To translate is to desecrate generatively; as much, if not more, is found as is lost. The gifted translator makes a new object while the sincere ones wag their tail in allegiance to the text. If we wish to see translation as an assured and not a parasitic art, then we must get comfortable with audacity being superior to sincerity.
Sure, Coleman Barks stripped Rumi’s words of their Islamic context in his translations. You must come across this line, if not in an Imtiaz Ali film, then tattooed somewhere on a body or a home page: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.”
The words Rumi used were iman, or religion, and kufr, or infidelity, that Barks—who neither read nor understood Farsi, the language in which Rumi wrote—interprets as “rightdoing” and “wrongdoing” respectively, turning a religious ethic into a secular morality. What is lost is fidelity. What is gained is poetry. Jawid Mojaddedi, who is attempting a more accurate translation, includes footnotes in his translations. Footnotes! If anything could make a poem go limp, it is this.
The sensitive translator wields audacity while leaning on the original, a yearning that pulls them in two directions, not merely one, as it does with Barks. For example, when Aijaz Ahmad was editing Ghazals of Ghalib, he selected 37 ghazals and not all of the ghazal’s shers (couplets), foraging maybe five or six shers a ghazal. Then, writing a literal translation of them, he gave this text to a few American poets—Adrienne Rich, William Stafford, William Hunt, David Ray, W.S. Merwin—to work on, to turn his translation into poetry. Some would steer closer to the translation, “without cluttering their versions with archaisms… keeping clear of the trite”, while others wandered away. Ahmad was okay with that: “That, I think, is a risk in poetry, and one of its chief glories”.
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No risk, no glory, as trite as it is true. Jerry Pinto and Shanta Gokhale’s translation of Tukaram’s abhangs (a form of devotional poetry in praise of Pandurang), for example, is so singularly anchored to Tukaram’s original words that even the slight, naughty detours feel like a lunge on a leash. Their translations, with a few metaphysical scorches of heat, often feel clumsy: some rhyme, some do not, sometimes Pinto’s translations are so unclear you need Gokhale’s more grounded interpretation to bring you back. With neither rigour nor recklessness, it is as if the translations are in limbo, not quite poetry, not not-poetry.
In trying to retain a devotion to Pandurang, on whom Tukaram waxed eloquent, seeing him mothering the god, as the god mothers him, they refused to stray into the poetic possibilities. They did not want to make meaning, merely restore it. The abhangs themselves are not spectacularly original in what they are saying. It is their presentation that is succulent.
Punctures and purrs of sound
True, there is something fundamentally foolhardy about translating across languages, especially poetry, which is as much style as substance, as much about what is being said as how it is being said, how it is using the punctures and purrs of sound, the doubleness of meaning, to create an “affect”—the way the body responds, pre-reason.
It could be the tradition of poetry itself; how, as Aijaz Ahmad notes, “the movement in Urdu poetry is always away from concreteness. Meaning is not expressed or stated; it is signified… [with an] abundance and variety of lyrical effects, verbal complexity, and metaphorical abstraction.” Or it could be the way a language sings; as Shanta Gokhale notes, “[T]he consonants in English resist flow; the open vowels of seventeenth-century Marathi are made for fluidity.”
Cover of the Hanuman Chalisa translated by Vikram Seth
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In his translation of the Hanuman Chalisa, Vikram Seth wants to retain two things—the rhythm of the sentence and the rhyming scheme—to “convey the incantatory pleasure”. If only language worked so neatly; a poet should know better. A sentence spoken in a language is loaded with sounds, the connotation of those sounds and their permutations, the memories associated with them, all of it is lodged in the throw of syllables, some of which are incompatible with English—like the retroflex, the act of curling your tongue and expelling air, producing soupier or sharper sounds. How to uproot it and replant it in an English garden, hoping it will bloom?
The Hanuman Chalisa held a strange position in my growing years. Every evening, my brother and I would be called to perform it—rattle it aloud, trip along the syllables like skipping stones, tak-ta tak-ta, what Seth recognises as the “falling rhythm” of the poem. There were passages I could not wait to arrive at because they felt like the tongue tripping; how we would have to stretch “Kripa karahu gurudev ki naee” because we made “karahu” into “karu” and “gurudev” into “dev” and, so to fill that excess space, yawned some consonants.
It was phonetic play, a part of which Seth is trying to replicate, at least in its rhymes—what Vivek Narayanan correctly points out (in the review titled “Sonic pathways”, published in Frontline on August 23, 2024), by copping out, by choosing “-ing” and “-tion” words to rhyme.
Why translate the Hanuman Chalisa?
The question lingers, why translate the Hanuman Chalisa? A flat text of devotion, its joy lies in its lilting performance: it is what Narayanan calls a “sonic organism”. How do you translate EDM (electronic dance music)? The question quickly flips on itself, rephrased as “Why translate EDM?”
If we were to read Seth’s translation as its own poetic being, divorced from the source text, it would not suffice because it is constantly looking over its shoulder. It never strays.
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Leaving aside the milquetoast liberal values at play here, where the text is useful is in deepening our attention to the original Hanuman Chalisa. Seth, an accomplished poet himself, is deeply sensitive to sounds, and his pointing our attention to the repeated nasal sounds in the 23rd chaupai (quatrain verse using a metre of four syllables)—“teeno(n) loka haa(n)ka te(n) kaa(n)pai—helps retrieve the text from what it sounds like, in a rushed elocution, “teeno lok haakate kaape”. Similarly, the retroflex in the 36th chaupai—sankaTa kTai miTai saba peeraa—is fascinating, given that these retroflex sounds, found only in about a fifth of the world’s languages, are present in almost every Indian language.
In fact, Peggy Mohan notes that the presence of the retroflex sound in Sanskrit and other linguistic descendants of it—like Awadhi, in which the Hanuman Chalisa is written—and not in any other Indo-Aryan language might point to the influence of Dravidian languages on Sanskrit as it entered the Indian subcontinent. English, however, is barren of this sound.
This kind of attention, to me, feels more capable of doing what Seth is after: “acquainting or reacquainting people with a magical and joyful work”. Maybe some things do not need another language. We would like to think of languages as a bridge, but not all bridges can hold the weight of what they must ferry across. Would you rather sit among the debris or sit by the banks?
Prathyush Parasuraman is a writer and critic who writes across publications, both print and online.
