SCANNING FOR TROJANS IN INDIAN POETRY IN ENGLISH: HEMANT DIVATE’S VIRUS ALERT

Virus Alert: Poems by Hemant Divate, translated from Marathi by Dilip Chitre, Mumbai: Poetrywala, 2004, pp. 76, Rs. 100/-

Is English translation of contemporary Marathi poetry a part of Indian English Poetry? Or does translation from non-English Indian languages occupy a separate compartment? Following this rather controversial query can lead us to the cultural sites haunted with spectres of history, sociology and politics. These spectres usually remain usefully masked and only reveal themselves at uneasy moments in intensive discussion of Indian Poetry appearing in English. The unequal status of Indian Writing in English vis a vis writing in other Indian languages mirrors the asymmetrical and hegemonic status of English language in India and this discrepancy surfaces when we probe deeper into the ideological sore.

If one examines ` Virus Alert’ poems by Hemant Divate, one of the prominent contemporary Marathi poets, translated into English by Dilip Chitre in the context of these old haunting debates, it will offer us fresh insights into tortuous relation between poetry and politics.

If we are to hypothetically consider English translation from the bhashas at par with Indian Poetry in English, a collection like ` Virus Alert’ is a rarity in Indian writings in English. Going by the canons of Indian English poetry, something like

` Dhullu is switching the TV on and off with the remote

He’s telling me to switch on one channel after another

Till his favourite channel is found

Any moment soon after

He begins to hate the channel..(p.2)

Would be considered `too loose’, ` too direct’ and less informed by the Anglo American modernist aesthetics of formal precision, irony and mythopoetic imagery. The chances of a longish, directly confessional and often flat poetry like that of Virus Alert of being rejected by the established canons of Indian English poetry are great.

Yet one cannot fail to acknowledge that there is something unsentimentally honest and humane in these poems which make them attractive in spite of being ` quite different’ from the `acceptable’ norms of Indian poetry in English. The themes of the poems as well as their treatment differ from the ones usually found in Indian poetry in English.

Chitre in his Foreword suggests that anxiety and panic seems to be the most common themes of Virus Alert. However, it seems that the central theme of the collection seems to me is inability to come to terms with what the City like Mumbai has done to you:

“ One is just a domesticated animal kept by this city

The one that sniffs around the city the whole day long

Day by day

One’s turning into a fuckin’

Unprinted roll of newsprint thats found defective

Or the key number in the material of an ad

A pimp, a pimp, a pimp...( p.12)

Or consider how the poem whose title says it all ends:

“ and Hemant Dayanand Divate

Belongs to no one anymore

He belongs to the e-universe

And here too he gets waylaid and screwed

But he hardly lets out an `e’ from his mouth

He utters` Aai-ee-ga!’

(And here too he gets screwed, p.19)

The metropolis of Mumbai transformed by globalization transforms the speaker, who sometimes signals his intimacy with the poet, into something he never was. It decontextualizes him, uproots him, dehumanizes him and what is left is only the memories of thirty one years.

The speaker is always afraid of losing his individuality, not to mention his sanity, under the cultural bulldozer of globalization:

I

Am forgetting

Me

No trace remains

Of colour, form, speech, touch, or meaning

To me

There does not remain

God, parents, relations

No remainder

Like caste, class, religion, nationality, language, script

Breath, mind, body and soul

I am reaching out

Beyond birth and death

I don’t know

Me

(p.29)

The standardization and homogenization of culture that globalization threatens people is a real danger, especially for the poets.

Uniformity

While reading the poems of contemporary poets

You do not

As the blind in the parable

Of Chakradhara do

Feel the whole elephant

But feel it as though it were a piller, a wall, and so forth

And therefore perhaps

If a poem

By one of you is

Passed around as anyone else’s

It wont add a whit

To language.

(p.28)

The speaker is paranoid and self obsessed hypochondriac who worries about poetry being bedridden in this time of great cultural crisis.

The Poem Should Not Be Bedridden

Word constipated poem

Its skin’s become prickly

Its restless, itchy

Slowly, its sores will fester

Begin to stink as well

Language languishing as through under a curfew

Words silent as though prohibited from assembling

With this sort of strict patrolling

One cant even curse meanings

Freely

(p.34)

The sense of urgency, fear and the feeling of being a misfit in the culture pervades Hemant’s poetry. Unfortunately the poetry written in English is too busy trying to conform to the modernist conform to sense this cultural `emergency’ and voice the dilemma of the person trying to cross the street of contemporary Mumbai.

The contemporary poetry translated from non-English Indian languages will often be loaded with concerns, which are not merely aesthetic or academic. Though both Indian Poetry in English and Indian Poetry in English translation use the same medium of English language, they exhibit distinct texture, styles and obsessions. Though the chances of poetry like that of Hemant’s remaining on the margins of the Indian poetry in English, the very accessibility of such poetry in English is bound to affect the sensibility of Indian readers of poetry in English. A point to be noted is that both these traditions can co-exist and something fruitful may emerge from mature and unprejudiced interaction among them.

Hemant’s poetry will definitely appeal to younger readers of poetry in English translation for its freshness and unsentimental directness.

This Review Appeared in The Dhauli Review, Sept 2008

Readability as Conformity: The Politics and the Commerce of English Translations from the Indian Languages

One of the substantive differences between a serious literary publication and a commercial one is the attitude it has towards its readers. What separates a serious literary publication from other types is whether it merely caters to its own idea of `what the readers want’ or it considers its readers as intelligent discriminating people willing to explore various alternatives. It refuses to take the reader for granted. The other essential difference lies in its attitude to the writers and their writings. Both these aspects are of course interrelated. The question is of the commercial facet of publication. The question here is regarding certain extremely prestigious publications professing serious literary concerns while they are actually interested only in their calculations of profit and loss. The issue becomes very striking in the context of publishing literary translations from Indian languages. It revives the long-familiar deliberations about politics of English in India, but in the context of `marketing’ these translations.

The editors of these prestigious English-language publications recklessly impose `stylistic modifications’ on the translations from the ‘regional languages’ of India so as to make them more `suitable’ for their readers. Interestingly, these editors have hardly any knowledge of the source languages or the processes of translation, or even of the aesthetics of literary genres. They feel that they are making translations more `readable’. However, what one means by `readable’ or `natural’ is the question not many of these editors would like to pursue. Linguistically, whether there is such a thing as a single `natural’ English register even where English is the first language is a question that one would like to ask before asking whether there is a single universal `natural’ English register in the world. Today, when we are talking of Englishes rather than a single `English English’, asking for conforming to one subjective perception of `natural English’ is nothing more than neo-colonial arrogance. While I admit that editors have the right to proofread the text for grammatical `errors’ (a question equally vexed) or point out (not change but suggest changes) the existence of clichés and idiomatic oddities, I believe that changing the imagery, syntax, lexis, paragraph sequences, descriptive passages without any knowledge of the source text and the aesthetics of form is nothing less than the perpetuating of a tyrannical colonial mindset by the twenty-first century brown sahibs and memsahibs. I believe English is very much an Indian language but the Indians who speak English have yet to learn how to treat the other languages as equals.

However, there is another side to this story as well. As every translator of Indian literature into English knows, a great many writers in Indian languages, though they may be vehemently opposed to the oppressive presence of English in India are, in fact, exceedingly eager to get their works into English. The thirst for instant fame and the desire for some sort of `international’ recognition make many of the writers submit to this editorial colonialism. After all, exploitation is a two handed game. Very few writers are willing to stand up and resist the editor’s policy of such a `back-seat’ translating. However, not every writer is so timid as to compromise with his or her art. And the case of Nazir Mansuri and Mona Patrawalla becomes particularly significant in this context.

Nazir Mansuri and Mona Patrawalla are two young and brilliant Gujarati fiction writers. They are marginalized in Gujarat not only because they belong to the minorities in Gujarat but also because what they are doing is something radically new in the Gujarati literary context. Both these writers are exceptionally meticulous about their craft and aesthetics of the form of fiction. They give great importance to literary and stylistic aspects of their craft such as imagery, symbolism, paragraph sequences, and the structure of their stories. Both these writers are remarkable in their artistic use of locale, dialects, and their knowledge of subcultures. Nazir writes about a small fishermen community in Diu and Mona writes about the Parsis and the interior villages like Vasda in South Gujarat. Though their stories are mythopoetic, they are extremely realistic in their descriptive style. They write with deep knowledge about the rural areas and their stories have a very indigenous texture to them. Though both of them are influenced by some version of nativism, they are thoroughly modernist in their treatment of their themes. They are also postmodern in the sense that they are aware of the shortcomings of Indian modernism and move beyond it. Their stories reveal their aesthetic employment of myths, symbolism, and archetypes without ever losing their realistic mode. They are extremely bold in their depiction of the existential dimension of sexuality. Homosexuality, obsessive desires, and illicit relationship often come under their lenses. Both these writers use cinematography-like devices in their narrative technique. A good reader is able to identify layers and layers of mythical, historical, and existential meanings in their texts. No wonder they are marginalized in Gujarat. Translating these writers is a great challenge even for a native speaker of Gujarati. These stories are very difficult for the urbanized Gujaratis as well as those who have no knowledge of the archetypal and symbolic modes of narrative fiction. I have managed to translate these writers merely because I was lucky to have them beside me. While translating these writers, I tried very hard to retain all the things mentioned above like technique, aesthetics, native textures, and dialects and so on in some form.

Mona Patrawala very spiritedly rejected a very prestigious award for translated Indian fiction in English because the editors insisted on sticking to their `version of the story’ though they had absolutely no idea of the source text and they hardly understood what is meant by the aesthetics of narrative. Thanks to their own class, regional, and caste location, they wanted the story to be more `urbanized’ and `urbane’, something that these stories are definitely not. What they meant by `natural’ English was, I suspect, some metropolitan variety of Indian English, irrespective of the fact whether this idiom represented the source text in some form or not. They insisted on this sort of idiom because they thought their readers are like them: ignorant of the other interior Indias and ignorant of artistic aspects of the narrative mode. Mona Patrawalla and her nominator for the award, Nazir Mansuri, threw away the award because the version they wanted to see published was not the one their editors wanted to publish---something that other Indian writers in regional languages rarely do. This experience was repeated when another smart-looking metropolitan `literary’ journal published a tampered and doctored translation of Mona’s story. When she and Nazir, who also had contributed his story, protested and demanded that the other stories should be published with doctoring, they received a curt reply from the memsahib saying that the magazine has rights (given to them by the ex-rulers of the British Raj, I suppose) to make `necessary stylistic modifications’ in the interest of the readers. To an extent, they may be right, for they may be thinking of their readers as belonging to the same location and ability as readers of Ms. Shobha De.

New Quest, on the other hand, is publishing two stories, one by Mona Patrawala---the version which she finds acceptable, and a story by Nazir Mansuri, because it has faith in the intelligence and ability of its readers. Mona Patrawalla has rejected the earlier draft of the same story that appeared in another magazine.

Before concluding, I would like to comment as a translator and a theorist on certain theoretical issues involved in this question. As a literary translator, I believe that my editors should have reasonably good knowledge of aesthetics, literary devices, and ideological debates and so on and if they do not know the source language and the text, they should have faith in what I am doing. As a translator, I aim for approximate equivalence not at the level of word but at the level of poetics. I believe these editors are simply ignorant of such things.

I also recommend two ideas for serious consideration by the editors of so-called literary publications. The first is Professor Lawrence Venuti’s radical position as propounded in Translator's Invisibility (1995). He critically examines history, politics and economics of the norm of nativization of the translated text in order to make it appear as if it were originally written in the receptor language, to make the translator `invisible' and marginal. He examines historically how the norm of fluency prevailed over other translation strategies to shape the canon of foreign literatures in English. He makes a strong case for `foreignness' and `awkwardness' of the translated text as a positive value in the evaluation of translation.

The other idea that I would like these editors to think about comes from a great German hermenuetician Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834). He says that there are two ways of translating: ` Either the translator leaves the writer alone as much as possible and moves the reader towards the writer or he leaves the reader alone as much as possible and moves the writer towards the reader' and favours the first method which emphasizes the idea of drawing out the readers from the linguistic world they inhabit. I believe that the first method is radical and the other one is commercial. Though I am not suggesting that one should publish awkward and unreadable translations, I believe that if the editors do not know the source language and the text, they should have faith in what the translator is doing, however `awkward’ it is, in the interest of the source text. I am also suggesting that in a serious literary work, the things like paragraph sequences, descriptions, imagery, textures, and other artistic aspects of the source work have a very important function in the totality of the target text. If the editors do not know such things then they should stop calling themselves editors of literary publications.

REFERENCES

Schleriermacher, F. 'from "On the Different Methods of Translating" Translated by Waltraund Bartscht.' in R.Schulte and J.Biguenet (eds.) 1992.pp.36 -54

Schulte, R and Biguenet. J. (eds.) Theories of Translation: An anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida. Chicago, University of Chicago, 1992.

Venuti, L. The Translator's Invisibility: A history of translation. London and New York: Routledge, 1995

_______ `The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference.' London and New York: Routledge, 1998

This article appeared in New Quest , A quarterly journal of participative inquiry, Mumbai, April June 2005

A THIRD WAY OF READING KOLATKAR: BEYOND FORMALISM AND POLITICS

The pre-modifier and the post-modifiers of the word `writing’ in the term `Indian Writing in English’ have perpetually shackled the creative writing in English in India to the relentlessly hounding questions of nationality and the politics of English language in India. Both, accusations as well as apologies sound tiresome to our ears today. Amit Chaudhari’s recent review in the Hindu of a short book called `Jejuri: Commentary and Critical Perspectives’, edited and, in part, written by Shubhangi Jayakar, stirs up the same old weary debate about nationality of Indian writing in English. While one tends to agree with his complaint ` for 20 long years, influenced by Said and post-colonial theory, the aesthetics of estrangement has been confused with the politics of representation.’ one wonders if these questions will ever stop dogging the Indian writer in English. It is high time literary studies today stopped looking at the Indian Writing in English merely from the formalistic point of view or from the postcolonial approach, which highlights the politics of nation in the text. The ancestor of this disputation is the antiquated debate about `form’ versus `content’ in aesthetics. One has to go beyond this `either/or’ approaches and search for some ecumenical critical view.

It is a true that much of the recent academic criticism reads the politics of representation in literary texts. Reacting against its own earlier formalistic orientation, literary studies in the past couple of decades have obsessively focussed on the social, historical, and political context of literature. While this focus reveals that art is never `autonomous’, the formalist approach analyzes literature as a special form of language by isolating the `literariness inducing devices’ like defamiliarization. The inordinate preoccupation of the recent academic criticism with the political and historical context of art seems to promote a fallacy that these are the only contexts of art. They forget that literature is an intricate `language-game’ and has its own rules, which cannot be understood in these contexts alone. They also fail to explain why sorcerous appeal of certain works has cut across the specifics of time, region, and society. The nationalist, nativist or versions of Marxist criticism taken to their dogmatic extreme, reduce the work of art merely to its social existence and make it unidimentional.

While formalist criticism will find Kolatkar poems teeming with literary devices of `defamiliarization’ due to his oblique idiosyncratic vision , the opposite approach, which is usually some version of socialism, will focus on the theme of alienation of an elite English educated bourgeoisie from his cultural context. Both these approaches have predetermined notions of what Kolatkar’s poetry will yield. However, I believe that a successful work of art transcending the polarities of `social existence’ and ` individual vision’. One only has to take a closer look at Kolatkar’s poems to see that they are not only, in Bruce King’s phrase `defamiliarization and transformation of the commonplace’, but are also deeply embedded in the cultural and historical milieu.

Defamiliarization is not restricted to Kolatkar’s poetry only but is an indivisible part of the creative process. It is at once aesthetic and political because to perceive something, or to think in the ways that seem strange to the conventional ways of thinking, is an act of non-conformity. It may not be political in the obvious sense of conforming to some party doctrine, but simply because it dares to see something in a different way, it becomes deeply political. It is both art and politics and it is politics because it is art.

Poetry of Kolatkar does not just `employ the literary devices’ of defamiliarization nor does simply deal with the theme of `alienation of the western educated intellectual’ from his roots. His texts have complex, multiple meanings and operate at more than one level. His oblique vision dislocates the established ways of perception only to yield richer insights into Indian culture. This is certainly not the `tourist’ eye-view, nor is it written with the western audience in the mind.
Consider a poem from Jejuri:

The Reservoir
There isn’t a drop of water
In the great reservoir the Peshwas built.

There is nothing in it.
Except a hundred years of silt.

(Jejuri p.36)

Perhaps nativists, nationalists, or even formalists haven’t read the poem closely at all. Kolatkar’s oblique view of the things is obviously not merely a device. To say that the great reservoir of the Peshwas, one time potentates of Maharastra has run dry and contains nothing but clay deposits of history, is not a simple use of some literary figure of speech, but a significant cultural comment on the decadence and the irrelevance of the once powerful community. This point of view is not that of a person alienated from the culture but of a person who feels that the culture has very little to offer to him. Culture is distanced from the sensitive and intelligent speaker rather than the other way round. Therefore, it is better to take all the discussion about `alienation’ in Kolatkar’s poetry with a little pinch of salt.

Art is about divergent ways of seeing; poetry, about divergent ways of using language. Inseparable from the creative process, defamiliarization achieves its effects from uncovering relationships that are not obvious to others. Defamiliarization yields insights and discovers truths. It sees things from a different angle and a different level and this is what makes it semantically complex and multilayered. In epiphanic moments, the visual artist in Kolatkar sees things that startle the readers only to enlighten them. For instance, the `Pi-Dog’ in Kala Ghoda Poems, lying on a traffic island at midnight reveals

“I look a bit like
a seventeenth century map of Mumbai
with its seven islands” (p.16)


The perceived similarity between the appearance of a mongrel and an old map of the city with a history of cultural hybridization is not simply a technical device but a revelation, a discovery of truth. Discovery of these truths in Kolatkar’s poetry makes it difficult to understand it as poetry of estrangement and alienation. The defamiliarization in these poems is a road that leads to discovery and illumination, rather than being an agonized expression of an `alienated’ consciousness.

On reading the poems in `An Anthology of Marathi Poetry (ed. Dilip Chitre, 1967), we notice that much of Kolatkar’s early Marathi poetry was intensely dark, unsettlingly subjective, and surreal. Many of his poems are the types which TS Eliot in his extremely perceptive essay `Three Voices of Poetry (1953) called the poems of the `first voice’. Alluding to the observations made by Gottfried Benn, Eliot observes that the poetry of first voice is addressed to no one in particular and is a result of the intense struggle between the poet and his unknown dark psychic material. Many of these poems were called `kalya kavita’ or ` dark poems’ in Marathi. Metaphysical angst, depression, and existential sense of absurdity and all the stuff found in the early modernist poetry in India are abundantly found here.

In a Room Next to Death

In a room next to death
In a hotel in a way out town…
Lizards on the wall
Will cast my horoscope

In the ill humoured room in the hotel
Ina a way out town
Witness to masturbation
Will be spider in sardonic corner….

(In a Room Next to Death, An Anthology of Marathi Poetry, translation Dilip Chitre, and p.127)

Much of his later poetry became more and more allegorical, narrative, and mythopoetic. Eliot in his essay has pointed out that the poetry of second voice is that of the poet addressing an audience and the poetry of the third voice is when the poet attempts to create an imaginary dramatic character addressing another imaginary dramatic character. Poetry of Sarpa Satra, Kala Ghoda Poems, Bhijki Vahi, Droan, and Chirimiri (all collections published by Clearing House or Pras Prakashan, 2003) and some of the poems from his earliest collection including Jejuri belong to these voices.

Bhijki Wahi (A Soaked Notebook) is a remarkable collection of poems strung together with the archetypal motif of `The Weeping Woman’. Employing narratives, myths and legends from all over the world, Kolatkar has evoked woman’s suffering and agony. In this collection, one comes across poems on legends from Greek, Egyptian, Arabic and south Indian cultures and poems on the life of Osip Mandelstam’s wife Nadajada and on the series of painting `Weeping Woman’.

The Weeping Woman III

The splayed butterfly of the handkerchief
Is sitting
On your face

Drunk
On the honey
Of the dark lotuses of the eyes

Now how will it lift
Its wings daubed with pollens
Of grief

It will be difficult
No very difficult
For it to fly in this state

I don’t think
The Pandavas of tear
Will permit it to fly

(The Weeping Woman III, Bhijki Wahi, p.287 , translation Sachin Ketkar )

Woman’s tears seem to symbolize the suffering of entire humanity. Human tears transcend cultural and temporal contexts and become universal. All the contexts of human suffering, historical, cultural, or regional are incidental. The collection ends with a prayer to the Cosmic mother and evokes the redemptive power of human tears:

When all this filth flows out
Out of your eyes
Then only a pure drop of tear
Just one
Will remain in the end
Save it in the eye
It will be the useful one
To create afresh
The Universe

O
Cosmic Mother
(The Last Tear, translated by Dilip Chitre, New Quest 157-158 July Dec 2004)

However, Kolatkar uses extremely contemporary language while dealing with his legends and myths. One has only to consider a poem called ` Kovalan’ based on the ancient Tamil classic `CilaPattiKarm’. After shuffling the Marathi word order of Kannagi’s line ` Ajun Kasa Parat Ala Nahi Kovalan’ (Why hasn’t Kovalan returned yet?) eight times in eight lines,

`How will the poor woman know
That the goldsmith whom he had approached with her anklets
Accused him of theft
And that police have finished him in an encounter?’

( Bhijki Vahi, 197 translation Sachin Ketkar)



To say that Kolatkar’s poetry is not embedded in its cultural environment and politics of his location is to be ignorant of much of his work. One has to consider a very early Marathi poem like `Suicide of Rama’ from the Dilip Chitre Anthology (p.137). The poem speaks of the epic hero committing suicide by leaping out of the epic-legendary narrative into the elemental presence of the river. After

`winding verses stir him up
the turreted epic shrugs him off…

from valmiki’s roof top rama jumps
disturbing a tile or two... .’

The godhead can have presence only in the epic imagination of the bard and the world of semi fictional narrative. The leap out of the world of cultural imagination into the phenomenal world symbolized by the river is the way Rama prefers to commit suicide. This `defamiliarized’ and poetic way of (mis) reading a culturally charged text create multiple layers of meanings. Playing on the binarism between cultural imagination and the phenomenal world, it obliquely asks if the whole effort of extracting a semi-fictional character out of a narrative and turning him into an unquestionable historical truth for political reasons is anything less than killing the spirit of the hero.

To look at poetry, like Kolatkar’s, merely with the questions its relation to nation state or merely from a formalist angle is be extremely reductive and simplistic. Obviously, both these ways of reading are inadequate. Both these approaches overlook the individual contours and specifics of the complex artistic texts. We can discover something new and interesting if only we abandon predetermined notions of what one hopes to discover in poetry and access it with more open mind. Serious engagement with Kolatkar’s poetry will begin once we abandon these stereotypical critical approaches and start reading it more carefully, sensitively, and intelligently. Once we start doing this, Kolatkar’s poetry will gladly share its wisdom with us.



REFERENCES

Amit Chaudhari, `On Strangeness of Indian Writing’ in The Hindu (October 2, 2005)

Bruce King. "Two Bilingual Experimentalists: Kolatkar and Chitre." Modern Indian Poetry in English. Delhi: OUP, 1987, 162-82

Dilip Chitre. An Anthology of Marathi Poetry (1945-1965). Bombay: Nirmala Sadananda Publishers, 1967

____”_____ translation of Arun Kolatkar’s ` The Last Tear’ and `Reduced to Beggary by Mumbai’ in New Quest, 157-158, July Dec 2004

T S Eliot, `Three Voices of Poetry’ (1953), The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Major Author Editions, ed. MH Abrams et.al (p.1986-998)