Translation has several different relationships with time. AI does not get any of them

These days I think a lot about translation and time. What might be the relation between the two, you may ask? Am I thinking of how much time it takes to translate something? Perhaps.

Although there is no standard time there, some take longer than some others and that may depend on how much “time” a translator has to how much “time” a particular text demands. I could think of the “time” in a text as when and in which time has an author situated her text – the narrative time.

Do I, as a translator, manage to capture the same narrative time, or does my modern idiom transpose the “time” of the text to another “time”?

For instance, the translator-historian Manu Devadevan recently mentioned on a panel that AK Ramanujan’s translation of Mahadeviakka and other women vacanakars made them sound like Sylvia Plath. He was not referring, I think, only to the idiom, but also to what that idiom did to time so that an 11th-century voice seemed contemporary.

Careful translators take care of “time,” which is not to say AK Ramanujan wasn’t one, but he may have been invested in making us read the vacanas as modern poems. However, my concern begins with a banal question...

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