Programme
David Buck
Associate Professor
Division of Physical Sciences
Elizabethtown Community and Technical College
E/ david.buck@kctcs.edu
Translating Literary Beauty and Some of its Ugly Consequences: The Case of Some of the Real People in Kutrala Kuravanji
This short paper will raise some questions and discuss some of their ramifications, but not answer any of them. It grows out of unresolved issues I faced while translating the beautiful and ever-popular Tamil dance-drama Kutrala Kuravanji by Melagaram Tirikoodarasappa Kavirayar, composed 300 years ago.
One of the central unresolved problems I wish to confront is that Kutrala Kuravanji presents beautiful poetic descriptions which may also serve as mere caricatures of real people, designed consciously or unconsciously to help justify the expropriation of resources over which they had some claim. If this is the case, then how does a translator confront the social snub that is built into the ways these caricatures are drawn?
Kuravas in Melagaram now claim, and both the poet and Sangam literature seem to concur, that they were once owners of mountain lands, or at least of usage rights to mountain resources. Kurava people in Kutrala Kuravanji are said to lead happy but poverty-stricken lives, with homes in those beautiful mountains. The Kurava woman who is one of the two central characters in the drama is described as a widely-traveled fortune teller, independent and very quick-witted, if a bit on the coarse side, who has collected a lot of glamorous jewelry through her art; her husband and other Kurava men are portrayed comically, as silly bumpkins. Their portrayals contrast sharply with the elegantly drawn portrait of the other central character, a beautiful and proper high-born girl, and with the admiring portrayals of the only non-fictional characters in the drama, a number of very important men, and a local ruler, from the rich agricultural lands around Kutralam. These men are described as controlling lands and resources in the area, but not particularly in the nearby mountains, which are portrayed as home to the Kurava people. Adult women in these high-born communities are not described.
Today Kurava people in the area are officially prohibited from even going into the mountains to collect materials for basketry and broom-making, an occupation that provides a large portion of their meager income. Did the differential literary portrayals, in works like Kutrala Kuravanji, of Kurava people and of wealthy, powerful landowners and little kings factor into justifications for dispossessing real people from their ancestral homes? Literature and entertainment styles and forms from other times and places have clearly played such a role in justifying dispossession. Might Kavirayar’s portrayals have served the expansionist needs of little kings and big landowners by painting Kurava people as so markedly different from those powerful people, indeed painting them as untamed, independent, and silly, that they might seem perhaps unworthy of ownership rights?
How do literary portrayals like these factor into the continuing process of alienating so-called tribal people from their ancestral homes? What undercurrents of these sorts are present in this otherwise lovely work that might help shape a Tamil-language reader’s experience of the dramatic content, and that should be available to someone reading its English translation as well? Should translators try to incorporate such overtones of social rank into the very words that paint pictures of literary characters, or should we leave all of that for discussion in introductions or prefaces? This paper will examine translation problems such as those that arise out of these and similar questions.
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Prof. Buck's principal research interest is in the academic and literary
translation of Tamil literature into English. Currently he is working as a
co-translator, with M. Kannan of the French Institute, Pondicherry, on a
translation of Dalit Literature: My Experiences, edited by Kannan M.,
which includes essays by Dalit writers as well as previously unpublished works
by them. Recently, he has translated Kutrala Kuravanji (2005) He was a
co-translator, with the late K. Paramasivan, of
The Study of Stolen Love (1997), and also translated
The Song of Pampatticcittar (1976).