(A Short) Song of Myself

There are things I've failed to link to and - by some miracle, since I seem to be blogging again - here are a couple of things I've been doing.

Some time in the summer, Janice Pariat asked me to send her some poems, there: irreverence, so she could curate six poets' works for Poetry at Sangam's July issue. Because I haven't really been writing much, it was a struggle to find anything that was unpublished, much less truly irreverent. I sent her something anyway, and here they are: 'Untitled' and 'Three False Starts and a Conclusion'.

Earlier even, in the year, I was one of the poets participating in the Poets Translating Poets marathon that the Goethe Institut had been doing since 2015. In February, the carnival made a pit stop in Hyderabad, bringing German poets Sylvia Geist and Tom Schulz, as well as Jeet Thayil (Hyderabad was where the anglophone English poets were going to meet the German poets). 

We worked for four days translating each others' poems and it was intense and for me a little bit scary, never having translated anything before. But as the days went on, it was also very energising.*

Once that part was over and the readings happened at Kala Ghoda in Feb, it all subsided for a bit, though we knew there was more in the pipeline.

That happens now. Since the summer, poets have been travelling to Germany, to literature festivals where they read with the poets they've translated and been translated by.

This is one of the four readings I'll be doing in Germany is September. There are others in Dresden, Leipzig, and - after Berlin - Hamburg.**

(All things considered, I've stretched out a very short song into a long one.)

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*In my usual fashion, I assumed this was a signal that I would be unusually productive in my own writing. I never learn.

**Needless to say, if any one reading this is going to be in Germany between the 14th and the 23rd of Sept, mail me! 

At Kala Ghoda 5th and 6th Feb

I'll be at Kala Ghoda for the annual Arts and Literature Festival. The full programme is up at the KGAF site. My sessions as follows:

On the 5th, from 5-9.15pm, 18 poets (The Hope Street Poets!) will read at The refurbished David Sassoon Library. There will be three sessions of 75 minutes each, with six poets reading in each session. A 15 minute break after sessions 1 & 2.

In order:

Panel 1 | 5 - 6:15 pm

Adil Jussawalla

Sridala Swami

Gerson da Cunha

Jane Bhandari

Priya Sarukkai Chabria

K Srilata

Panel 2 | 6:30 - 7:45 pm

Arundhathi Subramaniam

Gieve Patel

Ranjit Hoskote

Anupama Raju

Menka Shivdasani

Sampurna Chattarji

Panel 3 | 8 - 9:15 pm

Mustansir Dalvi

Meena Kandasamy

Anju Makhija

Anand Thakore

Dominic Alapat

Mani Rao

On the 6th, Thursday, The Tarq Salon: Translation from 6.15-7.15pm. Participants are Arunava Sinha, K. Srilata, R. Sivapriya. I will moderate.

Hope to see some of you!

Almost Island, late 2012

Having just noticed that Almost Island has a new issue up, I feel the year has got off to a very good start. Anu almost-apology you might detect in the editorial should be set aside because there may not be many things, but what things there are, are a feast in themselves.

Adil Jussawalla in a 45 page conversation wiht Vivek Narayanan and Sharmistha Mohanty, and László Krasznahorkai  in a shorter but no less illuminating conversation with Sharmistha Mohanty and Kabir Mohanty.

*

I am envious of my friends who have proper reading diaries and know exactly what (and how much of what) they have read in any given month. It's something I ought to have done but never, ever have in all my life.

Last year, I resolved to learn poetry and failed unspectacularly at it. What can I say? No ambition, that's me.

This year's resolve to at least make a note of what I've read, watched and listened to seems more doable and it gives me a great feeling of achievement when I see the page filling up with stuff.

Of course, this makes no sense unless I also say a little bit about what I thought of all the things I've been reading/watching etc., but whether I'll post about it remains to be seen.

This is a good time to remind myself that I've had Bela Tarr's Satantango, based on László Krasznahorkai's book, for over a year now and still haven't watched it.

Review: Selected Poems of Subramania Bharati

Last week in The Sunday Guardian, my review of Usha Rajagopalan's flawed translations of Subramania Bharati's poems.

Selected Poems: Subramania Bharati

Translated by Usha Rajagopalan

Hachette India. Pp 151. Rs 350.

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About a century ago, two poets were writing transformative verse in languages other than English. In their own ways, these two poets changed the way people read and spoke about poetry. One was Rainer Maria Rilke and the other was Subramania Bharati. While Rilke’s poetry has been translated into English many times, it’s incredibly hard to find an English translation of Bharati’s work.

As a child growing up outside Tamil Nadu but immersed in Carnatic music, I have always had a frustrating relationship with Bharatiyar’s poetry: I know it only through song, both classical and filmic but I cannot read his poetry off the page and have always needed someone to translate his verse for me.

It was with delight, therefore, that I began Usha Rajagopalan’s translation of Bharati’s verse. It seemed to me a necessary project, to bring this poet who sang of ships and minerals as joyfully as he sang about Krishna and Shakti, to the notice of the Anglophone world. I was even more thrilled to read that Rajagopalan’s journey through his work also began via song.

It helps that this is a bilingual edition as, I think, all translated poetry should be. Unfortunately, this is as far as the good news goes. The risk in a bilingual edition of course is that for those who can read the source language, the shortcomings in the translation are inescapable and apparent. Every translating decision is laid bare on the page and the translator’s only defence – if it can be called that – lies in an Introduction.

This translation of Bharati’s poetry does not have an Introduction. It has a list of important dates and an account of his life that very briefly outlines his engagement with the Independence movement, his political writing, his subsequent escape from British India and his life as an ardent spiritualist-nationalist. But there is nothing from Rajagopalan on what her approach to translating his work was or how she engaged with the very different kinds of poetry he wrote: the spiritual/love poems and the rousing nationalist verse.

Not all translators need be scholars or even be in a position to contextualise a poet’s work and place it in the broader framework of the times in which s/he lived. The Selected Poetry of Rilke translated by Stephen Mitchell, for instance, has a comprehensive and intelligent Introduction by the American poet Robert Hass. If it was beyond Rajagopalan to write an Introduction that examines Bharati’s poetry with the care it deserves, surely someone else could have been commissioned to write one?

For a reader who is not already familiar with Bharati’s verse, this plunge into the deep end of his work is very disorientating: the first poem is an invocation, which is all well and good. It is followed by a poem that Rajagopalan titles ‘A Special Song’ but in the Tamil is called ‘Ammakannu Paatu’. Even for someone whose Tamil is as workaday as mine is, it is apparent that ‘Ammakannu’ is a term of endearment and ‘Special’ in no way conveys the tenderness and affection of the title in Tamil. The poem itself is a barrage of trochees that assault the ear: The hand opens a lock,/Wisdom opens the mind./ Melody makes a song/A woman makes a home happy. For a poem that is called ‘Song’, it is singularly unmusical.

There are many such instances through the book and it would be unnecessarily cruel to draw attention to more of them. Let us admit that poetry is not easy to translate. When it is done well, it is a cause for celebration.

But when a translation of poetry does not read or sound like poetry, I would imagine that those involved in the project would do anything rather than put the work out into the public domain. They could, for instance, have had two translators: one who knew the source language well and the other who knew the mechanics of poetry in the target language well.

Here for instance, is Stephen Mitchell translating Rilke:

You, Beloved, who are all

the gardens I have ever gazed at,

longing.

            (‘You Who Never Arrived’ from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke)

And here is Usha Rajagopalan translating Bharati:

If I can forget Kannan’s face,

What use having eyes at all?

            (‘Kannan, My Lover – I’)

Someone who knows nothing about Subramania Bharati, who cannot even struggle through the Tamil on the page or have someone read aloud the original Tamil so they can absorb the beauty and power of the sound – if not the sense – of the poetry; someone whose first and only encounter with one of 20^th century’s greatest poets is through this translation is absolutely sure to ask what the fuss is about.

Bharatiyar’s poetry is in no danger of being forgotten in his native land. It is a great pity that our definition of ‘native land’ must be more narrow and parochial than his own expansive one, at least until a better translation replaces this one.

After that evening, tonight

The whole day feels like it's been wasted. I sat around, ate,  smiled when I didn't feel like smiling, dressed up, waited. Then we read when we should have performed and were rewarded most unjustly for it.

I feel so annoyed and restless. I feel like throwing things. Instead, I am reading If not, Winter.

Here's Carson on marks - specifically brackets - scattered through the text, and other things:

I emphasise the difference between brackets and no brackets because it will affect your reading experience, if you allow it. Brackets are exciting. Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp - brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure.

[...]*

Then she talks about how some fragments of Sappho survive because lines have been quoted by other writers of the time. But these quotations, decontextualised to suit the purpose of the writer, are tantalising and tell us nearly nothing of what the verse itself might have been. Such as this line found in Appolonios Dyskolos' On Conjunctions: 'Do I still long for my virginity?'

~~~


Give a thought, those of you who quote indiscriminately and because you like the jewel and can't be bothered to keep the setting; some day, some scholar will reconstruct someone else's work from your worthless one.

~~~

I have known for some time now that my eyes are not what they used to be. I am fairly certain I need reading glasses but since that would mean bifocals, I just prefer to take the damn glasses off and read. Typing these quotations now** I realised I was doing what we laughed at our history teacher for doing back in Class 8: I put my glasses on and removed them a second later only to need them back on immediately after. I am glad there were no children in front of me giggling into their notebooks, though that day can also not be far behind.

~~~

For all these reasons, I need Carson. Or maybe I mean, I need Sappho.

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* Otherwise known as 'a free space of imaginal adventure'. Also, brackets are exciting.

** Some Carson scholar some day is bound to curse me for being so heedless of the needs of posterity.
 

Review: I, Lalla

My review of Ranjit Hoskoté's translations of Lal Ded in The Sunday Guardian last Sunday.

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I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Děd

Translated by Ranjit Hoskoté

Penguin India, 2011. Pp. 246. Rs. 450

*

The last time I checked, my TV had at least five channels oriented to religious discourse and bhajans. Hoardings advertising yoga camps or talks by gurus of all kinds assault our eyes every day. It seems to me that somewhere in the last half century, bhakti has become less the challenge to authority we have come to believe it is and more the default mode of engaging with religion, philosophy and spirituality. In such a context, I can’t but ask myself what the role of bhakti poetry is in contemporary South Asia.

Ranjit Hoskoté’s I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Děd goes some way toward answering or soothing my uncertainties. Hoskoté’s translations of the vŒkhs of the Kashmiri poet known variously as Lal Děd, Lalleshwari, Lal- ‘Œrifa and Lalla, has been two decades in the making and is a work of both scholarly depth and poetic exactness. His 77 page Introduction sets the context for his chosen 146 of the 258 vŒkhs attributed to Lalla, and is a fascinating essay in its own right.

Hoskoté’s thesis moves along interesting lines: he sees Lalla as not quite the bhakti poet that anthologists and literary historians claim her to be. He would like to see her, instead, as a poet ‘whose ideas straddled the domains of Kashmir êaivism, Tantra, Yoga and YogŒcŒra Buddhism, and who appears to have been socially acquainted with the ideas and practices of the Sufis’. (xix). What Hoskoté does is to closely argue for a figure whose biography contains the sketchiest details, but whose words demonstrate the variety and richness of Kashmir’s intellectual and social heritage of the 14^th century CE. In contemporary terms, his introduction serves to place Lalla in a tradition that stands against the Vedantic mainstream.

That little is known of Lalla is not so much a loss as a freedom. The appropriation of Lalla began, in Hoskoté’s account, in the 1980’s, where both Kashmiri Pandit and Kashmiri Muslim scholars claimed Lalla for their own and attempted to purge her verse of what they saw as interpolations. Perhaps, given the turbulent times that the 80’s inaugurated, this is no coincidence.

Hoskoté declines to look for a pristine Lalla, opting instead, to see the vŒkhs (collected from various sources; the account of what these sources are make for engrossing reading) as a product of what he calls a ‘contributive lineage’. ‘Lalla, to me, is not the person who composed these vŒkhs; rather, she is the person who emerges from these vŒkhs’, Hoskoté says.

Yet, reading the vŒkhs themselves, shorn of context, can be a baffling and perplexing experience. Some of them fall clearly within a tradition that is familiar to readers of bhakti poetry and thus more accessible – VŒkh 13, for instance, gestures to the familiar idea of the seeker as lover and the sought as Friend, and the quest returning to the point of departure:

Love-mad, I, Lalla, started out,

spent days and nights on the trail.

Circling back, I found the teacher in my own house.

What brilliant luck, I said, and hugged him.

Other vŒkhs are more unyielding and require a context that Hoskoté provides in the notes to each vŒkh at the end of the book. This makes the book an experience akin, if not to wrestling with the Arden Shakespeare editions, with its wealth of annotations at the bottom of the page, then to reading the notes to The Wasteland, which provide a much-needed way into the text.

It is not impossible to read and experience these verses by themselves; but I would suggest that the notes enrich the text with their exposition and are crucial in understanding the philosophical traditions that Lalla claimed for her own.

 VŒkh 103, for instance:

Pressed in winter’s paws, running water hardens into ice

or powders into snow. Three different states

but the sun of wisdom thaws them down to one.

The world, all hands on board, has sunk without trace in Shiva!

 It is possible to read the exquisitely compressed imagery as the dissolution of self into the divine; but knowledge of Kashmir êaivism would add nuance to the vŒkh and separate it from the all-too-common tendency toward a new-age blurring of all philosophies into one indistinguishable mess.

Indeed, if Hoskoté did nothing else with these translations, it would be enough that he has insisted upon restoring complexity to the personality of Lal Děd and her words; unsurprisingly, that is not enough for Hoskoté, who has also managed to make Lalla’s words shine through the filter of his own considerable poetic skill.

If no other lines remain, for me the beginning of vŒkh 28 will: Remove from my heart’s dove-cote, Father/ the ache for too-far skies­, Lalla says, but it could have been something Hoskoté himself wrote.

Kolatkar once said to Arvind Krishna Mehrotra that ‘he was not done with a translation until he made it look like a poem by Arun Kolatkar’ (AKM, Introduction, The Boatride & other poems, Arun Kolatkar). Hoskoté doesn’t go quite so far, but his stamp is clear upon the continuum that is Lalla’s verse.

C. Rajagopalachari memorably said, in his introductory comments to the Bhaja Govindam as sung by M. S. Subbalakshmi:

‘When wisdom is integrated with life and issues out in action, it becomes bhakti. Knowledge, when it becomes fully mature is bhakti. If it does not get transformed into bhakti, such knowledge is useless tinsel. To believe that jnana and bhakti, knowledge and devotion are different from each other, is ignorance.’

Perhaps Hoskoté’s approach, in light of Rajaji’s remarks, is the answer to the question of bhakti as the default mode of approaching the divine in today’s world: to complicate the discourse with genuinely intellectual iterations of bhakti. Hoskoté’s translations certainly pose a challenge, inflected as they are with deep scholarship and political awareness.

Arun Kolatkar: 'Fire'

Fire

Arun Kolatkar

This fire            This one laughing          This is yet another

What shall I do with it               Where shall I keep it

Shall I   set it     to the house      to the door       to the world

What will it cook          Where will it spread

This torch         where shall I throw it

This fire            must be obeyed

This fire            wear it on your head

Become a torch            dance

 

Come, let’s play

Light my cigarette

Fire my engine

Leaven my bread

Cook my stew

Condense my soul

Boil my blood

Bend my steel

Melt my gold

Bake my brick

Crackle my mustard

Burn my corpse

Fling my arrows

Helter skelter

This fire            This one laughing          This is yet another

I am the toppling Ravana           I am charcoal       I am charcoal

This is Dussera

 

This fire            Flames flames               This bonfire

Broken window            I’m a smashed door      This bonfire

This bonfire             This bonfire

Limping chair              I’m a table on crutches      This bonfire

            This bonfire              This bonfire

 

Running fence          I’m a beam escaping          This bonfire

            This bonfire             This bonfire

Flying cupboard            I’m a warehouse being looted               This

bonfire         This bonfire           This bonfire

 

this world without tunnels          This house of wax

Helpless   Helpless   Fire engines   Sandbuckets   Water tanks

 

You are fire      I’m ash

You are today     I’m cash

You are yesterday        You are fire      You are tomorrow

You are fire      You are now    You are before      You are after

You are flower I’m stalk

 

You are matchhead       I’m matchstick

 You are sacred fire      I’m holy man

You are fire         Ask      Take

I’m smoke        I’m smoke        I’m smoke

 

I am myself sacrificial fire          I am the host       I am the altar

            I am the priest      I am the fire           I am the sacrifice

The fire itself         is ignorant

I sacrifice          I sacrifice          I sacrifice

 

Your mane will catch fire           Be careful

Your tail will burn         Take care

Come my lion        Make a compromise

Jump         through        this burning hoop

From here to there        and again          from there to here

This fire shaped like a zero        This freedom to burn     is daily

This whole circus      is you alone

 

Rajabai Tower       The Gateway    The Taj

The Majestic Hotel

These buildings      beasts          foxes      tigers      wild boars

This jungle        molded        this clear         darkness

These vultures

 

You are hearth       neighbouring            fire

Scatter       the city        make them wait           

Rajabai Tower       The Gateway    The Taj

The Majestic Hotel    Churchgate    Station

The Town Hall       The Victoria Terminus         The Regal

            The Eros

Detached       Immobile

Keep burning       please       for my sake

Keep       me     warm

Terrify          this city

Otherwise    these buildings   will tear me   and devour me

This city       stays as is    because of you    or else    or else

 

Terrorize         the city         the museum

Be        a neighbour.

 

[Translated from Marathi by Dilip Chitre and Mick Fedullo]

Chandrabhaga 13

Thanks, Rahul!

From the Song

Mani Rao's translations (we need to find another word here) of the Bhagavad Gita are here. Of course, these are only tiny portions of two chapters, but I can't wait to read more.

On fidelity (in translations?), Mani says:

Your partner is faithful to you, it is conventional, she is obedient, you can’t complain. Does she love you? What if she had the freedom to betray and nothing to lose? Your partner is unfaithful. Does she pity you, or think you so stupid you don’t know it? Her attention is elsewhere when you speak. Can you be with someone who is not with you?
Love is problematic when faithless.
Fidelity is a drag when loveless.
Love as translation.
After all these years my love, you dare tell me that you merely did what I said?

But the whole thing here. Also her essay, 'Repetitiveness in Gita Translation'.

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And while I'm linking to her recent work, more Mani Rao, from the latest issue of Almost Island [you should check the whole issue out].