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Poetic Representations: Cultural
Differences in Hindi and English
Reading R. K. Singh’s Poetry Through Translation
Varsha
Singh
Research Scholar
Vinoba Bhave University,
Hazaribag,
Jharkhand
I have had the privilege of translating R. K.
Singh’s poetry.1 That effort was rewarding for me as it was done
under the keen presence of the poet himself. I had the benefit of reading my
own translations, or – to use the metaphor of Raji Narasimhan – using ‘translation
as a touchstone’2 to understand the original. Indeed, translation –
as they say – is the most intimate interpretation of the original text. This
paper is an attempt to situate Singh’s poem in its cultural and critical
tradition and reading them with the help of my own translations in Hindi.
The Poet
R. K. Singh’s poetry is apparently simple in its
first reading but reveals itself when you show patience. Anything beautiful and
meaningful will demand that from you. You can’t order a sunrise or a sunset.
You must have the patience to see the sun come up or go down. Similarly,
Singh’s poetry demands that you choose your spot and allow the spirits to
conjure themselves up.
R. K. Singh is realistic and tries to present facts
in his poems. The themes of spiritual search, an attempt to understand inner
self and the outer world, social injustice and disintegration, human suffering,
degradation of relationship, political corruption, fundamentalism, hollowness
of urban life and its false values, prejudices, loneliness, sex, love, irony,
intolerance are prominent in his writing.
Poetry
Ezra
pound once said that “Great literature is simply language charged with meaning
to the utmost possible degree”, and it is the same with the poems of R.K.
Singh. The compressed language Singh uses in his poetry gives the readers complete
freedom for interpretation. His style contains certain key aspects such as –
manipulation of language to a special effect, lack of punctuation marks,
practice of giving no titles, use of erotic metaphors, and depiction of the
painful realities of the Indian society. He explores and reinvigorates
traditional forms and styles with eclectic understanding of creativity. His
poems create an intrinsic effect on the reader’s mind that is long lasting. In
the words of R. K. Singh:
“Poetry is an art, a verbal art, which when
effective, generates some physical, emotional or psychosexual sensation,
stimulates some sensuous, spiritual or exalted pleasure, or provokes some mood
or aesthetic sentiments, feelings, thoughts or ideas. It is also subjective
expression of a social vision, reality or protest and an extension of the
poet’s self”3
In an interview with me, Singh pointed out the
complexities of understanding of his own poems. He says,
Sometimes when I re-read my poems and find that I am
not able to understand it myself as a reader, I try to rewrite it, or discard
it. I do ensure that I don’t put out a poem which is not sensible to me.
Sometimes certain images and metaphors may be challenging, but I do enjoy
writing poems that may be “ambiguous” and/or allow more meanings than one. For
example, since I hardly use titles or punctuation marks, the lines can be read
differently to derive different meanings. Then, there is the use of enjambment
(one line passing to the next with full period or question mark etc at the end)
just as there are instances where first word of the next line plays a double
role both at grammatical and semantic levels. The readers do need to be
sensitive about these features of my poetry that make it simple and complex at
the same time. This has been my normal style, posing difficulty to readers…. I
am not writing prose as poetry!4
Flight of Phoenix
Published in
1990, R. K. Singh’s collection of poems, Flight
of Phoenix, dominates itself with intense sensitivity of eroticism and
expression of inner-self as well.
Translation:
An Intimate Reading
R. K Singh’s Flight of Phoenix is an important work
in his oeuvre. My experience of translating his poems in the collection gave me
an opportunity to understand the poems in an intimate way. Let us take poem
number 18 as example,
Each
day I construct
myself
in new desires and
end
in emptiness
a
hollow shadow
I
move in dust and rest in
stony
webs of haze
Translation
Roz
banaataa hoon khud ko
Nayee
tammannaon mein
Aur
simat jaataa hoon
Khaalipan
mein
Thothaa
saya saa
Firtaa
hoon dhool mein
Aur
tham jaataa hoon
Gubaar
key pathreeley jaalon mein
In this poem the
poet presents some majestic images such as “hollow
shadow” and “stony webs”. As a
translator it was my first job to read the poem through these images and try to
find its equivalent in the target language that is Hindi. However, we must
understand the context of these images and phrases used in the poem. If hollow
shadow and stony webs can be translated as “thothaa
sayaa” and “pathreeley jaal” one
was very conscious of the fact that they must be able to carry the negative
connotation of the phrases in the original. The process of translation did not
only open up the possibilities of meanings in the poem but also alerted me to
the possible equivalences in the target language. This is what I call
translation as an intimate reading. With more examples from the book, I will
try to drive home the point. With the help of the translations of poem number 4,
I will illustrate the point. With the original, I provide two possible
translations to understand the close reading the process of translation
entails.
When
sleepless poetry
fails
to negotiate night
I
wait for white dreams
Translation
– 1
Jab
beyneend kavita
Haar
jaati raat sey samjhautey mein
Main
berang sapnon ka kartaa intezaar
Translation
– 2
Jab
rahoon beyneend
Aur
kavita haarey samjhautey mein
Tab
raat karoon main intezaar
Berang
sapnon kaa
In the first
attempt of translating this poem it can be seen that it is the poem
becoming sleepless, which is not the
implied meaning and thus incorrect: whereas, in the second translation it is
the person who has become sleepless, and thus it is the correct translation.
This is basically a transferred epithet, which requires keen observation of the
translator for a better result.
The compressed language
in Flight of Phoenix is its most
dominating and impressive aspect providing rhythm and tone to the poems as well
as leading towards the textural issues in translation. This aspect of the book
can be seen as another big challenge for a translator. Poem no. 24 is a perfect
example situating the issue of compressiveness in the poems of R.K. Singh.
Is
it the heat wave
or
stupor that I see
shadows
in the dark and call it vision?
Translation
Kya
hai yah
Taptee
tarang yaa madhoshi
Jo
dekhoon main anderey mein saya
Aur
pukaaroon usey kalpana
The
poet does not use any punctuation mark in this poem except a question mark at
the end. This describes the compressive nature of the poem and thus becomes a
challenge in translation. Similar problem is encountered in all the poems Flight of Phoenix.
As discussed
earlier, that, compressed language provides a variant tone to the poems of this
collection, poem no. 26 would be a suitable example describing this issue of tone
in translating verses.
The
colour of night is the same everywhere
what
if my identity is not known
let’s
fuck the moment and forget the place
The tone of this
poem is negative, where the poet is talking about darkness and his unidentified
identity. In this situation, any kind of carelessness or incapability of the
translator may lead toward misinterpretation, as resulted below:
Translation
1
Raagini
ki rangat har taraf ek si hai
Toh
kya, agar main anjaan hoon
Chalo
is sthaan sey virakt ho
Is pal ko hum
shikast dein
Here, the poem
has resulted as over translation and has become a romantic piece, which is not
the original tone. A better version for this poem would be:
Translation
2
Raat
har taraf ek si
Toh
kya agar meri pehchaan chupi
Bin
fikra key ab jagah ki
Jee
lein hum yeh pal abhi
As it is known
that translation is not only a linguistic procedure, it is a cultural process
as well. A translator has to face numerous issue related to the culture, as one
has to take care of the emotions, values and traditions of two cultures – i.e.
the culture of the original text as well as the culture of the target language.
Poem no. 16 from Flight of Phoenix is
a better example providing the cultural issues in translation.
Winter
is caught in
waves
of narrow discussions
under
the blanket
fingers
move by nipples erect
without
sensing consummation
Translation
chaadar
taley
hui
sard
tarangein
tang baaton ki
ungaliyaan
stan ko chooti
ab
bin ehsaas koi
It was essential
for me to take proper care of this piece as the poem carries certain element of
eroticism in it and the erotic sensibility goes handy with each culture
differently. The expressions and sentiments of two different cultures cannot be
same, they vary from each other; therefore, careful understanding becomes an
essential requirement otherwise the poem would die in the hands of the
translator. Similar problem is noticed in poem no. 19 as well.
Bones
of levity criss-cross
at
the bottom of silence
there
is no shape in the mind
Translation
Khaamoshi
taley
Hoti
aadi-tirchee
Shareer
utaavaleypan ki
Zehan
mein rahey nahin
Fir
aakaar koi
Present
translation makes it clear that a slight deviation by the translator may lead
the text towards a negative cultural impression, and may hurt the sentiments of
the target readers.
Some other
examples of the erotic elements which create cultural problems while
translating this collection are:
Poem
no 59
I
smell my boneless
semen
under the pillow
weaving
legends in
half-dream
along her
hips
as I curl like rainbow
dying
winds splash down blots
Poem
no.56
Like
a woman’s mind
resides
between her thighs joy
and
satisfaction
man’s
love and hatred
concentrate
on the crevice
though
he watches face
she
laughs when I say
love
and beauty is nothing
but
sabre and sheath
Poem
no.52
The
split in cypress
is
vulva I know the roots
purush-prakriti
call
it Yin and Yang
our
basic sex, lingam and
yoni harmonise
Like
lotus rising
from
the depths of lake through mud
crossing
existence
My
focus has been on retaining the sense of the poems, rather than the mere verbal
meaning, even as the basic problem was faced related to the cultural
transformation of expression from English to Hindi. Words substitute and sense substitute for
erotic words and sense had to be found out in Hindi, which was a major cultural
challenge, as it was important to find the equivalence in Hindi of images
created so often and evocatively in English. For instance, words and images
such as, ‘scratching between his legs’, ‘tending the blouse’, ‘boneless semen’,
‘unzips her skirt’, ‘lingam and yoni’, ‘Yin-Yang’ etc. were difficult to
transfer in Hindi; yet an effort was made by
translating them as: “khurachtey
paavon key beech”, “choli sarkaatey”, “beyasthi veerya”, “utaarti vo kapdey”,
“ling aur yoni”, “yin-yang” . Here, it may be relevant to quote R.K. Singh,
from one of his essays:
“The
problems of translating metaphors, alliteration, collocations, puns, word play,
proper names, neologism, cultural words, eponyms (like Gandhism, thacherism),
no equivalent words (like jaunty), acronyms, imagery, symbols, and even
problems of a given text are genuine just as finding an exact ‘communicative
equivalence’ across different languages is challenging.”5
One faces
another kind of cultural implication while translating the title of the text – Flight of Phoenix. Phoenix is basically a Greek mythical
bird, the only one of its kind; hence, it becomes a challenge for the
translator to find out a suitable equivalent for Phoenix in Indian culture too. After some research “Garud” comes as the Indian mythical
bird, which is considered the only one of its kind and very much similar to the
nature and features of Phoenix. As a
result, the title Flight of Phoenix
becomes Garud ki Udaan in Hindi.
At last, it
becomes necessary to say, that, there are many more dominant ingredients that
constitute the art of R.K. Singh’s poetry and if the translator misses them,
then a major constituent of Singh’s poetry is lost. A literary translator,
therefore, needs to use his/her art and craft “with responsibility to capture
the spirit of the original” avoiding both under-translation and
over-translation.
Translating
the contemporary poets writing in English, especially, for an international
audience poses a greater challenge than poets writing for the home audience.
The difficulties multiply if the poetic sensibility entails both Indian and
other cultural ethos. A complex of personal understanding and wider sensibility
is called for in handling the textual and contextual problems, too, especially
in the poetry of a collection like Flight
of Phoenix. Possibly, more and more exercises in translating an Indian poet
in an Indian language may help in negotiating the emotional and cultural
contents more effectively.
Notes:
1.
Singh,
Varsha. “Translation of Flight of Phoenix:
Some Linguistic and Cultural Issues”. Dissertation, Indian School of Mines.
2011.
2.
Narasimhan, Raji. Translation as a Touchstone. New Delhi:
Sage Publications. 2013.
3.
Singh,
R.K. Flight of Phoenix: A Collection of
Poems. Berhampur: Poetry Time Publications. 1990. p. 9.
4.
Singh,
Varsha. “Interview with Dr. R.K. Singh”. Reviews,
Vol I, Issue II.
5.
Singh,
R.K. Teaching English for Specific Purpose: An Evolving Experience. Jaipur: Book
Enclave. 2005. p. 280.
