|
Literary Review
A translator translated
|
Translating Harivansh Rai Bachchan can be a complex task as his writings reflect the confluence of many influences. Fortunately for RUPERT SNELL, the task was made easy by the fact that often, Bachchan's Hindi was itself a kind of translation from English. A story of exoneration...
|
Harivansh Rai Bachchan: A romantic at heart drawing on multiple traditions.
THE idea of trying to translate Harivansh Rai Bachchan's Hindi autobiography first occurred to me in the 1980s, after reading the first of its four volumes — Kya Bhulun Kya Yad Karun (1969). Like so many of Bachchan's readers, I was much taken with the candid, heart-on-sleeve account of his early life, and I loved the way in which the sepia-toned and almost mythic account of his ancestors gradually shifted into the crisper detail of his own childhood memories. Allahabad's semi-rural lanes and byways (it was not a time for highways) came alive in his fluent prose, and an astonishing cast of warm-blooded and very human individuals stepped from the page.
These characters were not "larger than life", they were precisely life-sized: for if Bachchan's pen was the fount of the romantic "Madhushala," the best-loved Hindi poem of the 20th Century, it was also a precision instrument that relished the small hard details of realistic description. Many themes and styles run through his writing, a ragamala alive with the richnesses of thumri and folk song, and yet equally capable of an elevated classicism. Right from early adulthood in that Allahabad setting, Hindi and English were the two main streams of his career, but a third element was that gift of the muse that flowed unseen into his life — a Saraswati to join the more visible streams of his individual creative sangam.
This confluence of diverse influences was one of the aspects of the autobiography that appealed to me most strongly. Even in intensely personal and even confessional moments, Bachchan's romanticism would draw equally on Indian and English streams. An example is his description of Champa, the wife of his boyhood friend Karkal, with both of whom the young "Harbans Rai" briefly and tragically enjoyed the closest of liaisons.
Champa was a fair, willowy girl, her body slender like a golden cane; her face had no easy-going cheerfulness, none of the flightiness that is admired in girls of her age, but a languorous look — perhaps born of the repressive control of her foster-mother — which seemed to crave sympathy while also being keen to bestow it on others. Yet perhaps the circumstances in which I first set eyes on Champa concealed her true form, which I was to see two or three months later when she was sitting on the low parapet of the roof-terrace overlooking Mohan Chacha's house, wearing a light blue sari, free of jewellery or adornments. Immediately below in Mohan Chacha's courtyard there stood a lasora tree whose upper branches overspread the roof where she sat, and whose half-open foliage seemed to imitate her own incipient beauty. At that time I lacked the words to describe it: only years later did they come to me, borrowed from Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale'' — "light-winged Dryad of the trees"; light-winged she was, and doubtless that is why she was to fly from us in the blinking of an eye, disappearing into the limitless heavens.
An appreciation of Bachchan's writing was only the first step towards the distant goal of translating it. My idea was to find an English style that would not look out of place in the rural United Provinces, and which might preserve at least some of the homely textures of Bachchan's work. I began by toying with a few paragraphs, trying different English fashions for size and feel, and eventually settling for a comfortable compromise between the homespun and the factory-milled import. Some initial satisfactions here encouraged me to continue, and I began wondering how to encompass the 1200 or so pages of the four-part autobiography within a single volume.
Abridgement is fiendishly difficult. You omit what seems an insignificant detail, only to realise that it had been the seed for a plant that would bear fruit a hundred pages later: so you sheepishly creep back and re-plant it, trying not to disturb the carefully-tamped ground in that earlier part of the story. A particular problem was what to do with the many extracts of verse that dot Bachchan's narrative: though smoothly integrated with their prose surroundings in Hindi, they seemed awkward in their new English setting. In the end I decided that the poetry would have to hit the cutting-room floor, except in those places where it formed part and parcel of the narrative. One such exception was when Bachchan — this "wine poet" who had drunk deep of Fitzgerald's rebottled Omar Khayyam — was reported to Mahatma Gandhi for promoting alcohol. Summoned to recite from "Madhushala'' and explain himself, Bachchan artfully chose a rubai that seemed most likely to please the Gandhian palate:
O Muslim, Hindu — faiths are two,
But one the brimming cup you share;
And one the drinking house, and one
The wine which flows so freely there.
By mosque and temple all's divided,
All is either `mine' or `thine';
But feuds thus forged are all at last
Forgotten in the House of Wine.
Bachchan was exonerated. Would his translator be, for pressing the "delete" button on so many passages of verse? Honesty demands an admission: the voice that I had adopted for Bachchan's prose sounded far less convincing in verse. My confidence was further eroded by the knowledge that Bachchan himself was a consummate translator, for his Hindi quatrain that reflects Robert Frost's "The woods are lovely, dark, and deep" — a passage famously dear to Nehru and quoted by Bachchan in this context — is the very model of the translator's art.
Fortunately, there were other contexts in which English fitted many a prose passage like a familiar old glove. And this is easily explained by the fact that in describing English-medium settings such as anecdotes from his days as an English lecturer at Allahabad University, Bachchan's Hindi was itself a kind of "translation" of an English original. My task, therefore, was to peel the top layer off this palimpsest to reveal — partly by guesswork — the Anglophone textures that lay underneath it:
Other contemporaries ... were
Mr. Bhagvat Dayal and Raghupati Sahay "Firaq". Mr. Bhagvat Dayal had been educated in Anglo-Indian schools and in England — perhaps in Oxford — the full impact of which showed in both his pronunciation and his manner. When asked his name would say "B. Dial". He was proud of being able to speak English like the English, and used to look down on people who spoke it with an Indian accent. We always shrank from talking to him because half of the English that emerged from his cigar or pipe-clamping lips was completely beyond us; if that was the case with us teachers, God alone knows what the students must have made of it. The only person able to speak on equal terms was Firaq Sahib: "Mr. Dayal, I'm beginning to understand your English again, I think it's time you made another trip to England.''
The many delights of reading Bachchan were revisited, but with a different resonance, in translating him. A further pleasure was a series of visits spent quietly in the author's company in Juhu, hearing at first hand the memories of which this autobiography is the most articulate record. For all the excitements of his phenomenal success as a Hindi poet, his university work (including a Cambridge Ph.D. on Yeats, which took him to Ireland), his career as "Officer on Special Duty: Hindi" in Nehru's government, his domestic life with Teji and their friendship with the Gandhis and the eventual time when his own renown was eclipsed by that of a more famous son, Bachchan himself seemed still to inhabit those dusty Allahabad lanes and to haunt his hand-built Madhushala.
With a No Objection Certificate (and in fact eager agreement) from Dr. Bachchan, I named the English translation of the abridged autobiography In the Afternoon of Time — a quotation from a poem by R.L. Stevenson that describes how he (like Bachchan) was the first in his family to turn to a career in writing. Publication of the translation was to bring its own anxieties. I had read enough Indian book reviews to know that reviewers are ustads with blades sharpened on a cruelly efficient whetstone. Generally, however, they proved merciful, even if one or two suggested that my English was sometimes too...English! But by this time, the book had already survived an even tougher test — that of the author himself. It was only when the entire draft translation was complete that I had dared show it to him. To my great relief and still greater joy, Dr. Bachchan, a man of few (and gentle) words in the evening of his time, greeted the translation with a bilingual judgement that sounded to my ears like the most sublime of blessings: "Bahut accha hai — I like it". He put his hand on my shoulder. I too was exonerated.
Rupert Snell teaches Hindi at The School of African and Oriental Studies, London, and is the author of several books, among them a translation of Harivansh Rai Bachchan's autobiography.
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
|
