Transcreation: Two Essays

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P. Lai T ranscreation: two essays

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The Art of the Essay O950; «says "The Merchant of Venice” ('1952; criticism Premthand; His Life and Work O957J biography Oodan ( 1957> translation [w ith Jai Ratan] Modern JndoAngJun Poetry (1960) anthoiogy The Parrot's Death & Other Poems (i960) Love's ihe First (1960) poems Great Sanskrit Plays In Modern Translation (1964; The Bhagavad-Gita (1965) transcreation The Golden Womb of the Sun (1965) transcreation T. S. Eliot: Homage from India (1965) anthology Sanskrit Love Lyrics (1966) transcreation "C hangeI" They Said (1966) poems The Dhammapada (1967) transcreation Draupadi and Jayadratha & Other Poems (1967) An Annotated Mahabharata Bibliography (1967) The Jap*Ji: Religious Songs (1967) transcreation The First Workshop Story Anthology (1967) The Il&'Upanisad (1967) transcrcation The Farcc of the Drunk Monk (1968) transcreation The Concept of an Indian Literature (1968) essays Sccular Sanskrit Literature (work in progress) Children’s Talcs From India (1969) re-telling Creations and Transcreations (1969) poetns Yakshl from Didarganj & Other Poems (1969) The Avyakta-Upanisad (1969) transcreation Modern Indian Poetry in English (1969) anthology The Mahflnilrfiyana Upanisad (1969) transcreation Ghnlib’s Love Poems (1971) transcreation The Mahfthh&ratn (1958) continuing transcreation David McCutchlon: ShraddhSnjali (1972) anthology A Handbook to Assamese Literature (1972) [with P. N. Shastri] Tagore's Last Poems (1972) transcreation [ with Shyamasree Devi ] Henry l>cro2io: Poems (1972) anthology

P r e f a t o ry

Note

These two essays explore some problems I faced when translating (and transcreating) sacred and secular texts from Sanskrit and Prakrit into English. TEe~first is'a'revised version of a paper I read at a Seminar of Indian and Australian writers organised by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations in New Delhi in 1968. A condensed version appeared in The Indian and Foreign Review in 1970. The second is a revision of the Preface to Shakuntala in my Great Sanskrit Plays in Modern Translation (New Directions). Calcutta/1972

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DEDICATION

in memory of Davidrkaka (1930-1972) from Plaltn'n “ No place for crybabies. So hide your tears and laugh.”

Myth, Literature, and Transcreation P. Lai I s h o u l d lik e simply to record a few observations on the problems I faced and the discoveries I made while searching for myth-values in Indian literature. I began more than twenty years ago using English as a medium of creative expression, chiefly in poetry. I soon realised that an exces­ sive absorption in the milieu and tradition of English was divorcing me from the values that I found all around me as an experiencing Indian, so I undertook the translation of Indian—in practice, mostly Hindu— sacred texts, in the hope that the intimacy that only translation can give would enable me to know better what the Indian “ myth" was, how it invigorated Indian literature, and what values one could pick up from it that would be of use to me as an “ Indian” human being and as an Indian using a so-called foreign language, English, for the purposes of writing poetry. M y intention was selfish and parasitical; and I think I have benefited. The most important discovery I made was that there is indeed a myth element in Indian literature or, more nar­ rowly, in classical Sanskrit and early Prakrit literature. The strength of the literature I was translating lay in its myth content. If I am asked to define this myth content, I cannot; but I can recognise it. One may carry this argu­ ment further, and say that all classical literature is inform­ ed by what, for want of a better word, should be described as “ myth". This quality, in fact, distinguishes it from what might loosely be described as romantic literature, for while romantic literature is a search for myth, classical is an embodiment of it. Tt is perfectly possible, in other words, to have both types of literature coexisting until

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there arrives a stage in a society's cultural change when myth ceases to have meaning altogether; when its people are no longer inspired by identifiable common values and aspirations; when their moral and metaphysical outlook is no longer unified, and when protesting, aberrant, and ex­ perimenting voices, all struggling to establish the validity of private myths, demand to be heard and respected. But let me try to be a little more precise. Myth may be difficult to define, but its presence takes many forms in literature, and impregnates literature not only with literary value but moral and religious value as well. A literature judged only by aesthetic standards remains only an aesthe­ tic literature; and few things are more sad than a litera­ ture that cannot be anything but literary. One Upanisad, traditionally the earliest and most important, certainly the shortest and most concentrated, and by general consensus the most cryptic and obscure work of the Upanisadic canon, seems to me to embody what I shall describe as “ abstract" myth. (I shall come to “ concrete” myth a little later). This is the Upanisad that Mahatma Gandhi flourished before a perplexed agnostic interviewer, Vincent Sheean, three days before he was assassinated on January 30, 1948; Candhiji quoted the first sloka and said he found “ the sum of wisdom” on the subject of renunciation in it. "When I went to Travancore I spoke to Christians,” he said, “ large numbers of Christians. I looked for authority with which to convince them, and what I found was the Isa-Upanisad.” The world is swaddled in the glory of the Lord. But it changes! Renounce it. Enjoy with detachment the wealth of the world. A ll worfe is bondage: who escapes? This is the world's way. Loading good deeds with wishes, A man hopes at most for a hundred years.

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Sunless, convered with darkness on darkness, A rc the worlds of those who are blind. T he slayers o f the Self go to them after death.

But That One, the Unmoving One, is Swifter than mind, subtler than sense, faster than flux. It breathes, and The world breathes with its breath. It moves, and it does not move; It is far, and near; Inside the world, and outside it. The man who sees the world in the Self, And the Self in the world, sees The world as it is, and is not perplexed. Sorrow and delusion do not touch him,

The world ts one with his Self— He has attained Unity of Being I The Self is everywhere! It has no body! No sinews! It is whole, pure, sinless! It shines! It is self-bom! It knows! From it flows continuous moral duty. Plunged into darkness are the worshippers knowledge ; Plunged into darker darkness Those who delight in Knowledge.

of

For the words o f the wise have explained it clearly :

Non-knowledge will not do ! But Knowledge is not enough!

non­

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The Truth lies beyond, Beyond knowledge of knowledge and knowledge of non-knowledge: Non-knowledge leads to death, and Knowledge to after-death. Plunged into dark darkness Are the worshippers of non-Being; Into greater darkness those who Delight in Being. For the words of the wise have explained it clearly: 'Non-Being will not do! But Being is not enough! The Truth lies beyond, Beyond knowledge of Being and knowledge of non-Being: Non-Being leads to death, and Being to after-death. The womb of the sun is covered with a golden disc. Remove it! O Pusan, I love the Truth, show me the Truthl O Sun, lonely wanderer, controller and giver of light. Fold your light around me, Let me see your face— The Indwelling Being, I am He I Perish, my body! Blend, breath, with immortal w ind! Remember past deeds. O my mind, remember! Past deeds, remember I O my mind, remember I O Sun, you sec through all we do, Guide us from goodness to joy, Keep us from wrong-doing and deceit, Our words pay you homage again and again.

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Gandhiji was looking at this Upanisad from a purely religious viewpoint—his interest in poetry was limited to "Lead Kindly L igh t"; “ Raghupati Raghava Raja Ram a"; 4,Ekla chalo re” and, curiously, "The Hound of Heaven". I would like to see it from a literary angle. The first sloka may be important, but the key sloka, the break­ through point, the point of epiphany— I am fascinated by breakthrough points in works of imaginative power, because those are the places where the translator or transcreator must come to real grips with his material—isthe fifteenth, and the key line the first in that sloka, andthe key word is "patra" in that line: hirammaycna patrcna satyasyapihitam mukhom (with a golden patra of truth is covered the face). Consider what the dictionaries say: according to Monier Williams "patra" is "utensil, plate, pot, goblet"; according to Apte, Devasthali, Joshi and Kulkami, it is "vessel" or "jar". The translation by Swami Frabhavananda and Manchester has "orb", Max Mueller has "disc", Sri Aurobindo has "lid", fuan Mascaro uses "circle", and Hume prefers "vessel". W. B. Yeats and Swami Purohit come out with a startling rendering: "They have put a golden stopper into the neck of the bottle". Now, the idea behind the mystical metaphor of the original apparently is that the dazzling sun (the entire Isa-Upanisad revolves around fire and sun imagery), like a round, golden patra, blinds us to the Reality behind it: we cannot see the Divine Truth face to face so long as we are what we are and That is what That is. But bottles! Bottles in Upanisadic times! Here is an exam­ ple of Yeatsian transcreation that becomes transcorruption. It is not suggested that Divine Reality is bottled up and has to be released; that idea has never been and is not likely to be part of Hindu myth-values; rather, it is sug­ gested that Divine Reality is everywhere, but human eyes are deceived by the brilliant seductions of the physical senses and therefore fail to see it. The opening line of the Upanisad— the line Gandhiji so deeply admired— Isavovosyamidam sarvcm yatkinca jagatyam jagat—is a

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prayer to the Lord, Isa, to remove the dazzle of His glory so that his devoted seekers may see Him. Why did a person of Yeats’ undoubted literary sensiti­ vity and sympathy for matters of spiritual quest and insight fail to see the point of what must appear to an Indian as really a very simple thing? After all, what the unknown rishi is saying is that the truth of the sun is hidden behind the dazzle of the su n ; paradoxically, the Sun's light prevents us from seeing the Sun itself. The only answer I can give is that Yeats did not sufficiently involve himself with Hinduism’s abstract myth-values, in this instance (I'm putting it crudely) the maya-myth (which in Hinduism has almost the sanctity of unwritten dogma). Let me come to my second example concerning “ con­ crete” myth. Since this will be associated with very close translation, I would like to dwell briefly on a couple of points relating to translation from the classics, specially religious and semi-religious texts. In a letter written in 1934 Sri Aurobindo remarked, "Whenever I have translat­ ed I was careless of the hurt feelings of the original text and transmogrified it without mercy into whatever my fancy chose. But that’s a high and mighty criminality which one ought not to imitate. Latterly I have tried to be more moral in my ways.” That is one way of looking at the translator's job; another is to echo the sentiments of the critics who suggest that since Homer wrote to please his contemporaries shouldn’t we translate him to please our contemporaries, even if it involves transmogri­ fication ? A good example of excellent transmogrification is the famous quatrain from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam : A book of verses underneath a bough, A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou Beside me singing in the wilderness— Ah, wilderness were paradise enow.

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In the original, the tastes of the poet were more earthy: Let me have a loaf of fine wheaten flour, A flagon of wine, and a thigh of mutton, A nd beside me, in the desolation, a comely youth— This is happiness no Sultan's palace holds. It seems that the Victorian public of Edward Fitzgerald's days did not particularly relish the thought of munching on thighs of mutton in the presence of a comely youth. Another intriguing bit of transmogrification occurs in Romesh Chunder Dutt's meticulously metronomic Locksley Hall version of the Mahabharata; this is in the Sabha Parva when Duryodhana orders Draupadi, who is in her period, to be dragged into the assembly hall prior to her disrobing by Duhsasana: Madness seized the proud Duryodhan, and inflamed by passion base, Sought the prince to stain Draupadi, with a deep and dire disgrace; On the proud and peerless woman cast his wicked lust­ ful eye, Sought to hold the highborn princess as his slave upon his kneel Note “ upon his knee” . The word in the original is uru and that has only one meaning, “ thigh". “ Thigh" is a perfect rhyme for “ eye". Yet Dutt, so meticulous a rhymester, preferred to rhyme “ eye" with “ k n ee"! It is amusing to picture the discomfort of any male if a lady of Draupadi's proportions sat upon his knee—a fracture, no less— but Dutt, a good Hindu Victorian, would rather break the requirements of rhyme and accuracy than offend the propriety of the nineteenth century Bengali bhadralok and break a thigh. Inaccuracy here may be simply fu n n y; in other texts it can be disastrous. In fact, accuracy of an almost mathe­ matical kind is of the essence in some cases—and I do not mean only in legal, political, and commercial translation. This brings me to my second example, which is from the

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Avyakta-Upanisad, a splendid invocation to Visnu in his Narasimha or Man-Lion avatara. This magnificent hymning of the Man-Lion avatara has to be carefully translated because its breakthrough point is an anustubh sloka, the mantra-raja of the Narasimha sect of Vaisnavism. Here is the quintessential "king of prayers” : ugram viram nwhavisnum jvalontam sarvatomukham nrsimham bhisanam bhadram mrtyumrtyum namami aham This has 4 padas (lines), 1 1 words, and 32 syllables. You cannot change this in translation: the number of lines, words, and syllables, and the order of the words must be mathematically retained, because the Upanisad’s meaning develops around the structure of the mantra. I tried to do this, and this is what I achieved: Terrible Powerful Mahavisnu Flaming Everywhere-Facing Mati*lion Terrifying Holy Death*s-death I Praise I Permit me to go on to the first section of this remarkable Upanisad in order to show why such close correspondence is essential, how the whole depends intimately on the mystic mantra, and how the concrete myth-element is inter­ woven in the rich poetry: Nothing.

Nothing at first. Neither sky. Nor air. Nor earth. Then light. Formless. Neither beginning nor ending. Indistinct. Neither ¿mull nor Iurge. Knowing.

M YTH , LITERATURE, AND TRANSCREATION

filissfu L Only one— He. Not two. Then two. One yellow, one red. The red, Spirit: Pum a. The yellow, matter: Maya. The two copulate. Blissfully. One again. It grows. It is a golden egg. It swells. The Lord of Creatures is bom. He wants to know: “ Who am I? "W hat shall I do?" A voice replies: “ You are Pra;apati, Child of the Unmanifested. You will work In the Manifested/' He asks: “ What is the Unmanifested? What the Manifested Where I must work?** The Voice replies: “ It shines. It cannot be known. Because it can»not be known, It is the Unmanifested. If you wish to know it. Listen to me.*' He says: “ Who are you? What voice speaks to me? Show yourself!”

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The Voice answers: “ Meditate. Do penance. Then know m e.”

So he meditates and does penance for a thousand years. . . Then he sees the anustubh sloka, The magic mantra. In it is Brahman, In it the gods. How will knowing the Vedas help If one does not know this? He knows the Sloka. He wants to know the Red One. So he chants continuously: T ER R IB LE PO W ERFUL MAHAVISNU FLAMING EVERYWHERE-FACING MAN-LION TERRIFYING HOLY DEATH’ S-DEATH I PRAISE !

For a thousand years Putting Om before and after Each word. He chants for a thousand years In the same way Syllable by syllable. Then he sees The Shining One I Sri-embraced, Sitting on Garuda, Hooded By Sesa-Naga!

M YTH , LITERATURE, AND TRANSCREATION

Lion-faced, Man-bodied, Three-eyed "With Sujn and Moon and A g n i! He prostrates himself, Saying: "I bow to yo u ! I bow to y o u ! He sings the Slofea in praise of THE T ER R IB LE ONE (U GRA M )!

Terrible for he is lion-faced: THE PO W ERFUL ONE (V IR A M )!

Powerful for he is the essence of power: THE GREAT V ISN U (MAHAVISNUM) !

Because he straddles the three words: THE FLAMING ONE (jVALANTAM) !

For he is aflame with radiance: EVERYW HERE-FACING (SARVATOMUKHAM)

Became he htis many forms: MAN-LION (NRSIM H AM )!

For those are the words of the scriptures THE TERRIFYING ONE (BHISANAM) !

Afraid of him, the Stm rises, Afraid, the moon, Afraid, the wind blows, Afraid falls the rain: THE HOLY ONE (BHADRAM) !

Holy, holy, holy, Sri-embraced: d e a t h ' s -d e a t h

(m r t y u m r t y u m ) !

For he is the death of death, giver Of immortality to food-eating creatures:

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I For those are the words of the scriptures: I PRAISE (NAMAMl)

i (a h a m ) I

For that is the word in the scriptures. What follows in the Upanisad is an account of how the lines, words and syllables in the sloka are used by Prajapati to create the cosmos: And Prajapati wishes to create. With thirty syllables He creates the three worlds. Two syllables remain. With these two syllables He holds the worlds fast On both sides . . . With the sloka’s eleven words He creates the eleven Rudras . . . With the first line He makes the Rig-Veda. W ith the second,

The Yajur. With the third line, The Satna. With the fourth, He makes the Atharva . . . Exactitude in translation instead of unprincipled trans­ creation is also required when the sacred text employs punning. This is rare, but I can think of two fine examples. In the eighteenth chapter of the BhagavadGita, Krishna tells Arjuna, “ I have given you all the wis­ dom I can give you/' and concludes his advice with these words, uYatheccha$i tatha kuru” . Literally, this means, which you like, d o ;” or in sensible English, “ You are free to choose” . But there is a kind of pun on the word “ Kuru", which means both “ do” and “ one of the Kuru dynasty” (as Arjuna is). The profound irony of this is that, as a Kuru, Arjuna, by following Krishna's advice,

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will be killing other Kurus; and, by not taking Krishna's advice, will be at war with his own Kuru conscience. The point of the pun is borne out by the pyrrhic victory that Arjuna and his brothers w in : doing what a Kuru should do, he has destroyed the Kuru race. The other example is from the advice of the Buddha to his favourite disciple, Ananda: “ Be a lamp to yourself. Work out your salvation with diligence.” The first half of this advice in the Pali is: “ So fearohi diparn attano “ Dipa” in Pali can mean “ lamp” or “ island” , so what the Buddha is really saying is: “ Be a lamp to yourself. Be like an island.” Anyone conversant with Buddhist religio-literary symbolism will see how important the “ island” image is as a statement of the need to guard against the tempta­ tions of the burning world of the senses: “ Everything is burning, O Ananda.. . ” Mention of the Buddha leads me to my third point: I refer to the Buddhist sacred text, the Dhammapada, in Pali: Section 1 1 of the text. We are concerned with ▼ery important moral, philosophical, and, I think, literary values here. This section is titled “ Old Age” and consists of 1 1 slokas; the eighth and ninth slokas are supposed to have been uttered by the Buddha at the time of his attain­ ment of Nirvana. The Buddha is significantly silent on N irvana; whenever questioned by disciples about the nature and experience of Nirvana, he conveniently retired behind the Buddha smile. (I think it should be noted that this is very different from the Mona Lisa's which, according to Aldous Huxley, is the smile of a well brought up lady suffering from a mild attack of constipation). In fact, these two slokas are all that we know of the experi­ ence of N irvana: “ anekajatisamsaram sandhavissam anibbisam gahakarakam gavesanto dukkha jati punappunam.. . ” The world is burning; W hy is there laughter, why the sounds of joy ? Seek enlightenment, O fool, for the darkness surrounds you.

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Look at it, this painted shadow, this body, crumbling, diseased, wounded, held together by thoughts that come and go. This body decays: It is frail, diseases nest in it; corrupt, it breaks into pieces, it lives only to die. And its bones are cast away like seeds of water-melon in autumn. Let him who will rejoice in this, rejoice. A round these bones is built the fort, mortared with flesh and plastered with blood. Living in it arc old age, death, pride, and deceit. Like glittering royal chariots slowly rusting, the body moves into old age. “ Only virtue is stainless'*— this is the only wisdom. A man who learns little grows old like an o x: his body grows but his mind remains stagnant. How many births have I known without knowing the builder of the body! How many births have I looked for him. It is painful to be born again and again. But A ll The You

now I have seen you, O builder of this body! desire is extinct, Nim fna is attained! rafters have crumbled, the ridgepole is smashed ! will not build them again.

They pine away, the young men without discipline or struggle, like old cranes staring in a lake without fish.

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They lie like rejected bows, dreaming of the past, these young men -without discipline or struggle in their youth. Now, behind these two breakthrough slokas, the epip­ hany points of Section 11 , lies an entire nexus of thought and feeling arising from a strong belief in Karm a; in them also is the serene ecstasy of achieving release from Karma. Here is another Hindu “ dogma” —moksa, expressed in the gentle but vivid manner of which the Buddha is so capable. Place the original beside Irving Babbitt’s rendering: Looking for the maker of this tabernacle I ran to no avail through a round of many births; and wearisome is birth again and again. But now, maker of this tabernacle, thou hast been seen; thou shall not rear this tabernacle again. A ll thy rafters are broken, thy ridge-pole is shattered; the mind approaching the Eternal has attained to the extinction of all desires. To me this is the voice of a cultivated, liberal professor elegantly discoursing to affluent students in a well-ap­ pointed drawing room; it is not the voice of the Buddha achieving Nirvana under the Bo-tree, it is not the voice of myth-recognition or discovery. There are other versions too, equally uninspiring. F. I. Woodward transforms the Buddha’s deeply-felt slokas of Karmic release into well-cut iambic pentametric lines full of archaisms and inversions that the colloquial Pali used by the Buddha scrupulously avoided. There are K. J. Saunders and Max Mueller, impossibly academic, filled with asterisks and parentheses. The only fine one is by Edwin Arnold in his The Light of Asia—and that, as everyone knows, is not translation, but a re-telling of the Buddha’s life story. The search for values in literature— values that truly matter, not values that satisfy only aesthetic needs—can be conducted fruitfully only among sacred texts. Sacred texts make special demands on readers— and translators.

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I strongly believe that, all other things being equal, an Indian is better equipped to translate his sacred works than a foreigner. A Hindu is best to render Hindu texts, and a Sikh, Sikh texts. But this is not an inflexible rule. Take the case of a recent version of Guru Nanak's hymns by Khushwant Singh. There are few sights in India more stirring than white-bearded, reverend-looking Sikh gentle­ men in a gurudwara chanting hymns: to me Sikh piety is a memorable and beautiful experience. Khushwant Singh wrote once that he is not particularly a believer in the moral tenets and spiritual aspirations of the Sikhs, though he is glad to profess the religious faith of the community. To some this may appear like having the “ laddoo” and eating it too; but this is precisely the credo of many modem “ humanists” . In religious books, the quality of the translator's participation gets fairly accurately reflect­ ed in the quality of the translation. The King James' team of translators were all believing Christians; at least the Dove is supposed to have descended on them during their collective dedication. Without ecstasy, there is little point creating; without ecstasy, there is little point translating the ecstasy of sacred texts. Here is Khushwant Singh’s translation of the 25th hymn in the Jap-ji, the Morning Meditation of hym ns; it is beautiful, it is even evocative, it is wellstructured; but it is not ecstatic: in the realm of justicc there is la w ; In the realm of knowledge there is reason. Wherefore are the breezes, the waters and fire, Gods that preserve and destroy, Krishnas and Shivas? Wherefore are created forms, colours, attire, Gods that create, the many Brahmas? Here one strives to comprehend, The golden mount of knowledge ascend, and Iearn as did the child-sage Dhruva. Wherefore are the thunders and lightnings, The moons and suns, The world and its regions?

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Wherefore are the sages, seerst wise men, Goddesses, false prophets, demons and demt-gods, Wherefore are there jewels in the ocean? How m any forms of life there he,

How many forms of speech, How many kinds of proud ancestry ? Of these things many strive to know, Many the slaves of reason, Many there are, O Nanak, their numbers are legion. The hymn is a celebratory piece listing the wonders of God's creation; it is not an enquiry: it says nothing about "slaves of reason** struggling to comprehend the mystery of creation. That is the disbelievers or agnostic’s problem; not the man of faith's. In its own way, that hymn of Guru Nanak enshrines and expresses, as did the Isa-Upanisad, the Avyakta, and the passage from the Dhammapada, the values of a mystical vision, some kind of a satori, a cohering of all light at a Dante-esque centre of paradisial felicity; its tone is that of glorification, of awe and reve­ rence before the fathering-forth of dappled and even con­ tradictory beauty by One who is past change. Here is my version of this hymn: This is the way of the workers of righteousness; What follows is the way of those who know. How many winds 1 How many waters and fires ! How many Krishnas and Shivas! How many Brahmas, creators of the worlds! Forms, colours, dresses of all kinds! How many graceful liirtds like this 1 How many mountains! How many teachers of that which is holy!

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How many Indras, moons, suns! How many ccuntries in how many parts of the world ! How many Stklis, Buddhas, Naths! ■Gods and goddesses, how many divine likenesses! How many demigods and anti-gods and demons! How many saints I How many pearls in how many seas! How many sources of life, languages> kings! How many possessors of divine -wisdom! O Natwk, there is no end to them.

On Translating “ Shakuntala”

why Kalidasa's classic has remained unavailable in an actable English translation for so long, but one strikes me as especially significant. Rhapsody in criticism begins very often where precision and intelligent judgment leave off, and Shakuntala has been unfortunate in receiving periodic doses of honeyed comment. Some of this has come from usually reliable sources. I ’ll give three instances. Tagore made two points about Shakuntala: first, that the play has a basically sym­ bolic structure; and, second, that the “ character” of Shakuntala as a “ girl of Nature” is more satisfying when contrasted with that of another girl of Nature, Shakes­ peare's Miranda. In the matter of symbolical interpreta­ tion, Goethe had anticipated Tagore. His lines on the play, which he wrote in a letter to Monsieur Chazy, the French Indologist, after reading the Iatter’s edition of Shakuntala, are, by modem standards, excessive; but they unerringly capture the spirit of the play: Th ere

are

m any

rea so n s

Willst du die B!uethe des fruehen, die Fruechte des spaeteren Jahres, Willst du, was reizt und entzuecht, willst du, was saettigt und nährt, Willst du den Hummel, die Erde mit einem N aman begreifen, Nenn’tch, Cakuntala, dich, und so ist alles gesagt. . . (If you desire the flowers of spring along with the fruits of autumn. If you desire everything that charms, enraptures, and feasts the soul, If you are seeking a union of heaven and earth, I give you Shakuntala, which has them all.)

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Third, the palpitating tribute of Sylvan Lévi, when in Le Théâtre Indian he reproduces imaginatively the impact of Shakuntala's first performance in the city of Ujjain dur­ ing the reign of Vikramaditya: “ Curiosity grips the spectators. Shakuntala, the daughter of an apsara and creation of Kalidasa, is all loveliness ; will the actress be able to come up to expectations and realize the ideal? She appears, dressed in simple bark which seems to hide her form but actually accentuates its beauty. The curves of her face, her dark-blue [ sic ], languorous eyes, her opu­ lent, imprisoned breasts and her delicate arms allow you to guess the beauty which her ascetic garb hides. Her posture and her gestures ravish all eyes and hearts; she speaks, and her voice is a song. The court of Vikramaditya trembles with a serene and deep emotion: a masterpiece has just entered the annals of immortality/' The play has survived all such attempts to “ spiritualise" it ; and why not?— it has a fine story line, delicious bits of comc-dy, and some of Sanskrit poetry's most sensuously memorable slokas. It also has—and without this it is nothing— the allegory. It deals with the sentiment of love, sringara rasa, and Tagore put his finger on the heart of the matter when he interpreted it as an allegory in which the fibres of naked physical passion are toughened and chastened by pain, separation, and penance into a deep, domestic, abiding, semi-spiritual love. It is a movement from kama into prema via tapasya. Both Dushyanta and Shakuntala (and through them the audience) have to learn this lesson. Dushyanta must accept the consequences of his passionate involvement after refining it with sincere re­ morse; Shakuntala must suffer and smile at grief like Patience on a monument, secure in the conviction that patient grief moves mountains, even royal ones. In order to give the effect of this allegorical pattern, Kalidasa had to alter the original Shakuntala legend (in the Adi Parva of !he Mahabharata) in two key places. The irascible sage Durvasas does not figure as a character in the legend. Why does Kalidasa introduce him? His curse on Shakuntala (because she forgets to honour him)— that

ON

TRANSLATING

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Dushyanta will forget her—is needed in order to soften the terrible harshness of the king in the legend. In the play Dushyanta is a forgetful but not cruel kin g; cruelty is destructive of the spirit of sringara, while forgetfulness is a venial sin, forgivable when the time comes for reconcilia­ tion. “ Without the curse, there would have been no separation, no ensuing remorse, and no reunion.’* Secondly, while in the original story Shakuntala waits until her son is bom to take him to the king, in the play she goes to Dushyanta in her pregnant state. In the story a disembodied divine voice compels the king to acknowledge his own son; in the play, Dushyanta’s charac­ ter is again presented in a better light, because he permits a strange pregnant girl to stay in the palace though she makes what must appear to the court the most criminal of charges against him ; he is prepared to grant the possibility of a mistake and a mix-up. He is, in fact, prepared to grant that he may be the culprit— a tremendous concession for Puru royalty! The significant alterations of the Mahabharata legend is only one aspect of Shafmntala's greatness. More signifi­ cant is the manner in which Kalidasa, in writing his play, was summing up, consciously and unconsciously, an entire dharma, a code of humane values. Shakwitala cannot be divorced from the ethical and moral tradition, and relished, as some are prone to do, on purely literary and esthetic grounds. Its meaning is rooted in the framework of Hindu ethics, and any production that does scant justice to this fact misses altogether the quality of a work of art that, for all its secular excellence, draws sustenance from the moral values that proceed from the acceptance of a “ total myth**. Here begins the translator’s first headache. Translation is often easy, traduttori traditori notwithstanding, and lite­ ral translation absurdly so ; but perplexing problems arise when a perfectly orderly set of conventions and values of one way of life has to be made perfectly orderly and com­ prehensible to readers accustomed to values often slightly, and sometimes totally different.

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Taken the scene where Mother Gautami, and Samgarava and Saradvata, the hermits of Kashyapa’s ashrama, bring the veiled Shakuntala before King Dushyanta. She is pregnant, and the hermits hope that Dushyanta, whose Kshatriyan propriety is well known, will accept her as his wife. They do not know that an irascible hermit has placed a curse on the king, making him forgetful of the immediate past; they have only Shakuntala’s word to go by, and Shakuntala, evasive at first, admits that Dushyanta married her by Gandharva rites in the ashrama. “ You look happy, hermits/* says the guard. “ I hope your news is pleasant.” Dushyanta, who is at a distance on the left of the stage and who has an eye for good looks, turns to the female guard at his side, and whispers, “ Who is that veiled lady? She stands out like a glisten­ ing bud among brown leaves." Although not exactly a risque remark, it gives the guard a chance to flatter the royal taste : “I could not say, sire,” she remarks. “ But she is very lovely.1' By this time Shakuntala has approached near enough for the king to note that her head is covered, and he realizes quickly that he has overshot the limits of Kalidasan decorum. “ Hold your tongue,” he orders. “ She may be married.” Which is not only good stage sense, but excellent Hindu sense as well. I shall have cause to refer again to this self-correcting moral mechanism in Shakuntala: it faces the translator on nearly every page, and is the most important quality he must somehow succeed in conveying to his reader. It might be helpful here to digress a little. The difference between journalistic invention and imaginative representation is clear enough: the latter is merely intelligent, the former sensible. But the difference between imaginative writing and creative writing is, because subtle, more important: the first is esthetically organic, the second esthetically and morally unified. It is a question of the difference between the titillating, entertaining writer and the elevating writer —and there is such a difference. To an audience thoroughly familiar with Sanskrit, Shakuntala is all of a piece, possessing a clean, bracing

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ethics; but to English readers the scenes and incidents which best embody the ethics can appear incongruous and even farcical if a translator goes about his job ignorantly or condescendingly. Even on the technical level, his job is not easy. In the first place, the play is full of irritating dei ex machina; stage divisions are not into acts and scenes but parts and interludes., fluid, interwoven—seven altoge­ ther; asides, whispers, soliloquies, and chantable slokas abound; good middle-class Sanskrit, “ pure" sloka Sanskrit (for the Brahmin and Kshatriya Establishment), and pidgin servants* Sanskrit (called Prakrit) all rub shoulders. Then there are naive bits of melodrama (as when Shakuntala starts crying because she has to leave the ashrama), adoles­ cent chivalry (when Dushyanta rushes out from behind the tree in order to swat the bee that has been annoying Shakuntala), and trivial bits of school-girlishness (when the two maids, Priyamvada and Anasuya, tease Shakuntala about falling in love). There is also an impossible jester called Mathavya who, in punning and wise ludicrosity, is very Shakespearean but who, to the Indian mind, is lovable chiefly because he is an insatiable bundle of gastronomical desires. Faced by such a variety of material, the translator must edit, reconcile and transmute; his job in many ways be­ comes largely a matter of transcreation. The sage who lifts his right hand and says: This is a sacred place, sir, and the stag is a sacred beast. Hunting sacred beasts is sinful. This stag is not a scrap of paper, for boys to set fire to. The very thought is sinful: a tender animal matched against your lightning-like arrows. Put the arrow back in your quiver, sir. It is meant to guard the distressed, not harm the innocent. has to be made credible; and so has the king who replies meekly, ‘‘I am sorry.*' Once that is done, the picture of a pattern of culture in which the sage can occasionally give orders to a king and get away with it is complete.

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Take other examples. The fact that the birth of a son, Bharata, to Dushyanta has already been predicted, and the birthmarks that help to reconcile the king to Shakuntala are in that sense required only for the sake of work* ing out a happy ending for the play, is not incongruous within the play’s cthical structure, however much it may appear so to a foreigner. The Indian knows in advance the legend which Kalidasa makes use of for the purposes of his “ plot” . Again, when an Indian critic interprets the play within the requirements of Hindu metaphysical theory, suggest­ ing that it has a circular development of theme beginning with santa (the peaceful hermitage in Act I), developing into sringara (love seen as rajas, the quality of passion seeking fulfillment, in Acts II-III), moving further into karuna (repudiation, seen as tamas, the quality of dark, tragic passion in Acts IV -V 1), and finally santa once more (in the Reunion Scene, the quality of sattva in Act VII), this appears perfectly plausible too, though to a mind grooved in a different cultural pattern it must surely ap­ pear farfetched and abstruse. I could go on in this fashion—expanding on Tagore’s erotic-to-domestic-love interpretation, or suggesting the antithesis posited i*i the play between the verities of ashrama life and the hypocrisies of the court, a theme dear to the creative artists of all forest civilizations—but in each case the key point to an understanding of the inter­ pretation would necessarily have to refer to the harmony that Kalidasa achieves, whatever the significance we attach to the play. Shaftutitala is a delicately balanced play, with no technical or emotional loose ends, spinning within its own moral framework like a gravity-defying gyroscope. It is a matter of the self-correcting moral mechanism again when Samgarava in Act V argues with Dushyanta to have Shakuntala lawfully accepted as his queen. This scene is a delicate one. When Mother Gautami says, “ You are aware of the exceptional circumstances of the case. She kept her love to herself; you didn't tell us either. It's difficult for 2 third person to interfere with a private arrangement,"

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the king protests, "I don't understand” . Samgarava, who despite his ashrama training is a bit of a hothead, steps forward: ‘ We don't either. You know the custom, sire. We cannot keep her in the ashrama. We know she is pure, but what will people say? A wife must stay with her husband." Sense overtakes Dushyanta: "A re you im­ plying that I'm married to her?” Samgarava cushions the shock by saying, “ You may have made a mistake, but duty comes first to a King.” Dushyanta snorts, "You’re pre­ sumptuous.” Samgarava instantly loses his head: "I do not like the tone of your voice, sire, you speak like one drunk with power.” But almost instantly he cools down and employs sarcasm: "You are no adulterer; it’s Father Kashyapa who’s to blame for giving his daughter in honour to the robber who stole her.” Surprisingly enough, the king takes all this calmly. He must follow the tradi­ tion, and play his small part in the harmonious system of courteous and moral checks which go into the making of Shakuntala. Or consider the famous, remarkably tender last scene where the king, now in his senses, recognizes Shakuntala as she moves slowly towards him. In Laurence Binyon’s version published in London in 1920, which is a condensed paraphrase in iambic pentameter, the finest lyrical phrases are cut and the remainder turns into a sloppily sentimen­ tal encounter: Mother, who is this man? He embraced me and called me his son. sh an ku tala. O my heart I is it my lord indeed? k in g . O my beloved! sh aku n tala . Victory! Victory ! (her voice breaks) k in g . Tears choke the words that you would greet me with. I have found you. I have found you. A ll is won. bharata. Who is he, mother ? sh aku n tala. Ask of Fate, my child. k in g . O ease your soul, Love, of its bitterness. My mind was darkened, when I knew you not. sh a ku n ta la. Rise, husband, noble husband.. . . bh arata.

Binyon missed the point. A husband falling at the feet of his wife communicates an experience of extraordinary poignance to an Indian. Shakuntala’s “ Ask of Fate, my child” suggests much more than just that in Sanskrit: it involves the idea of Karma and of the stars influencing human life. To communicate this I translated it a s: “ My son, a star is dancing!” The second problem is the question of style. Even if Binyon's English is unobjectionable, his style fails to con­ vey the Indian “ spirit” . There have been other translators too, and among them many Indians, and far too often a succulent silliness has often resulted from an overly meti­ culous attention to the Sanskrit. Take the well-known love scene. I am afraid it is in many ways similar, so far as amorous technique goes, to what Indian movie moguls find excellent for box-office success: coyness, rapid and irrepressible eye movements, and an unfulfilled clinch. The translator has to make all this appear natural, for to a Sanskrit-knowing and tradition-conscious audience it is not corny at a ll; and I do not see how this is possible if Sbakuntala, seeing her friends leave, exclaims (in the P. K. Roy version) : “ H ow ! Gone indeed! ” The king is at her side, however, and murmurs, “ A w ay with anxiety. This person, the server, stands indeed by your side. Shall I work the lotus-leaf-fan whose breeze is moist with particles of water that allay lassitude; or, O thou, withthighs-like-the-outer-edge of-the-palm- of-the-hand, h a v i n g placed your lotus-red feet in my lap, shall I press them as is agreeable to you ? ” Shakuntala, perturbed by the ungrammatical sweet nothings of this hyphenated ardour, replies, ' 1 shall not cause this self of mine to offend against those that deserve respect/' and wants to get up and leave. “ O fair one,” continues the chivalrous Dushyanta, “ the day is not yet extinguished, and this your condition. Having left the bed of flowers in which lotus-leaves serve to cover up the breasts how can you go out in the sun with your limbs delicate through suffering ? ” He stops her. Shakuntala appeals to his family honour. “ O descendant of Puru,”

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she implores, “ respect decorum. Though smitten by love, I cannot command myself/’ But the king is adamant. “ O timid one, off with respect for your superiors. Having known of you, his worship, the lord of anchorites, who is aware of the shastras, will not take offence at it. Besides, several daughters of royal sages are as married by the Gandharva rites and welcomed by their fathers/' In spite of the fact that he calls Father Kashyapa "his worship/' Shakuntala will not relent. “ Do release me. I will yet again honour my friends." And the king says, “ Well, I will release/’ “ When ? " asks Shakuntala. The king puts all he has in the speech that follows : “ Mean­ while, O fair one, as is done of the fresh flower by the bee, the flavour of your tender and untouched lower lip is being gently tasted by me longing for a sip.” This is nonsense, for he is only about to begin to kiss her when a voice offstage announces that it is time for good girls to go to bed. Shakuntala leaves. The same scene can be better translated without violat­ ing its Endianness." An excellent literal version, such as the one from which 1 have quoted, sounds like a ghastly parody, and reading it becomes a comical experience. Binyon attempted to get away from such unimaginative jejuneness. But I cannot imagine a king, however Edwardian, uttering true love in metronomic verse pattern: When, like the bee on the just-opened bud, I have tasted that untasted sweet, your Ups, And for one heavenly moment have assuaged The thirst that parches me, Shakuntala! Such thirst passeth understanding, and it is small wonder that Shakuntala responds so tardily to passion expressed in mealy prose and gelatin verse I Neither method will do the trick. Both believe that the Sanskrit “ flavour” needs to be preserved, and that English can be “ exotified” enough to do this. This halfway house is a dream castle. The thing to do is to attempt to pre­ serve not the Sanskrit language but the Hindu tradition

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which it enshrines; in fact, I would suggest that the best way to translate Shakuntala is to have the translation as far removed from the coils of Sanskrit as possible. Sanskrit is an extremely disciplined yet intricate and metaphorical weapon in Kalidasa's hands, resembling an alpana pattern. Within the strict outlines, the ascetic grammar, the exact­ ing sloka form, there is amazing virtuosity of idea, image, and metaphor. What is required of the translator is that he be able to comprehend the tightness of the pattern and communicate it rather than the dazzling displays of lin­ guistic and imaginative skill. These are incommunicable; the history of translation is littered with the debris of incommunicables. Quoting Sanskrit critics, Professor Ingalls explains how poetry is supposed to possess three kinds of dhvani (or "overtone” ). Every word, in fact, has three kinds of radiating meaning. "Ganges” by itself means just a holy river in India, but the moment the word is used in context (such as "a village on the Ganges” ), the second meaning— a village on the bank of the Ganges— comes into operation; the word means more than itself. But there is a third meaning too; the word “ Ganges” associated with a village on its bank suggests coolness and holiness. “ Our difference from the Sanskrit poets really comes down simply to this : we rely on the magic of the spoken tongue to bring about these sudden expansions of the mind, whereas the Sanskrit poet has chosen to use linguistic and rhetorical devices that are more controllable and more consciously rational.” The translator, in other words, has one major task to perform : he must divine, discover, or guess the effect Kalidasa was trying to create, and then attempt to recreate it with the resources of the English language. A t the same tine, he could profitably keep in mind the system so beloved of the New Critics : associations of ideas and clusters of images. In the first Act, symbols of fertile feminine beauty recur: deer, flowers, the spring creeper, the mango tree, and a bee. “ The vine has budded prematurely,” explains Robert Stein, “ symbolising Shakun-

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tala's entry into womanhood. The creeper has chosen a mate— the mango tree which will symbolise the stable and true aspect of Dushyanta’s character." The third Act repeats the lotus symbol, "a self-sustaining flower which grows from filth/’ thereby suggesting the all-consuming, destructive, romantic love, which will lead directly to the curse of non-recognition.” In the fourth Act, the central symbol is the ritual fire, representing romantic love and also the god Agni, “ the dispeller of night," dispeller of ignorance and confusion, foreshadowing the final recognition of Shakuntala. Shakuntala’s impending motherhood is suggested by the pregnant doe, and by the trees bringing forth fine garments and jewellery for her to wear. The song heard by the king in the fifth Act—about a mango tree, a bee, and a lotus— refers the audience back to the initial meeting of the two lovers. Later, there arc references to a sterile spring, because the king has ordered that there be no celebration on account of his grief. And so on, till the final Act, with its clear, white light of recognition, the gold peak and the images of motherhood introduced as we meet Kashyapa and Aditi, the parents of the gods. The play is completed in the santa rasa, “ there is absence of passion, perfect illumina­ tion, blissful consciousness and complete concentration of attention" (as laid down in the Sahitya-Darpana, The Mirror of Art.) "And may I be released from further lives."