Translation and retranslation: thoughts on methodology, with respect to the Mahābhārata

                                       Translation and retranslation: thoughts on methodology, with respect to the Mahābhārata

What began in 1970 as a translation of the newly completed critical edition of the Mahābhārata by Professor J. A. B. van Buitenen of the University of Chicago (van Buitenen 1973, 1975, 1978)  was left unfinished after his untimely death at age 51 in 1979. James Fitzgerald has added one volume (Fitzgerald 2004) to van Buitenen’s earlier volumes, with one more (the Mokṣadharma section of the Śāntiparvan) forthcoming shortly from the University of Chicago Press. But the annotated translation of the rest of the epic remains unfinished. It has now been taken over by a group of scholars, to be published by Primus Books in Delhi rather than Chicago. The simple reason for this, although not relevant to my remarks today, is because pressure on academic publishers to turn a profit has become so overwhelming that many long running series’ have been cancelled. At this point, with broad advances in Mahābhārata scholarship and in virtually every field of Indological scholarship, we are justified in recognizing this as a retranslation project.

To this end, I have examined both translation and retranslation theory within literary studies to more fully grasp our present undertaking. Retranslation theory is a recent development, emerging in the late 1980s and 1990s (see references below), augmenting the wealth of sources we have on translation theory. It largely addresses theories and practices of retranslation of eighteenth and nineteenth century continental European literature, and to a lesser extent classical Greek and Latin literature. It has not been employed to examine recent translations of South Asian (or any Asian) classical literature. More directly, retranslation of a classical Sanskrit text (or a Sanskrit text of any period and genre) must be more than an attempt to produce a more perfect philological product, important as this is. It must also consider the weight of both a broader spectrum of translated texts and theoretical approaches that nuance rather than redefine what translation means and can bear in the twenty-first century. I have thought about this while undertaking my translation of the last five parvans of the Mahābhārata and the translations of the other parvans not represented in the Chicago series.

One of my guideposts for these thoughts on retranslation lies in an ostensibly unrelated area of discourse, the history of photography. My primary source for this is the noted photographer Mark Klett, who has generated a subfield called rephotography, which involves both revisiting old sites and superimposing sections of old images on new images of the same site taken with much more advanced photographic and scientific techniques. What from the the new is superimposed over the old? Is this even justified? How are old photographs or translations used or recontextualized in composing new ones? The parallels are striking; it is worth thinking out of the box in our own blindered fields and subfields.

What, we also ask, are the politics of translation and retranslation, and how have they changed? Is translation now decolonized? Sheldon Pollock, in his review of Dorothy Figueira (1991), views this process as “the complex intercultural transaction of translation” (1992: 419) More important, however, is to look to the English translations, from Ganguli (1883-1896) to Dutt (1895-1905) to Lal’s transcreation (1970-2008) to van Buitenen (and Fitzgerald) and Debroy (2010-2014). None of them have addressed the colonial legacy of translation or spoken much at all of their methodologies.

Among the examples to be discussed are two versions of the Uttaṅka story, from the Ādiparvan and the Āśvamedhikaparvan. We shall look at Ganguli for both and van Buitenen for the Ādiparvan story. Ganguli translated his in the 1880s, van Buitenen nearly ninety years later. Now we are fifty something years beyond that. Pollock notes that in general “second- and third-generation translations are treated just like translations from the original, with no methodological nuance” (Pollock 1992: 420). This is taking the easy way out, and can readily be seen in second- and third- and even fifth-generation translations of classical Indian texts (see Smith 2023 for how this stagnant situation has played out in translations of the Yogasūtras). Good philology remains the highest priority, but advances in cultural understanding and translation practice can give greater focus to the meaning, intent, and comprehensibility of a received text, like superimposing a current high-resolution photograph next to a vintage photo from the 1860s to 1880s.

Selective bibliography

Albachten, Özlem Berk & Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar (eds.). 2019. Perspectives on Retranslation. Ideology, Paratexts, Methods. New York: Routledge.

Bear, Jordan & Kate Palmer Albers. 2017. Before-and-After Photography. Histories & Contexts. London: Bloomsbury.

Brownlie, Siobhan. 2016. Mapping Memory in Translation. Palgrave MacMillan.

Buitenen, J. A. B. van (ed. and trans.). 1973. The Mahābhārata, Volume 1. Book 1: The Book of the Beginning. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

Deane-Cox, Sharon. 2014. Retranslation. Translation, Literature and Reinterpretation. London: Bloomsbury.

Dutt, Manmatha Nath. 1895-1905. Mahābhārata (Volumes 1-9). Calcutta.

Figueira, Dorothy. 1991. Translating the Orient: The Reception of Śākuntala in Nineteenth-­Century Europe. Albany: SUNY Press.

–––––. 2023. The Afterlives of the Bhagavad Gītā. Readings in Translation. Oxford. Oxford University Press.

Fitzgerald, James L. 2004. The Mahābharata, Volume 7: 11. The Book of the Women, 12. The Book of Peace, Part One. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

Klett, Mark. 1984. Second View: the Rephotographic Survey Process. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico press

–––––. 2004. Third Views, Second Sights. A Rephotographic Survey of the American West. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press.

Lal, P. 1970-2008. The Mahābhārata of Vyāsa, Transcreated from the Sanskrit (more than 300 fascicules). Calcutta: Writers Workshop.

Pollock, Sheldon. 1992. Review of Figueira 1991, Journal of Asian Studies 51.2: 419-421.

Senf, Rebecca & Stephen J. Pyne (eds.) 2012. Reconstructing the View: The Grand Canyon Photographs of Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Smith, Frederick M. 2023. Abhiniveśa. Journal of Indian Philosophy 51: 343-363.

Webb, Robert H., Diane E. Boyer, & Raymond M. Turner (eds.). 2010. Repeat Photography: Methods and Applications in the Natural Sciences. Washington/Covelo/London: Island Press.