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Literary Review
Season-etched lines
MARTHA ANN SELBY'S translation of the classical Indian seasonal poetry into English is relevant in many ways. Firstly, any translation, poetry in particular, from any regional language into English is welcome in this day and age when a much-puffed up image that Indian literature is by and large the kind of stuff produced by Indian English writers is being propagated through discriminatory anthologies and orchestrated media build up. Secondly, it keeps the debate on translation alive; whether the translation of a work must remind one of its original tongue, or should it make a reader feel more the nuances of the adopting language.
Selected from old Tamil, Prakrit and Sanskrit, the most ancient literary languages of India, this anthology contains 188 poems, many of which we won't even chance upon if our pursuit in poetry isn't for some specific antiquity. Also, being the outcome of a research project sponsored by the American Institute of Indian Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Office of the Vice-President and Dean of Graduate Studies, the University of Texas, Austin, tells us what our Akademies and universities should do if they are really concerned with culture, language and literature.
The Sanskrit selections are mainly from the Rtusamhara and the Sarngadharapaddhati. And from the Gathasaptasati and the Vajjalagga, the Prakrit poems. The Kuruntokai and the Ainkurunuru are the sources for the Tamil. Beginning with poems from the first century, the anthology spans a period of 14 centuries. The scheme the translator has chosen for organising them is that of the Rtusamhara in which seasons are put in an order beginning with summer and ending with spring, while most of the time it is in spring that the Indian season sketches begin. And, this rearrangement of the conventional sequence is intended for adding to "the emotional continuity of the poems, their narrative tensions and suspense."
Varnana, be it of time as exemplified in seasonal exposés in ancient Sanskrit and Prakrit or of space as conceptualised in tinai articulations in Tamil, in Indian poetics, is not just a long-winding graphic extrorsal. But, a literary device to suggest the symbiosis between man, time and nature by associating each with the other at a deeper level of meaning and experience. "A generic way of thinking about time", and, impliedly, of space too, "articulated in transgeneric fashion", says the translator.
It is, to all intents and purposes, the human desire, angst, desolation, the agony of separation and the joy of reunion; that is, life's all and varied experiential and emotional phases that displace onto the burning forests, rumbling clouds, dewy mountains, harsh deserts and flowering trees. Whether it is eroticism as in "In autumn/ thirsty travellers drink/ at the lake's clear waters/ spiced with the essence of blue lotuses/ as if sipping from the faces/of their darling" ("Autumn", Gathasaptasati), or didacticism as in "Fabulous riches to a miser/ are useless/ as his own shadow to a traveller, / grilled to a turn by summer's heat" ("Summer", Gathasaptasati) or just a catchy stroke like "Flowing downhill, / the pale, new water meanders, / full of grass, dust, and insects, / and as it crawls along its crooked path, / startled frogs take it for a snake"("Rains", Rtusamhara ), the seasons and landscapes function as stimulative or reflective determinants for responsive aesthetic flavour and meaning production.
Apart from all these, perhaps, even more fundamental to an anthology of this sort, are the inherent issues involved in translating the poems on time (seasons). A poet-translator rather than a rigid scholar she is, Martha Ann Selby evidently is very much aware of poetry's time-related niceties; that it is in essence a synchronised function of time and space wrought into language, and to dissociate one from the other is as good as undoing its organic wholeness.
And so, though the poems are classified on seasonal basis, they give space (landscapes) the semiotic density that tacks them down to time. For instance, take these Kuruntokai lines on autumn: "He is from that place / where a round stone, / black and pitted, / lies in the green place, / resembling an elephant / washed clean of its dust / in a downpour. / He's made me sick, friend, / and my eyes, / once beautiful as lilies, / now brim only with pallor." They signify a corresponding space without obviously referring to it, but by passing onto it silently, which is elemental to all poetic expressions, for, "poeticisation of time is what makes time tangible and human".
If, as Walter Benjamin says in the introduction to the translation of Baudelaire's Tableax Parisiens, "the task of the translator consists in finding the intended effect upon the language into which he (she) is translating which produces in it the echo of the original", Martha Ann Selby has hit the big time. Or else, she wouldn't have been able to echo this exactitude of the Prakrit in English: "Having burnt it all to ash / along with every animal, / the wild fire / shins up a dried-out tree / and surveys the forest again, / wondering what is left" ("Summer", Vajjalagga).
The Circle of Six Seasons: A Selection from Old Tamil, Prakrit and Sanskrit Poetry, Martha Ann Selby, Penguin India, Rs. 250.
Thachom Poyil Rajeevan writes in Malayalam and English and is the editor of Yeti Books.
THACHOM POYIL RAJEEVAN
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