Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

forever. Weak poems fall apart in translation. Strongpoems survive intact in translation. For a poem, originalor translation, lives in its language or not at all. The Songof Songs is as much an English poem as it is a Hebrewpoem. The resonance of the original survives miraculouslyin English in the King James Version. Translation thusabolishes the boundaries that separate languages. It confirmsthe truism that all languages are ultimately one language— the language of humanity.Translating From an Indian Language Into EnglishDrawing upon my translations from the Tamil andSanskrit, I would like to talk about my experience of“Translating India.” In the process, I will be talkingbriefly about these languages and about the problems Iencountered in enabling poets from these languages to beheard in English.Translation is the most intense form of reading. Tointerpret his text to his audience, the translator muststudy the culture that has produced the text and study itdiligently and for a long time, so that he knows what theSanskrit word moksa means (the word lacks an Englishequivalent), or what a bo tree (Ficus religiosa), underwhich the Buddha attained enlightenment, looks like.Translation samples that I will discuss are takenfrom the Tamil Kuruntokai (An Anthology of ShortPoems, 2nd c. BCE–3rd c. CE) and Purananuru (FourHundred Heroic Songs, 1st–3rd c. CE), and the SanskritAmarusataka (Amaru’s One Hundred Poems, 7th c. CE)and Subhasitaratnakosa (The Classic Anthology of FineVerses, ca. 1100). I will examine some problems ofidiom, syntax, imagery, meter, and tone encountered inthe course of making English poems from the Indian languages.I will also talk about the differences in the poeticsof the Indian languages on the one hand and ofEnglish on the other and examine the implications thosedifferences have for the translations.TamilTamil is the oldest of the four major Dravidian languages,and it is spoken primarily in Tamil Nadu insoutheastern India. The language was regularized around250 BCE. Tamil is an agglutinative language likeFinnish, Japanese, Magyar, and Turkish. Such languagesform their derivatives by a process of fusion. Suffixes,themselves meaningful elements, are added to a noun orverb to inflect its meaning.Turning to syntax, we find that the normal order ofwords in an English sentence is SVO (subject + verb +object). In Tamil and other Dravidian languages, theword order is SOV (subject + object + verb): nan puttakampatitten (“I a book read” instead of “I read abook”). Of course, such a construction is not unusual inEnglish; it occurs in poetry as an inversion: “For thysweet love rememb’red such wealth brings”(Shakespeare, “Sonnet 29”). 10 The inversion of the normalorder of words (anastrophe) is a rhetorical deviceused for dramatic effect. The verb in Tamil is usually inthe final position. What are the implications, then, fortranslation into a non-OV language such as English? Theinverted word order has to be normalized in English.Let us look at a poem, “A Trail of Foam,” byKalporu Cirunuraiyar from the Kurun-tokai (AnAnthology of Short Poems, 2nd c. BCE–3rd c. CE), comprising401 short poems of four to nine lines each andcompiled by one Purikko. Tamil poets are often known bytheir metaphors. We know this poet only by his pseudonym:“The Poet of the Trail of Foam on the Rocks.”kaman tankumati yenpor tamaktariyalar kollo vanaimatu kaiyarkolyamen katalark kane mayircerituni perukiya nencamotu perunirkkalporu cirunurai polamella mella villa kutume 11What do they know about love —the folks that tell me to endure its torments?Is it their strength makes them speak so?It would break my heartnot to be able to lay eyes upon my lover.Like floodwaters leaving behind a trail of foamas they spend themselves on the rocks,minute by minute I too waste away.A woman pines for her lover, who is away. When herfolks try to console her, she is furious. She alone knowswhat it is to be lovesick, and it breaks her heart. Unableto explain her condition fully, she lapses into a traditionalimage of floodwaters spending themselves on the rocks,leaving behind only a trail of foam. The image says it all.Her life too slows down to a trickle, though once it hadoverflowed with love. The alliteration of “m” and “l”sounds in the last line of the Tamil poem hints at elementalpassions beyond the reach of language. The imagetakes the poem to a new level of expressiveness unavailableearlier by concretizing the speaker’s feelings. Itfunctions as a parallel text. The image comes naturally tothe poet as the ancient Tamils tried to live in harmonywith their surroundings. An anonymous Japanese poem62 Translation Review