Literary Translation
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Literary Translation: Recent Theoretical Developments
By Sachin Ketkar
Lecturer in English
SB Garda College,
Navsari
www.geocities.com/sachinketkar sachinketkar@yahoo.com Literary studies have always, explicitly or implicitly, presupposed a certain notion of `literariness ' with which it has been able to delimit its domain, specify, and sanction its methodologies and approaches to its subject. This notion of `literariness ' is crucial for the theoretical thinking about literary translation. In this paper, I have attempted to analyze various recent theoretical positions to the study of literary translation and sought to understand them in the context of the development in the field of literary studies in the last three decades of the twentieth century. The recent developments in the literary studies have radically questioned the traditional essentialist notion of `literariness ' and the idea of canon from various theoretical perspectives. I have contrasted the traditional discourse on literary translation with the recent discourse in order to highlight the shift in the notion of `literariness ' and its impact on translation theory.
The traditional essentialist approach to literature, which Lefevere (1988:173) calls `the corpus ' approach is based on the Romantic notion of literature which sees the author as a quasi-divine `creator ' possessing `genius '. He is believed to be the origin of the Creation that is Original, Unique, organic, transcendental and hence sacred. Translation then is a mere copy of the unique entity, which by definition is uncopy-able. As the translator is not the origin of the work of art, he does not possess `genius ', and he is considered merely a drudge, a proletariat, and a shudra in the literary Varna system. This traditional approach is due to the Platonic-Christian metaphysical underpinning of the Western culture. The `original ' versus `copy ' dichotomy is deeply
Literary Translation: Recent Theoretical Developments
By Sachin Ketkar
Lecturer in English
SB Garda College,
Navsari
www.geocities.com/sachinketkar sachinketkar@yahoo.com Literary studies have always, explicitly or implicitly, presupposed a certain notion of `literariness ' with which it has been able to delimit its domain, specify, and sanction its methodologies and approaches to its subject. This notion of `literariness ' is crucial for the theoretical thinking about literary translation. In this paper, I have attempted to analyze various recent theoretical positions to the study of literary translation and sought to understand them in the context of the development in the field of literary studies in the last three decades of the twentieth century. The recent developments in the literary studies have radically questioned the traditional essentialist notion of `literariness ' and the idea of canon from various theoretical perspectives. I have contrasted the traditional discourse on literary translation with the recent discourse in order to highlight the shift in the notion of `literariness ' and its impact on translation theory.
The traditional essentialist approach to literature, which Lefevere (1988:173) calls `the corpus ' approach is based on the Romantic notion of literature which sees the author as a quasi-divine `creator ' possessing `genius '. He is believed to be the origin of the Creation that is Original, Unique, organic, transcendental and hence sacred. Translation then is a mere copy of the unique entity, which by definition is uncopy-able. As the translator is not the origin of the work of art, he does not possess `genius ', and he is considered merely a drudge, a proletariat, and a shudra in the literary Varna system. This traditional approach is due to the Platonic-Christian metaphysical underpinning of the Western culture. The `original ' versus `copy ' dichotomy is deeply
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