Saturday, August 19th, 2006

Daily Archive

August 19, 2006

Secular Sanskrit Poetry

Posted by Kamalakar under Of Books
[2] Comments 

Read this old book Poems from the Sanskrit. With its musty smell and brittle pages, it was a pleasant experience reading it: a book bought in a second hand bookstall, with the firm knowledge it wouldn’t be available in fresh stocks, marks of age all over it, signs of previous use too making you share with all those earlier readers the thrill of reading anachronistically together.

This book of translated Sanskrit poems caught my attention when I picked it up ‘coz it was a collection of secular Sanskrit verse. Published by Penguin in 1968, it has translations and an intro by John Brough. As Brough points out secular verse in Sanskrit is not exactly well known. Most today would think Sanskrit has only sacred hymns, chants, Upanishads, Bhagavad-Gita and so on (some would want it to have only those). It will surprise at least some to come across a verse such as this:

            Your breasts are like two kings at war, my dear;

            Each striving to invade the other’s sphere.

Or:

Sweet girl, your dress has come apart

While you lie in the heather;

And here am I, with lonely heart:

Why don’t we sleep together?

Or this one:

            They are firm, and you are tender,

            Full and round, while you are slender;

            Bold your breasts, while you are shy

            – Since so near your heart they lie.

There are many types of poems in this. There are love poems, erotic poetry, descriptive poems, wisecracks, and what I usually like best – the clever word plays:

            When we have loved, my love,

            Panting and pale from love,

            Then from your cheeks, my love,

            Scent of the sweat I love;

            And when our bodies love

            Now to relax in love,

            After the stress of love,

            Ever still more I love

            Our mingled breath of love.

This is hardly a love poem. This is nothing but an exercise in language; some of the best poems are actually about such linguistic acrobatics. As far as I know Sanskrit poetry had a lot of such stuff where a variety of refinements are aimed at. Complex rhythms, strict metrical lines, complex alliteration and repetitions etc.

But how about the original of the above? Has the translator done such a good job that we can see the clever play on the words? Surely it must have had a meter that is untranslatable, compound words that cannot be translated etc. Now, translation is always a hard job. Brough says about his enterprise: “The attempt often involves what seems to the translator to be a complete dismemberment of the original verse into constituents of sense, and the subsequent creation of a new poem, where these constituents are rebuilt and constrained, with much labor, into a new formal pattern of words.” More or less what most translators say, especially of poetry.

More bits from this eminently readable book:

A hundred times they kiss, and then

A thousand times embrace,

And stop only to start again:

There is no tautology in such a case.

On sacred cow:

            Unfit to bear a burden

            Unskilled to pull a plough

            These temple oxen

            But one thing, you will allow –

They are pretty good at eating.

There are more. Some originals are in English transliteration. Let me offer one verse in English transliteration and its English translation. This would give us an idea of the distance that lies between the original and the English in some cases (it is possible in some cases that translation has become more effective than the original):

            Samesamasamomasassamemasasamasama

            Yoyatayatayayatiyayatyayatayataya.

In English:

            When you’re away,

            A day’s a year;

            But when you are here,

            A year’s a day.

Good try, but the clever arrangement of words and the bending and the twisting of sounds that we can make out is present in the Sanskrit version is lost in the translation. Mind you it is against such challenges that one translates from Sanskrit and I do think Brough has done a fairly good job.

Good read.

 

August 19, 2006

A note on Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines

Posted by Kamalakar under Literary Criticism
1 Comment 

This 1988 novel by Amitav Ghosh quickly became a celebrated novel and got into syllabus of University courses in Indian English literature or postcolonial literatures. There are hundreds of scholarly studies of this novel. Consequently there is not much that one can say that may sound fresh. I won’t dare to even try it. Let me just present a few stray ideas on the issue of ‘identity’ in this novel.

In Indian English literature the question of identity is often entangled with that of alienation. Ghosh in this respect treads a different path. In SL (The Shadow Lines), the question of identity is worked through integration rather than alienation. The novel presents characters who are well-entrenched in their surroundings even when they are traveling across cultures. One set of characters in the novel are alienated from their surroundings and they sort of desire that alienation: Nick and Ila; the novel not surprisingly invalidates their position as having no positive force in dealing with identity formation.

Another set of characters in the novel are the obverse of this. They are deeply rooted in their cultures. They are even chauvinistic about their positions: Th’mma and Robi; the novel does not find any positive force in their position either. The third set of characters are at once integrated in their environment as well as are open-minded in taking steps towards the ‘others’, those who are traveling beyond the shadow lines: Tridib, May and the unnamed narrator. The framework that emerges through these characters in SL is one which invalidates both alienation and chauvinism and embraces an inclusive imagination.

This strategy becomes highlighted if we compare it to its contemporary English August, An Indian Storyby Upamanyu Chatterjee. In this novel Agastya Sen finds himself alienated not only from the rural town in which he is posted as a trainee IAS officer, but also within the babudom. The novel ends with Agastya’s decision to quit the civil service job hoping to find a better one. English Augustis a hilarious read no doubt; Upamanyu Chatterjee is working with a trope that is quite well known in modern Indian English writings, especially in the poetry of Ezekiel, Adil, Daruwalla, etc.  

As opposed to this is the portrayal of Tridib in SL: son of an aristocrat whose interaction with people on the
Calcuttastreets is so earthy that they believe that he lives in one of the slums. Tridib is equally interested in esoteric knowledge, is sharp in imaginatively reconstructing for himself the knowledge he receives from various sources. This is what he teaches the narrator too, who fashions himself after Tridib. The novel which projects Tridib as the ruling consciousness for the narrator’s story of growing up, thus also suggests that identity is to be actively and continuously generated by the investment of one’s volition. It is never enough to make do with the given narratives (as do Robi and Th’mma) or cynically be self-centered in negating history by living in a kind of valorized present (as do Nick and Ila).

Next post on how SL deals with the issue of nationalism.