1 on the Translation of Binodini's Asangba

ON THE TRANSLATION OF BINODINI’S ASANGBA NONGJABI “Whatever people in other lands might say, as far as we are concerned no Manipuri dialogue has been written that is more beautiful than this, “ Eigya Syam said. It was, no doubt, a gentle word of caution. It was winter, early in 2011. I was in Imphal for the extended mourning rituals following the death of my mother Maharaj Kumari Binodini Devi on January 17, 2011. I had once again approached Aribam Syam Sharma, or Eigya1 Syam as I called the film and theatre director about subtitling his television film of my recently deceased mother’s play Asangba Nongjabi (Crimson Rainclouds). As a film curator based in New York, I had been badgering him to subtitle this film for some years, feeling that it could then be better shown internationally. So having recently been asked by a festival in Norway to send some shorter film works written by her, I broached the subject again. No one knew the plays and other works of my mother, who wrote under the single name Binodini better than Eigya Syam. He started collaborating with my mother, in the early 1960s directing the first stage production of Crimson Rainclouds in 1966, as well as the hour-long Manipuri Television film in 2003. So when Eigya Syam said that he found the dialogue in the play so beautiful he left it all intact, changing only the scenario and sequences as a film required, I decided that I would translate the play itself. Eigya Syam could then extract the subtitles from it for the film. It was in the course of the next few weeks in Manipur that I finished the first draft of my translation. I had read Crimson Rainclouds in its original Manipuri as a young teenager back in the 1970s, some years after my mother had published it along with two of her other plays. I had translated my mother’s works before: some short stories, the screenplay of My Son, My Precious (Cinewave, 1981), and the yet-unpublished translation of her last work, The Maharajah’s Household (2009). In each, I had worked directly with my mother, she often reading them out to me, and I consulting her on the finer nuances, tuning it, fine-tuning it. She had often read out the drafts of her works to me as she was writing them, or as finished pieces. But I don’t remember her reading Crimson Rainclouds out aloud. Revisiting the play straight after her death, I could hear her voice in every line, almost as if she were finally reading it to me. The linguistic distance between Manipuri, or Meiteilon, to use its ethnonym, a Tibeto- Burman language, and English, an Indo-European language, posed the expected difficulties. My mother had made the character of Keinatombi in the play, an uneducated village woman, speak and use, Manipuri differently from the other characters. A straightforward translation of the words put in her mouth did not work at all. How to render kaosing? Trash? Too negative and dirty. Flotsam? Who uses that word in daily speech anyway, especially a village 1 An honorific mode of address, usually used for Manipuri Brahmins. 1 woman? Yet what Keinatombi had to say went beyond that of a mere village woman, for what she said, and how she said it, was as important a part of the discourse on the nature of art, the artistic process and the eternal yearning of the artist, as the dialogue given to Gautam, the idealistic painter on one side, the pragmatic Uncle on the other, or to the educated city girl, Indu, poised, suspended and torn between the twin poles. That Gautam, the protagonist of Crimson Rainclouds was inspired by Ramkinkar Vaij, the Indian artist discovered by the poet Rabindranath Tagore, is known to the writer’s inner literary circle. Ramkinkar was my mother’s teacher when she studied art in the early 1940s at the university established by the Nobel Laureate in Santiniketan. She became his muse, and Ramkinkar created a large body of drawings, paintings and sculptures of her.2 I grew up hearing stories of Ramkinkar from my mother and as I translated Crimson Rainclouds, I recalled these anecdotes once again, bringing me back to the days of my childhood. I heard once again the familiar writer’s voice of my mother that I had come to know in my own little way growing up with her. Perhaps there are works of literary criticism that I am not aware of that have delved into the stylistic influences upon my mother’s works of the giants of Bangla literature, such as Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Sarat Chandra and Tagore, whom she had loved so much. But for me, the romance and imagery of the dialogue, written to be delivered by characters on stage, proved to be another challenge. Therefore, I request readers who are conversant in both Manipuri and English to be a little forgiving if I have not perfectly captured the nuances. It was precisely these nuances of translation that I missed working out with my mother when I was translating Crimson Rainclouds. As late as 2010, she and I would sit out on the front verandah or out on the lawn of her home in Yaiskul. She would sit in an easy chair in the weak, winter sun, eyes closed, as I, a painfully slow reader in Manipuri, had my friend Shantimo read her memoirs3 out loud, while I typed into my laptop. “Should I use nonchalance or carelessness for this word?” I would ask her. “Carelessness. I mean it more informally. Nonchalance is too fancy,” she would answer promptly. So without her there, providing incomparable insight into her writing process and inner thinking, I turned to Chongtham Kamala. Cheche Mani, or Elder Sister Mani, as I have called Chongtham Kamala all my life, is my mother’s cousin. She was the person my mother trusted the most, and in all things. It was not just for her literary acumen and insight, but as my mother once said to me, because she had a large heart. My mother discussed everything with Mani, ‘my very own Precious Jewel’4, as I often heard my mother refer to her, playing on her beloved cousin’s name. Growing up next door in Yaiskul, Mani Ibema, (as my mother called her, using her household name), wrote out all my mother’s drafts for her in her neat and clear handwriting. She was one of the few people who could read my mother’s handwriting, an idiosyncratic calligraphy full of character and beauty, but near impossible to decipher for the average reader. 2 Many of the works can be seen at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi. 3 Maharaja Churachandgi Imung (The Maharajah’s Household, 2009) 4 Mani means jewel or gem in Manipuri. 2 So it was Chongtham Kamala whom I consulted during those days in Imphal on especially ambiguous passages or the tone of a turn of phrase. For she was the person who was always there, who first wrote out Crimson Rainclouds for my mother back in1966. What I got from her was an acute literary analysis of the play, as she explained how that passage meant this and ought be translated thus. “I have to say I worry a bit,” she said to me candidly, gently, at the outset, in her lovely singer’s voice. “We love this play. It is so lovely to our ears. Will your translation convey what we feel about it?” These were words from an artist herself, one who had sat for hours with my mother, listening to her read out passages, draft after draft. And so my eternal gratitude to her, with the hope that somehow this translation bears a trace of the beauty that she so deeply felt. I simply could not have done this translation without the help and insight of my Cheche Mani. “Terrible.” That was Eigya Syam’s judgment of my first draft. “It is only a first draft”, I pleaded. “But you can’t use that word”, he would say. We sat and talked about, oh, how the bumblebee, a symbol of romance in Manipuri culture, conveys ungainliness, an aeronautical improbability, in English. Therefore I am much indebted to Eigya Syam for the many linguistic, literary and cultural bumps he helped me negotiate. He continues to be the mentor he has been to me since I was a little boy. When I came back to New York, I worked further on the translation. Back in the English- speaking world, all the delicious intricacies of language and differences of cultural perceptions that a Manipuri-English translation threw into relief gained an added dimension. I went to American PEN’s poetry slam at the Bowery Poetry Club, listening with bemusement and a sense of shared misery as an elegant Parisian woman and an American man in a cowboy hat read competing translations of a French poem. It showed me how many translations are possible, and in as many voices. But it also underscored that I was not a native English speaker. So I turned to two writer friends: Belinda Morse in London and Hope Cooke in New York. They combed through my drafts, ironed out Americanisms and Indianisms, and gave me valuable advice on how to handle the more romantic passages. It was Lady Morse who finally helped me come up with the English title. I had until then been calling it Crimson Rainclouds, Azure Skies, a more literal rendering of the original title in Manipuri that both she and Hope found too awkward.

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