India in Translation, Translation in India by GJV Prasad;

Author:GJV Prasad;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

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Transcending Borders, Bridging Cultures: Reading Faiz Ahmed Faiz1

Fatima Rizvi

People within a cultural tradition engage with their literary texts in a process of ‘primary internalisation’ whereby they interiorise literary capital in their collective consciousness. Authors and their texts, inclusive of metaphors, images and symbols, become part and parcel of a literary imagination. ‘Secondary internalisation’ requires people from different cultural domains to develop a level of familiarity with the linguistic practices, literary forms and styles of other cultural traditions. This makes serious demands upon readers. Only after striking the imagination of the new readers, can the new literary forms be accepted and subsequently internalised (Rahman ‘Internalizing…’). Translation enables secondary internalisation by widening the scope of literary forms belonging to various literary and linguistic traditions. In the case of British Literature, translation decentralises its centrality by increasing the relevance of literatures belonging to other cultural and linguistic canons. It helps create liberal spaces of readership where acceptance of new texts and significance of different sensibilities becomes possible. It widens possibilities of reviewing and researching not only a text but also the culture of its location. Translational exercises are processes whereby the translator decodes semantic and syntactic codes of the source language along with the intangible and tangible cultural elements and recodes or appropriates them so as to blend with the target language and culture. Cross-cultural translational exercises are about understanding and interpreting cultural significations with a view to surmount both linguistic and cultural gaps. They involve a creative involvement with the source and the target languages. Familiarity with the cultural milieu of the two languages plays a significantly enabling role. This chapter reads poems of Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911–1984) and their translations, as creative exercises, transcending borders and bridging cultures. It elucidates that translation is not merely ‘a transaction between two languages … that literary texts [are] constituted not primarily of language but in fact culture, language being in effect a vehicle of culture’ (Trivedi 2007, 278). It explicates that ‘the task of the translator consists in finding the particular intention toward the target language which produces in that language the echo of the original’ (Benjamin 2002, 258). The aim of translation is not to imitate the sense of the original, but to incorporate the original’s way of meaning and thus make both the translation and the original recognisable as fragments of a greater language (Benjamin 2002, 260). The study comments on Faiz’s assertiveness in having himself translated. It reads humanism in his poetry and goes on to read translators’ engagements/conversations with the aesthetic and essence of Faiz’s Urdu language poetry and its significations—both possibilities owing much to the availability of the translated Faiz.

During the nineteenth century, prose genres were popular, perhaps because they were better suited to express realism that was rapidly making inroads into the socio-cultural fabric of subcontinental India. Apart from this, the popularity of prose emanated from the fact that it was easy to grasp for readers who weren’t from literary backgrounds, as also for those looking for the social change it was propagating.

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