JAST © 2015 M.U.C.Women’s College, Burdwan ISSN 2395-4353 -a peer reviewed multidisciplinary research journal Vol.-01, Issue- 01

Translation as Transcreation: A Study of Selected Poems of

Joyanta Dangar Department of English M.U.C. Women’s College, Burdwan West , E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract: Jibanananda Das, a poet of the post-Tagore era in Bengal, composed volumes of poetry, from which some representative poems such as “I have seen the face of Bengal,” “Banalata ,” and “One Day Eight Years Ago” have been selected for the present study. To capture the “harmonic cadences” arising from employment of different types of rhyme and figures of speech in Das’s poetry is a challenge for his translators. Besides, considerations of form and the art of conveying Das’s sense of when the target audience is non- Indian are equally challenging. However, some gains in the form of transcreation may be considered compensations for inevitable losses incurred in course of translation.

Key words: Mosaic rhyme, hyperbaton, “ambiguity,” target reader, linguistic equivalence, untranslatability, sense of history

The act of translation is voluntary, that is the material has been chosen by the translator himself and the prime mover is to recreate it. —Meenakshi Mukherjee, “Transposition of Culture.” Cygnus 2: 2(1981)

Jibanananda Das (1899-1954) was a modern Bengali poet writing in the twentieth century. Acknowledged as the leading poet of the post-Tagore era, Das wrote ceaselessly, but only seven volumes of his poetry were published during his lifetime. An introvert, he never came to the limelight: one of his contemporary poets, Buddhadeb Bose called him the “loneliest of poets.” Among major collections of his poetry are Beautiful Bengal (Rupasi Bangla; 1934, Pub. 1957), The Grey Manuscript (Dhusar Pandulipi; 1936), (1942), and The Great Universe (Mahaprithivi; 1944). And the common subjects of his poetry are nature, beauty, death, history as well as contemporaneity. On the one hand, Das’s poetry bears the marks of Keatsian sensibility: his poetry is a riot of colours, sounds, perfumes, and tastes. On the other, he is said to have “inducted the tortured sensibilities of modernity into ” (Das: Introduction I). In 1955 the Award was posthumously conferred on him for his Best Poems (Shreshtha Kabita). Unfortunately, Das lost his life in a tramcar accident: some claim it to be a suicide. Among the major translators of Jibanananda Das are Clinton B. Seely, Joe Winter, Martin Kirkman, , Sukanta Chaudhuri et al. Das’s unfamiliar poetic diction, choice of words, and thematic preferences are both enticing and baffling to the readers and translators as well. In the present study, I have selected some representative poems of Jibanananda Das—such as “I have seen the face of Bengal,” “Banalata Sen,” “One Day Eight Years Ago”—rendered into English from original Bengali by some translators of recent times, including myself, and seek to explore how the common difficulties encountered by a translator of Das’s poetry ultimately paves the way for transcreation. [Article History: Received on 25.03.2015 , Accepted on 12.05.2015] [17] Translation as Transcreation: A Study of Selected Poems of Jibanananda Das Author: J. Dangar Maintaining the Rhyme Scheme Much of the charm of Jibanananda Das’s poems rests on rhyme scheme. Maintaining the original rhyme scheme deems almost impossible, and in a likely way most of his translators avoid the trouble of maintaining the rhyme scheme. But I believe that a translator should achieve “harmonic cadences,” and write in a “sweet and even style as to ravish the reader’s ear and intellect,” to use the words of George Steiner (263). Sincere efforts might be made to recapture the effect of his rhyming by use of (often imperfect) rhyme, internal rhyme, alliteration and assonance, and so on. As for the rhyme scheme in “Banalata Sen,” every sextain involves alternate rhymes in the first four lines followed by two rhymed lines. Here is the first stanza of “Banalata Sen” as rendered into English by Amitabha Mukherjee: A thousand years I have walked these paths, From the harbour at Malacca in the dark of night To the straits of Ceylon at glimmer of dawn. Much have I travelled— The grey world of -Bimbisara, Further yet, The dark city of Vidharbha; Around me life foams its stormy breath. Weary of soul, I found a moment's respite in her presence— She: Banalata Sen of Natore. (1-11)

In fact, Mr Mukherjee’s rendering of “Banalata Sen” is an instance of sincere free-verse translation, but it sacrifices the original “harmonic cadences” arising from the rhyme scheme, the alliterations (e.g. “path hatitechhi prithibir pathe” in the first line in original Bengali), rhymed phrases or mosaic rhymes (e.g. “chul tar kabekar andhakar Bidishar . . .” in the seventh line), the medial external rhyme (“Anek ghurechhi ami” in the second line rhyming with “Sekhane chhilam ami” in the third line), etc. In my translation of “One Day Eight Years Ago,” efforts have been made to maintain the effect of original rhyme scheme:

He has been, as I overhear, Taken to the morgue over there. Last night in April’s darkness When the crescent moon had set in the pale sky He had the desire to die. (Dangar 1-5)

But a translator’s obsession with rhyme sometimes overrides the original. For example, the phrase “After day’s toil” has been superadded for the sake of rhyme: “After day’s toil / Beside him slept the bride and the baby, too. / There was love and hope as well.” Does it amount to some violence offered to the sanctity of the original? Or, would it be considered an act of transcreation?

Reproduction of Dislocated Diction

Das’s poetry verges on the language of unconscious. Diction of his poetry is more often than not dislocated and fractured. In fact, he was influenced by the surrealist tradition: at times, the unconscious mind floods his poetry. Among the chief devices that allow us to dislocate the hard bound SVO structure of English prose is hyperbaton. And frequent use of hyperbaton helps the translator reproduce the spontaneous overflow of unconscious in Das’s poetry. “Much have I travelled—/ The grey world of Ashoka-Bimbisar” is an instance from

JAST-2015, Vol.-01, Issue-01 [18] JAST-a peer reviewed multidisciplinary research journal Vol.-01, Issue-01 Mukherjee’s rendering of “Banalata Sen” (4-5). A similar method has been adopted in “One Day Eight Years Ago” also:

Away from blood and pus one time run The flies to the sunshine . . . Many a time have I seen the flying insects Play in streams of golden sun. (Dangar 32-35)

Translating the Metaphors Let’s, now, consider the problems of translating metaphors in Das’s poetry. It might be a problem because a metaphor often involves “ambiguity” in the Empsonian sense. William Empson in his Seven Types of Ambiguity holds that “metaphor is the synthesis of several units of observation into one commanding image; it is the expression of a complex idea, not by analysis, nor by direct statement, but by a sudden perception of an objective relation” (2). He further asserts that presence of ambiguity in poetry leads to “richness and heightening of effect,” and that “the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry” (3). “In a translation process it is the metaphoric métier that provokes the problem of ambiguity even when assuming that the “core” meaning arrived at by the translator represents the temper and tone of the original faithfully,” notes A. K. Srivastava (19). In “Banalata Sen” we have the exquisitely beautiful simile or metaphor in a broader sense, “pakhir nirer mata chokh”, where the eyes of Banalata Sen have been compared to a bird’s nest. It is both evocative and open to multiple significances. As Sumita Chakrabarti, ex-Professor of Bengali at the University of Burdwan and well-known Jibanananda critic, comments on this metaphor, “The primary meaning is obvious. Nest is a place of rest for a bird, abode of the nestlings hidden by the enclosure of mother bird’s love. That sense of rest is reflected in the eyes of the beloved woman here” (63; trans. mine). But, how can we overlook, as argued by Ketaki Kusari Dyson in a seminar, the physical likeness between the egg-shaped nest and the oval eyes of Indian women? Martin Kirkman translated the expression “pakhir nirer mata chokh” as “raising her bird’s nest eyes,” which was not liked by Das. In a letter to Debiprasad Chottopadhyay, Das wrote, “Kirkman’s translation of “Banalata Sen” is indeed good. I grant it wholeheartedly. But he has translated the expression “pakhir nirer mata chokh” as “raising her bird’s nest eyes.” Can’t there be a meaning translation instead of this one which is too much literal? ” (qtd. in Chakrabarti 56; trans. mine) A similar problem arises when a translator strives to render the multidimensional silence-camel image in “One Day Eight Years Ago”:

He won’t bear life’s incessant burden Any more,” said a silence beside his window-sill, That came like a camel’s neck When the moon had set in the dark sky’s lake. (Dangar 21-24) Sumita Chakrabarti thinks that the silence-camel image alludes to one of the Arabian folk tales and thereby attains a fabular dimension: Perhaps he [Jibanananda] has lifted the image of camel from Arabian folk tales . . . the camel that poked its neck through the tent of a desert-bound merchant in a wintry night. Then the camel entered the tent, and the merchant was once again under the open sky of the desert. Such a condensed, uneasy, and questioning silence peeps through the window of man’s cozy, comfortable, and certain home. The man is thrown out into homelessness. (87; trans. mine)

[19] Translation as Transcreation: A Study of Selected Poems of Jibanananda Das Author: J. Dangar It poses a challenge to incorporate the implications of such a fable in the image of silence in translation. No less baffling is the significance of the word “sangharam” in “One Day Eight Years Ago.” Commenting on the allusive nature and metaphoric significance of the word, Sumita Chakrabarti points out:

The word “sangharam” is to some extent mysterious. Mosquitoes live in swarms . . . that sense of unity may be there in the word. But the word “sangharam” inevitably bears the connotation of Buddhist monastery. Idealistically and philosophically, Buddhist monks were withdrawn from life, and nirvana aspirants. But were they so in reality? Temptations of life and animal instinct invaded the monasteries. By employment of the word the poet here perhaps means to say that beneath the apparent indifference to life remains the flow of earthly desire. Perhaps, he means to say that desire to live is natural for an animal; desire for death is against animal nature. (88; trans. mine)

In English there is no lexical equivalence for the word “sangharam.” I must admit here I have failed to accommodate such implications in my translation.

Again, Jibanananda Das at times used synaesthetic metaphors, which involve either a subordination of one sensation to another, or a confusion of multiple senses. For example, we may quote the lines from the poem, “Grass”:

The green grass, like unripe grapefruit—just as scented! I too wish to drink in the scent of this grass like green wine, ...... Descend from the delicious darkness Of the body of some intimate Grass-Mother. (Majumdar 4-10; italics mine)

These multisensory metaphors (as italicized in the text) belong to what Empson categorized as “ambiguities of the first type,” in which “the main comparison is neither true nor false, and one is thrown back on a series of possible associations, as to the social setting in which these sensations would be expected, or the mood in which they would be sought out” (13). A translator is likely to be baffled by the alternatives before him as synaesthetic metaphors generally arise from a phenomenon that is either medical (genetically inherited), or drug- induced, or affective. In Das’s poetry such a sense swapping is, however, one of the legacies of Keatsian sensibility.

Difficulties of Untranslatability

The difficulties of untranslatability encountered by a translator always have been one of the central issues of Translation Studies. Finding English equivalents, especially for the flora and fauna peculiar to Bengal, is a problem that a translator of Das invariably faces. In “One Day Eight Years Ago” the original Bengali words such as “ashwaththa,” “doyel,” and “faring” have been translated into “peepul,” “robin,” and “grasshopper,” respectively. Would it be better to use “the holy fig tree” instead of “peepul” when the target reader is an Englishman? Can “robin” be a substitute proper for “doyel” that is generally found in the Indian subcontinent? And, by “faring” Jibanananda perhaps meant “damsel fly” instead of “grasshopper,” because he used the word “gangafaring” (“grasshopper”) elsewhere. But

JAST-2015, Vol.-01, Issue-01 [20] JAST-a peer reviewed multidisciplinary research journal Vol.-01, Issue-01 “grasshopper” rather than “damsel fly” is supposed appeal to the imagination of an English reader.

Utpal Kumar Basu, himself a Bengali poet, in his translation “If I Were” has made a phonetic transcription of “Phalgun”: “Then on this Phalgun night/ Watching the moon rise behind the tamarisk branches . . .” (6-7). Professor Supriya Chaudhuri also in “Twenty Years After” retains the original Bengali sound “Kartik”: “Beside the paddy-stalks, perhaps, / In the month of Kartik—” (3-4). Such words and phrases as “Phalguner rater andhakar,” “panchamir chand,” “Kalidaha” in “One Day Eight Years Ago,” however, have been translated into “April’s darkness,” “the crescent moon,” and “the Kali River,” respectively. “Phalgun” in Bengal is “vasanta” or “springtime,” and my choice for “Phalgun” is “April” (the springtime in Britain that lasts from March to May). For the man in this poem, “April is the cruellest month,” to use the opening words in T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. However, “One Day Eight Years Ago,” far from being a poem of mere death, is a celebration of a victory—a victory of spring over winter, life over death. Whereas the man in this poem surrenders to death, the subhuman creatures such as mosquito, grasshopper, decaying frog offer resistances. The springtime, thus, is central to the drama of Eros and Thanatos in this poem. But when the target audience is an Indian, it seems to be an anomaly as in the Indian subcontinent April is rather summertime. When “panchamir chand” is translated as “the moon of the fifth (lunar) day,” it sounds un-poetic. So my preference has been “the crescent moon.” On the contrary, Professor Sukanta Chaudhuri’s interlingual transposition of the phrase “krishna dwadasir jyotsna” as “the light/ Of the moon’s twelfth dark phase” (10-11) in “I have Seen the Face of Bengal” seems really poetic. The word “badhu” in “One Day Eight Years Ago” has been rendered as “bride” for the sake of alliteration, but the exact translation would have been “wife.” “Badhu” in Bengali and “bride” in English have similar detonate, but they differ in their designate, for “badhu” means both “wife” and “bride.” The phrase “buri chand” may be transferred to a word compound, “hag-moon.” In fact, the adjective “buri” that is used to define an old woman in Bengali does not have its lexical equivalence in English. Bengali “daha” means a deep place in a river, where water moves in a circle. Then, in place of “the Kali River” we may use “the eddy of Kali.” But one cannot be sure whether the second one would be better. A literal translation of the expression “pragar pitamahi” into “highly condensed grandmother” would have been ludicrous, and in a likely way it has been rendered as “age-old grandmother.”

Considerations of Form

In translation work, considerations of form are no less important. Whereas “Banalata Sen” is a poem of love, death, peace and history cast in the form of an interior monologue, “One Day Eight Years Ago” relates the story of a man, who, despite having a secure life, commits suicide one night out of troubled wonder. “One Day Eight Years Ago” can be considered a dramatic monologue. The poem is “dramatic,” it involves a “narrative,” and it is eminently “lyrical” too, as it reflects the psychological state of the speaker. In a Browningesque dramatic lyric

“the poet, the speaker, and the reader constitute a magic circle with the three figures placed at significant distances from each other; and the magic circle opens up only when the three figures co-operate. The key function is that of the reader who must work through the words uttered by the speaker to re- create the meaning intended by the poet: in the process the reader becomes ‘the co-creator’ with the poet.” (Biswas xxi).

[21] Translation as Transcreation: A Study of Selected Poems of Jibanananda Das Author: J. Dangar In “One Day Eight Years Ago” the poet, however, himself takes up the narration and gradually identifies himself with the man in the poem by way of probing the secrets of his death. In such a precarious state, is the translator necessarily “a reader, an interpreter and a creator—all in one” (Das 58), or someone more than that?

Representation of Myths and History

To convey Das’s perception of Indian myths and history when the target audience is non- Indian is also a challenge for a translator of his poetry. His poems such as “Banalata Sen,” “I have seen the face of Bengal,” “Here the Sky is Blue” are deeply rooted in Indian mythology and history, especially those of medieval Bengal. The image of Banalata has been carved out of history of pan-India. In pursuit of his dream-damsel, the very end and source of his much coveted peace, the poet has been travelling across the world for one-thousand-year from the Ceylon Sea to the Malayan Bay in darkness. He has roamed much the grey kingdom of Ashoka and Bimbisar, and also been in the dark and distant town of Vidarbha. “Her hair the ancient darknes of Vidisha, / Face a sculpture from Sravasti” (Mukherjee 6-8). Sometimes it becomes impossible for even an Indian other than a native speaker of Bengali to appreciate mythical stories associated with Bengal which are neatly woven in Das’s poetry. For example, the quasi-historical story of Chand the merchant and (the daughter-in-law) as narrated in Manasamangal helps the poet reproduce the timeless beauty of Bengal in his poem, “I have seen the face of Bengal”:

So Chand the merchant long ago, from his honey-bee boat, Sailing past Champa, saw the same blue shadows float Of hijal, tamal, banyan—Bengal’s beauty beyond form. So Behula saw from her raft on the Gangura, when the light Of the moon’s twelfth dark phase died on the sandbank, countless peepuls And banyans, golden paddy; heard the shama’s soft song. (Sukanta Chaudhuri 7-12) The suggestion is that Bengal is as beautiful as she was in the distant past, when Chand the prosperous merchant must have noticed it on his way to the place called Champa, and when Behula saw it during her journey on a raft on the Gangura River after the death of her husband caused by the wrath of Manasa, goddess of snakes in Hindu mythology. By percolating the story to the direct elemental world Jibanananda conceived the image of Bengal’s dance-bird, khanjana, in terms of Behula who eventually arrived and danced in the court of Lord Indra, king of gods in heaven, to bring her husband back to life. Some footnotes are often helpful to explain the significances associated with mythical/historical references. But, are footnotes alone enough to make a non-Indian reader understand Das’s sense of myth and history? Perhaps not. Appreciation of Das’s poetry inevitably calls for an intimate study of Indian mythology and history.

Loss and Gain in Translation

Once Robert Frost opined, “Poetry is that which is lost in translation” (qtd. in Das 44).” But it is hard to concur with Frost as a good deal is also obtained in translation. For instance, we may take the lines from “One Day Eight Years Ago”: “The grasshoppers in the hands of wanton boys / Struggle a lot shuddering before they die” (Dangar 38-9). Here is a preference for the word “wanton” instead of “uncontrollable” (“duranta” in SL). It immediately reminds us of the lines in King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport” (IV: ii). Does it not add a new dimension to the original poem in the SL, the extraordinary discourse of life and death?

JAST-2015, Vol.-01, Issue-01 [22] JAST-a peer reviewed multidisciplinary research journal Vol.-01, Issue-01 To conclude, translation of Jibananada Das’s poetry calls for a scholarly investigation of the SL text. The ambiguities embedded in his poetry always allow the translator a free exercise of his faculty to create. Although it, at times, appears to be a preposterous act of balancing between the extremes, the task is ultimately rewarding.

Works Cited

Basu, Utpal Kumar, trans. “If I Were.” A Certain Sense: Poems by Jibanananda Das. Ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri and Sumita Chakrabarti. : Sahitya Academi. 20. Print. Trans. of “Ami Jadi Hatam” (Collected in Banalata Sen). Biswas, Anima. Introduction. Browning’s Dramatic Poetry. Ed. Biswanath Bhattacharya. Burdwan: Burdwan UP, 1996. Print. Chakrabarti, Sumita. Intimate Study of Poetry (Kabitar Antaranga Path). : Dey’s, 1995. Print. Chaudhuri, Sukanta, trans. “I have seen the face of Bengal.” A Certain Sense: Poems by Jibanananda Das. Ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri and Sumita Chakrabarti. Delhi: Sahitya Academi. 2. Print. Trans. of “Banglar Mukh Ami Dekhiachhi” (Collected in Rupasi Bangla). Chaudhuri, Supriya, trans. “Twenty Years After.” A Certain Sense: Poems by Jibanananda Das. Ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri and Sumita Chakrabarti. Delhi: Sahitya Academi. 16. Print. Trans. Of “Kuri Bachar Pare” (Collected in Banalata Sen). Dangar, Joyanta, trans. “One Day Eight Years Ago.” By Jibanananda Das. Polyphony: A Journal of Association for Literary and Societal Interaction 2(April 2013). 190-194. Print. Trans. of “At Bachhar Ager Ek Din.” Shreshtha Kabita (Best Poems). Kolkata: Bharobi, 1954. Das, Bijay K. A Handbook of Translation Studies. New Delhi: Atlantic, 2005. Print. Das, Sisir Kumar. Introduction. A Certain Sense: Poems by Jibanananda Das. Ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri and Sumita Chakrabarti. Delhi: Sahitya Academi. I - VI. Print. Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. 1930. Harmondsworth, Mitcham: Penguin-Peregrine, 1961. Print. Majumdar, Swapan. trans. “Grass.” A Certain Sense: Poems by Jibanananda Das. Ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri and Sumita Chakrabarti. Delhi: Sahitya Academi. 17. Print. Trans. Of “Ghas”(Collected in Banalata Sen). Mukherjee, Amitabha, trans. “Banalata Sen.” By Jibanananda Das. Web. 14 Apr. 2015. Trans. of “Banalata Sen” (Collected in Banalata Sen). Srivastava, A. K. “On Translating Literature.” Pie Literary Criterion 22:2 (1987). Print. Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1997. Print.

[23]