In her translation of a hundred poems from Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitobitan, Malati Mukherji is very conscious of the music. It is evident in the title of the collection Songs of Surrender, in her understanding of Tagore’s poesis (‘every poem sings that melody’, p. 13) and also functionally, in her indicating the raag and the taal (p.14) at the foot of each translation. Such efforts open up new ways of reading, new communions and certainly, new paths to follow. Indicating the intermediality in translation of songs sans the music is a welcome effort, but requires just a little more rigour in transliteration. A few examples:‘normal koro’ on p. 58 which should actually be ‘nirmal koro’, i.e., ‘render me pure’; or ‘akasha’ , ‘sky’ (p. 39), whereas the source text has ‘akashey’, literally ‘in the sky’, or ‘bipaday amin a’ (p. 61) which should be ‘bipaday ami na’, i.e., ‘in danger I may not’, whereas the printed ‘amin a’ is auto-corrected gibberish. But this further underlines the utility of existing apparatus when publishing translations from Indian languages into English, added to the stated difficulty of translating poetry both as words and music.
I remember a 45 rpm record of four Rabindrasangeet songs translated into English and sung by the legendary singer Debabrata Biswas, popular from the late sixties of the 20th century–it did not occur to me to find out who the translator was, but I remember the song translation of Gitobitan No. 157, ‘Klanti amar khoma koro probhu’ :
This weariness forgive me O my lord
If ever on my way I should fall behind
Compare this with the translation published in Songs of Surrender :
Forgive me this weariness Lord
If I fall back on my path (p. 26)
I feel the first was translated to be sung whereas in the second, the emphasis seems to be on recitation.
The difficulty of the translator of poetry from an Indian language into English comes from the music of the words. As a reader, the translator is a sahrday in the world of rasa which Tagore dives into to find formless gems: ‘I have dived into the ocean of form’, he says, ‘in search of a formless gem.’ This is ‘roop sagorey doob ddiyechchi, orup roton asha kori’ No. 607 in Gitobitan, here translated as:
I dive into the beautiful ocean of form
In search of the beautiful formless gem (p. 89).
‘Roopsagar’ and ‘oroop ratan’ translate very easily into the justly philosophical ‘ocean of forms’ and ‘formless gem’, where the word ‘beautiful’ which is the colloquial interpretation of ‘roop’ seems an overlay of situated reading. A conflation of form with beauty does not occur in the original as it does in the translation–and this slippage may not have arisen if the source and target languages were both of Indian origin with common residues of Sanskrit.
The translator acknowledges translation as an affective human activity, which bears testimony to the uniqueness of each translator’s vision.Tagore’s poetry and music manifest the essence of her life as a seeker through the medium of Tagore’s songs. This underlies her reading and relation with the poetry that she chooses to translate. Addressing the intended readers of this book, she says: ‘I hope this book will open up the possibility to begin a life of seeking: of searching for the eternal truth we were born to discover’ (p.14).
The path identified by the translator is the path of surrender, of worship. But in the vast repertoire of Tagore’s poems turned songs, this strain of surrender is not necessarily the goal of the seeker. In fact, even in a random selection of songs containing the word ‘shadhon’ or sadhana, surrender may be the ideal, but the poet seems to be calling us to the adventure of seeking. No. 129 in source text Gitobitan is translated here as, ‘I do not know how to worship you’ (p. 74); ‘shadhon’ is translated as worship. As a fellow reader of Tagore, from outside the confines of Bengal in the wider world which he kept attempting to address, and as a translator between Indian languages as well as from Indian languages into English, I appreciate Mukherjee’s intentionality, but I hear Tagore calling for seekers, not worshippers in that same line:
I know not what it is to seek you (I don’t know),
I sit at your door and play
In the dust.
Unaware of any game, as myself here I came
By fear of you I was not crushed.
This interpretation of shadhon/sadhana as ‘seeking’ opens up possibilities that escape surrender to worship and devotion, but maintains the humility of wonder and openness before the other, divine or human:
With what radiance you have lit the candle of my heart and come to earth,
O seeker, O lover,
O obsessed one, you have come to earth.
Mukherjee’s reading of Tagore’s poetry as manifested in her translation has enabled me to seek an unfamiliar path through the poesis of familiar words which is the aim of poetry itself. Hence, instead of ‘a path into the fearlessness granted by the mercy of god’ (p. 79), in ‘Bhoy hotey tabo abhoyo maajhey notun janam dao go’ (No. 124 in Gitobitan), I hear the seeker say:
From fear birth me anew with your boon of fearlessness, o dear one.
Ipshita Chanda teaches comparative literature and translates between Bangla, Hindi, Urdu and English. She is the author of Living in Air (Rubric, 2022).