Translation As Transcreation: a Study of Selected Poems of Jibanananda Das

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 Jibanananda Das Joyanta Dangar Department of English M.U.C. Women’s College, Burdwan West Bengal, India 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 Sen,” 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 history of India 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), Banalata Sen (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 Bengali poetry” (Das: Introduction I). In 1955 the Sahitya Akademi 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, Chidananda Dasgupta, 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 Ashoka-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.

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