Copyright by Bhavya Tiwari 2014 The Dissertation Committee for Bhavya Tiwari Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Beyond English: Translating Modernism in the Global South Committee: Elizabeth Richmond-Garza, Supervisor David Damrosch Martha Ann Selby Cesar Salgado Hannah Wojciehowski Beyond English: Translating Modernism in the Global South by Bhavya Tiwari, M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December 2014 Dedication ~ For my mother ~ Acknowledgements Nothing is ever accomplished alone. This project would not have been possible without the organic support of my committee. I am specifically thankful to my supervisor, Elizabeth Richmond-Garza, for giving me the freedom to explore ideas at my own pace, and for reminding me to pause when my thoughts would become restless. A pause is as important as movement in the journey of a thought. I am thankful to Martha Ann Selby for suggesting me to subhead sections in the dissertation. What a world of difference subheadings make! I am grateful for all the conversations I had with Cesar Salgado in our classes on Transcolonial Joyce, Literary Theory, and beyond. I am also very thankful to Michael Johnson and Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski for patiently listening to me in Boston and Austin over luncheons and dinners respectively. I am forever indebted to David Damrosch for continuing to read all my drafts since February 2007. I am very glad that our paths crossed in Kali’s Kolkata. This dissertation would have been impossible without his mentorship. I am also very fortunate to have shared the anxieties and joys of drafting this dissertation with my grandfather, father, sister, and old friends. My father’s question – “why this assorted group of authors in your project?” – still rings in my ears, and my grandfather’s comment – “it makes no sense” – often demanded me to reinvestigate my ideas. My sister has been a constant source of support. The best suggestion she gave me was to just keep writing, without stopping. I am also very thankful to my childhood v friends who are far away from the academic shores. They were always very sympathetic, supportive, and amused when I couldn’t connect or pair ideas in an organic unity. They believed in my creativity and persistence. I am specifically grateful to my friends at UT who would often comment and help with translations. I am also very thankful to our cohort of 2008 in the Program of Comparative Literature for sharing the anxieties of comparative literature. In a true spirit of a global comparative literature this project was possible because of the friendships developed in the realms of music, ideas, conferences across oceans, and the departments of Spanish, Portuguese, Asian Studies, English, and even Sciences. We aren’t so different after all! vi Beyond English: Translating Modernism in the Global South Bhavya Tiwari, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2014 Supervisor: Elizabeth Richmond-Garza My title echoes Agha Shahid Ali’s sentiment of needing to move beyond the linguistic nationalism of “English” toward a more varied understanding of Anglophone writing within multiple contexts in the world. In three theoretical case studies from four linguistic and literary traditions (English, Bengali, Spanish, and Hindi-Urdu), I explore the dimensions and definitions of comparative Anglophone and world literature, comparative poetics, and a comparative study of novels – in the global postcolonial world. I focus on moments of translatability and untranslatability to question traditional models for studies in English and comparative literature that do not account for translation. Each of my chapters shows how texts in the “original” or “translation” do not always circulate from a homogenized metropolitan center to a marginalized periphery, and unlike in the elite North American and Parisian world where untranslatability often inspires terror and loss of language, translations can act as connecting forces that create organic dialogue in the global south on modernism and postcolonial discourses that go beyond Europe and America. vii Table of Contents Chapter 1 Introduction ............................................................................................1 Chapter 2 Comparative World Literature: Tagore’s Gitanjali and "Vishwa Sahitya" .......................................................................................................................27 Chapter 3 Comparative Poetics: Gabriela Mistral and Mahadevi Varma………..98 Chapter 4 Comparative Modernism: Joyce, Rao, Desani, and Borges…………...180 Chapter 5 Conclusion……………………………………………………………..236 Bibliography ........................................................................................................238 viii Chapter 1 Introduction No language is old—or young—beyond English. So what of a common tongue beyond English? I know some words for war, all of them sharp, but the sharpest one is jung—beyond English!… Go all the way through jungle from aleph to zenith to see English, like monkeys, swung beyond English. So never send to know for whom the bell tolled, for across the earth it has rung beyond English (Ali 68-9 ). The above couplets from Agha Shahid Ali’s “Beyond English” ask us to look beyond English. The emphasis is on unspoken verbs (such as, look, hear, smell, see, touch, analyze, compare, etc.,) that could precede the preposition “beyond” followed by the noun “English.” But the declarative opening statement: “No language is old—or young— beyond English” undermines the impossibility of a common tongue beyond English. The rhetorical question that follows the declarative statement – “So what of a common tongue beyond English?” – is rendered ineffective in the next couplet. The subjective voice declares in a confident tone the knowledge of “some words for war, all of them sharp,” and the sharpest among them is “jung,” which is beyond English!” “Jung” meaning “war” in Urdu is, as the speaker tells us, untranslatable and incomprehensible for those who cannot go beyond English. My dissertation echoes Agha Shahid Ali’s sentiment of needing to move beyond the linguistic nationalism of “English” toward a more varied understanding of modern Anglophone writing within multiple contexts in the 1 world. For this, I take the verbs – “compare” and “analyze” – to understand “untranslatability” and “translatability” as necessary global and local tools. In the couplets quoted above, Agha Shahid Ali asks us to look beyond English by taking particular cases in point. He suggests a journey through the Borgesian labyrinth to gaze at English “swung beyond English” or at an Aleph point in time and space, where the tolling of the bell goes beyond dead poets such as John Donne or Thomas Gray. My dissertation, too, takes case in point to showcase not only English swung beyond English but comparative literature swung beyond Europe as it evolves into world literary studies. I pursue this task by focusing on moments of translatability and untranslatability from the global south in order to question traditional models for studies in English and comparative literature that do not sufficiently account for translation. Each of my chapters shows how texts in the “original” or “translation” do not always circulate from a homogenized metropolitan center to a marginalized periphery, and thus they move beyond Franco Moretti’s and Pascal Casanova’s scholarship on the “world” in world literature. Further, as I show in this project, unlike the untranslatability in the elite North American and Parisian world that often inspires terror and loss of language, translatability and translations can act as connecting forces that create organic dialogue in the global south on modernism and postcolonial discourses that go beyond Europe and America. In three theoretical case studies from four linguistic and literary traditions (English, Bengali, Spanish, and Hindi-Urdu), I explore the dimensions and definitions of comparative world literature, comparative poetics, and a comparative study 2 of novels – in the global postcolonial modern world that go both through and beyond English. The choice of texts My three case studies – comparative world literature, comparative poetics, and comparative modernist novel – analyze an archive of modern texts in prose and poetry in the original and in translation. I take translatability and untranslatability as my methodological tools to put literary texts in conversation with each other. The case studies do not just reflect on a text’s afterlife, but also explore what happens before it experiences loss or gain in translation. The archive of texts and authors in this dissertation echoes my personal taste, but is also an extension of the larger disciplinary debates on comparative literature. Recently, scholars of comparative literature have had recourse to modern texts in formulating and revising its paradigms as it transforms into global studies. This is probably because modernism was always a global movement. As Elleke Boehmer tells us in her “How to Feel Global, the Modern, the Global and the World”:: Modernism may be one of the few movements or approaches in the arts that can take the qualifier of the global without conceptual jarring, that is to say, that permits a shift from the still-dominant axes of temporality that shape inter-textual literary work, to spatial and horizontal