As far as literature is concerned, globalisation happened hundreds of years ago. Crossovers and links were made by scholars and wandering singers both into and out of India and by fortune-seeking traders, some of whom had a keen understanding of rare manuscripts. Much give-and-take took place — naturally impossible to record — at what might be called the meta-level.
Thus it is that Nissim Ezekiel could, in the spirit of his Jewish ancestors and Sufi poets, say: “May you read wisdom books in the spirit of the comics and the comics in the spirit of wisdom books.” He said it like a blessing. At nearly the same time, A.K. Ramanujan, drawing on Kannada, Tamil and European traditions, joked that he was the hyphen in Indian-American.
Essential ambiguity
Thirty years later, we have Kazuo Ishiguro speaking Japanese at home, “pursuing Japanese values” and straddling the debate between mother tongue and acquired tongue by winning the Nobel for writing in English. Though the lists say that he is the second Literature Nobel Laureate Japan has produced, the flag next to his photograph is the red, blue and white of G.B. Globalisation or not?
What sort of translator should or can translate poetry from Indian languages into English, or increasingly, Anglo-American? Ideally the translator should be a poet in the target language, but how common is that? Much eye-rolling and groans accompany any discussion about the translation of poetry.
To me, the notable advantage of translating poetry is that it transcends both geographies and time whereby contemporary language can be brilliantly employed in recreating ancient originals for today’s readership. Fiction, on the other hand, is less malleable, with the translator hesitating to use modern language while hauling 19th century fiction across 20th or 21st century terrain. For instance, the following lines —
“ Hanging low with their burden of
water
And adorned with rainbows and
crackling lightning…”
These lines could have been written last month, but it comes in fact from 5 BC (Kalidasa, Rtusamharam , trs Martha Selby). Many believe that to translate a poem into English, it is necessary to write a new poem in English and call it a translation. While translating from Urdu, a language which evolved from a sophisticated Persian tradition — never put to mundane use — the symbolic nature of the language has always been a mountainous challenge. Indeed, an essential and distinct component is ambiguity. Is the beloved a person or a country? Is the wine-giver benevolent or a tyrant?
Spurred creativity
Words and meanings are continuously used to disarm and mislead while enchanting the reader or reciter. Adhering closely to the literal force of classical originals, Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Schulman work seamlessly together with paraphrase and English idiom to bring a wonderful banquet from the Vijayanagara period to those not versed in Telugu. Is it because it is neither possible nor realistic to break away from an 800-year-old (possibly older) tradition?
Ketaki Kushari Dyson in her introduction to the selected poems of Buddhadeva Bose refers to the scholar-translator, Martin Kämpchen, who translates from Bengali into German and says that such writers have two mother tongues. With rare perception she adds, “The truth is that some people are dormant or suppressed poets, who may not have written much poetry beyond their student years, but whose poetic creativity is spurred and maintained by the exercise of translation.”
Winding down, here is both akam (interior landscape) and puram (exterior landscape), the earth and sky of Tamil poetics.
‘Rain’
Emptying the sea
pouring it over the sky’s head,
chilling the hills down to their stony
roots
drowning the crops,
melting the paths,
on houses floating in the swelling
flood,
it beats down in a frenzy,
the rain.
This wetness everywhere
turns everything
to mud and mire.
In my heart alone burns
a great fire.
(Ravikumar; trs Vasantha
Surya)
This stirring poem makes me recall what Jerry Pinto said to the audience at the Ooty Lit Fest: “Are you guys reading poetry? If you are not reading poetry every day you shouldn’t be here!”
One of the natural functions of the human brain as it evolves is to build on the past and engage intuitively with words. But as we outsource memory to electronic banks and replace it with useless, entertaining information, we damage the subconscious and block off the ability to source words for thoughts and feelings.
Poetry is our last frontier. Deny it space and beyond it lie mumble and chaos from which, the brain, in its machine mode, retrieves only jargon — the McDonalds of the language feast and the opposite of poetry.
The writer edits translations for Oxford University Press, India.
