I have this year committed a great blasphemy. Over the year I have been working on two books of translations by the two masters of Bengali literature: Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s swashbuckling historical romance Durgeshnandini (1865) — translated as The Chieftain’s Daughter — which was the first (genuine) novel in Indian writing; and Rabindranath Tagore’s (unintended) triptych on failed marriages: Nashtaneer (1901), Dui Bon (1933) and Malancha (1934) — called Three Women in homage to Ray’s film. As I virtually lived together with the prose of these two masters, word by word, phrase by phrase, I simply couldn’t stop myself from comparing them as writers.
In any case, by choosing to translate these superstars, I had already pincered myself—between the hawks waiting to pounce on anything they perceive as unfaithfulness to the original works, and demanding readers to whom the translations would have to prove that Tagore and Bankim are every bit as great as their reputations suggest. It is a rare feat to translate great literature and not be criticised, and since I was going to be damned, I thought why not commit the ultimate damnation and ask, like Steiner famously did of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Tagore or Bankim?
Historically the two men followed each other, Tagore standing on Bankim’s pioneering shoulders to take the fledgling Bengali novel further. Bankim regarded Tagore as his literary successor and there is a famous anecdote about this. Bankim, attending a wedding, was garlanded as an honoured guest. A young Rabindranath, who had published his celebrated collection of poems, Sandhya Sangeet (Evening Song) recalled: ‘As I came up, Bankim Babu eagerly took the garland and placing it around my neck, said, “ The wreath to him, Ramesh, have you not read his Evening Songs?”’
However Rabindranath and Bankim were vastly different writers. Rabindranth, lyrical and interior, Bankim, full of vigour and intellect. But as I struggled with the challenges of translating both, I began to compare the way the two writers employed language—selecting words and phrases, building arrays of nouns and adjectives, making use of imagery and rhetoric. No one is compelled to study the words of a text as closely as a translator, for he must reproduce every nuance of every intent behind every word, besides every component of the content, in the translated version. This then is the background to my blasphemy.
First, the differences between the two. Throughout his novel, Bankim’s language elevates the Bengali of his times to a higher register by injecting a Sanskrit-flavoured idiom. Read nearly one hundred and fifty years later, his language is both beautiful and powerful, sonorous to the ear but, often, arcane to the eye and the brain. And yet it is important to recognise that Durgesh was a bestseller in its day and went into thirteen editions, electrifying its readers with its portrayal of battling Mughals and Pathans, and the Romeo-Juliet love story. I felt strongly that a new translation needed to retain the impact that Bankim would have had on his contemporary reader, and yet be true to Bankim’s classical prose style. Translating was thus a two-step process. First, consult the dictionary—and, when necessary, experts—on the precise meaning and application of every single word not used today. Second, find and craft a contemporary English equivalent. My rule was simple. The prose had to have a formality but it couldn’t sound archaic. For example I never used the word ‘thou’, a word that Bankim used in his first novel, Rajmohan’s Wife, which was written in English.
It was in the process of this journey that I discovered just how effortlessly Bankim could switch his tone. From elegant depictions of the settings of his scenes to the emotionally-charged dialogue of adversaries, from tense accounts of battle to elaborately faux-epic descriptions of the beauty of his heroines, he segues smoothly in and out of such diverse passages. His text captures a multiplicity of voices, situations, sentiments, all in the space of a single novel. The second challenge in translating him was to match him step for step as he danced through his prose.
Here is Bankim, wry and ironic in this scene between Aasmani the maid, and her suitor, the oaf Diggaj who considers himself a great lover:
‘Aasmani entered as soon as he opened the door. It dawned on Diggaj that his beloved deserved a worthy welcome. Therefore, he intoned, his arm upraised, ‘I bow in reverence to you, o goddess.’
‘And where did you discover such juicy poetry?’ enquired Aasmani.
D: I composed it today just for you.
A: Not for nothing have I dubbed you the king of love.’
Now watch him switch gears to pure melodrama in the climactic scene where Bimala, one of the heroines of the story, plots her revenge on the evil Pathan Katalu Khan:
‘Why do you pour so much wine? Pour, then, pour even more, you have your dagger concealed inside your garments, do you not know? But of course you do. How then can you smile so much? Katalu Khan is gazing upon you! What was that? One of your glances! And again! There, you have further aroused the Yavana already drunk on the taste of wine. Is this the ruse with which you have eliminated the others to become the object of Katalu Khan’s affections?’
In contrast, Tagore is indisputably Tagore the poet, the lyricist, even in his prose. Addicted to adjectives and adverbs, he wrote in a flowing, unique hand that made even the mundane magical. He is generous with metaphors and often these metaphors contained a whole image in them, so realised that they halt the narrative and draw attention to themselves. Consider the following metaphor about a grief-struck father who has lost his son in Dui Bon:
‘The image of such a beautiful, strong body being carved up in this fashion wrapped its talons around his mind, like a ferocious, black bird of prey.’
But many of these sentences read oddly in English (see my examples below) in their full, literal translation. And I must admit that sometimes the heavy lyricism, the decorativeness of the sentences, brought out my editor’s instincts. (The instinct was quelled for obvious reasons!). To translate Tagore, then, I had to enter a space untethered to syntax and grammar, one that required his voice to be heard, absorbed, and then reproduced. Mostly, that meant finding a phrase, an expression, a structure that matched my interpretation of his cadence and his meaning. I give you two examples. Here is a literal translation of from a section in Dui Bon:
‘Her vivacity raises ripples in the blood, reaches the heart of the senses, where a solitary string of a golden veena awaits in silence a melody, the melody that makes one resonate with the call of the indescribable.’
This is my translation, simplifying Rabindranth’s rich imagery but keeping the central picture of the original intact.
‘Her vivacity makes the blood tingle, entering the very core of one’s being and bringing the expectant body to life, like the melody that awakens the silent veena.’
Here is another example from Malancha.
‘The scent of the memories of different seasons, mingled with the vapour of Darjeeling tea at dawn, merged with her sighs to raise a storm of mourning in her heart.’
And here’s how I chose to translate it:
‘She remembered the Darjeeling tea at dawn, whose vapours had carried the aromas of the seasons and now seemed to mingle with her sighs, and felt utterly desolate.’
Rabindranth’s prose, I discovered, often followed the irrational jumps of the human mind when telling a tale, rather than the organised storytelling of the professional narrator. The gaps could not be bridged in the translated text, the angularities could not be sandpapered, the effusiveness could not be dampened, the colour and imagery could not be diluted.
And now, the judgment. Unneccessary, perhaps, but then so is translation. So, going out on a limb, and making it clear that this is a personal choice only, I prefer reading Bankim, but I prefer translating Tagore. As a reader, I admire Bankim’s control, structure, richness, characterisation and narrative verve. But as a translator, I was perhaps more challenged by Tagore’s craft, his unfailing ability to create poetry out of sentences, to draw rich pictures in his descriptions, and to present a larger truth through his fiction.
And no, this isn’t a cop-out.
Arunava Sinha is the translator and series editor of the Random House India Classics Series, Bengali. His translations include Chowringhee (winner of the Vodafone Crossword Prize for best translation), My Kind of Girl (shortlisted for the Vodafone Crossword Prize for best translation), Middleman, Striker Stopper.
