Translating the Indian past: The poets’ experience

Abstract

This essay meditates on the work of three Indian poet-translators: Toru Dutt, A.K. Ramanujan, and Arun Kolatkar. It explores whether these three share a way of translating, or at least a sensibility. Does the global stride of their work make them exemplars of “world literature”, or is theirs an “Indian” view; or both?

Few moments in the two-hundred-year history of Indian writing in English are as suspenseful as the one described by Edmund Gosse in his introductory memoir to Toru Dutt’s posthumously published Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan (1882):

It was while Professor W. Minto was editor of the “Examiner”, that one day in August, 1876, in the very heart of the dead season for books, I happened to be in the office of that newspaper, and was upbraiding the whole body of publishers for issuing no books worth reviewing. At that moment the postman brought in a thin and sallow packet with a wonderful Indian postmark on it, and containing a most unattractive orange pamphlet of verse, printed at Bhowanipore, and entitled “A Sheaf gleaned in French Fields, by Toru Dutt”. This shabby little book of some two hundred pages, without preface or introduction, seemed specially destined by its particular providence to find its way hastily into the waste-paper basket. I remember that Mr. Minto thrust it into my unwilling hands, and said “There! see whether you can’t make something of that”. A hopeless volume it seemed, with its queer type, published at Bhowanipore, printed at the Saptahiksambad Press! But when at last I took it out of my pocket, what was my surprise and almost rapture to open at such verse as this:―

Still barred thy doors! The far east glows,

The morning wind blows fresh and free

Should not the hour that wakes the rose

Awaken also thee?

When poetry is as good as this it does not much matter whether Rouveyre prints it upon Whatman paper, or whether it steals to light in blurred type from some press in Bhowanipore. (1882: ix–x)

As it happens, the poem quoted by Gosse, Hugo’s “Morning Serenade”, was translated not by Toru Dutt but her older sister Aru, who had predeceased her by three years. Both sisters had died of tuberculosis: Aru, aged 20, in 1874; Toru, aged 21, in 1877. A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields (1876) was the only book by Toru to have appeared in her lifetime, its Bhowanipore printing paid for by her father, Govin Chunder. The second edition of Sheaf, published in 1880 by Kegan Paul, London, carried a prefatory memoir by Govin Chunder. From 1869 to 1873, the Dutts had lived abroad, first in France, which is where Aru and Toru learned their French, and afterwards in Cambridge, England. The Dutts were Bengal’s pre-eminent converts to Christianity, and Aru and Toru the first Bengali girls to travel to Europe. “After her return to India”, Govin Chunder wrote in the memoir,

Toru commenced the study of Sanscrit along with me. We laboured hard at it, for not quite a year; her failing health compelled me to order her to give it up. She made a few translations as we read together. As two of these pieces have been published, I may as well reprint them here. (1880: ix)

The two pieces were “The Royal Ascetic and the Hind” and “The Legend of Dhruva”, both from the Vishnu Purana. No one would have found it odd, I suppose, that Sanskrit translations and translations of French poetry — from du Bellay and Pierre Corneille to Hugo, Nerval, and Baudelaire — were done by the same person and printed between the covers of the same book. Subsequently, “The Royal Ascetic and the Hind” and “The Legend of Dhruva” were incorporated into Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, the book Gosse introduced.

In his fifth Vamana avatar, the god Vishnu transformed himself into a dwarf Brahmin boy and asked the asura king Bali, during the horse sacrifice, for a grant of land, but only as much as he could cover in three steps. Once the boon was granted, Vishnu grew to immense size, covering with the first step the earth, with the second Heaven, and with the third — he didn’t know where to put down his foot for the third. That’s when Bali, to keep his promise, offered him his head and instantly attained immortality; others say he was dispatched to the underworld. As you click the pages of A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields on the computer screen, and go in one click from India to Europe, from the Vishnu Purana to Nerval, this book of translations begins more and more to seem like Vishnu’s stride, the one with which he covered the earth.

The decision to include Sanskrit translations in A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields was of course not Toru’s but her father’s, though she would have approved. The globe-encircling stride came naturally to Toru, as it did to the Indian poet-translators who came after her. Take “The Royal Ascetic and the Hind”, a story, told in blank verse, of King Bharata, who

left

His kingdom in the forest shades to dwell,

And changed his sceptre for a hermit’s staff,

And with ascetic rites, privations rude,

And constant prayers, endeavoured to attain

Perfect dominion on his soul. (Dutt, 1880: x)

Things were going well for the king, until one day

his ablutions done, he sat him down

Upon the shelving bank to muse and pray.

Thither impelled by thirst a graceful hind,

Big with its young, came fearlessly to drink.

Sudden, while yet she drank, the lion’s roar,

Feared by all creatures, like a thunder-clap

Burst in that solitude from a thicket nigh.

Startled, the hind leapt up, and from her womb

Her offspring tumbled in the rushing stream. […]

Up rose the hermit-monarch at the sight

Full of keen anguish; with his pilgrim staff

He drew the new-born creature from the wave;

’Twas panting fast, but life was in it still.

Now, as he saw its luckless mother dead,

He would not leave it in the woods alone,

But with the tenderest pity brought it home. (1880: x–xi)

Bring it home he did, but his affection for the forest animal and the animal’s for him had an unexpected consequence. Though he had renounced the kingly life and changed “his sceptre for a hermit’s staff”, Bharata failed to see that, for an ascetic, attachment in any form was an act of transgression. In A Time to Keep Silence, Patrick Leigh Fermor, observing the daily routine of the monks at the Abbey of St. Wandrille, wrote:

As the monks dispersed after Vespers, and, a few hours later, after Compline, I had a sensation of the temperature of life falling to zero, the blood running every second thinner and slower as if the heart might in the end imperceptibly stop beating. These men really lived as if each day were their last, at peace with the world, shriven, fortified by the sacraments, ready at any moment to cease upon the midnight with no pain. Death, when it came, would be the easiest of change-overs. (1977: 15)

No such easy change-over awaited the “hermit-monarch”. For him, the influence was not Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”, but Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night”; not ceasing upon the midnight with no pain, but raging against the dying of the light:

Years glided on . . .

And Death, who spareth none, approached at last

The hermit-king to summon him away;

The hind was at his side, with tearful eyes

Watching his last sad moments, like a child

Beside a father. He too, watched and watched

His favourite through a blinding film of tears,

And could not think of the Beyond at hand,

So keen he felt the parting, such deep grief

O’erwhelmed him for the creature he had reared.

To it devoted was his last, last thought,

Reckless of present and of future both! (Dutt, 1880: xii)

This is not the way of ascetics and monks, especially on their death bed. Unable to leave his “favourite”, “the creature he had reared”, without being overwhelmed with grief, King Bharata, in the Vishnu Purana, pays the price. He is reborn first as a forest deer and then as a Brahmin, in a family of ascetics. He remembers his past lives but pretends to be a simpleton, and being strong of body is hired as a palanquin-bearer by King Sauvira. The chapter in the Purana in which the story of King Bharata appears ends with a disquisition on the nature of reality:

Thou art a king; this is a palankin; these are the bearers; these the running footmen; this is thy retinue: yet it is untrue that all these are said to be thine. The palankin on which thou sittest is made of timber derived from a tree. What then? is it denominated either timber or a tree? People do not say that the king is perched upon a tree, nor that he is seated upon a piece of wood, when you have mounted your palankin. The vehicle is an assemblage of pieces of timber, artificially joined together: judge, prince, for yourself in what the palankin differs really from the wood. Again; contemplate the sticks of the umbrella, in their separate state. Where then is the umbrella? Apply this reasoning to thee and to me. (Wilson, 1840: 249)

In contrast, “The Royal Ascetic and the Hind”, takes a surprising turn after Bharata’s tearful death. Without a word of explanation, in one transcultural stride, Toru reaches the other end of the religious world, the Gospels of John and Matthew. The last section of the poem follows immediately after the quotation from it above, and is Toru Dutt’s coda, her argument against the very text she’s translating. The language is almost psalm-like:

Thus far the pious chronicle, writ of old

By Brahman sage; but we, who happier, live

Under the holiest dispensation, know

That God is Love, and not to be adored

By a devotion born of stoic pride,

Or with ascetic rites, or penance hard,

But with a love, in character akin

To His unselfish, all-including love.

And therefore little can we sympathize

With what the Brahman sage would fain imply

As the concluding moral of his tale,

That for the hermit-king it was a sin

To love his nursling. […]

Not in seclusion, not apart from all,

Not in a place elected for its peace,

But in the heat and bustle of the world,

’Mid sorrow, sickness, suffering and sin,

Must he still labour with a loving soul

Who strives to enter through the narrow gate. (1880: xii–xiii)

In “The Royal Ascetic and the Hind”, Toru Dutt refuses after a point to translate the Vishnu Purana — and makes the refusal a part of the translation. It is translation by rejection; by not translating.

However, by turning her attention to the Sanskrit classics at all, to the Vishnu Purana here and to the Mahabharata and Ramayana elsewhere, Toru Dutt, unbeknownst to herself, was vernacularizing the colonial language. “[I]t is only in response to a superposed and prestigious form of preexistent literature that a new vernacular literature develops”, Sheldon Pollock writes in The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, describing the vernacularization process.

The intellectuals of ninth- and tenth-century Karnataka, Andhra, and Java who invented Kannada and Telugu and Javanese did so now in emulation of, now in competition with, now in antagonism toward the example of Sanskrit. But no different is the case of Dante in fourteenth-century Florence — his guide into the world of the vernacular, Vergil, was the preeminent poet of a superposed Latinity — and countless of his peers across medieval Europe. (2007: 328)

Toru did not write in a South Asian vernacular, nor did Sanskrit occupy the same space in her mind that it did in the minds of the pre-modern poets of Karnataka and Andhra, but she has a few things in common with them. As they did in their vernaculars — Kannada, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, Nepali — so she did in English, making sometimes emulative and sometimes antagonistic translations and adaptations from the classics. If we leave out Henry Derozio for the moment, we could say that the “vernacular transformation” of English in India began with Toru, marking the birth of a “new literature”, then still without a name, that was forcing its way into the Indian linguistic landscape, changing it permanently.

It’s a sad irony that Toru’s almost childlike desire for bureaucratic recognition as a writer remained unfulfilled. Writing from Calcutta on 24 April 1876 to her friend Mary Martin in England, she says, “The Sanskrit is going tolerably well; we are now reading the Ramayana”. And immediately after that, “The census of Calcutta was taken a few days ago; I asked Papa to put in my column “Authoress” as a profession, with which request he did not comply!” (Das, 1921: 146). Earlier, in March, she had sent Mary Martin a copy of A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields, and must have felt that her claim to “Authoress” was not unjustified. She died the following year, her life’s work now available in an incomplete and wretchedly edited Collected Prose and Poetry, published by Oxford University Press India in 2006.

A. K. Ramanujan (1929–1993) discovered the Tamil classics he translated not at home, as Toru did, but abroad. A man with more faces than a hexahedron, Ramanujan was a poet in English and Kannada, a translator from Tamil and Kannada into English and from English into Kannada, a linguist, a folklorist, an essayist, an anthologist, and a renowned professor at the University of Chicago. He was also a MacArthur Fellow. He wrote, too, a novella and a few stories in Kannada. One of them, “Annayya’s Anthropology”, is about a young Brahmin scholar from Mysore who is studying economics at the University of Chicago where

. . . He read about the Hindu tradition when he should have been reading economics; he found time to prepare a list of books published by the Ramakrishna Mission while working on mathematics and statistics. “This is where you come to, America, if you want to learn about Hindu civilization”, he thought to himself. He found himself saying to fellow-Indians, “Do you know that our library in Chicago gets even Kannada newspapers, even Prajavani?” He had found the key, the American key, to open the many closed doors of Hindu civilization. He had found the entire bunch of keys.

That day, while browsing in the Chicago stacks, he chanced upon a new book, a thick one with a blue hardcover. Written on the spine in golden letters was the title: Hinduism: Custom and Ritual. Author, Steven Fergusson. Published, quite recently. The information gathered in it was all fresh. Dozens of rituals and ceremonies: ceremony for a woman’s first pregnancy; ceremonies for naming a child, for cutting the child’s hair for the first time . . . The more Annayya read on through the book, the more fascinated he became. Sitting between two stacks, he went on reading the book. (Krishnaswami and Srilata, 2008: 28−9)

Ramanujan’s readers will immediately recognize this passage, which is as much about him as about his fictional character. In the same library, browsing in the stacks, Ramanujan had similarly come across a book that unlocked “many closed doors”, in his case the doors of his Tamil past. In the translator’s note to Poems of Love and War he describes the moment of discovery, or self-discovery:

Even one’s own tradition is not one’s birthright; it has to be earned, repossessed […] One chooses and translates a part of one’s past to make it present to oneself and maybe to others. One comes face to face with it sometimes in faraway places, as I did. In 1962, on one of my first Saturdays at the University of Chicago, I entered the basement stacks of the then Harper Library in search of an elementary grammar of Old Tamil, which I had never learned […] As I searched […] I came upon an early anthology of classical Tamil poems, edited in 1937 […] That edition, I later learned, was a landmark in its own right. I sat down on the floor between the stacks and began to browse. To my amazement, I found the prose commentary transparent; it soon unlocked the old poems for me […] Here was a part of my language and culture, to which I had been an ignorant heir. Until then, I had only heard of the idiot in the Bible who had gone looking for a donkey and had happened upon a kingdom. (1985: xvii)

The key to the Tamil past he found that day in Chicago led, as we all know, to The Interior Landscape (1967), the book that established Ramanujan’s reputation as the inventor of Tamil poetry for our times.

If Ramanujan’s are some of the most eloquent translations of Indian literature available in English, it is largely because he was a not inconsiderable poet in English himself. In the running battle between the “literalists” who believe that you can only translate by biting off a good half of your own tongue and those for whom translation is “to metaphor”, to “carry across”, Ramanujan’s position is unambiguous. “The ideal”, he wrote in the introduction to Hymns for the Drowning, “is still Dryden’s, ‘a kind of drawing after the life’” (1981: xvi), and in “On Translating a Tamil Poem” he says that “The only possible translation is a ‘free’ one”:

Translations are transpositions, reenactments, interpretations. Some elements of the original cannot be transposed at all. One can often convey a sense of the original rhythm, but not the language-bound meter, one can mimic levels of diction, but not the actual sound of the original words. Textures are harder (maybe impossible) to translate than structure, linear order more difficult than syntax, lines more difficult than larger patterns. Poetry is made at all these levels — and so is translation. That is why nothing less than a poem can translate another. (1999: 230−31)

George Chapman, the translator of Homer and, like Dryden, one of Ramanujan’s forebears, put it thus: “With Poesie to open Poesie”.

Ramanujan separates those elements in a poem that resist translation from those that do not. Levels of diction, syntax, and phrases are the translator’s points of entry. Through them he nudges his way into the material, before dyeing it, thread by thread, in the colour of his voice, one that is, like a fingerprint or signature, unique to him. No two translations of the same poem, for this reason, can sound the same. It’s a way of translation; there are others. Ramanujan is quick to caution, though, that by free translation is not meant an untethered one. “Yet ‘anything goes’ will not do”, he says, adding immediately afterwards, “The translation must not only represent, but re-present, the original. One walks a tightrope between the To-language and the From-language, in a double loyalty. A translator is ‘an artist on oath’”. Having said this, Ramanujan once again faces in the opposite direction. “Sometimes”, he says, “one may succeed only in re-presenting a poem, not in closely representing it” (1999: 231). Clearly, the tightrope between poetry and Indology, modern English and early Tamil, is not easily walked. Like some of his other essays, “On Translating a Tamil Poem” ends with a parable:

A Chinese emperor ordered a tunnel to be bored through a great mountain. The engineers decided that the best and quickest way to do it would be to begin work on both sides of the mountain, after precise measurements. If the measurements are precise enough, the two tunnels will meet in the middle, making a single one. “But what happens if they don’t meet?” asked the emperor. The counselors, in their wisdom, answered, “If they don’t meet, we will have two tunnels instead of one”. (1999: 231)

Though the influence of Ramanujan’s example on the translation of Indian classics into English is yet to be assessed, there is little doubt about the ways in which the translations shaped his own English poems. He was, by the early 1960s, still writing some of the poems that were to appear in The Striders (1966), and just as what he knew as a modernist poet reinforced his translations, what he was learning as a translator found its way into his poems. When Ramanujan says of the Tamil poems, that often they “unify their rich and diverse associations by using a single, long, marvellously managed sentence” (1985: 314), he could well be describing his own practice. Not only are some of his poems similarly made, but the single syntax-driven sentence can take a page or more to unfold.

Ramanujan also pointed out the correspondence between the ancient Tamil poets and a modern virtuoso like Marianne Moore. Explaining why the Tamil poets chose the kurinci flower to suggest the mood of first love, he says the choice was partly motivated by a botanical fact: “a kurinci plant comes to flower only from nine to twelve years after it is planted ― this identifies it with the tropical virgin heroine who comes to puberty at the same age”. “Thus is the real world”, he says, “always kept in sight and included in the symbolic. These poets would have made a poet like Marianne Moore happy: they are “literalists of the imagination”, presenting for inspection in poem after poem “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”” (1985: 250).

Ramanujan viewed classical Tamil poetry through a Modernist lens, but classical Tamil poetry also subtly changed his own practice as a poet in English. When an Indian poet translates the Indian past, translation becomes a cosmopolitan two-way street.

“Will the real Ramanujan please stand up”, Arun Kolatkar wrote on a piece of scratch paper I discovered in his archives after his death in 2004 (2010: 354). It was one of several such undated sheets, bought by the kilo, to which he committed his thoughts as they came to him. Here he is on translation:

I can’t translate a poem until I’ve got the feeling that I possess it.

I must take possession of a poem before I can translate it. (2010: 345)

In India, the word “possession” is used mostly in connection with property, often disputed property. When Kolatkar says that he cannot translate a poem until he’s “got the feeling” that he possesses it, he is, in a sense, eyeing a piece of real estate that belongs to someone else. Before he can take possession, he must first evict the person whose property it is, the original author, who has the title deed. “I must take possession of a poem before I can translate it”. The two translations that follow are from Janabai, who lived in the thirteenth century. This is what she sounds like, after Kolatkar has evicted her from her property and remodelled it, in lower case:

god my darling

do me a favour and kill my mother-in-law

i will feel lonely when she is gone

but you will be a good god won’t you

and kill my father-in-law

i will be glad when he is gone

but you will be a good god won’t you

and kill my sister-in-law

i will be free when she is gone

i will pick up my begging bowl

and be on my way

let them drop dead says jani

then we will be left alone

just you and me (2010: 301)

*

i eat god

i drink god

i sleep

on god

i buy god

i count god

i deal

with god

god is here

god is there

void is not

devoid of god

jani says:

god is within

god is without

and moreover

there’s god to spare (2010: 299)

On several occasions in the notes — the pieces of scratch paper — Kolatkar addresses Tukaram, the seventeenth-century Marathi bhakti poet. He addresses him as one might a contemporary; sometimes he addresses him in American English:

I say

I’m his legal heir

let ’em contest his will

Tuka has left me everything

everything he ever wrote

is mine by right

let ’em go to court

and argue their case for a hundred / thousand years

there are many who claim

to be his legal heirs (2010: 353)

*

Like it or not

I’ll make you world famous

  not you alone but both of us

we’re going to be famous Tuka

you and I together

These translations are going to make me famous throughout the world

I’m going to teach you

You got to have some English Tuka

if you want to get ahead in the world

You don’t care for fame, I know that

I’m not gonna pan off your poems as mine

Salo Malo tried that

  Salo Malo tried to pass off your poems as his

  that didn’t work

  I’ll try to pass off mine as yours

I’ll create such confusion

that nobody can be sure about what you wrote and what I did (2010: 353)

The reference to Salo Malo is to a fictitious character in the Prabhat Film Company’s 1936 classic Sant Tukaram, in which Salo Malo tried unsuccessfully to pass off Tukaram’s poems as his own. Kolatkar aims to do the opposite, to “create such confusion that nobody can be sure about what you wrote and what I did”. Or as one of the Jejuri poems has it:

what is god

and what is stone

the dividing line

if it exists

is very thin

at jejuri

“A Scratch” (2010: 53)

Seven hundred years earlier, another Marathi poet, also referring to a translation — one of the inaugural literary works in that language — had said something identical to Kolatkar’s “nobody can be sure about what you wrote and what I did”. This was Jñāneśvar. About his Jñāneśvarī (c.1290), a poem framed as a commentary on the Bhagvadgītā and the most important text of the Varkaris, the religious community to which many of the Marathi bhakti poets, including Tukaram and Janabai, belong, Jñāneśvar said: “if my Marathi version of the original Sanskrit [Bhagvadgītā] is read carefully, with a clear understanding of its meaning, no one could say which is the original” (Pollock, 2007: 382).

However translations into English may be seen and judged in the West, the Marathi Jñāneśvarī, by blurring the line dividing translation and original, comes at the whole business of translation differently. For eight centuries, the Jñāneśvarī has been read and judged as a poem, not as a translation. Nor is it alone in this; far from it. “We read Kampan to read Kampan, and we judge him on his own terms — not by his resemblance to Valmiki but, if anything, by the extent that he differs from Valmiki”, Ramanujan says of Kampan’s twelfth-century Tamil Rāmāyana in “Three Hundred Rāmāyanas” (1999: 309). And so, too, we read Kolatkar’s Janabai — “god my darling” and “i eat god” — to read Kolatkar, not Janabai. All of which leads one to ask, only half in jest and following Ramanujan’s essay “Is There an Indian Way of Thinking” (1989), is there an Indian way of translation? Judging by the examples above, and limiting ourselves to some Indian poets, it would seem to be so.

When he translates Tukaram, Kolatkar employs the same American English he addresses him in:

What now my son,

What will you eat?

Your old man’s become

God’s idiot.

He has given up

All pretence of trade.

In penitent fury

He batters his forehead.

Wears all kinds of

Funny beads; worries

Only about himself.

We don’t matter.

Castanets get the jitters

When he opens

His ugly mouth

To sing in the temple.

He would rather be in

The jungle; home

Has little use for him.

What do we do now?

Don’t get excited, woman,

Tuka says.

This is only

The beginning. (2010: 309)

*

Tuka tiptoed

Back home

Leaving God

In his temple.

The sidekick knew

The boss would

Want him to do

Just that . . . (2010: 319)

*

Another of the Tukaram translations begins:

We are the enduring bums.

Thieves regard us with consternation.

When we go out and beg

Dogs manage our households.

Get lost, brother, if you don’t

Fancy our kind of living. (2010: 310)

Kolatkar did the Tukaram translations in the early to mid-1960s. In 1962 Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky visited Bombay, where Kolatkar became a friend of theirs. They hung out together and Kolatkar translated a section from Kaddish into Marathi. In a chronology of his intellectual life that I found among his papers, Kolatkar lists the names of the authors (or books) he read between 1948 and 1974. Against the year 1965, he has “Williams Carlos Williams, Berryman, Snyder, Villon, Lautremont, Apollinaire, Catullus, G. G. Belli, Christian Morgenstern, Wang Wei, Li Po, Tu Fu, and Cold Mountain” (2010: 361), the last a reference to a book of translations by Gary Snyder of the ninth-century Chinese poet Han Shan. Nowhere in the chronology does Kolatkar mention Jack Kerouac, but he would almost certainly have been aware of The Dharma Bums, first published in 1958, and in which Snyder appears as Japhy Ryder. Kerouac’s title is slyly hinted at in the opening line of the Tukaram translation, “We are the enduring bums”. It is Vishnu’s stride, all over again.