[INDOLOGY] Texts about translators and translation?

Wed Jan 8 18:07:49 UTC 2020

Dear Nataliya (and her student),

not yet mentioned by the contributors on this topic, there is quite a
substantial

book not directly thematizing the practice of translation, but the
hermeneutical

presuppositions for semantic understanding, hence translating. Benefitting
one’s

so-called ‘prestructure of understanding’ (in Gadamer’s terminology), i.e.,
what

Dominic has pointed out as “presuppositions [which] too often remain
unexamined”

(right at the beginning of his remarks “On translation”), it investigates
some of the

underlying classical Indian principles of hermeneutics:

Eivind Kahrs, *Indian Semantic Analysis. The *nirvacana* Tradition*,
Cambridge 1998.

Best wishes, Hartmut

P.S.: My mind somehow getting drawn into reflections on this subject,
fingers

finding their way to the keyboard, I noted down some *ad hoc* reflections;
following

Dominic’s example, I send them along with this mail to the list as an
attachment.

On Mon, Jan 6, 2020 at 8:13 PM Eric Gurevitch via INDOLOGY <
indology at list.indology.info> wrote:

> In addition to the articles already mentioned, the following recent
> (except for one) essays and books all contain useful analyses on how
> translation was conceptualized both to and from Sanskrit — although not in
> free-standing texts.
>
> Cort, John E., ‘Making It Vernacular in Agra: The Practice of Translation
> by Seventeenth-Century Jains’, in *Tellings and Texts*, ed. by Francesca
> Orsini and Katherine Butler Schofield, Music, Literature and Performance in
> North India, 1st edn. (Open Book Publishers, 2015), pp. 61–106
>
>
>
> Fisher, Elaine. “Multiregional and Multi-Linguistic Vīraśaivism: Change
> and Continuity in an Early Devotional Tradition.” In *Modern Hinduism in
> Text and Context*, edited by Lavanya Vemsani, 9–22. London, UK:
> Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.
>
>
>
> Obrock, Luther. “Muslim Mahākāvyas: Sanskrit and Translation in the
> Sultanates.” In *Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India*, edited
> by Tyler Williams, Anshu Malhotra, and John Stratton Hawley, 58–76. New
> Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018.
>
>
>
> Patel, Deven M., ‘Source, Exegesis, and Translation: Sanskrit Commentary
> and Regional Language Translation in South Asia’, *Journal of the
> American Oriental Society*, 131 (2011), 245–66
>
>
>
> Pingree, David, ‘Islamic Astronomy in Sanskrit’, *Journal for the History
> of Arabic Science*, 2 (1978), 315–30
>
>
>
> Truschke, Audrey. *Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court*.
> South Asia across the Disciplines. New York: Columbia University Press,
> 2016.
>
>
>
> Williams, Tyler, ‘Commentary as Translation: The Vairāgya Vṛnd of
> Bhagvandas Niranjani’, in *Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India*,
> ed. by Tyler Walker Williams, Anshu Malhotra, and John Stratton Hawley,
> 2018, pp. 99–125
>
>
>
> All the best,
>
> Eric
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, Jan 4, 2020 at 2:13 PM Valerie Roebuck via INDOLOGY <
> indology at list.indology.info> wrote:
>
>> Dear Nataliya
>>
>> Has anyone mentioned mentioned the Buddhist tale, based on mistranslation
>> between Middle Indian languages and/or Sanskrit, retold by John Brough,
>> Gāndhārī Dharmapada, pp. 45-6? It hinges on a misunderstanding of a
>> Middle Indian form from the dvandva *udaya-vyaya*, ‘arising and passing
>> away’, as being from a tatpuruṣa **udaka-baka*, ‘heron of the water’.
>>
>> "This curious tale concerns the last days of Ananda, and tells how he
>> chanced to overhear a certain monk reciting a Dharmapada-verse in the
>> following manner (according to the Chinese versions):
>>
>> *If a man were to live for a hundred years, and not see a water-heron, it
>> were better that he live only for one day, and see a water-heron.*
>>
>> ‘My son’, said Ānanda, 'the Buddha did not say this. What he said was:
>>
>> *If a man were to live for a hundred years, and not see the principle of
>> coming into existence and passing away, it were better . . . (and so
>> forth).*
>>
>> The monk thereupon reported the matter to his teacher, who replied,
>> ‘Ānanda is an old fool. Go on reciting as before’. On hearing once more the
>> same faulty recitation, Ānanda realized that it was futile to attempt to
>> convince the monk of the error, since ail his seniors, to whom he might
>> have appealed, had already entered Nirvāṇa. Being thus unable to do
>> anything further to protect the Buddha’s words from corruption, he
>> considered that there was no reason to delay his own Nirvāṇa”
>>
>> Valerie J Roebuck
>> Manchester, UK
>>
>>
>> On 3 Jan 2020, at 22:13, Dominik Wujastyk via INDOLOGY <
>> indology at list.indology.info> wrote:
>>
>> Dear Nataliya,
>>
>> I recently wrote some remarks on this subject in another context.  I've
>> extracted and lightly edited them here. (Attached)
>>
>> Best,
>> Dominik
>> --
>> Professor Dominik Wujastyk
>> <https://www.ualberta.ca/arts/about/people-collection/dominik-wujastyk>
>> ,
>>
>> Singhmar Chair in Classical Indian Society and Polity
>> ,
>>
>> Department of History and Classics
>> <http://historyandclassics.ualberta.ca/>
>> ,
>> University of Alberta, Canada
>> .
>>
>> South Asia at the U of A:
>>
>> sas.ualberta.ca
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, 1 Jan 2020 at 23:42, Nataliya Yanchevskaya via INDOLOGY <
>> indology at list.indology.info> wrote:
>>
>>> Dear Colleagues,
>>> Happy New Year!
>>> A student of mine wants to study Sanskrit texts about translation and
>>> translators. She also asked me if I knew any short poems or jokes – again,
>>> in Sanskrit – about translators. Could you please kindly suggest anything?
>>> Frankly, I know nothing about this topic – have never encountered such
>>> texts!
>>> Many thanks and best wishes,
>>> Nataliya
>>> -----------
>>> Nataliya Yanchevskaya
>>> Lecturer in Sanskrit
>>> PIIRS, Princeton University
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>> <On_translation.pdf>_______________________________________________
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>
>
> --
>
> Eric Gurevitch
>
> PhD Candidate, South Asian Languages and Civilizations and
>
> Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science
>
> University of Chicago
>
> gurevitch at uchicago.edu
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