On the Wings of Hummingbirds, Rabindranath Tagore’s Little Poems: An Invitation to a Review-cum-Workshop
Ketaki Kushari Dyson
Rabindranath Tagore, Particles, Jottings, Sparks, The Collected Brief Poems Translated with an
Introduction by William Radice; Angel Books; London; 2001; ISBN 0-946162-66-2
ONE : INTRODUCTION
William Radice’s translations of Rabindranath Tagore’s brief poems in a
collected edition is a welcome addition to the new wave of translations from
Tagore into English that we have been witnessing in recent years. The volume
contains complete translations of Kanika
(1899), Lekhan (1927), and the
posthumous Sphulinga (1945).
Literary translation, moving between the need to achieve as much
fluency as possible in the new texts, and the need to retain as close a
relationship as possible to the originals, resisting the temptation to yield to
wholesale ‘domestication’, is always a juggling act. The translation of poetry
into poetry, where the translator hopes that the new texts will impact into the
reader’s consciousness as poetry rather than as prose paraphrases, involves an
extra degree of complication, requiring further delicate balancing, as the
translator attempts to create equivalent poetical forms in the target language.
Readers who cannot access the original texts, or can do so only haltingly, will
necessarily receive the translated poems as independent texts, except as and
when alerted by the critical apparatus provided. When to draw attention to a
point and when to move along without comment are to some extent subjective
decisions of the translator, but will also be dictated by an overall editorial
policy. A new book may be seen as meant for the general reader, with a general
introduction, and not burdened by too many scholarly notes. It may have a clear
academic bias, with a commitment to provide detailed contextual information. Or
it may be a dual-purpose book, hoping to attract the scholar as well as the lay
reader. The present volume falls into this last category.
Radice, himself a practising poet, believes in the creative translation
of poetry and strives to give a poetical form of some sort to each piece he
translates. His editorial policy is a mixture, as I think is inevitable when
the translator is both a poet and a scholar and is himself or herself in charge
of the total process, without an outside editor standing, rule-book in hand,
telling the translating poet-scholar what to do and what not to do at every
step.
In the occasional footnotes provided, Radice’s decisions when to
annotate or not are guided by the needs of the new text he has generated rather
than by a need for alignment with the original. This is understandable. Thus,
in Particles 24 he feels obliged to
inform his readers who ‘Narad the Sage’ is, but in Particles 1 he translates ‘pushpak biman’ as ‘a flying
flower-chariot’, and leaves it at that without further comment, presumably
because the phrase is comprehensible without any other reference. The phrase is
quite a lucky find, as it refers to the pumpkin’s bamboo trellis, which may
well be covered with pumpkin flowers. However, some of us would have been
tempted to add a note on the mythological Pushpak, because it was not any old
flying chariot: it was the god Kubera’s airship that could fly at will. That’s
how high the pumpkin’s ambition is: he wants to fly at will. In Particles 17 Radice keeps the original
word Bápu
intact and glosses it,
while in no. 27 he does not translate this word at all, omits it, and moves on
without comment. (Radice uses the horizontal sign for the long vowel over the
‘a’ of ‘Bapu’, the kind that is used in romanized Sanskrit.
As this is not
available in my font, I have used, as a substitute, the accent commonly used in
Spanish to denote an emphatic vowel, and I shall have to do this again in this
article.)
In no. 83 of the same series, ‘Silk-cotton flower’, however, could
have done with a brief note to help those who are not familiar with the
appearance of this tropical flower. The point the poem is trying to make is
directly connected to this appearance: the flower is criticized by people for
its lack of fragrance, but it more than makes up for that lack by its dazzling
colour.
Radice provides a learned Introduction to the volume, containing much
textual history, and further relevant material is provided in the Appendices. I
am not altogether sure of the rationale for Appendix B in the present volume.
This is a translation of Tagore’s essay ‘Adhunik Kabya’, first published in
1932 and included in Sahityer Pathe
(1936). In this essay Tagore discusses a specific ‘twist’ of modernity in
English-language poetry, the equivalent of which in his own poetic development
may be traced in Palataka (1918), Lipika (1922), Punashcha (1932) and subsequent collections published in the last
decade of the poet’s life. This ‘twist’ is not usually associated with Kanika, Lekhan, or Sphulinga. Not that these three collections represent writing that
is particularly ‘old-fashioned’, but we tend to regard them as the poet’s
experiments in the special genre of
little poems rather than as part of his leap to ‘modernity’. Kanika is affiliated to a native Indian
tradition of aphoristic, didactic verses, while the two other volumes also owe
a debt to the spirit of Japanese haiku poetry. Having said that, I admit that
nobody who cannot read Tagore in the original is going to complain when an
important essay gets thrown in as an extra in a volume like the present one.
The more material becomes available in translation, under whatever pretext, the
better.
There is a statement of Radice’s in the Introduction which I would say
requires qualification. He says, ‘By and large, Bengali Shaktism (worship of
the mother-goddess) is absent from Tagore’ (footnote 43, p. 28). There is some
truth in this, but only at levels close to the surface. At deeper levels
Tagore’s psyche pays homage to a cosmic feminine principle, manifest in many
forms from a vulnerable earth-mother to an over-arching enchantress whose ultimate
authority we cannot escape. This principle is certainly related to Bengali
Shaktism. Interested readers may look up discussions of this issue in two of my
books (Rabindranath O Victoria Ocampor
Sandhane, pp. 310-13, and I Won’t Let
You Go, Selected Poems of Rabindranath Tagore, Introduction, pp. 48-53).
In the transliteration of Bengali titles and key words Radice adopts a
slightly modified version of romanized Sanskrit with diacritical marks. I have
doubts about the usefulness of this system for the majority of English-speaking
readers of this book. If readers have to be formally informed that ‘Sanskrit is
India’s classical literary language’, as they have been on p. 6 of this book
(footnote 8 to the Introduction), how equipped are they likely to be to decode
such a system in the first place, and to relate it to the fluctuating
specificities of Bengali pronunciation? Will most of them know that c is meant to be pronounced ch, for example? Radice writes bhába – really with a horizontal mark on
the first vowel, as explained before – which does not quite correspond to the
Sanskrit (which would require bháva);
nor does it correspond to the Bengali word(which calls for bháb). The end-vowel is particularly inappropriate when the word’s
special Bengali meaning of ‘friendship’ is being discussed (p. 25).
A reader who follows the source language as well as the target language
responds to a translated text slightly differently from a reader who follows
the target language alone. Bilingual readers find it difficult to relax and
accept the texts in front of them as independent texts; they keep going back to
the originals to find out how this or that piece has been handled. It is for
the reader who cannot access the original text that a translator translates, but
alas, it is the other kind of reader who is often asked to review the book.
Bilingual reviewers are expected to
compare the two texts and assess how ‘accurate’ the renderings are. ‘Accuracy’
is, however, only one of the qualities of a good translation. It has to be
balanced against many other qualities.
Theoreticians of translation are often polarized between those who
support ‘fluency’ and those who are in favour of offering ‘resistance’ to this
tendency and following the originals more closely. Practitioners know that such
polarization is futile. ‘Resisting’ to the hilt will deliver a wooden text from
which little literary pleasure can be obtained. A total focus on fluency, on
the other hand, may rob the text of that flickering gleam of alterity or ‘otherness’
which we prize in a text translated from another language and culture. Good
translation is a craft skill that strikes a balance.
Readers who are obsessed about ‘accuracy’ and are not themselves
practising translators often fail to grasp why a translator has taken this or
that decision, especially in the translation of poetry. Having myself been at
the receiving end of comments from such readers, I would not like to inflict
such comments on another’s work. For a reviewer in my position, who is both bilingual
and a practising translator, reading a translated text triggers a special set
of reactions. We are in a position to fully appreciate the translator’s skill
when a job has been done really and truly well; when less than fully satisfied,
we begin to visualize alternative ways in which the job could have been
handled. Without much effort – spontaneously, involuntarily – ghost images of
alternative lines and phrases begin to form inside our heads. They refuse to be
pushed away, hovering like optical ‘floaters’ in the field of vision. The best
way to deal with these re-creative energies that are released in us may be to
offer them in the spirit of a workshop. As the need to mediate between
different cultures increases, the need to train literary translators increases.
Workshops are good training grounds for raising awareness of issues and
polishing craft skills. I know this from having attended poetry and theatre
workshops. In respect of translation too, individuals have sometimes asked me
to offer comments on their work in the spirit of a workshop. Others have
mentioned how they have learnt things from my essays on translation issues
published in Desh. These experiences
encourage me to think that there is scope for infusing ‘the spirit of a
workshop’ into a Parabaas review.
Currently there are Bengalis both at home and abroad, from literary as well as
non-literary backgrounds, who are trying to translate. They have the advantage
of an advanced bilingualism, but may not always be sharply aware of the desiderata
of literary translation, the why’s and how’s of the discipline. I hope such
people may learn something from a review-cum-workshop. For my own convenience,
I shall deal with the three collections translated by Radice one by one. Being
brief, these poems lend themselves especially well to the focus of a workshop.
Next
|