I gave some more thoughts to the topic of whether we should translate the titles of Sanskrit works.
As you might remember, braodly speaking, many of our US colleagues started translating them and most of our Japanese, Indian and European colleagues just leave the Sanskrit titles as they are.
I basically have two problems with the translations:
- the English titles might be too vague (“Commentary”) or misleading (“Maxims”, suggesting the enunciation of a moral truth, not to speak of “Mirrors”, “Amulets”, “Rising Moons” and the like)
- there is no standardised translation (I know that here some colleagues might suggest to just follow Sheldon Pollock’s one, but even they will have to agree that sūtra is more often translated as “Aphorisms” than as “Maxims”), so that readers of article a, b and c might think that their authors are talking about different texts.
Thus, I see no point in translating titles in case of articles of books targeted at Sanskritists. For a Sanskritist like me, a title like “Versed Commentary” just forces me to wonder what is meant, whether Ślokavārttika immediately rings a bell. Nor do we want to have our PhD students learn English titles instead of Sanskrit ones, I believe, since if they did so they would have more troubles reading actual Sanskrit texts.
However, I also understand the advantage of translating Sanskrit titles in English in articles or books aiming at non-Sanskritists, which at least give some idea (though vague or misleading) and might be more easily memorised by lay readers. Hence, what about the following:
- we use a translation which is slightly more specific, e.g. (Pūrva) Mīmāṃsā Sūtra = “Maxims (or Aphorisms) on Vedic Exegesis” or “Exegetic Maxims (or Aphorisms)”.
- we explain in the first footnote about the texts whose titles should be translated, e.g., PMS and ŚBh, something like “The title Mīmāṃsāsūtra has been differently translated. In general, it states that the text is about Mīmāṃsā, i.e., about an investigation on Vedic texts, and that it is composed in short, syntetic and terse sentences, called sūtras. These are often hardly understandable without an extended commentary, and bhāṣya means indeed ‘extended commentary’. For pragmatic reasons, in the following we will refer to these texts with an English translation, i.e., as “Exegetic Maxims” and “Commentary on the Exegetic Maxims” respectively.”
What do you think?
Your observation about audiences is critically important. As Venuti taught us all (The Translators Invisibility), we write for reception, and it in matters of translation is pointless to agonize about “truth” apart from a consideration of the reader for whom we write.
I do not agree that there can be a pure division between a Sanskritist audience and a non-Sanskritist audience. In spite of the Venuti argument, to some extent we mould our readership by the choices we make in our translation.
I think it is worth pointing out that our Sinologist colleagues routinely translate titles, and I think that accounts for the greater popularity of high-level Sinological literature amongst the international reading public.
Finally, our ability to even consider leaving titles in Sanskrit is partly an artefact of our comfort with transliteration. For over a hundred years, some people have been using Roman script to write Sanskrit. But it remains a reality that to reach an audience in India, using Devanagari or another regional script is far preferable. If you imagine your writing as using Devanagari for Sanskrit words, rather than Roman, then it immediately casts the question of translation into a different light. “Ślokavārttika” is only apparently legible. Imagine how many people would be excluded if you always wrote श्लोकवार्त्तिकम्. I think that’s why Sinologists tend to translate titles more than we do, because script and language are more tightly bound in the Chinese case (also in Russian, Greek, and many other languages).
Many thanks for these interesting remarks, Dominik. I completely agree that we have the luxury of being able to offer reliable (i.e., unambiguous) transliteration of Sanskrit text, a luxury our colleagues working on Arabic or Chinese texts don’t share and this influences our willingness to offer translations of texts. Yet, I also think that there are further two problems here:
1. We and our readers don’t share the same intuitions about “mirror”, “raising moon”, “light” and about the other metaphorical images constantly used in the titles of Sanskrit texts. This makes literal translations of titles obscure.
2. Sanskrit titles are often not very informative. Is it really an advantage, if we let our readers know that a text is called “Versed commentary”? I mean, are the advantages more than the risks (of thinking that it is a poetical work and that it is “just” an unambitious commentary)? In other words, it seems to me that titles might have a different function than they now have gained in Europe and in the Anglophone world.
Which leads me to a risky point: Should we perhaps partly *invent* titles? Should we call the ŚV a “Versed commentary on Vedic exegesis”, for instance?
You might want to read also other comments on the issue here: http://indianphilosophyblog.org/2018/03/07/on-translating-the-titles-of-sanskrit-works/#comment-212247