Politics of Translation Subject of Skidmore’s Annual Moseley Lecture

Poet and translator R. Parthasarathy will present this year’s Edwin M. Moseley Faculty Research Lecture, “Writing Between the Lines: The Politics and Poetics of Translation.”

Free and open to the public, the talk will begin at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 12, in Gannett Auditorium of Palamountain Hall. A reception will follow. Each year Skidmore’s faculty chooses one of its own to deliver the Moseley Lecture. Selection as the Moseley Lecturer is the highest honor the Skidmore faculty can confer upon a colleague.

Parthasarathy’s lecture will examine the ways that politics shape and direct translation. “The British in India, in the 18th and 19th centuries, used translation as an instrument of policy, since a first-hand knowledge of Indian traditions would be invaluable in governing the country,” he explained. “English enabled India to become a province of European thought. Initially, only Sanskrit texts were translated into English. Translations from other Indian languages followed later. With the end of British rule in 1947, the focus shifted. Britain’s legacy was the English language, and English-speaking Indians began to translate the literatures of India into English. My own translations have a political bias: to gain recognition for Indian literature. The translator unearths long-forgotten classics and puts them into orbit, thus redrawing the literary map. He is a ‘hidden persuader’,” Parthasarathy added.

Parthasarathy’s examination of these issues stems from his own practice as a translator from four – Sanskrit, Tamil, Hindi, and Urdu – of the 18 languages recognized by the Indian Constitution as official. His translation of the Tamil epic, The Tale of an Anklet (fifth century) won several international awards, including the 1994 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Citation, a 1995 English translation prize from the National Academy of Letters in India, and the 1996 A.K. Ramanujan Book Prize for Translation from the Association for Asian Studies. The Tale of an Anklet translates an ancient epic poem whose importance in Tamil culture, notes Parthasarathy, is like that of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey in Western cultures. “Tamil, the oldest surviving classical language of India, is spoken by 56 million people, mainly in southeastern India,” he said. “It has, with the exception of Sanskrit, the richest literature of any Indian language.”

Parthasarathy’s other works include Rough Passage, a long poem, and two as-yet- unpublished manuscripts, A House Divided and The Forked Tongue. The first is a sequence of poems that bears witness to the political uncertainties of contemporary times, and the second is a work on Indian poetics.

Parthasarathy was educated at the University of Bombay, Leeds University, and the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a Ph.D. degree in English. Before joining the Skidmore faculty in 1986, he was a literary editor with Oxford University Press, New Delhi. A former director of Skidmore’s Asian Studies Program, he is an associate professor of English.

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