However, this lyrical quality was difficult to copy in the case of Narsinh's devotional, didactic and philosophical verse. The fact that word music imparts a great deal of beauty to Narsinh's poetry makes it difficult to translate this type of poetry into English, as its propositional content is not lyrical in the conventional sense of the word. The success of these poems is largely due to the happy marriage of the word music with the sentimental moralistic and philosophical content. The epigrammatic and compact expressions inevitably had to be recomposed into rather loose syntactical patterns of English. In this type of poetry, as most of the word music and sentimental verbal associations could not be recomposed into the language as different as English, the translations appear dull, prosaic and without the impact which the source texts have in Gujarati. For instance, the famous Vaishnava Jana to ...was rendered in following way:

He who feels others grief as his own,

He who obliges others in distress

Without being swollen with pride,

He alone can be called a Vaishnava!

Humbly he bows before everyone in the world

And he disparages none.

He is resolute in his words,

Deeds and mind - Glory be to his mother!

For he alone is a true Vaishnava!

He views everyone with equal eyes;

He has relinquished the tormenting thirst

And looks upon another’s woman

As his own mother!

He alone can be called a Vaishnava!

In some padas, the content is technical and occult rather than conventionally lyrical. Therefore, the translation is in danger of being awkward and stiff, for instance in a composition like this

Meditate, meditate, the lord is in your eye, as a divine ecstasy in your

inner forehead.

In person, he will touch you with love, his wonderful face

with incomparable eyes!

The inner forehead referred here is the occult `third eye' or the aajnya chakra in certain esoteric tantrik practices of kundalini energy.

            Besides, I could not reproduce certain expressions typical to Gujarati songs like re and lol coming at the end of a musical phrase and which are vocal gestures of endearment, and in English. In certain places, expression O is used. However, the excessive use of O in English translation would sound old-fashioned or even more terrible-it would sound Victorian.

            I took particular care not to translate songs into the `modernist' free verse, which relies on devices like dislocation of syntax and use of minimalist-imagists conventions. In translating a text from different poetics, equivalent, I believe should be sought at the level of aesthetics that affect the text. The attempts to adapt a text belonging to radically different poetics, to contemporary modernist poetics do not do full justice to the source language text. As translation is reading, a modernist reading of the Bhakti literature creates an illusion that the Bhakti literature was modernist. As a result, though we are blinded by the brilliance of A.K. Ramanujan’s extraordinary readings/translations of the Bhakti poetry, the realization that the Bhakti literature was never modernist in the Continental and American sense of the term makes us uneasy.

Translating a discourse whose medium is oral word and whose performer-audience relationship is largely face-to-face, into a discourse, whose medium is written word and the relationship between the performer and the audience is not face-to-face, raises some complex questions. What one does here is not merely reproducing sense and style of the source language text but also shifting one type of discourse into another type. This type of discourse shift is involved in the translation of most of the medieval Indian poetry into English. Most accusations and laments for loss of `flavour' and `charm' from people against the translation of Bhakti poetry are actually laments for loss of `ear experience' of the word music and emotive associations linked to the source language text. This results not only from difference between two acoustic personalities of the languages but also from the difference between two types of discourses. This does not, of course, mean that I consider translation as mourning over the loss of the `original’. Translation is always a gain and profit. It produces a new text in another language and opens one more window on the other language and culture. The sooner we come out of the rhetoric of loss in discussing translation the better. However, what I am doing here is highlighting the structure of difference one encounters in the practice of translation. It is because I am writing as a translator that certain vocabulary of loss may creep into my article here. However, translation studies have come out of `practice-oriented’ perspective of translation, and I have no quarrel with it as it has opened up the field in an unprecedented way. At the same time, it is always extremely interesting and enlightening to know what is left out while translating, because it educates us about a different culture and different ways of looking at the world.

             The difference between cultures is another obvious and major challenge one faces while translating poets like Narsinh into English. In fact, language and culture cannot be separated and both are inextricably interwoven with each other. Julia Kristeva's thesis (1988:59-60) that one signifying cultural practice is interwoven with the elements from other signifying cultural practices.That is, the notion of intertextuality is particularly important here. A verbal text as a signifying practice already contains elements from other signifying systems like mythology, systems of food and fashion, indigenous medicinal system, metaphysics, literary conventions and genres, musical system, festivals, religious-ritualistic beliefs and even superstitions. No text can be an island or can remain isolated in a network of signifying structures called culture. Hence, one does not translate a piece of text, though it may seem isolated, but tries to find equivalents for the entire network involved in the construction of the text. All this becomes very apparent when one attempts to translate Narsinh.

             Genres hardly have equivalents in a different literary tradition, as they are conventions of a particular literary tradition. They may travel to another tradition but they are no longer the same. The flexible and lyrical form of Pada, which has been discussed in the chapter three, has no equivalent in English. Hence, the free verse renderings of Narsinh's poems have no fixed form in English.

             Of course, the mythology of Krishna and Radha has no equivalent in English culture, nor do the allusions and references to Puranic characters and events have parallel in the target language culture. They are untranslatable and therefore I have only transliterated them. I also provided a glossary of culture-specific Indian terms as appendix. Narsinh often refers to Puranic characters like Pralhad, Harishchandra, Shukadevaji, and Narada to give an illustration of true devotees and the miracles they can bring about. A glossary seems to be the only way out.

             Certain items referring to codes of dress and food too do not have equivalents in English or even if it has a rough and approximate equivalent, the connotations and details are very different. For instance, `choli' which occurs often is a sort of bodice, but the whole lot of conventional erotic associations and connotations are lost and certain type of triviality sets in. It may also be because the whole way of looking at sex and the erotic is greatly different in the Indian and the Western culture. It can be said about `jhanjhar' and `payal' which means anklets but in Gujarati, it carries a distinct charge of erotic associations. In such cases, in some places I have only borrowed the lexical items in English or replaced equivalents in English. I have mainly borrowed `choli' within italics and used anklets for `jhanjhar'. The same can be applied to Gujarati food items, for instance certain Gujarati delicacies like `rabdi' a kind of sweetmeat have been only transliterated. The terms are explained in the glossary. Items belonging to the indigenous medicinal system, `ayurveda' are also to be found in the compositions. In an interesting `pada', Narsinh compares his beloved Lord with various types of ayurvedic medicines like dried ginger or `ajmain’. In most of the places, I have borrowed the item in English or replaced it by approximate equivalents. Certain omens like `fluttering of left eye' and `auspicious moment' or `muhurat' are culture specific and are untranslatable.

             So are traditional kinship terms and the conventional stereotypes that are so peculiar to the Indian culture. For instance, saasu or the mother-in-law is a stereotypical oppressor of her daughter-in-law along with nanand or the sister-in-law as her accomplice. Hence, in many padas of Narsinh, when Radha, a married girl in love with Krishna, refers to her in-laws she is evoking a typical or rather stereotyped situation where the in-laws are keeping an eye on their daughter-in-law's activities. Allegorically they connote the norms and the dictates of the mundane world, which interfere with devotional activities and thus are detrimental in Bhakti.

Similarly, gopi or Radha addresses her female companion as sakhi, which literally means female friend. However, the use of words like female friend or girl friend would not be appropriate in English. Hence, the word friend had to be used. Yet, the word sakhi has special connotation in certain Vaishnava sects. The ideal devotee would be like sakhi to the Lord, His girl friend. This signification cannot be rendered into English.

 

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