1. The Hindu (http://www.thehindu.com)
Madras Miscellany - When the postman knocked, 12 February 2012
by S. MUTHIAH
It's been another of those weeks that has kept the postman busy and readers contributing generously to this column.
・ First off the mark was archaeology historian Chithra Madhavan correcting the perception that Rajaraja Chola I built the Buddhist vihara in Nagapattinam (Miscellany, February 6). He did not build it, she writes, but he did give permission for it to be built by Chulamani Varman, the ruler of the Buddhist kingdom of Sri Vijaya (Palembang in Sumatra today) and Kadaram (Kedah in the Malay peninsula today), Chulamani started the work in the 21st year of Rajaraja I's reign, but it was completed by his son Maraviayaottunga Varman.
Dr. Madhavan, citing the bi-lingual (Sanskrit and Tamil) Larger Leiden copper-plate grant dated 1005 C.E., states Rajaraja I went even further than merely granting permission. He donated the village of Anaimangalam to the Chulamani Vihara in Nagapattinam to ensure that it would never want.
That authority on the Cholas, the late Professor K.A. Nilakanta Sastri had in his writings pointed out that, according to the 7th Century C.E. Chinese monk I-Tsing's diaries, Nagapattinam was the first port that Eastern merchant vessels trading with South India touched and it was, therefore, understandable that sailors from a Buddhist kingdom would welcome a vihara where they first made landfall after a long journey.
・N. Dharmeshwaran and P.S. Shanmugam offer additional material on the judges of the Madras High Court. Coutts-Trotter, whom I referred to last week, was on the Bench one day, according to the former, when a telegram was delivered to him. It was addressed to the ‘Insolvency Judge', no doubt a reference to the numerous insolvency cases the judge heard. Coutts-Trotter received it, laughed aloud and, addressing the Court, said, “So I'm now the Insolvency Judge according to the address on this. I wonder how the sender and the messenger came to know of my financial condition!” Shanmugam adds that Murray & Co, the well-known firm of auctioneers, much of whose business in the early days was auctioning goods on the Court's orders, took its name from Murray Coutts-Trotter. Many Indian-owned firms at the time took names that helped them to create a British image. Murray was chosen by the proprietor of the auctioneering firm as much for the numerous orders Murray Coutts-Trotter issued for auctioning of property after hearing insolvency cases as to reflect integrity (for which Coutts-Trotter was renowned) and high quality (which was a characteristic of his judgments).
Shanmugam, however, feels that there were in those first hundred years judges as outstanding as Coutts-Trotter. He quotes that eminent advocate Eardley Norton who once said, “Were it in my power to select for a difficult case, in which I was interested either as party or as counsel, the constitution of the Court, I would unhesitatingly apply for Muthusami Iyer (1878-1895) or Kernan (1870-1887) on the Original side and Muthusami Iyer and Kernan on the Appellate side.” On a later occasion, Muthusami Iyer, knighted by then, referred to the ‘Kernan Maze' that a leading lawyer of the late 19th Century, S. Billigiri Iyengar, had constructed in the garden of his house, Kernan Castle (now Vivekananda Illam but still called Ice House), and named after his friend, Kernan. Muthusami Iyer explained the maze as being “designed to represent the meshes of the law through which Mr. Justice Kernan so successfully found his way to uphold the cause of truth and justice.”
・With the Madras High Court celebrating its 150th anniversary, P.N. Srinivasan and J.V. Swami, have sent me copies of requests they have addressed to the Chief Justice asking for some remembrance of bits of heritage. Swami wants the High Court authorities to protect the plaque recording the shelling of Madras by the German light cruiser S.M.S.Emden on September 22, 1914. He seeks a covered shelter for it to protect it against the elements and proper lighting that it may be seen at night too. Srinivasan's letter, on the other hand, is a request to the High Court to remember Gandhiji's visit to the Court and the address he delivered there on April 24, 1915, by raising a plaque with excerpts from the address of one who was a lawyer himself.
I am all for commemorative plaques, but often wonder what happens to them. The ‘Emden Plaque' is more often plastered with posters than not. And the ‘Coja Petrus Uscan Plaque' at the head of the Marmalong/Maraimalai Adigalar Bridge seems to have vanished under the weight of all the Metrorail work going on all around it. When I passed by its site the other day I couldn't spot it and can only hope that it has not been destroyed but has been removed for subsequent restoration on the bridge after the railway work is finished. The Armenian merchant Uscan is certainly a significant figure in early Madras history and one to be remembered.
・Grace Stephens, who was responsible for Lechmenon Appaduray becoming a Christian called Samuel (Miscellany, January 30), was Superintendent of the Methodist Episcopal Mission, writes Karthik Bhat, and hit the headlines in the 1890s in a cause celebre. Subbunagam Ammal, a 16-year-old Telugu Brahmin girl and the daughter of A.L.Venkataramana Pantulu, the first double graduate of the University of Madras, became a Christian and Grace Stephens was held responsible for the conversion. Subbunagam, a child bride who had lost her father when she was only 10 but continued to live in his home under the guardianship of her uncle, had wanted to learn Tamil and was sent to Ms. Stephens' zenana mission for this purpose. There, her textbook appears to have been The Bible in Tamil! On Christmas Day 1895 she went to the mission and declared to Stephens that she was her “Christmas gift”! She was baptised on February 3, 1896. By then the furore had intensified, with Subbunagam's family, the Brahmin community, the Mission, the Police and the Press all having their say, much of it acrimonious. The family even went to the extent of staging a funeral and, after performing all rituals, cremating an effigy of Subbunagam!
Subbunagam, meanwhile, had started working with the mission. Then, in April 1900 she and her mentor left for a year's cross-country lecture tour of the United States where the Press had a field day portraying her as a fugitive from Hinduism who had been saved by the Church. As a saved soul, she worked for the Church till August 1905 when she again grabbed the headlines.
This time they screamed that she had been ‘kidnapped', ‘murdered' or ‘become a martyr to the cause of Christianity'. But by the end of the year the frenzy toned down when the Bishop of Madras, W.F. Oldham, announced that Subbunagam had not been kidnapped, had “reverted to the religion of her fathers,” and requested his congregation to pray for Grace Stephens “who is in all kinds of trouble.” He himself was transferred to the Straits Settlements.
With both leading players maintaining their silence for the rest of their lives, there has never been a satisfactory answer to what really happened between 1895 and 1905 in the lives of these two women.
・It's Khalsa Mahal and not Kalas Mahal, says former PWD Chief Engineer C.S. Kuppuraj, in a letter addressed to me by A. Veerappan, State Secretary of the Tamil Nadu PWD Senior Engineers' Association, whose Founding President was Kuppuraj. Khalsa, the writer states, means “appointment/udyog” in Urdu. Kuppuraj's father had studied in what was then called the Civil Engineering School (later College of Engineering, Guindy) when it was housed in Khalsa Mahal. And this is also the name I've found in all the early records as well as those of the College of Engineering.
2. Culture Kiosque （http://www.culturekiosque.com）
BOOK REVIEW: LANGUAGE GAMES
by Melynda Nuss
LOS ANGELES, 9 FEBRUARY 2012 — Call it the postmodern dream. You can travel anywhere you want, passing as a native in the sushi bars of Tokyo or the markets of Tangiers. You can conduct meetings with engineers who speak Mandarin, German and Czech, read poetry in Italian, watch telenovelas in Spanish, respond to your taxi driver in Amharic. Click on the left bar of Wikipedia and have fun translating the entries into Magyar or Malay. Land a job at the CIA or the United Nations. Be a scholar, diplomat, or international man of mystery. Fit in anywhere, effortlessly.
Two fascinating new books, David Bellos’ Is That a Fish in Your Ear? and Michael Erard’s Babel No More, provide some insight into how we’re progressing towards that dream and what obstacles we face along the way. Bellos, a scholar of French and Comparative literature and the director of Princeton University’s Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication, starts with the basics. How do we communicate in a multilingual and multicultural world? We could all become multilingual — difficult when there are are as many as 7,000 languages spoken in the world today. One language could become the lingua franca, as Latin was during the Roman empire. We could speak in creoles and pidgins, like sailors in the Middle Ages, or isolate ourselves into our own linguistic communities. But if none of those is adequate — and they are not — we need translation.
We learn how Google Translator works — and when it doesn’t.
What follows is an erudite and absorbing tour of the history and practice of translation. We learn about the translation schools of Venice, which produced "language boys" — giovani di lingua — to serve the Ottoman empire, about the difficult miracle of simultaneous translation at the Nuremberg Trials, about the underpaid geniuses who translate movie dialogue into subtitles that can be read quickly enough to keep up with the film. We get a glimpse into the United Nations, where a team of 14 translators provides the illusion that they can translate any language simultaneously into all the world’s tongues. We learn how surprisingly dominant English is as a language for translation. We learn how Bible translators adapted ancient Aramaic to all sorts of contemporary cultures. We learn how Google Translator works — and when it doesn’t.
But Bellos’s main purpose is to mount an impassioned defense of translation as both a communicative necessity and a creative art. Thus much of the book is devoted to dispelling the myths that make translation a poor substitute for the original. Bellos takes on the contention that certain things simply can not be translated, that poetry disappears in translation, that a translation that does not preserve every single feature of the original is a poor one. He even wrestles with the old chestnut that Eskimos have 100 words for snow. After all, New Yorkers have a few hundred words for coffee, and a fairly complex lexicon for snow as well. The myth survives, Bellos theorizes, because we want to preserve the idea that the "civilized" languages are better at expressing abstract ideas, while "primitive" languages are better at expressing the immediate and the physical. Throughout Bellos is sensitive to the power dynamics between languages — how conquerers hand down their dictates to subordinates, and how the linguistic riches of the primitive are brought back to the conquerers.
And riches they are. As one might expect from Bellos, who is known for his dazzling translations of George Perec and Romain Gary, Is That a Fish in Your Ear is full of linguistic wonders. There’s a German poem that looks like a fish, translated into Finnish, language games from 15th century French wit Clément Marot and (of course) George Perec. Chinese shunkouliu that look impossible to translate resolve into beautiful word rectangles with meaningful rhymes. I’ve never had so much regard for the translators of the Astérix cartoons, who not only have to translate French jokes and character tics into English, but have to do it in a space that fits the pre-drawn cartoon bubble. After reading Is That a Fish in Your Ear I wanted to go out and read some translations to find out what I’d been missing.
But what if translation still isn’t enough? Michael Erard explores another part of the dream. What would it take to learn all the world’s languages? Is it possible? Does it get easier the more you learn? Is there a limit? Erard, a journalist with a masters’ degree in linguistics, plays the scholar-adventurer, searching for the secrets of people who speak eleven languages or more — people he calls "hyperglots." Erard’s search takes him all over the world. He begins in Bologna, Italy, where he scours the archives of Giuseppe Mezzofanti, a 19th century cardinal who could speak fluently to any visitor in their own language after only asking the visitor to recite the Lord’s Prayer. Along the way he talks to translators at the Defense Language Institute, where the U.S. military provides its recruits with language training. He meets eccentrics and spiritual seekers, linguists and neuroscientists. Each throws a different angle on the question of how we learn language, and whether it is possible to learn or maintain many.
Although Erard does hazard a theory about learning languages — that polyglots and hyperglots might have different brain plasticity than the rest of us — the fun comes more from the questions he asks than the questions he answers. After all, what does it mean to "speak" different languages? Cardinal Mezzofanti, after all, might have been just an accomplished mimic, able to imitate accents and glean a few common phrases, but unable to read and write or to carry on a more complex and technical conversation. And what of the language collectors that Erard finds, who have studied as many as 130 languages, but who show no interest in using them to speak? And what about cultural fluency? One of the hyperglots Erard finds, a woman who spoke and read 16 languages, claimed that only five "lived inside" her, to the extent that she could switch among them easily. Is there a limit? Is it that? And can one even count? Erard moves in the multilingual climate of Hyderabad and Secunderabad in southern India, where three, four or even five languages are spoken side by side. No one is a monoglot, but there is a good deal of tolerance for levels of expertise in different languages. A few words here, a few phrases there. Eventually the languages start to run together, "less like apples — neat and discrete — and more like oatmeal," as Erard puts it.
As the following suggests, a good deal of the pleasure of Erard’s book, like Bellos’, is Erard himself. We see him learning to order espresso in Italian, or looking at slices of brain matter in Germany, or learning Hindi from a polyglot in Berkeley. A Russian teacher Erard encounters at community college spews out grammatical rules "like a jaded stripper." Erard’s landlord, on hearing of his project, points out his son-in-law, the genius, who speaks six or seven languages, and who is at that moment fixing Erard’s sink. Even for people who don’t think they’re interested in languages, linguistics, education or science, Babel No More is, quite simply, a fun book.
Bellos and Erard also have some words for those of us whose last language experience was in a high school or college classroom. Language teachers tend to emphasize perfection. They want you to learn grammar and follow grammatical rules. But the language experiences that Bellos and Erard find are much more flexible. While their language learners don’t necessarily "pick up" languages effortlessly, both emphasize trial and error. Language learners make mistakes. The secret is to make them and make them often. As Erard tries to twist his tongue around Italian, Russian and Kannada, and as Bellos twists one language into another with art and joy, the message is clear. Don’t be afraid to play and to experiment. The world awaits.
Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything
By David Bellos
Hardcover 384 pages
Faber & Faber (October 2011)
ISBN-10: 0865478570
ISBN-13: 978-0865478572
$27.00
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