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Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore. National Book Trust India, New Delhi. Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi. |
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This is how I bewitched him, friend, I rolled over him in our love play! `No, no!' cried he as he tried to flee, And he cried out for his mother!
Associated with
eroticism is the conventional notion of what constitutes a woman's beauty in
the Indian tradition. For instance, in the following poem:
Wear these ornaments and necklaces, elephant-gaited
one! How many times to tell you to get started! We'll kiss the nectarous mouth of our admirer, embrace
him, and gambol Casting aside all our coyness and shame! Let’s go and play dear friend! Leave aside the
churning of curds
The reference to
the girl as `elephant gaited one' would raise brows or sniggers in West. Gajagamini
or the woman whose gait is like that of an elephant is considered beautiful in
the Indian tradition. A plump woman with narrow waist but `droops slightly from
the weight of breasts' is sexually attractive in Indian erotic traditions. This
notion of woman's attractiveness is quite different from the Western notion of
woman's beauty. Therefore, it becomes difficult to convey such a notion in
English translation.
The words like ras,
which literally means `flavour', `sap', `essence', and `nectar' is used in many
ways in Indian tradition. It is used in Indian aesthetics to denote an
aesthetic mood that is based on bhava or the essence of aesthetic
experience and rasika is the person who wants to enjoy the rasa. I have translated rasika for
Terms belonging
to Indian metaphysical and philosophical systems also do not have accurate
equivalents in English. I have at times rendered concepts like maya or
the Brahman as `illusion' or `the absolute' only to avoid monotony,
though they are not quite the same. In most places, they have been borrowed in
English. The words that describe the brahman like the satchitananda
literally meaning that which has the qualities of the Truth, the Consciousness,
and the ultimate Bliss have been borrowed without translating. In fact, the
whole way of looking at things differs in the two cultures especially the way
of looking at sexuality, religion, sentimentality, and even the moral issues.
These of course cannot be translated. Culture and
language are not mutually exclusive domains of human signification. There is a
great difference in the syntactical and lexical organization between Gujarati
and English language. For instance, while the verb usually occurs at the end of
clause in Gujarati, it occurs between the subject and the remaining part of the
predicate in English. Gujarati has more inflexions and hence greater
flexibility in word order compared to the more or less rigid order of English.
As a result whereas an inversion would not appear as a jarring deviation in
Gujarati, it would certainly appear so in English. Unlike the prepositions in
English, Gujarati has post-positions. These differences in the syntactic and
lexical organization between the two languages call for a number of
`adjustments' while reproducing the message in the receptor language. For instance, the famous composition bhootal
Bhakti padarath motu... had to be rendered as:
Great is the wealth of Bhakti found only on the earth,
At the lexical
level, too the distinction between pronouns of address in Gujarati like
honorific ‘tamey' and familiar ‘tu' cannot be rendered into
English. Some lexical peculiarities of Narsinh's poetry could not be reproduced
in English. For example, Narsinh's fondness for using ‘di' suffix to
nouns like ‘gori' (fair one) or ‘deha' (body) turning them into ‘gordi'
(dear cute fair one) or ‘dehadi' (cute little body). This suffix turns
the nouns into their diminutive forms and at the same time, it signifies
excessive fondness for the thing.
Translating
idioms word by word is almost impossible for an idiom, by definition means a
group of words whose meaning considered as a unit, is different from the
meaning of each word considered separately. Certain idioms in Narsinh Mehta's
poems have a function which is not merely semantic, that is, the images
signified by the idiom are very poetic and hence add to the overall experience
of the poem. For instance, in a poem `doodhe voothya meh, sakarna dhim
jaamya re', the refrain is an idiomatic expression which literally means
`it was raining milk and sugar was being heaped' and connotes a feeling of
extreme bliss or ecstasy. Nevertheless, the image of sugar and raining milk is
important in the poem, as the experience of
`As if it was rapture of rains of milk And all the sweetness of sugar was being hoarded in
heaps!'
Ambiguity arises
when there is more than one clear interpretation. A signifier does not have a
single unequivocal signified in such cases. Ambiguity is not considered as a
flaw in a literary text but is seen as one of the properties that enhance
aesthetic quality of the text. Narsinh's very
famous composition, `prem ras paa ne....'contains an interesting example
of ambiguity. In the composition, Narsinh says, `tatva nu tupanu tuchh a
laage..' in which the word `tupanu' is interpreted by the critics in
two ways: i) as `tu -panu' as `you-ness' to signify the otherness or
separateness of the Lord as a lover and as an entity and ii) as the noted
critic Anantrai Rawal (1994:96) has observed it indicates the chaffing or
producing useless husk which metaphorically denotes arid and futile
philosophical debates disliked by Narsinh who lays great stress on affective
rather than rational relationship with the divine. These interpretations are
not mutually contradictory as both denote the things Narsinh disliked and hence
have negative associations, but while the first one is distinctly Vedantic as
well as erotic, the other interpretation is more appropriate in the context as
the next line uses the metaphor of husk and grain, and had to be retained. The
translation offered is as follows:
Serve
me the draught of love's ambrosia One
bedecked with peacock feathers! This
futile threshing of arid philosophies tastes so insipid! These
emaciated cattle crave merely the dry husk, They
pine not for the ultimate release! Serve
me the draught of love's ambrosia One
bedecked with peacock feathers!
Another
interesting example of ambiguity arises from the clever use of the word bhog
which can mean not just enjoyment but also suffering in the well known
philosophical poem Jaagi ne jou to jagat dise nahi, oongh ma atpata
bhog bhaase. It means that when I am awake spiritually I cannot see the
phenomenal world, but only in sleep do I perceive the bewildering
temptations/woes. Sleeping and awakening of course are used as metaphors for
the states of ignorance and enlightenment respectively. It turns on the head
the conventional belief that we can perceive the phenomenal world only when we
are awake. The cognition of the phenomenal world and all its temptations and
woes is actually a dream and illusion born out of the sleep of ignorance. In
English, however, the word that combines the signification of pleasure and
suffering was not available. Hence, a compromise had to be made
When I wake up, the world recedes from my sight. Only in sleep, its bewildering miseries and
enjoyment perplexes
me!
This
of course takes away much of the force and poetic quality of the poem but
somehow the plurisignation had to be rendered in order to capture Narsinh's
fatalistic vision of the phenomenal world.
The dark one turned to gaze the moonlike face of the
jewel among beauties, Their eyes met, their desolation ended, the lord
pleaded and took the other half of his self close to
him. Putting
her arms around him, the girl with a ravishing face said, `
Thou art my life,' the lord replied, `Thou art my embellishment, my garland,
in thee alone am I absorbed and thou alone sway my soul.' Copyright © CIIL and
The Author 2006 |
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