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I will go back to Sudhindranath Datta, an important poet-translator of the period who believes that the ground for creating poetry is not as fertile as before and so the poet has to roam the entire world and gather seeds that can germinate into poetry. In his introduction to his volume of translated poems Pratidhvani (1954) he takes up the notion of translation and states that poetry is untranslatable – it is impossible to create the same poem in another language at another time and in another place and especially where the systems are as different from each other as for instance, Bangla and French. Yet he translates. His translations of Mallarmé's 'L'après-midi d'un faune' and of Valéry's 'L'ebauche d'un serpent' have been acclaimed as poems of considerable achievement. The first has a hundred verses of the same length with end rhymes, while the second has thirty-one stanzas of ten short and equal lines with a complex rhyme scheme. Datta also has a detailed note on Mallarmé's poem suggesting that the venture had been undertaken as a kind of exercise in difference – an attempt to reach some kind of an end-point, a limit to which poetry could aspire, to the empty core of music or to the ideal of absence. It is a certain concept of poetry that would then seek to find expression in the translated poem. The volume also has twenty-three sonnets of Shakespeare and several poems of Heine. Datta tries to find a way out of his own argument that since poetry is the exact correspondence of word and experience it is untransferable, by saying that in the case of a translated poem it is the experience of the source language poem that is substituted for primary experience. Again later he says that translation is a creative act undertaken as a means of self-expression. The success of the translated work, he feels, depends on the means adapted for self-expression. What he means is that translation engages with form and style, rather than with semantic content – the latter is important in as much as it is a part of the form, but not as a central preoccupation. The translational norm then encompasses a holistic perspective including the poem and the history of poetic form as such. It is within this broader view of poetry that the translational act becomes crystallised. It will be a faithful translation from the point of view of the overall experience or the elicitation of rasa and an independent poem in literary history, looking both to the past and the future, carrying within it the possibilities and potentials of further explorations in form and syntax, something that may bear fruit in the poet's own poems. Some parts of Datta's famous poem 'Jajati', Buddhadeva Bose points out, is a happy blend of translation, reception and creation.

           Moving from the general to the personal, Datta uses a complex symbol to describe his status as a translator. Although, he states, his translations can never reach the heights achieved by the source language poems, by constant revisions and rewritings, he is able to achieve the status of Ekalavya. It is history that makes him use the symbol that he does, but history is not a determining force, for the symbol is evocative of both pride and humility, the former more perhaps than the latter. There is a double vision in Sudhindranath's concept of the translator as Ekalavya – a strong attempt to excel in conveying the experience of the source language poem on the one hand, and on the other, the consciousness of having achieved excellence as a poet, of a sense of fulfilment that will lead to other directions, other poems and other poets, create a tradition that will link up with his own as well as with the tradition of European poetry from which he draws.

            Commenting on the act of translation with reference to Sudhindranath Datta's translations in 'Kabitar Anubad o Sudhindranath Datta' (1957) Buddha deva Bose, an eminent poet-translator, says translational activity implies training in discipline and self-restraint (a point mentioned earlier also by Datta) as well as what he calls atmasuddhi or purification of the self. The latter may signify that labour undertaken for the sake of poetry in a somewhat detached manner, as a kind of sadhana, with the self in the background, leads to purification. The task of the translator gets invested with a value code from a spiritual domain. In fact, he often envisions a deep relationship with the source language poem. He states that in order to “get hold of the poem, one has to merge with it, give a part of oneself to it. This great union can be called translation” (ibid. 1957:167). The discourse on translation that we encounter in Bose is symptomatic of a general trend in engaging with translation where one tries to understand the nature of the activity from an ontological point of view, sometimes with reference to the creative impulse, as most of the translators are also poets. There is an inward turn -a self-reflexivity with reference to the creative, situated within kavyatatva, or Indian poetics, that is present in a diffused manner in the literary system. It is the poet, Bose says, who is the natural and legitimate translator of poetry. With the right combinations, the act undertaken by a poet will be creative and not simply constructive. He also talks of the poet using a source language text as a mask for himself and so his translation is often not just a translation, but in fact a rival poem. He compliments Sudhindranath not for a faithful series of translated poems, but for having added a group of “heartwarming” poems to the repertoire of Bangla poetry.

 

There is also a movement towards the objective, the pragmatic area of discourse when he begins to engage with actual target language texts. He voices his reservations about the domestication of source language texts on cultural levels. A translational experience demands that a lilac should remain a lilac and the Alps should not to be transformed into the Himalayas. But he is willing to temporarily withdraw his reservations because of the gift of certain poems such as 'Parivad', scintilating with rasa. Bose, incidentally, also quotes from various European poets and translators on translation. There are changes in translational norms, as exemplified by Sudhindranath's and Buddhadeva's analysis of metrical patterns in different language systems with reference to dependability, but this is so only in the case of the discourse on translation while actual practice foregrounds creativity, recognises, in the words of Bishnu Dey, that the equation is far more complex than that of a simple mathematics of one and two, involving as it does rupa and guna, rasa and prem or love (Dey 1965:1-97).

 

Buddhadeva's greatest achievements in the area of translation are his renderings of Kalidasa's Meghadutam, Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal and the poems of Holderlin and Rilke. In the context of Kalidasa's translation, he states that it is the translator's task and the translator's alone, to make ancient writers and their works an integrated part of contemporary literature. There are also numerous references to European literature in his article where he thinks the ancient literary tradition manifests itself as a vital part of the modern because of an uninterrupted history of translations of ancient texts. Here he attests to the fact that translated texts while being discrete units are also parts of a larger whole contributing to a certain extent in giving shape to contemporary texts and/or investing them with a certain depth and perspective.

 

While translating Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal, Bose gives detailed annotations along with a chronological sequence of events in Baudelaire's life and a separate date chart of literary events in France during his time. He reconstitutes the period in which Baudelaire was writing to prevent any unilinear or single dimensional reading of the poems. It is important to create a frame within which the act of translation takes place - and the act itself becomes a linguistic event with metalingual dimensions within a macroevent of cultural reconstruction. The latter is related primarily to the source culture, but works in the context of the target culture as well. Baudelaire's poetry, Bose feels, extracts and conveys the essence of poetry while divesting it of all that is inessential. Translating his poetry then would be an important literary task, an exploration of language and what it can achieve, an exercise that would be functional in different ways in literary history. The actual translations give us poems in Bangla that bear traces of a different kind of poetic sensibility – they introduce new elements to Bangla literature by bringing in the face of the base and ugly in poetry and by creating new expressions of suffering. It is Baudelaire suitably adapted to a different space and time and to a certain extent, reworked in accordance with the personal predilections of the poet-translator. Les fleurs du mal is a book of poems that takes one on an evocative voyage through some of the most desperate, vile and loathsome images of modern life. The poetic form in Bangla is not ready to carry across certain experiences, as language and form answer in a very complex manner to what can or cannot be expressed in a particular community at a particular time. Hence, “Il est des parfums frais comme des chairs des enfants/ Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies” (Baudelaire 1954:14) (There are perfumes fresh as the flesh of infants/ soft as the oboe, green as the prairies) becomes “Kono kono gandho jeno organer nisvane komol/ prairier sabuje makha, sisur parase sukhomoy”(1969:39) (Some perfumes are soft in the sound of the organ/ covered with the green of prairies, pleasurable with the touch of infants). The metaphoric rendered into the non-metaphorical has taken away the extension in space and time as well as the nameless violence of the first verse, but the invariant core of synaesthetic experience has been preserved and it is this that would be functional in literary history.

 

In his introduction to Les fleurs du mal, Buddhadeva Bose explains that as we had been confined within English literature for a long period our consciousness of world literature as well as of English literature remained incomplete. In order to appreciate any literature it was important to be aware of related literatures and of the multiliterary factors acting upon it. Translation was a kind of decolonising activity for him in that it led to a decentering of primary channels of influence and reception.

 

Bishnu Dey, the third poet-translator in this study, has made various statements on different occasions regarding the act of translation, but I will simply take up a word that he uses in the context of translation and that word is anubadsambhavyata or 'translatability'. Dey is an important poet translator who talks about why certain poets and their ideas had been important to him. Eliot's method, his formal devices, Dey states in an essay on the poet (1948), are of great help to him as he writes despite the fact that they inhabit different worlds. He further states, that it is because of the “underlying freedom of the symbolist method... that a Christian poem receives translatability (anubadsambhavyata) in memory of Gandhiji's second movement, 'Coriolan' in the period of the interim government, 'Gerontion' suddenly appears in the twilight of the merged adaptation-translation period when Gandhiji protests through fasts and young boys and girls lay down their lives in processions to protest against the insane murders taking place in Calcutta.” The word anubadsambhavyata throws open a whole range of contexts within which the act of translation receives maturation. There is the context of historical configurations where translation would play an interactive role in grasping and consequently giving voice to the experiences of the given moment. A sense of solidarity established through translation also underlies the examples that Bishnu Dey offers, for each of them articulates a situation of oppression. This is a phenomenon that one encounters quite often in the history of translation in Bengal, in Bishnu Dey's own translation of socialist poets, as well as generally, in translated collections of anti-fascist poetry, for instance. What is important in Bishnu Dey's statement again is the fact that translation is not simply a transfer from one language to another, but also from one event to another, bringing new contexts of understanding to an event in another culture.

 

The word 'translatability' also takes us back to Walter Benjamin's essay “The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisien”:

 

 “Translation is a mode. To comprehend it as mode one must go back to the original, for that contains the law governing the translation, its translatability... Translatability is an essential quality of certain works, which is not to say it is essential that they be translated: it means rather that a specific significance inherent in the original manifests itself in its translatability” (Benjamin 1969:72).

 

Benjamin's statement also pointed to a continuous renewal and transformation of the original in translation. He stated that the purposefulness of the process was to be sought in a higher sphere, “the ultimate purpose towards which all single functions tend is sought not in its own sphere, but a higher one.” It is here that the “suprahistorical kinship” of languages enters. Bishnu Dey's anubadsambhavyata brings us back from the suprahistorical to the present in a very concrete manner – fills out a speculative continuum with a segment of an intense presence. For instance, if we look at 'Coriolan'- “ Look / There he is now, look: There is no interrogation in his eyes / Or in the hands, quiet over the horse's neck / And the eyes watchful, / waiting, / perceiving, / indifferent” (Dey 1969: 127)- and place it in the context of the freedom movement in India we understand that translatability involves a clearer grasp of the present, the struggle for independence, the chaotic times and an ability to articulate and hence have a grasp over history. And again translatability does not only pertain to a newer comprehensibility, a different understanding of the particular, but also takes one back to other contexts of meaning and hence opens up further possibilities of future relationships with yet other similar contexts. Dey is moving towards a larger sphere of purposefulness that lies in a different conceptualisation of literature and that gets assimilated with the concept of translation. Translational norms are then formulated with reference to both old and new systems of aesthetics operating in the sphere of Bangla poetry.

 

References

 

Baudelaire, Charles 1954 “Correspondences” in Les fleurs du mal Paris: Garnier Freres.

Benjamin, Walter 1969 Illuminations (tr) Harry John New York: Schocken Books.

Bose, Buddhadeva 1957 “Kabitar Anubad o Sudhindranath Datta” in Swades o Sanskriti Calcutta: Bharavi.

__________ 1961 “Pratisanga” in Charles Baudelaire Calcutta: Dey's Publishing.

Datta, Sudhindranath 1962 “Preface to Pratidhvani” in Sudhindranath Datter Kabyasangraha Calcutta: Bharavi.

Dey, Bishnu 1965 “Rabindarnath O Silpa-Sahitya Adhuniketar Samasya” Sahityapatra Saradiya.

__________1997 “Thomas Stearns Eliot” in Bishnu Dey Prabandha Sangraha (Vol I) Calcutta: Dey's Publishing.

Dutta, Satyendranath 1984 “Samapti” in Aloke Ray (ed) Satyendranath Kabyagrantha Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad.

Eliot, T.S. 1969 'Coriolan' in T.S.Eliot: The Complete Poems and Plays London: Faber &Faber.

Sen, D.C. 1907 “Bangla Bhashay Anubad-Sahitya” in Sahitya 119-125 & 145-153, Vol.18:2&3.

Sukumar Sen 1975 Bangla Sahityer Itihas  43 ,Vol III.

Toury, Gideon 1980 “The AdeQuate Translation as an Intermediating “Language”: A Stylistic Model for the Comparison of a Literary Text and its Translation” in Actes of the VIIIth Congress of the International Association of Comparative Literature.

 

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