![]() ![]() Modern poetry in English, with its keen sense for the present and the changes it was bringing, eschewed the (often exaggerated) tropes and images of the Romantic period using more familiar, tangible and everyday conceits instead. They stood as pleasant reminders of an idyllic rural period that was lost (a period that had perhaps always been more wishful than true) and whose mores were now obviously antiquated and wholly unmodern. Its ‘poetic conceits’ became artifacts frozen in time. The waning of the Romantic movement naturally rendered its ideas obsolete. ![]() Several of the Romantic movement’s ideas were pastoral (and pagan) – the idea of the earth as a nourishing mother (Gaia, Mother Earth, etc.), the anthropomorphism of nature and the natural elements (nymphs and fairies, for instance), and, of course, the great many gods of Greek (and Roman) mythology and of Norse mythology. KANNADA HANI KAVANA SKINThis, of course, meant the language had to ‘grow a new skin’, as it were, even as it shed the skin of its rural, agricultural, and pagan past – a progression that had begun as early as the Industrial Revolution of the middle-1700s but that had been kept in check by a counter-tide of literary Romanticism. In other words, English’s modernization was, in effect, its widespread urbanization. So – what is the character of a “modern language” like English? What does it possess (and lack) that other languages don’t? More specifically, how do Kannada and English compare? Is it possible to justify Radice’s claim concerning the ‘etiolation’ of English? Here are some thoughts, several of them generalized and speculative.Īs I see it, the widespread modernization of English through the 20th century was responsible for severing any last ties of the language with its rural and agricultural (not to mention its pagan) past. In that sense, it would not be wrong to say that English is, at present, the world’s most modern language. A natural consequence of such a link is the modernization of the language itself a process directly influenced by the growth and proliferation of new mores and the gradual obsolescence of old mores. I was reminded of it as I started to write this.Įven if we disagree with Radice’s claim that English is etiolated, there can be little argument that English is the language most closely linked to society’s rapid technology-driven modernization of the last century. ![]() I had already begun to transcreate Bendre’s poetry into English by the time I read Radice, but his perspective was thought-provoking and remained with me. I mention this matter not just because it introduced me to the word ‘etiolate’ (though I’m quite certain that is the reason Radice’s words have stuck with me) but because of ideas it kindled within me (in a mostly subconscious manner). His motivation, of course, is to explain – perhaps even justify – his own approach to translating Tagore’s poetry. He attributes this etiolation – this feebleness, this loss of vigour – to the English language’s global spread and its status as the world’s language of commerce and communication. In the introduction to a book of his English translations of Tagore’s Bengali poetry, William Radice speaks of the “ etiolation” of the English language. The specific context of this effort is this poem’s title and its cultural connotations, both implicit and explicit. ![]() Nonetheless, I will attempt to answer them – in no other capacity than as a keen translator-and-transcreator of Bendre’s Kannada poetry into English. There are, of course, no easy answers to these questions. What meaning do these two (intrinsic) characteristics of a language take on when they need to ‘transferred’ to another language? That is to say, what must a translation (or a transcreation) do in the context of the transfer of these twin characteristics? Is a transfer even possible? This is especially true of a language’s poetry. Like I say in my essay for ‘The Hindu’, a language is both a cultural and an aural vehicle. Poem Details: From the collection “ನಾದಲೀಲೆ”, first published in 1938. *Yama - the god of death in Hindu mythology ![]()
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