Rabindra Sangeet - essence & influence - Page 2

The translations I did for this book in the early 1980s are probably known to many of you. It is convenient for me to use them today, as I need to quote Tagore in English translation, and obviously my own translations are the ones I know best. But there is another, more important reason why I want to quote them. Above all, when I worked on this book, I wanted to convey in English what I felt to be Tagore's true qualities of poetic greatness, in a way that I did not think had been satisfactorily conveyed before, whether in his own translations or in translations by others. In order to explain to you what I was trying to achieve, I need to go into the 'nuts and bolts' of the translations more than I have done before in a lecture; which may also reveal the nuts and bolts of Tagore's poems in the original more than has perhaps been done by any critic in English, and possibly not in Bengali either. 'Tagore' and 'greatness' are very easily linked, because of his iconic status in Bengal and in India as a whole, not to mention other countries; because of his long life and vast influence; his central role in the formation of modern Indian nationhood; his noble appearance; his wide and human sympathies; and his profound spiritual insight. But I wonder if the prominence of his greatness in all these aspects has distracted us from his actual greatness as a poet. After all, it is possible to be wise, good, humane, brave and influential without being a poet. To be a great poet you need to write great poems, and that requires a number of purely literary gifts and qualities, some of which are quite technical. Let us consider some of the things in Maran-milan that makes it such a great poem. Firstly there is the astonishing technical control: the unerring use of metre, rhyme and verse structure to echo perfectly Death's quiet footsteps. Listen to the first stanza in Bengali:

ata cupi cupi kena katha kao
ogo maran, he mor maran,
ati dhire ese kena ceye rao,
ogo eki pranayer-i dharan!
yabe sandhyabelay phul-dal
pare klanta brinte namiya,
yabe phire ase gothe gabhidal
sara din-man mathe bhramiya,
tumi pase asi basa acapal
ogo ati mridugati-caran.
ami bujhi na ye ki ye katha kao
ogo maran, he mor maran.

In translating a poem of such technical and formal virtuosity, my first objective is to find an equivalent form in English that will not be the same as the Bengali but which will immediately convince the reader of the poem's craftsmanship. Tagore always attached great value to craftsmanship: many of his efforts at Santiniketan and Sriniketan aimed to support and develop it. As a poet myself, craftsmanship is immensely important to me too, for I believe no poet or artist, in the long run, will be credible unless he or she possesses it. We do not expect all artisans to be artists, but we do expect artists to be - among other things - artisans. In the Bengali, the regular (lines 2 and 12) placing of the refrain - ogo maran, he mor maran - is one of the most mesmeric things about this poem. I decided that this might not work so well in English: 'O my Death' is not a happy phrase, and doesn't in itself have that quiet, creeping quality the poem requires. So instead I have the simple, quiet spondee 'Death, Death'; and I let it move around in the stanza. I felt that this would express the steady, yet unpredictable footsteps of Death more effectively than keeping it in a fixed position. As regards metre, I did not follow Tagore's six foot/four foot alternating pattern, but I did pick up the trochaic character of the six foot lines, and the fact that the four foot lines are more 'accentual', with four main stresses, but with variation in the number of light syllables between them:

ati dhire ese kena ceye rao,
ogo eki pranayer-i dharan!

I thus used a five foot blank verse line that is not too rigid in its syllable-count, and has a lot of trochaic feet, often with the light syllable omitted completely at the beginning of lines:

Make the whole night ring…
Grasp me by the hand…
Pay no heed to what…

What else makes this a great poem? Well, there is its overall structural power, the way in which it moves, by means of vivid phrasing and imagery, from its quiet beginning to the drama of the Siva/Gauri verses; the passion of the poet's complaint against Death's stealthiness; and the final, unflinching statement of courage. A translator has to feel the emotional sequence from beginning to end, grasp the poem as a structural and dramatic whole, before he can sit down and translate it well. Then there is its energy and vitality of language: Tagore's vastness of vocabulary, from the classicism of compound phrases such as bijayoddhat dhvajapat (for Death's victory-flag) to colloquial Bengali reduplicative and onomatopoeic expressions such as kinkini-ranrani (for his jingling ankle-bells) and babam-babam (for Siva's cheek-slapping). (Tagore called such expressions dhvanatmak-sabda, 'sound-soul-words', and compiled a comprehensive list of them.) Then there is the poem's moral depth and sincerity. Here is a poet who is prepared to tackle the deepest, most cosmic, most universal themes: in the case of this poem, the mysterious power of Death, whose edicts we cannot resist and can never fully understand. Yet there is in this poem, solemn though it is, wit as well: Gauri's reactions to Siva as bridegroom and of her parents too are comically reminiscent of an ordinary Bengali domestic scene ('…and in his mind/Her father agreed calamity had struck'). For me, wit is an essential ingredient of great poetry. It is always there, because the skilful use of language in poetry involves word-play, which is by definition witty. Wit, too, is the handmaid of wisdom: a great poem needs to be many-sided, to be open to different points of view. A wise man is always humorous; a narrow-minded fanatic never is.

All in all, these elements working together in concert - verse-form, rhythm, structure, language, feeling, imagery, moral depth, wit - embody that power of poetic mind that makes a great poet, distinguishes him from the second-rate. It was that quality of mind that I felt was lacking in earlier translations of Tagore, including his own, and which I was so anxious to capture.