Main Article Content

Abstract

John Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (1820) in its exalted tone locates aesthetic experience in the perception and appreciation of a piece of art .The powerful visual image ‘urn’, a sylvan historian not only has invited several interpretations but also has found its ‘transformation’ in Kannada literature. A 1924 ode ‘Belur’s Sculpture Girls’ by D.V.Gundappa,a popular kannada poet, critic and philosopher  was  inspired by Keats’s aesthetic experience in  ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. The poet himself acknowledges his indebtedness to Keats in a submissive tone. The paper is a reading of ‘Belur’s Sculpture Girls’ to understand the complex processes of intercultural transfer. Critics like G.S.Fraser have identified Mathew Arnold‘s ‘The Scholar Gypsy’ (1853) and ‘Thyrsis’ (1865) as a ‘tribute of formal imitation’ paid to Keats. But the transgressions that Arnold’s texts achieve are different from D.V.Gundappa’s text. The paper attempts to identify the differences to deepen the understanding of the historical location of the text and seeks to understand the nuances of such transformation in the choice of visual images and the use of local traditions. The paper draws insights from Harold De Campos’s notion of transceation as radical translation praxis to shed light on the text in question. This paper thus is an attempt to look at D.V.Gundappa’s ode (not as imitation) as an act of creative re-imagination and identify its relation with the local tradition.   

Article Details