[written for the 18th European
Conference on Modern South Asian Studies, Lund, Sweden, 6-9 July, 2004]
This is not an academic paper, nor even a
book review. It is a personal
meditation on Clinton B. Seely’s translation of Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s
celebrated epic poem, Meghanad-badh kabya. The translation was published in the spring
of 2004 by Oxford University Press in New York, under the title: The Slaying of Meghanada: A Ramayana from
Colonial Bengal.
I’m told
it happens in science: suddenly several papers appear on the same topic. Having recently read and admired a book
called The Music of the Primes, by
Marcus du Sautoy (Fourth Estate, 2003), I’ve noticed that at least two other
books on prime numbers were published at the same time. So maybe some conjunction in the spheres was
responsible for the fact that Professor Seely’s book arrived on my desk at SOAS
a couple of months after I had finished my own translation of Meghanad-badh kabya, and was about to
nerve myself up for the Notes, Glossary and Introduction.
His
book did not, however, come as a complete surprise, because at least two years
ago Clint told me in an email that he was revising for publication the
translation of the epic that he had started in the 1970s. In that case, I responded, I would abandon
my own translation: there was no point in having two. With characteristic generosity, he wrote saying I should on no
account do that: the epic fully deserved more than one translation. I remained doubtful, but as the months went
by I realised that I just couldn’t abandon mine. I had been too closely and personally involved with it for too
long, and it was inseparable from trends and ambitions in my own poetry. Although my work on Madhusudan began with a
D.Phil thesis on him at Oxford, submitted and passed (though never really
completed) in 1987, and although out of that work had come two quite scholarly
articles, the translation of his major work was for me more a literary than an
academic project. I made this clear in
a poem I wrote in the 1990s, included in my book Gifts: Poems 1992-1999. It
was an elegy for Nicholas John, a friend of mine who worked as a 'dramaturge' (researcher and writer of programme notes) for English National Opera and who
slipped and fell to his death when walking in the Alps in 1996. As well as evoking him and the world of
opera he loved so much, it alluded to the composer Param Vir (with whom I had
collaborated on a chamber opera based on Tagore), and also to Meghanad-badh kabya. The speaker of the poem is an old woman
called Maggie, who fantasises about being a great opera singer:
yes I’d
sing on a vast scale Indian grief like
Queen Chitr-
angada not some corny old role not
Joe Green
Wagner or Strauss Puc- cini or Berg great
stuff true
but it’s the huge lush sound of the new age
East West
joined that I want grand stories untapped that
Megh- nad epic the bit my
nephew read out his
friend P
V as he’s known could set it so well yes
Queen Chitr- angada hair
loose body without jewels
wild eyes
brimming with tears like lotuses night- dew-
full half
crazy with grief her mighty-armed son good
brave strong Birbahu dead
grieves mother-bird-like when
some sly
serpent her warm nest entering grabs her
brood grief’s storm in the court
loose hair of her maids like
black clouds gale of their sighs
dense thunderous rain- tears
The reference here is to Book I of
Madhusudan’s epic, in which Ravana’s Queen Chitrangada sweeps into his sabha (council-chamber), grief-stricken
at the death in battle of their son Birabahu.
Here is part of that passage in my (draft) translation:
Then, suddenly,
the sound of feminine weeping flooded in from all sides,
Mingled with
the tinkling of anklets, and the sonorous jingling of girdle-bells. Chitrangada-devi
came into the chamber,
With her
gold-complexioned attendants. Her hair
was unplaited, alas,
Loose and
dishevelled! Her body was without
ornament, like a forest-adorning creeper in the snow,
Bereft of its
jewel-like blossoms! Her eyes were full
of tears, like petals of a lotus brimming with night's dew!
The
queen was benumbed with grief for Birabahu, like a mother-bird after a deadly
snake enters her nest and devours her young!
A storm of grief swept through the court!
Her womenfolk
shone with goddess-like beauty; their unbound hair was a bank of clouds; their
heavy sighing was a hurricane wind;
Their tears
streamed like a cloudburst; their weeping and wailing boomed like thunder! The Lord of Lanka started in his golden
throne!
Handmaidens
dropped their fly-whisks as their eyes moistened; the weeping umbrella-bearer
dropped his umbrella; shocked,
Angered, the
guard at the door unsheathed his awesome sword; councillors,
Ministers and
the rest of the court were all alarmed, all in tears, all weeping noisily!
In ‘Writing for the future’, an essay which
I published in a Statesman annual in
Kolkata but which I also included in my book Poetry and Community: Lectures and Essays 1991-2001, I wrote about
how my elegy would depend for its full comprehension and appreciation on
developments in the future: on, for example, the full establishment of Param
Vir’s reputation as a major composer of our time, and on the completion of my translation
of Meghanad-badh kabya. In relation to the stanzas quoted above, I
wrote:
In the fourth
stanza, Maggie’s operatic fantasy develops further. The European tradition is somehow not grand enough for her. (Joe Green is the joke English name that is
sometimes given to ‘Giuseppe Verdi’.)
Instead, she has a vision of European opera joining forces with the
Indian epic tradition, as interpreted by Michael Madhusudan Dutt, whose works
were indeed a marriage of East and West.
The ‘new age’ is one in which Western and Indian traditions will blend,
and the best composer for it will be the Indian-born composer Param Vir. Here I’m gambling on two things: firstly, a
future awareness in the Western world of the poetry of Madhusudan, which might
come about if I complete and publish my translation of Meghanad-badh kabya; secondly the future achievement and reputation
of Param Vir. This seems reasonable to expect, for his chamber opera Snatched by the Gods, for which I wrote
the libretto, has, with its companion piece Broken
Strings (libretto by David Rudkin, based on a Jataka story), been performed in Amsterdam, Munich, London, Glasgow
and Edinburgh, and further performances are planned elsewhere. The operas have entered the modern operatic
repertoire, and have even been included in the The New Kobbé’s Opera Book, a standard reference book that Nicholas
John was enlarging and revising when he died. I have great faith in the future
career of PV (as he is known to his friends), and my reference to him in this
poem is an expression of that faith. I
also have faith in my translation of Meghanad-badh
kabya, though I don’t know why I have made myself Maggie’s nephew!
Well, Param
Vir’s career has certainly gone on developing since then,
and as for my own I can at least say that my translation of Madhusudan’s epic
is now complete. But should I, now that
Clint’s translation has appeared, rush to publish it? Would it in fact offer anything that his translation does not
already offer?
My copy of The Slaying of Meghanada came from Clint himself, inscribed with a
message reiterating his view that I should not be daunted, that I should bring
out my own translation regardless: ‘For William,’ he wrote, ‘who understands
and appreciates this epic poem and whose own translations of the same will make
a wonderful and welcome companion piece to this book. Yours truly, Clint.’ You
can’t get more sincere and generous than that, and everyone who knows Clint
Seely will vouch for his kindness and modesty as a man, as well as his excellence
as a scholar.
Clint is indeed a scholar of kind
that I have never felt myself to be. In
terms of the lucidity of its historical Introduction, and the meticulousness of
its Notes and Glossary, there are scholarly qualities in his book that I would
find hard to match. If I do eventually
publish mine, with the apparatus that any translation of Madhusudan’s learned
and allusive epic requires, I shall certainly be climbing on to Clint’s
shoulders. I shall be deeply indebted
to him, just as an editor of a Shakespeare play, say, is indebted to all the
scholars and editors before him. Even
in the translation itself, though we can both say with total certitude that our
translations were done entirely
independently of each other, I shall use his translation as a control: checking
every line of mine against his, and going to him with queries if I find our
interpretations of the literal meaning of a word or line diverge. Indeed, almost the first thing I did on
receiving his translation was to tell a Bengali friend who I had been trying to
persuade to take on the onerous task of checking my translation from beginning
to end, that I would not have to ask her to do that after all. She was very relieved!
Having now read Clint’s
Introduction, and dipped into his translation, I think I can say that I will revise, introduce, annotate and
publish mine. But I shan’t rush
this. He himself found that he had to
let his draft translation rest for a good many years before he felt ready to
revise and publish it. I don’t intend
to wait quite as long as he did, but I do not now envisage publication of my
translation till 2007 or 2008. Penguin
India, from whom I have a contract, are happy to wait, as they themselves
recognise that for the next few years Clint’s translation should rightfully
hold the field.
What are the differences between his
way of translating Madhusudan and mine?
The most striking difference is technical: we have arrived at very
different solutions to the problem of how to render Madhusudan’s Bengali blank
verse in English.
Let me quote his rendering of that
same passage in Book I (ll.322-344):
Suddenly
at that time, there drifted in from all directions soft sounds
of weeping blended with anklets’ tinkling, jingling girdles,
and ominous outcries.
Escorted by the golden-limbed
women of her retinue, Queen Citrangada stepped to
the floor of that assembly - hair, alas, disheveled! Her
arms, naked, without bangles, like forest-ornamenting
vines when, in snow, they lack gemlike blossoms! Her tear-filled eyes
were as the dewy lotus pads at night! The queen was quite
beside herself, lamenting over Virabahu, as
does a mother bird when some fell snake slips inside her nest
and swallows up her fledglings.
A storm of woe blew into
that assembly hall! The
women folk stood there, appearing
comely as the wives of the divines, their loose and flowing
hair seemed a swirl of clouds, their heaving sighs Pralaya-like
heavy winds, their streams of tears torrential rains, their wailing
moans the thunder’s rumble!
Lanka’s sovereign on his gold throne
was startled. Maidens in
attendance, tear-soaked, dropped their yak-
tail whisks; the umbrella bearer let slip the parasol
and wept; angry and confused, the guardsman unsheathed his dread
sword; and the ministers, the counselers, and members of
the court, alarmed, broke down crying, causing utter havoc.
In a section
‘On Translation’ at the end of his fine Introduction to the epic, Clint
explains the principles of Madhusudan’s amitraksara
chanda, the blank verse that was one of his main innovations in Bengali
poetry. Comparing it to the
fourteen-syllable medieval Bengali payar line,
he writes:
Datta took that basic payar structure,
retained the fourteen-syllable line, discarded end rhyming, and allowed for
enjambment. That is to say, his poetic
lines flow across the weak boundaries within a line, suppress the sense of a
couplet structure altogether by not exhibiting couplet rhyming, and come to an
end, meaningfully, anywhere within the line, not just at the end of one.
This is
absolutely correct. Clint goes on to
say, after setting out four lines of the epic in separate transliterated
syllables, ‘In my translation, I hold to the fourteen-syllable, unrhymed line
displaying enjambment, though I make no effort to force my lines to be
coterminous with the original.’ In
other words, his basic verse principle is to count off lines of fourteen
English syllables, making sure, as Madhusudan always does, that all his
paragraphs end with a full, fourteen-syllable line.
I have to say that I have problems
with this as a defining principle of verse in English. Because (as Clint rightly admits later in
this section of his Introduction), English is a stressed language, it is very
difficult to base any kind of verse structure on a simple count of
syllables. Although in standard,
Shakespearean English blank verse, the line normally has ten syllables, this is
only because the most common structure for each of the five feet in the line is
an iamb - a light syllable followed by a heavier one. But instead of an iamb you can have a trochee, a dactyl or an
anapaest, or even a one syllable foot, so the number of syllables in a line can
vary quite a lot. An English ear does
not ‘hear’ syllables: it hears stresses and feet, if the poetry is in
traditional metre.
Does an American ear hear syllables
more acutely than a British English ear?
It is true that in my kind of English, the stressed syllable of a word
is perhaps more heavily stressed than in American pronunciation, and the lighter
syllables are lighter. I will say ‘momentarily’,
with a heavy stress on the first syllable, and the remaining syllables all
falling away lightly. An American will
say ‘momentarily’: he will give the third syllable a stress as
well as the first, and will give more time and weight to the unstressed
syllables too. I was interested the
other day to hear an American government spokesman on television saying ‘authoritatively’,
whereas I would say ‘authoritatively’, with a stress on only the second
syllable. So it may be that Clint, when
he pronounces his syllabic English lines, hears the syllables more separately
than I do.
But does he hear his line
endings? In order to maintain his
fourteen-syllable structure, he frequently has to end his lines (as in the
extract above) with words like ‘to’, ‘as’ or ‘of’. These are words after which we would never make any kind of
pause. Does a line-ending in verse - any
kind of verse - necessarily imply a pause?
Even in rhymed verse, the sense often requires us to run on without a
pause. Clint would be right to argue
that there are no pauses at the ends of Madhusudan’s lines when the sense runs
on, so what is wrong with ending an English line with whatever word comes at
the end of fourteen-syllables? He could
also cite in his defence poets who have specialised in writing English syllabic
verse, notably the American poet Marianne Moore. I’ve just looked at her poem ‘The Steeple-jack’ and find that she
has lines ending in ‘is’, ‘to’ and even ‘the’.
So although I personally, as a poet,
am resistant to ending lines with ‘little words’ that have a grammatical, not a
lexical function, I have to accept that Clint is perfectly entitled to use a
fourteen-syllable line that does not convey itself to the ear as a discrete
unit. But as to whether it effectively
conveys how Madhusudan’s Bengali blank verse works, I have two questions.
Firstly, although Madhusudan’s lines
are frequently enjambed, and a caesura can fall anywhere in a line, is it true
that the Bengali ear does not hear his lines as lines? I myself suspect that it does, partly
because the fourteen-syllable payar is
so fundamental to Bengali tradition, but also because - as Clint rightly points
out - Bengali is not a heavily stressed
language like English. Syllables are
given much more equal weight, though I would not go as far as to say, as Clint
does, that ‘normally all syllables within an individual word receive equal
stress.’ He follows that statement by
saying that ‘if any syllable is going to receive slight stress - and this
happens when a word is spoken in isolation from other words - then it should be
the first: ME-gha-na-da, not me-GHA-na-da or me-gha-NA-da, or me-gha-na-DA.’ I myself would say more confidently that
there is normally a stress on one
syllable in a Bengali word, though not as heavy as in English, and that in
Bengali poetry you can get a counterpoint between those stresses and additional
emphases required by the sense - just as in English metrical verse there is
that kind of counterpoint.
You also get fascinating syncopations in Bengali poetry arising from the
‘holding’ of syllables. This occurs
with conjunct consonants or longer vowel sounds or dropped inherent vowels or
consonants followed by ‘ya-phala’. In
the very first line of Madhusudan’s epic there are three such syncopations: sammukh-samare pari, bir-curamani…Thus,
despite all the enjambment, I think Bengalis hear Madhusudan’s lines as lines,
in way that I at least cannot hear Clint’s fourteen-syllable English lines as
lines.
Secondly, does Clint’s syllabic
method follow Madhusudan’s own prescriptions about how to hear and read his
verse? In a letter of 1 July 1860 to
Raj Narayan Basu that Clint himself quotes, Madhusudan wrote:
You want me to explain my system of versification for the conversion
of your sceptical friends. I am sure
there is very little in the system to explain; our language, as regards the
doctrine of accent and quantity,
is an ‘apostate’, that is to say, it cares as much for them as I do for the
blessing of our Family-Priest! If your
friends know English, let them read the Paradise
Lost, and they will find how the verse, in which the Bengali poetaster
writes, is constructed. The fact is, my
dear fellow, that the prevalence of Blank Verse in this country, is simply a
question of time. Let your friends
guide their voices by the pause (as in English Blank Verse) and they will soon
swear that this is the noblest measure in the Language. My advice is Read, Read, Read. Teach your ears the new tune and then you
will find out what it is.
Let your friends guide their voices by the pause. This, to me, is the
fundamental principle, and the one on which I have based my own way of
translating Madhusudan’s blank verse.
Steeped in Milton as he was, he realised that phrasing - the length and balance of phrases, the placing of pauses
in the line or sentence or paragraph - is just as important in Milton’s bank
verse (or in any good blank verse) as the metre. He wanted his readers to grasp that the beauty and music of his
Bengali blank verse lay in the phrasing, a phrase being defined by the ‘pause’
or yati coming before or after
it. Clint’s method is to let his voice
be guided by the syllable. I do not
think that was Madhusudan’s way.
My own verse principle in
translating Meghanad-badh kabya is as
simple as Clint’s, but is utterly different.
My lines are based on a count of three phrases, a phrase being defined by the pause before or after it
that is indicated by any kind of punctuation mark. I am not interested in syllables, or in metre: translating the
epic into English blank verse was an option I never considered, as I knew if I
did that it would come out as a bad pastiche of Milton or Wordsworth. I am
however interested in the line as a recognisable, audible unit, and I believe
that if you read my translation of the epic you will quickly build up a sense
of a three-phrase line, even though the phrases can vary hugely in length. The extract above has not been well set out
on the page: you really need the page to be in the landscape position, so that
the long lines can be spread across the page, without breaking them up. Like Clint, I observe the discipline that a
paragraph has to end with a complete line.
But, to my ear, the advantage of my method is that I can hear the last line of a paragraph - or
indeed any line - as a line, just as the Bengali ear hears Madhusudan’s lines
as lines, particularly at the end of a paragraph, where there is immense aural
satisfaction in the way he concludes with a complete line, despite the pauses
earlier in the paragraph coming anywhere in a line.
Only time will tell whether my way
of translating Madhusudan’s blank verse works for non-Bengali readers, or for
Bengali readers curious to see (and hear) what I have done. But I have been encouraged from the beginning
by Bengali friends saying that when they read my translation it is if they are
hearing the rhythm and music of Madhusudan’s Bengali blank verse. If that is so, it can only be because I have
followed his own prescription and have let my voice be guided by the pause.
Does my translation capture his
effects of metre? Not in any systematic or formal sense, as I
have not used metre. But I do like to
think that I have in places captured his syncopations, often by translating his
words with surprising literalness. Thus
from the opening invocation:
I adore your
lotus-feet, base-minded as I am, I call you again,
White-armed
Bharati! In the same way, mother,
That you came
and sat on the tongue of Valmiki (as on a lotus-seat) when,
With the
sharpest of arrows, in the deep forest, the huntsman pierced the heron when the
heron was with its mate,
Come, chaste
one, and do kindness to your servant.
Who on this
planet knows your might? The man who
had been the vilest man of the race of men, engaged in robbery,
Became by your
grace immortal, immortal as the lord of Uma!
O boon-giver,
By your boon the robber Ratnakar
is the poet who is the mine of the gems of poetry! By your touch, the poison-tree takes on the goodness of the
beautiful sandal-tree!
I haven’t analysed this fully yet, but its
movement has something to do with alternating patterns of rapid and slow
syllables. ‘Base-minded’ …
‘white-armed’… move slowly; whereas to my ear there is a tabla-like rapidity in
‘the huntsman pierced the heron when the heron was with its mate’. This is not like the ‘held’ sounds in krauncabadhu-saha kraunce
nishad bindhila…but I think there may be an equivalent sort of patterning
based on contrast.
Why
three phrases per line? Well, this
arose from careful structural analysis of Madhusudan’s sentences, paragraphs,
individual sargas (books) of the epic
and the structure of the epic as a whole.
I found - and I explored this at some length in my D.Phil thesis - that
groups of three came naturally and repeatedly to Madhusudan. So I based my lines on groups of three
phrases. This was a structure that
seemed to go deep into the heart and soul of the poem.
My
focus in these reflections has been on verse technique, not just because my and
Clinton Seely’s differing methods offer the most striking divergence between
our translations, but because for me so much else in Madhusudan’s personality and literary achievements stems
from the fundamental sound, music, energy - call it what you will - of his
blank verse. And not just from the
structure of the verse, but its punctuation and paragraphing too! I ended that sentence with an exclamation
mark. Why? Because there is a flamboyance in Madhusudan’s verse that his
prolific use of exclamation marks epitomises.
So crucial are these exclamation marks, it seems to me, that I have
based a whole lecture on a discussion of them. Entitled ‘Confession versus the
exclamation mark: why Rabindranath Tagore did not like the poetry of Michael
Madhusudan Dutt’, I delivered this lecture at Rice University, Houston, in
February 2004. I tried to show that the
gulf between Tagore and Madhusudan, in temperament and literary taste, can be
closely related to the play-acting, frivolous, flamboyant, exuberant, impious,
ambiguous, reckless personality that all those exclamation marks conveyed. Clint in his translation reduces the number
of exclamation marks, writing in his section ‘On Translation’: ‘I must admit to diminishing slightly the number
of exclamation marks, however. Datta,
in his letters, in his poetry, and in life, is exuberantly exclamatory.’
I
know why Clint has done that, and I was tempted for a while to do the
same. Such a plethora of exclamation
marks is a breach of literary decorum of precisely the sort that Rabindranath
objected to in Madhusudan. But if
Madhudusan was always ‘exuberantly exclamatory’, shouldn’t a translation of his
poetry be equally exuberant and exclamatory?
Is it fair to put him into more sober dress - especially when he was
famous in life for revelling in flamboyant and unexpected dress, whether
Western or Indian?
The
discipline of Madhusudan’s paragraphing, however, I would relate to his mastery
of structure in the epic as a whole.
Clint says ‘I have adhered to Datta’s own paragraph divisions’. In the extract I quoted earlier - the
description of Queen Chitrangada’s grief - he actually departs from this
adherence, coalescing this paragraph with the one before (which is why the
extract started in the middle of a line with ‘Suddenly’). I think that was probably just a slip. But it is a slip that might perhaps reveal
some overlooking of the rigour and rhythm of Madhusudan’s paragraph divisions. Learning again from that master of the verse
paragraph, John Milton, he knew that structure in epic poetry is built up by
variations in lengths of paragraphs, just as it grows at an even more
fundamental level from variations in lengths of phrases.
I’ll
end these reflections at a point where my debate with Clint over his
translation and presentation of Madhusudan will probably resume, next time I
look at The Slaying of Meghanada: his
lucid Introduction, and the emphases of analysis and interpretation to be found
in it. I think, when I do this, I shall
find that aspects of the epic that I would want to bring out will all be linked
to my different way of reading, hearing and translating his blank verse. For me - related as my study of him has been
to my own poetic output - reading Meghanad-badh
kabya has always been a more
emotional and also perhaps a funnier experience than I suspect it has been for
Clint.
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| [left] Ghulam Murshid's biography of MichaelAshar Chalane Bhuli (Ananda, 1995, revised ed. 1999); and [center] Heart of A Rebel Poet: Letters of Michael Madhusudan Dutt (OUP, 2004); [right] Gopa Majumdar's translation of Ashar Chalane Bhuli: Lured by Hope - A Biography of Michael Madhududan Dutt (OUP, 2004)
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For me, the poem is inseparable
from the heights and depths of his life: his ambition, his recklessness, his
virility, the tragedy of the adultery that led to the break-up of his marriage,
the loneliness of his ostracism by his relatives or of his exile in Madras and
France, the alcoholism that led to the deaths, within three days of each other,
both of him and his mistress Henrietta. At the core of the epic, for me, is the kausala, the dastardly trick by which
Meghanad is killed by Lakshman in the climactic Book VI of the epic; or the
sense of bidhi (fate) that torments
Ravana; or the recognition of Ravana’s pap
(sin) that brings all the gods eventually on to the side of ‘Ram and his
rabble’. Clint himself makes some
interesting connections between the life and the work (finding, for example, in
Madhusudan’s projection of Meghanad as a pious and dutiful son, reflection of
the guilt that he had not been so dutiful to his own father), but I would want
to emphasise the deeper, more tempestuous links that have been explored so
compellingly by Ghulam Murshid in his biography of Madhusudan.
I
would also want to bring out the humour.
For me, Madhusudan is always a witty writer, always hard to pin down to
sincerity or seriousness, though he took his vocation as a poet with profound
seriousness. Take, for example, his
English essay on ‘The Anglo-Saxon and the Hindu’, in which he dilates on how it
is ‘the Mission of the Anglo-Saxon to renovate, to regenerate, or - in one
word, to Christianize the Hindu.’ Clint
quotes from this essay when writing in his Introduction of the victory in
nineteenth century Kolkata of the Anglicists over the Orientalists. But does he find it as funny as I do? Funny in a
way that would have exasperated Rabindranath, who was always sincere, always
unambiguous, always knew what he meant and said what he meant.
It’s
easy enough to sketch all this out; much harder to get it all down in a
finished, polished, scholarly book such as Clinton Seely’s The Slaying of Meghanada. I
am so grateful to him for completing and publishing his book! It challenges me to complete and publish
mine. He was right to tell me not to be
daunted. And if I do live to complete
it, he will be the first person I shall thank, with an inscribed copy, just as
he so generously inscribed and presented me with his.
Northumberland,
July 2004
