,
Not in this way a contract.
Not that Winstedt did
not or could not understand the original; on the contrary, he was aware of all
its nuances and implications as his commentary on the quatrain
testifies.
A fort
consumed by fire, a girl difficult of access consumed by desire - these to a
Malay are
close parallels. ‘Between Jati and Bentan’ has no geographical foundation
but at
once suggests antara hati dengan
jantong ‘between heart and
liver’, a phrase
symbolical
of the very house of passion. [Winstedt 1969: 198]
So, the ultimate
meaning of the quatrain would be that a girl should not contract a marriage
when she is seized by lust. An admonitory pantun, one might say here.