Translating Tamil Dalit Poetry
Source: www.tamilnation.org
Topic: Poetry
Sort Desciption: in translating Tamil poetry. Initially, I had planned on get-. ting a professional translator to ... protest rhetoric of most modern Tamil Dalit poetry. The ...
Content Inside: 56 • WORLD LITERATURE TODAY • MAY – AUGUST 2004 F OR THE PAST TWO YEARS , I have been involved in a project to translate Tamil Dalit literature into English. (Dalit is the col- lective term for the “untouchable” castes of India.) Even though I am bilingual and worked as a translator of essays and technical reports during my graduate-student days in India, before I began this project, I had almost no experience in translating Tamil poetry. Initially, I had planned on get- ting a professional translator to do the work involved and actually spent a whole summer in India meeting prospective writers and translators who expressed an interest in my pro- posed book. All the men I met were professors of English in city colleges who had translated Tamil Dalit writ- ing before. Except for one, none of them were of Dalit origin, but then, neither am I. In fact, one of the initial reasons I felt uneasy about even trying to translate Tamil Dalit poetry was my uncomfortable awareness that I was attempting to take on the task of inter- preting and illuminating voices of a culture that had for cen- turies been silenced by those belonging to my caste groups and class. My early apprehensions were exacerbated by my search for translators from Tamil to English, as most of the men I met (and they were all men) made it clear that they too felt inadequate translating poetry, especially the slash-and-burn protest rhetoric of most modern Tamil Dalit poetry. The poetical form was a strange new animal that none of them had ever tried to tame before, or so the argument went, and the consensus was that essays, short stories, novel excerpts, and even plays by Dalits were translatable, but not poetry. I should clarify that Dalit literature is an entirely new genre within Tamil literature, and Tamil scholars—many of them non-Dalit—find themselves scrambling trying to find a new poetics for this emergent literature. The political and personal ramifications involved in ident ...
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