I recently discussed the translation of ākāśa with a senior and much more advanced scholar. Here come my thoughts thereon:
The first possible candidates for ākāśa are ‘space’ and ‘aether’.
I agree with my senior colleague that ‘space’ should not be used, because ‘space’ translates deśa and because one can imagine an empty space. In fact, the idea of avoiding an empty space is exactly the reason for postulating aether.
My current way of discussing possible translations is to create a conceptual map of the term I want to translate. In the case of ākāśa, this is
- 1. a substance
- 2. all-pervasive
- 3. not directly perceptible
- 4. postulated as the substate of sound understood as its exclusive quality
Ether, by contrast, is
- 1. a substance
- 2. all-pervasive
- 3. not directly perceptible
- 4. postulated as medium of propagation of the light waves and because pure empty space is unthinkable
- 5. has been used in the 18th c to explain some problems in the theory of gravity
Therefore, it is right that ākāśa is not exactly tantamount to aether, especially as for sound (for which European theorists thought that air was a suitable medium). Still, if one needs to avoid leaving the term untranslated, I think ‘aether’, especially if accompanied by an explanatory footnote is still the best solution.
What do readers think?
One should also consider that the word ether (ae- is obsolete) is a word that has itself been through a substantial series of evolutions in the history of science in Europe. It isn’t a fixed target. The OED cites authors from the late fourteenth century as using it to mean, “1. In ancient cosmological speculation: an element conceived as filling all space beyond the sphere of the moon, and being the constituent substance of the stars and planets and of their spheres (sphere n. 2a). Now hist. Ether was variously regarded as a purer form of fire or of air, or as differing in kind from all of the four elements. By some it was imagined to be the constituent substance, or one of the constituents, of the soul.”
Einstein abandoned the idea of the ether because it interfered with his ideas about relativity. But not every physicist agreed. While Special Relativity has been fully accepted by modern physics, I had a professor when I was a young physics undergraduate in the 1970s who still argued that a theory of the ether was necessary or plausible, in spite of the results of the famous Michelson-Morely experiment.
The Wikipedia entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_(classical_element) is rather good, I think, and shows how ether was pretty much introduced as a physics idea by Aristotle.
The word has a huge amount of historical baggage. As such, I think it’s very problematic to use it as the translation for ākāśa. But I don’t have a better idea.
Dear Dominik,
many thanks once again for your insightful comments. I used the writing “aether” in order to highlight that I am not speaking of the contemporary (though upheld only by a tiny minority) theory about ether in physics. I know realise I should have said it explicitly.
You are also right in stating that aether/ether has been postulated in order to explain different types of phenomena. One should certainly be aware of this history and make one’s reader aware of it, too.
Still, I continue to think of the word aether as akin to ākāśa for the reasons explained above (in its different pre-20th c. evolutions, aether has continued to indicate a postulated fifth element).
What do you think of the general approach to translation?
Q: What do you think of the general approach to translation?
I agree with the principle of finding appropriate pre-modern English terms to translate pre-modern Sanskrit terms. An eloquent argument for this idea was made by Francis Zimmermann (‘Terminological Problems in the Process of Editing and Translating Sanskrit Medical Texts’, in P. Unschuld (ed.) _Approaches to Traditional Chinese Medical Literature_. Dordrecht, London: Kluwer Academic, 1989, pp. 141–51.) I cited it in my discussion of scientific translation in the Introduction of _Roots of Ayurveda_. I used the old word “flux,” for example, to translate atīsāra, rather than “diarrhoea.” Some such words will be unfamiliar to the general contemporary reader, so one has to think about how often one wishes to send one’s reader to a dictionary. I thought about once every three or four pages was enough.