The Pickle

                        

                        

(Image courtesy: Swasthi's recipes)

                          Seasoned in its own juices,

                           salt chilli and spices.

Deep red.

Colour of wine or blood?

Among temptations, next to lust,

                         it tops the devil’s list.

A Note on Translating Akam Poetry

M Nazir Ali

I am a teacher, by profession. And a translator, by turn of circumstances. I teach in a college where most students come from villages, taught in government schools, where Tamil is the medium of their education. They reach college carrying all the debris of truncated English learning, incapable of framing even simple sentences. Over the years the strength of these students has grown more and more. Teaching them English and English literature is a daunting task even to the most stout-hearted. In the beginning I used an Esperanto kind and when even that failed I switched to teaching them in Tamil interspersed with some English. My Tamil improved. I switched back and forth between English and Tamil, often sounding like a pair of Christian missionaries, an English speaker and his native translator. This was my first and very active introduction to translation. It taught me a survival course in straightforward communication. It taught me the value of simplicity.

My avatar as a literary translator started after I read M L Thangappa’s Love Stands Alone, a selection of poems from Sangam literature. Two things happened at once. I fell in love with classical Tamil literature, the bards who composed it and the people who inspired it. The rare glimpses it offered into the Tamil mind, culture and civilization, partial even though they are, prompted me to look further. And Thangappa’s style of rendering it is after my own heart: simple, lucid and contemporary. He did away with all the Victorian poetic diction and performed a Wordsworthian job on translation. Only later I read A K Ramanujan, George Hart and Martha Ann Selby and though I appreciate the virtuosity they brought to it, the thoroughness with which they went about their job (especially Selby and Hart), Thangappa’s is the translation I admire the most. And between his two translated works, Red Lilies and Frightened Birds and Love Stands Alone, I like the latter more than the former.

To me translation, especially translation of poetry, has to undergo a twofold process. The first is to bring out the paraphrasable content of the poem with as much thoroughness and efficiency as possible. The second and the more difficult job is to transmute this lexical content into poetry. For languages as dissimilar as modern English and ancient Tamil, it is impossible to substitute the native form with an English equivalent. For instance, Selby has bravely attempted the “linked poetry” (totar nilai), in the decad titled “Thondi” in Ainkurunuru but she couldn’t carry it on beyond a few poems.

I wouldn’t like to prioritize between accuracy and readability. Rather than putting them into a kind of hierarchical order, I would like to imagine them as two arms of a balance. The process of translation is done when the two arms are in equipoise. I understood readability from a couple of impeccable sources. I have read a number of American thrillers, whodunits and espionage writings and such and I knew that an author made his living by keeping the reader glued to his pages. My other source is my students. The moment I tried to show off, their faces simply went to sleep. They have taught me exemplary lessons in keeping me down to earth. One immediate impact on my translation is that I have kept the language conversational (the Sangam poems are basically one-sided conversations) and kept out polysyllabic words. My choice has always been the simple over the complex.

When translation is attempted, a degree of partiality to one of the two languages is unavoidable. In translating prose or scientific treatise which is fact-centric, it is possible not to favour one language over the other, and even if one does, it will hardly matter. But in literary translations, especially in poetry, where the medium is inseparable from message, this is a challenging task. And if one is translating poems written two thousand years ago, the task is well-nigh formidable. To make an open confession, I have been unashamedly pro-English. My logic is simple: I am after all catering to the reader in English and it is his needs I must satisfy without taking undue liberties with the source text. Had I been doing a translation into Tamil, say for example a selection of Romantic or Metaphysical poetry, and then I would have been partial to Tamil than to English. Not that I framed these little rules and then proceeded to translate. It is a kind of after-the-event crystallization because I believe that translation is an empirical procedure rather than rule-based and more so when it comes to poetry translation.

I would like the translator to set for himself, as realizable goals, a near successful communication of the content and a partial success in conveying the nuances of the form. It is very difficult to quantify the success of a translation with any more accuracy than this. As Matthew Arnold recommended the “touchstone” method to find the literary worth, one can have as models the works of the best translators, like A K Ramanujan, George Hart, Martha Selby and M L Thangappa and the somewhat old-world translations of Nalladai Balakrishna Mudaliar. A translator becomes better with more translations. Since finding a poetic form corresponding to the source text is difficult in most cases, ‘free verse’ is the choice left to the translator as Thangappa makes it clear in his essay “My experience in translation” (Mozhipeyarppil en pattarivu)

I liked translating the akam poems because they are love poems. It is not the idealized Platonic kind of love but love that is openly physical, quite unashamed in dealing with the human body, and daringly specific about the polygamous longings of the human male. All these things are done in refreshingly appealing ways, using innuendoes, suggestions and subterfuges and decoding these allusions is one of the many pleasures of reading akam poetry. For a clever discussion of these aspects of akam poetry, A K Ramanujan’s Afterword to Poems of Love and War will be extremely helpful. George Hart’s Ancient Tamil Poetry, especially the chapter dealing with the techniques used by the classical Tamil poets is remarkable for its insights on suggestiveness. Tamil Concept of Love in Ahattinai by V Sp Manickam is an excellent text and key to understand the practices in the akam poems.

Classical Tamil Love Poetry: Ainkurunuru or Five Hundred Short Poems

What inspired me to write the book:

This book of poetry is a translation from classical Tamil popularly known as the Sangam Tamil.

Only when I began reading M L Thangappa’s Love Stands Alone, I understood I am heir to a great body of literature written a couple of millennia ago and it remained virtually unnoticed by me because of my preoccupation with other literatures.

It has such literary sophistication one rarely expects to find from a race in its infancy. Only after long gestation, trial and error refinement of this kind is possible.

These poems celebrate love in all its dimensions. Heartbreaking sorrow of the parted lovers and the most intense assertions of devoted love find expression in Ainkurunuru.

Just as rainwater acquires the colour of the earth where it falls, the conduct of love too varies from landscape to landscape. Love poetry with such literary rigour is rare indeed.

When I began teaching some of these poems as part of the National Literatures in Translation, the interest my students showed also gave me the idea to bring out a full length translation of a book like Ainkurunuru, known for its precision and brevity.

Apart from a few exceptions, their translation into modern English has not been done with the kind of commitment and skill that they really deserved.

My Book in a few sentences.

With river, sea, mountains, drylands, and forests as their backdrop, five poets renowned for their poetic skill and knowledge of landscape explore love in all its manifestations. Love before marriage, love after marriage, the jealousies love inspires, its anxiety, devotion and joyful unions. The most passionate aspect of human experience is evoked with an astonishing literary craftsmanship.

3           What is the overall theme of your book?

The theme of the book is love between man and woman in all its dimensions. It is not of the Platonic kind that one finds in Western love poetry, nor is it what Donne and Marvell write about. It is love wedded to the landscape, drawing observations from the tiniest bee to the most ferocious tiger.

                       Where does this book take place?

These poems have as their locale the landscape close to rivers, sea, forests, mountains stretching from the hills of Tiruvengadam in the north to Kanyakumari in the south. The modern Tamil Nadu, parts of Andhra and Kerala is the theatre where these love poems are played out. The approximate age of these poems is 150 BCE.

                  Who are the main characters and why are they important to the story?

The main characters are the hero (thalaivan), the heroine (thalaivi) and the girlfriend (thozhi). Unlike other translators, I have preferred to use their Tamil designations because of the cultural nuances they carry more or less like samurai or geisha in Japanese. Since love is the primary theme, the thalaivan and the thalaivi occupy centre stage but the thozhi is given no less importance.

Why do I think that this book will appeal to readers?

There are a number of Tamils, in India and abroad, who are unaware of the fact that they are heirs to a great literary heritage. Though they speak Tamil, the language of Sangam literature is so archaic it is almost as if it is written in a different language. Having these poems translated into modern, lucid English makes a great tradition accessible to them. The Tamil diaspora has also made them search for their roots.

Love is a language that transcends national, cultural and ethnic barriers. Love poetry, irrespective of language, has universal appeal.

Connoisseurs of literature will appreciate the subtlety and indirection in these poems. Such sophistication need not be the preserve of metropolitan cultures alone.

To readers living in concrete jungles, these poems will remind the wholesome life man led before he became distanced from Nature.

How is my book relevant in today’s society?

I think today’s society is more ready, than ever before, for a structural change of life. The popularity of books like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance proves this point. There is dissatisfaction with mega corporations and ruthless governments and self-seeking lives. There is a greater desire for nobility, individuality, love and values of the kind that sustained previous civilizations.

                              What makes my book different from other books like it?

Translators of Sangam poetry have been two kinds: poets and scholars. Only poet-scholars who saddled both cultures and languages with equal ease, like A K Ramanujan, have done an excellent job. M L Thangappa, whose unquestionable scholarship in Tamil is balanced by poetic skill and love of English language, is another noteworthy translator. I would like my translation to be known as a synthesis of Ramanujan’s skill and Thangappa’s directness and simplicity.

What do I want readers to take away from your writing?

Ainkurunuru is poetry, first and foremost. It is a peculiar kind of poetry not written before. It has a haiku-like concision. The message of the poem is bound up with the analogy. There is no one-to-one correspondence and that makes it all the more interesting. Like the reference to seasons in the haiku, there is reference to landscape, to animals, plants and humans rooted to the landscape. This is Nature Poetry in an un-Wordsworthian sense, because here Nature is an inextricable part of human life, almost another actor in the Akam drama. I think a poetry lover will fall for it.

            How did you learn about it?

I am a practising poet and for my living I teach poetry. So it is my business to know whatever happens here. However I would like to acknowledge my debt to

M L Thangappa whose selection from Sangam poetry titled Love Stands Alone, published by Penguin, introduced me to this vast body of Tamil love poetry.

1                               Is there a particular passage you would like to quote?

Let me give you some samples of the poems:

The flame-coloured tiger roars.

Frightened,

the male monkey

bounds up the mountaintop.

The chief of the mountains

went away leaving me alone.

While going,

he carried away

the beauty of my arms

and my sleep. (Kapilar: 274)

Driven by a desire

to make wealth,

I left you.

The path through the mountains

was long and tedious.

When I returned

by the same path

spurred by your bejewelled beauty,

it was surprisingly short. (Odalandayar: 359)

Mother, live long. Listen.

The muddy water of his country

at the bottom of a pond

lapped up by animals

and covered with dead leaves

is sweeter than the milk

laced with honey

from our own backyard. (Kapilar: 203)

nthposition online magazine: Madness & Tradition

nthposition online magazine: Madness & Tradition

It gives me a lot of pleasure to be acknowledged as a poet and given space in NTHPOSITION, an online magazine that the Hindu listed as one of the most noteworthy among a plethora of magazines!

nthposition online magazine: poetry

nthposition online magazine: poetry Here is excellent online magazine for contemporary poetry available free of cost. Aspiring poets can also submit their poems to this ezine!

Online Etymology Dictionary

Online Etymology Dictionary Are you interested in words? In the way they appeared, evolved and put into a variety of uses? Getting to know the nuance and resonance of words is an important aspect of a poet's training! You will find ample scope to develop your in-depth knowledge of words from this online etymological dictionary. I thank Douglas Harper on a job tremendously well done!

poetrypage

The Reading Hour (a magazine that will hit the stands soon) will bring out two of my poems titled "The Barber" and "The Table"