Its poetics too,
differed radically from Sanskritic poetics. The poetics of the Bhakti
literature, unlike the classical Sanskrit literature, presupposed the oral
performance of the composition. The performers and their audience were face to
face. Most of the types of compositions like ‘bhajans’, ‘kirtana’,
‘abhangas’, and ‘padas’ were meant to be performed aloud. Music,
recital, incantations were indispensable aspects of these compositions. Both
the production and the reception of this discourse differed greatly from the
modern written discourse. The aesthetics of the Bhakti was very much specific
to the performance; therefore, most of the tools of present academic literary
criticism are of little use as they largely presuppose a printed text (Ahmed
1992:253). The aesthetics of this kind of poetry involve the aesthetics of
personal involvement unlike, as Ramanujan (1993:161-162) comments, the
classical rasa aesthetics where the aesthetic experience is generalized,
distanced and depersonalized by the means of poesis, the Bhakti poetry
prizes bhava, anubhava, the personal feeling, an intense
involvement and intense identification.
The translation
of Indian literature into English is a widespread activity among the English
educated elite since the colonial times. They strive to overcome the sense of
alienation by translating literature from the Indian languages into English.
Translation becomes one of the inevitable and creative contrivances of giving
oneself a sense of belonging, a nationality and of locating oneself in the
present historical and cultural context. Translation into English by bilingual
poet-translators is a strategy to decolonize one’s soul or to bring about
something of positive convergence of the two cultures and civilizations. The
translators have sought to locate themselves in the ‘true Indian society’ by
translating what they conceive of as ‘truly Indian’. However, the notion of
‘truly Indian’ has changed over the period of time. In case of translators of
Indian literature into English like Sri Aurobindo or R.C. Dutt, Indianness
meant pan-Indian Sanskritic heritage,
whereas in the case of modernists like Dilip Chitre or A.K. Ramanujan,
Indianness means pre-colonial heritage in the modern Indian languages-the bhashas
(Ketkar: 2003,2004). However, translation of what is primarily oral,
performative, pre-colonial and demotic cultural traditions into a culture,
which is primarily written, elitist, and post-colonial raises a host of
complicated questions. In this context, I wish to discuss the challenges and
strategies of translating Bhakti literature into English and for this, I will
use my own experiences as a translator of Narsinh Mehta, the great fifteenth
century Gujarati saint poet.
As a bilingual
writer writing in Marathi and English, and as Maharashtrian born and brought up
in Gujarat, translation is a creative, existential and
ethical act of relating concretely to the other, a sort of chicken soup for an
alienated and fragmented soul. Translation becomes a rhizome like activity of
connecting horizontally without creating hierarchies across the multilingual
and multicultural topography I inhabit. Translation also helped me to overcome
the politics of `either/or’ binary logic of identity, which forces you to
accept a single identity: you are a Maharashtrian or you are a Gujarati, either
you are a true native or you are westernized elite and so on.
As the poetics
and practice of Bhakti poetry is largely indigenous, mass based, oral and
performative, its translation into English whose poetics is predominantly
elite, written and westernized involves intensely creative interaction between
two widely disparate cultural domains. This interaction helps the translator to
overcome his own feeling of being cut off from his own cultural and social
environment and helps to rehabilitate and relocate his sensibility in the
Indian context. The detailed account of this spiritually moving personal
encounter which follows is by no means a normative statement. I hope that the
deliberations over these issues and questions like culture, literariness, oral
traditions and so on, will have a wider relevance and will be of some use to
other translators.
Interestingly,
most of Narsinh Mehta’s work is preserved orally and the authorship of many of
the composition is disputable. The sole way of signing the orally performed
text in the medieval Bhakti tradition was by the use of `bhanita’ or the
signature line such as `Narsaiyyachya swami’ or `Bhale maliya Narsaiyyachya
Swami’ in the compositions of Narsinh Mehta or `Kahat Kabir Suno Bhai Saadho’
in the case of Kabir. One recalls Foucault’s incisive scrutiny of the shifting
and problematic nature of `author function’ in the Western culture
(1988:197-210). The relationship between the text and its author has never been
universal and constant across cultures, historical periods and the domains of
discourse. The medieval Indian audience perceived the relation between the
orally performed text and the author in a different way from today’s audience
and therefore translation of this relationship into contemporary terms is not
possible.
However, the
biggest challenge I had to face as a translator was that that Narsinh's poems
are actually songs, and they are meant to be performed live before the
audience, which even includes the God, and in a certain religious conventional
context. For instance, his famous matutinals, or `prabhatiyas' as they
are called, are conventionally sung in the morning. Some of his songs are
usually sung in a religious gathering in a temple or at home. William Radice
(1995:28), in his introduction to the translation of Rabindranath Tagore's
poems, calls attention to the fact that the songs being very culture specific
are impossible to translate. The emotive associations of Narsinh's word music
have no equivalents in English. The compositions are full of features that mark
them as oral performative texts, for example, features like consonance,
internal and end rhymes, refrains, repetitions, parallelisms, meters used for
the songs, the specification for a particular raga and so on. In short,
the extensive use of what Indian aestheticians call sabdalamkar or the
`ornaments of sound' is a characteristic feature of Narsinh's poetry as well as
most of the medieval Indian poetry. In Indian aesthetics, sabdalamkaras
form a contrast to the arathalamkars or the `ornaments of sense'. The arthalamkaras
include figures of speech like hyperbole, irony as well as simile, metaphor and
the like.
As great amount
of the Bhakti poetry consists of songs meant to be sung live before an
audience, the very conception of literature as something printed has to be set
aside. Walter.J. Ong’s main argument in
the essay `A Dialectic of Aural and Objective Correlatives' (1972:499) is that
while considering a poem as some sort of object or a thing, one overlooks the
fact that it is also sound. The `tactile and visualist bias' is very old and
pervasive especially when we consider the work of literature in terms of
objects, structures, skeletons and other spatial analogies. Nevertheless, when
we consider literature in terms of sound, oral and aural existence, we enter
more profoundly into this world of sound as such, `the I-thou world', where,
through the mysterious interior resonance persons commune with persons,
reaching one another's interiors in a way in which one can never reach the
interior of an object. The reduction of sound to spatial analogies is much too
facile. `In its ineluctable interiority,' writes Ong, ` related to this
irreducible and elusive and interior economy of the sound world, all verbal
expression, and in particular all true literature, remains forever something
mysterious.' This means that a written text is already a loss of this
mysterious element, and it is already a translation of words as sounds. Narsinh
Mehta's songs already lose this mysterious quality once they are presented in
print but come back to life mysteriously when retranslated into oral
performance. This is a rather painful realization for a contemporary translator
as songs are inseparable from the cultural environment and language.
If one considers
the suggestion put forward by Riffaterre (1992:204-217), to substitute all
`literariness-inducing' devices in the source text with literally parallel
devices in the target text and translate songs into songs, rhymes into rhymes,
consonance into consonance, meter into meter, then great liberties will have to
be taken with the semantic content of the original. One would rather agree with
W.H. Auden's observation (1962:34) that the sound of words, their rhythmical
relations and all meanings and associations of meanings, which depend upon
sound, like rhymes and puns, are untranslatable. He points out, `poetry is not,
like music, pure sound. Any elements in a poem which are not based on verbal
experience are to some degree, translatable into another tongue, for example,
images, similes and metaphors which are
drawn from sensory experience'.
In the case of
Narsinh's poetry, many elements like meter, word music, consonance, and rhymes
had to be done away with in order to stay close to the semantic content.
Gujarati meter of course, cannot have an equivalent in English because the
Indian languages, in contrast to the accentual English language are
quantitative; that is, it is the length of the syllable rather than the stress
that gives them their distinctive character.
Besides, as Lefevere (cited by Susan Bassnett, 1980:81-82) has opined
that imitating meter, rhyme, and alliteration usually distorts the poem
altogether. I have translated Narsinh's songs into nonmetrical verse in order
to do better justice to the semantic element. I have as well tried to retain
the poetic quality as much as possible. I have attempted to reproduce the
lyrical quality of the compositions by reproducing approximately some refrains,
repetitions, and some consonance wherever possible. However, I have tried to
replicate this quality mainly by imitating the lyrical tone and the lyrical
outlook of the compositions.
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