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.
