Hello and welcome.
I'm Allison Markin Powell,
Japanese literary translator
and former co-chair of the
PEN Translation Committee.
My co-host today is Larissa Kyzer,
whom many of you will recognize from our
week five program on the 2020
manifesto on translation.
Larissa is an award-winning translator
from the Icelandic and
the current co-chair
of the PEN Translation Committee,
as well as a co-organizer
of Translating the Future,
the conference you're now attending.
Thank you, Allison.
And, thank you all for joining
us for the 17th installment
of our weekly program on
Translating the Classics.
Today's conversation will
feature Laurie Patton,
who has translated the "Bhagavad Gita"
and is also President
of Middlebury College,
the sponsor of today's program.
Laurie will be joined by Gopal Sukhu,
a translator of classical Chinese poetry
and professor at Queens' College,
and Vivek Narayanan,
a poet, writer, editor
and translator who is a former fellow
at the Cullman Center, one
of our conference partners.
You can read their full
and illustrious bios
on the Center for the Humanities website.
We've just finished
celebrating the seventh year
of August as Women in Translation Month,
which aims to highlight
women and non-binary writers
and translators to
address gender disparity
in the field of literary translation.
The past year saw the
publication of more classics
appearing in their first
translations by women,
including Michael Nylan's
"The Art of War" by Sun Tzu,
and Maria Dahvana Headley's "Beowulf".
In her translator's note to
her edition of "The Odyssey",
Emily Wilson rejects the,
quote, "Gendered metaphor
"of the faithful translation, whose worth
"is always secondary to that
of the male authored original".
Instead, she points to
a translator's, quote,
"Responsibility to
acknowledge her own agency
"and wrestle in explicit
and conscious ways,
"not only with the multiple meanings
"of the original in its own culture,
"but what her own text may mean
"and the effects it may
have on its readers".
Because "The Odyssey" and, I might add,
the texts that we're discussing today,
are such foundational
texts, Wilson asserts
that, quote, "It is particularly important
"for the translator to think through
"and tease out their values and to allow
"the reader to see the cracks and fissures
"in these constructed fantasies".
It is in this spirit of
reflection, considered critique
and acknowledgement of
a translator's agency
that we welcome these
re or un-translations,
their daring interpretations
and creative works
in their own right, pushing
both reader and translator
to look at familiar,
canonical works with new eyes.
And, we hope to see more
such projects taken on
by translators and encouraged
by publishers in the future.
As usual, a Q&A session will
follow today's conversation.
Please email your questions
for Gopal, Laurie and Vivek,
to translatingthefuture2020@gmail.com.
We'll keep questions
anonymous unless you note,
in your email, that you would
like us to read your name.
Translating the Future will
continue in its current form
through the rest of this month.
During the conference's
originally planned dates
in late September, several marvelous
larger-scale events will happen.
We'll be here every Tuesday
through the rest of this month,
with the week's hour-long conversation.
Please join us next Tuesday, September 8,
for Translating Trauma
with Ellen Elias-Bursać,
Aaron Robertson and Julia Sanches,
moderated by Queenie Sukhadia.
And, keep checking the Center
for the Humanities site
for future events.
Translating the Future is convened
by PEN America's translation committee,
which advocates on behalf
of literary translators,
working to foster a wider
understanding of their art
and offering professional resources
for translators, publishers,
critics, bloggers
and others with an interest
in international literature.
The committee is currently co-chaired
by Lyn Miller-Lachman and myself.
For more information,
look for translation resources at pen.org.
If you know anyone who
was unable to join us
for the livestream today, a recording will
be available afterward on the HowlRound
and Center for the Humanities sites.
Before we turn it over to
Gopal, Laurie and Vivek,
we'd like to offer our utmost gratitude
to today's sponsor, Middlebury College,
and to our partners at the Center for
the Humanities at The
Graduate Center, CUNY,
the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center,
the Cullman Center for
Scholars and Writers
at the New York Public
Library and PEN America,
and to the masters of dark
Zoom magic at HowlRound,
who make this livestream possible.
And now, hand it over to our speakers.
I think we're still just waiting
for Gopal to become visible.
GOPAL: Oh, sorry about that.
Hello?
You are definitely with
us, but we can't see you.
GOPAL: Oh, that's strange.
My video is on.
I don't know what the problem is.
I seem, oh.
It stopped again.
I don't know what's going on.
Okay?
You know,
Gopal, I think what we might wanna do
is just start and maybe you could work
with Travis to see how you
might become visible to us.
GOPAL: Okay.
But, you can hear us okay, yes?
GOPAL: Yes, I can hear you.
Okay, great.
All right.
Well, first of all, I just wanna say
thank you so much to Allison and Larissa.
Just wonderful to be part of this.
I think we're all so excited
to be talking to each other.
And, I also just wanted to
say, on behalf of Middlebury,
how honored we are to be
able to co-sponsor this
or co-host this session with these really
wonderful, my fellow co-panelists today.
This would have been right after
the ending of our Bread
Loaf Writers' Conference,
had we hosted it in
person, and, as you know,
Bread Loaf also sponsors
a translators' conference
earlier on, and so we feel like we
are amongst kindred
spirits and we've lapped
at the opportunity to be
able to really support
this incredible work
that everyone's doing.
So, I'm gonna switch hats
now, from my admin role
to the translator and
poet reflection role.
And, I just wanted to start
with three or four reflections.
Allison and Larissa
asked us to think about
our language and the
relationship to our language,
so my work, as you may have read
from the bio, is in Sanskrit
and early Indian religions,
although I'm now doing a
contemporary ethnography
of the lives of women Sanskritists
in postcolonial India, so
I have some contemporary
understanding and engagement
with the language.
The one thing that I would
say is I've always had
a focus on trying to open up Sanskrit.
It's understood from
the very early period,
even in the early satires
we have about Sanskrit,
that it's an elite language,
it's a Romanichal language,
it is one that is muttered,
should not be fully,
clearly heard in all situations,
because it is a sacred language.
There's a lot more to say about that,
but that understanding of Sanskrit
is a very interesting and important part
of someone who is from an
Anglo-American heritage,
learning in a postcolonial environment,
where concerns about neocolonialism emerge
in some very interesting ways.
Is Sanskrit even a language
that we should engage
in a postcolonial environment?
That's one of the big
questions that certainly arose
for me in graduate school and beyond.
And so, after having
published a couple of books
in this area, on poetics
in ancient Vedic material,
the earliest material that we have,
I was asked to translate
the "Bhagavad Gita".
It would have been the 251st translation.
It is. (laughs)
And, the question is, why do that?
And, my first response is always,
well, there is no intellectual reason
to do the 251st translation
of this Sanskrit classic,
however there are generational reasons.
And, the last Penguin Classic was
in the mid-20th century
and was done by someone
who wanted to really see
Christian resonances.
And, it was of its time and it was time
for something new for Penguin.
And so, I really narrowed my scope
into saying, there's
no intellectual reason,
we have many wonderful translations,
I astute right away, the definitive,
the idea of any definitive translation.
I disagree with that idea deeply
and I think there are many translations
that are as good, if
not better, than mine.
But, I did feel that it was important
to take a new view of
gender in my translation.
So, I do not use the
gendered pronoun, him.
I use one, except in
one place in the text.
Second, I wanted to focus
on the poetic simplicity
that I think had been not as present
in many of the Victorian
English translations.
And, finally, I wanted it
to be concrete language.
There's a lot in the Gita that uses
a lot of early Indian
language, Vedic language
that is deeply concrete and
I think even more poetic.
So, for those three reasons,
I thought it was worth
giving the world a very
small alternative to
the many other wonderful
translations that were out there.
Lots more to say, but I'll begin with that
in a brief way and then
maybe turn to Gopal,
who is now newly visible, next
and then we can go to Vivek.
Oh, you're muted.
I think you're still, we can't hear you.
So, Gopal, I think now, if
you're working on the sound,
we've got the vision together,
but since we're working on the sound,
I'm gonna turn to Vivek next,
as you work on the sound.
So, hello, everyone, and I'm
excited to be on this panel.
I think of myself, in some ways,
a bit of an interloper in
the world of translators,
because I'm not a language
expert of any sort
and probably don't have
the discipline to learn
new languages by the traditional means.
But, I'm very grateful to the community
of translators that I've
been among in recent years,
because they've been so welcoming.
In my case, I found myself,
in my engagement with
different texts, driven by a
kind of necessity, as a writer.
And, more specifically, as a writer
in the tradition of
Indian poetry in English.
And, you can see this more or less
from the very beginnings of Indian poetry
in English in the 19th century,
with a writer like Toru
Dutt, which is, you know,
driven by a necessity to investigate,
reconcile, challenge one's own past
and the forces and the
discourses that have shaped me,
and to be in a kind of critical
dialogue with all of that.
And, as we go on, I want
to talk about two texts.
One, Valmiki's "Ramayana",
which I've been working on
for the past decade and recently completed
a book of poems on, which
is not a translation,
but what I've called a writing through.
A kind of critical
conversation, through poems,
between Valmiki and
contemporary poetry in English.
But, one that incorporates translation
and also plays with and tries to open up
the idea of translation in various ways.
And then, also maybe I'd
like to say a bit about
a project I've just
started or returned to,
which is the "Kuṟuntokai",
an ancient Tamil anthology
of short poems, four to
eight lines in length,
which I've just started
working on in earnest.
And, well, I'll talk, you know,
as we go on, I'll talk in
more detail about my method
and my inspiration and
how I came to Valmiki
and the "Kuṟuntokai" and so on.
But, I just wanted to maybe,
you know, propose a few things.
One is that, and these
are personal things.
I really want to echo Laurie's idea,
against the idea of a
definitive translation,
and maybe propose something more personal,
which I found for me,
which is the first point
would be that every translation, you know,
is a unique encounter, as I see it,
between the concerns,
personality, et cetera,
of the translator and that of the text.
And, various things follow from there,
including the ethics of translation.
So, what I've found myself doing
is not the kind of objective translation
that seeks to produce
a single authoritative
version that replaces all the others
and, you know, there's this kind of,
I think, you know, a
false idea that we have
of translations becoming obsolete,
you know, and being kind of
replaced in every generation.
I think that's pernicious, but I want
to propose something more
personal and, I would say,
both a strength and
limitation of what I do.
And, one of the things I've thought about
is translation as a kind
of soul fusion technology.
A translation is a
place where souls start,
with the soul of the translator
and the soul of the text are fused.
And, this is especially true, I think,
with the so-called ancient texts,
because they're distant from us,
not only in terms of language,
but also in sort of terms of time.
And, the other thing I
want to propose is that
translation is a fundamentally
collaborative process.
And, again, not only between
the translator and the text,
but also that you can't be indebted
to all the translators
that came to this text
or the specific area of
a language before you.
So, what I find is that
even if one rejects
the work of a previous
translator, one is still indebted,
because they've given
you something to reject.
So, for instance, with the "Kuṟuntokai",
the most famous previous
translator is A.K. Ramanujan,
who really introduced
the poems to the world.
And, although I would
say I would disagree with
and reject a lot of
his choices in my work,
he's given me something to reject,
which he didn't have when he went at it.
So, again, the idea of multiplicity.
And, final thing I want to say
to start off as a proposal, is that,
for me, the biggest revelation
through the process of
working with these texts,
as a writer and not a scholar,
in the past 10 years or so
of getting into the
weeds by various means,
is just how much is still
not known about them.
How little, for instance, that the reading
of specific lines has
actually been settled.
And, I would say this is true for Valmiki
and the "Kuṟuntokai" definitely.
And, I was also thinking recently of,
you know, a poem like "Wulf and Eadwacer"
in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, where,
you know, virtually every
word, in a way, is not settled.
And, I think this is not the
general public's understanding.
They usually tend to
assume that the meaning
and interpretation of
these canonical checks
is already well settled and
has to merely be conveyed
in an updated contemporary language.
So, although there have been
all these different layers
of critical interpretation and silting,
there is still, I think,
this matrix of raw mystery.
And, this applies to poetry especially,
because poetry is mystery.
And so, they can be
opened up again and again.
And, I think, for the text
I've been talking about,
it's not too much to say that these texts
can keep telling us new things,
that earlier generations perhaps
could not even hear in them.
So, those are some kind of proposals
for things I've been thinking about.
Vivek, I love those, I'm hoping
that Gopal's volume is now ready.
You're unmuted for us, so can you say?
Can you hear Gopal, Vivek?
I can't hear him, but I see the unmuting,
oh, I see the unmuting sign went on now.
Yeah, so Gopal, what I
would suggest that you do,
perhaps, is unmute yourself,
but
stop your video and see if
that makes a difference.
Can you now say something?
No.
Looks like we still can't hear.
I'm hoping that Travis
can still work with you.
So, what I'm gonna do,
Gopal, is I'm gonna respond
to Vivek, but turn back
to you in a second.
And, Travis, I'm assuming that you can
continue to work with Gopal to make sure
that we can hear him at some point
and it's not just my computer.
So, hopefully the two of you
can continue to work on this.
One more try, Gopal, you wanna just try
and say something and
see if we can hear you?
Trying to say something,
still doesn't work.
Okay.
Okay, so I'll come back to Gopal,
but Vivek, I love many
of the things you said.
I will tell you that Ramanujan
was one of my teachers,
one of my major teachers at Chicago,
and one of the things
that really struck me
in the middle of trying to decide,
and I'm sure you have
some thoughts about this,
about whether to be a scholar or a writer,
which I was obsessed
with in graduate school,
he looked at me at one
point with, you know,
only a stare that someone like him
could give and said, just write.
It was so simple, you know?
It sort of didn't matter
what genre it was.
I had just done some
work in publishing poems
and, you know, was filled
with all the identity crises
that only someone in their mid-20s
trying to figure out a
professional identity can have.
And, there he was and he just said,
it's very simple, you know, just write.
So, I'm really excited to hear from you,
given that the introducer
of an ancient language
classical text that is
not known to the world
can have certain liberties and also
certain limitations, I
think, as you rightly said,
in a way that the person
who is saying, no,
I actually wanna do it this way,
that you're taking up is, you know,
you have a whole different
perspective on it,
in a way that has its own
limitations and advantages.
The other thing that I think
was a wonderful thought
was how collaborative we
are with other translators.
I know, for the Gita, there were two
or three particular ones that I felt,
one of my other mentors,
Vēlcēru Nārāyaṇarāvu,
says frequently that the Gita is,
that frequently, our
understanding of Sanskrit
in the contemporary world is not Sanskrit,
it's actually Victorian English, right?
(laughing)
Yeah.
And, it's sort of true at a certain level.
And so, the simplicity
of my verses I tried
in the shloka move, I didn't
do short, long, short long,
I didn't want to imitate it,
I didn't think it would work
in English, but what I
tried to do was no more
than eight syllables per
line and always eight lines.
So, I gave it a loose,
free form understanding,
very much like the poems
that I have written
in my three books of poems,
very similar kind of deep simplicity.
And, I was reacting all the time,
to the ornate, you know, flowery thing.
But, what's been very
interesting is some folk
don't like the turn to
a contemporary idiom
for the Gita, because in their view,
the only English that the
Gita can be poured into,
literally, must be something more ornate,
because that's what the English reflection
of the high Sanskritic language, right?
So, there was this very
interesting conversation
happening all the time,
as I wrestled with that.
I'd love your thoughts on that as well,
on how you wrestled with A.K. Ramanujan,
would be a deep personal interest,
as I hope for others as
well, who are translating
and wrestling with their predecessors.
Yeah, I mean, and, you
know, with the Ramanujan,
the thing that's fascinating to me is
the sort of traffic or the sort of portal
between his translations
and his own poetry,
that we can see kind of moving
back and forth, you know?
And so, it seems, you know, as with me and
it seems that his approach
to the "Kuṟuntokai" poems
is also a matter of him
working out his own poetics
and, in some ways, channeling
pound, obviously, and,
you know, and, you know,
sort of working out
his obsessions, you
know, like all sexually,
Brahmans growing up with this
kind of sexually repressed,
(laughs) as with me, sex
obsessed, and so that.
You know, and so there
are various questions
that he's asking himself
and various things
that he's trying to work
out in his own poetics.
And, as I said, that is very much
the sort of tradition of
Indian-English poetry.
I mentioned Toru Dutt earlier,
who was writing in the 19th century and,
you know, dies very young,
dies at the age of, I think, 25, but,
towards the end of her life,
is working with Sanskrit.
And, she is translating a
story from the "Vishnu Parana",
and in the middle of the translation,
she stops and disagrees with everything,
disagrees with some
character and comes in, so
it's a very, you know, a personal process.
But, for many years,
Ramanujan's translations
had more or less replaced
the Sangam poems in my mind.
Yeah.
(laughs) Because, so in fact,
I felt no need to, you know, see what,
locate other translations, even,
and even show up in original.
And then, I think that that
happened for a lot of people,
that, in some way, they were so compelling
and so original and so fresh that they had
kind of replaced the original.
And, the break for me came for when
I started to look at
some other translations.
And, comparing them with the translations
done by others, I started to wonder.
And then, eventually,
you know, I found myself
going back towards the original.
It was a long process and, in my case,
you know, a crucial thing was actually
this text here, by Eva Wilden,
which came out just a couple of years ago.
And, it's a critical edition
of the "Kuṟuntokai", the short poems.
And, just to show you a little bit about
how I've been working with this text,
similar to how I've been
working with Valmiki.
Let's see if I can do this.
Yeah.
So, you see that there, in this corner,
is the original and then
the transliteration.
And then, you know, here you have
variations between the text.
And, here you have a word
for word translation.
And,
at the bottom here, you have a kind
of summary of various previous critical
readings of this particular poem.
And then, you have here, a
translation done by Eva Wilden,
but what I found was so
moving, is that she says,
you know, she has also
furnished a complete
English translation.
Hello?
The purpose of which is not
to offer a polished version
that brushes over the awkwardnesses,
but rather a tool that lays open
the difficulties of interpretation.
So, I was very moved by, you know,
her kind of effort as a scholar, first,
to go back to the original
manuscripts and compare,
but also to be able to offer
someone like me, you know.
Hello?
I speak the Tamil language
and had an early encounter with it
through the script, but, you know,
I read very haltingly, so
to offer someone like me
a way to kind of have these words and how
to kind of put them together.
Hello?
But, in one way that
doesn't close them up,
that shows all the different ways
and the kind of arguments that critics
are having about how to read the lines,
you know, and,
you know, that shows, kind of,
the mystery of these texts.
And, in many cases, we don't even seem
to have figured out what
these lines have said
or how to put them
together in certain ways.
And so, that was kind
of an opening for me.
And so, one of the things was that,
you know, Ramanujan and
many of the translations
kind of reconstruct the poem from within.
And--
Yeah.
And, yeah, sorry?
No, I just was gonna say,
there's so much to say
and I think that question of allowing
both the mystery of the language,
as well as the fact that, in India
and in other Asian materials,
it's different than the Greek.
It's different than the
Latin, there's a mystery
because there hasn't been the same
amount of translation happening,
so there's, I think, the double mystery.
I think Gopal's, and I wanna,
I'd love to--
I think I heard Gopal, yeah.
I think Gopal is happening.
I'm sorry,
I hope I didn't disturb you.
Yay, you're back!
Yay, we hear you.
That's fine.
We've been jumping all around,
but we can't wait for you to join us.
So, Gopal, I'm so happy.
I'm very sorry.
I'm a tech dunce and among
other types of dunces,
but anyway, it's one hat that I wear
not very proudly anymore.
But anyway, here I am.
Let's see, where am I?
Okay, a short introduction.
I got into Chinese originally through
the study of Buddhism, but
I did the foolhardy thing
of trying to learn all
of the Buddhist languages
at the same time, Sanskrit, Pali
and Chinese and it wasn't easy.
And so, I went off in
the Chinese direction,
but, of course, I never
quite gave up the others.
Anyway, the text that I'm working on,
or the text that I've published on
is known as "The Songs of Chu" in English.
And, the main problem with that is,
well, if I can go back to the beginning.
I, of course, cut my teeth in
Asian studies on translations,
like most people in the western world.
And, one peculiar thing that I noticed
about a foundational poem in Chinese,
and that poem is known as the "Li Sao",
sometimes translated as
"Encountering Sorrow".
There are at least two
translations of it out.
But, what I noticed with
all of the translators
is that they admitted
that they had no idea what
the poem means, or very little
idea of what the poem means.
(clears throat) And,
much was written on this.
And, I found this a very curious problem.
How could it be that a
poem is considered great,
but no one knows what it means?
And, when I looked at
the Chinese commentators,
I found that there also was
a great deal of disagreement
and bafflement about what the poem means.
So, I looked at the poem and realized
that there's something very odd about it.
As you all, all of the
participants here know
that when you read an ancient text,
you are dependent on commentaries,
on ancient commentaries.
And, when you read an ancient commentary,
especially when you are a beginner,
as I was in those days, you
trust it, right? (laughs)
You try to follow it, because
you have nothing else.
And, in doing that, I
found that there were,
I decided I wanted to
get into this commentary
literature to find out what is going on.
And, the disagreements were appalling.
And, the disagreements not only went
across space, in terms
of different people,
you know, at the same time, disagreeing,
but also across time.
And, I found that
I had to find out what was behind
the commentary and
behind the disagreements.
Long story short, the problem
was ideology and politics,
which is to say that, as is the case
in many ancient cultures,
the commentator had an
ideological ax to grind.
And, following the tradition, he basically
used the hermeneutical tools
that were available to him and
commented on the poem, glossed the poem
in a way that would be convenient for him,
during the period that he was writing.
To put this a little bit more succinctly,
because I think we wanna get on with the,
conduct the discussion,
the poet was something of a patron saint
of loyal descent during the Han dynasty.
And, the people who were
commenting on his poetry
were opposing those
who were attempting to
create a new ideology,
wherein the emperor would be
considered above criticism.
And so, they were using
the poet and the poetry
as a kind of, as their
hero, as a kind of effigy
of their movement.
And so, they commented
on the poem that way.
And, it was through basically
uncovering all of this that
I was able to get back to a
coherent reading of the poem.
And, I'll leave it there and we could
perhaps go on in the discussion,
but that's essentially what was going on.
And so, by doing that,
I finally managed to come up with
at least one coherent
explanation of the poem,
perhaps not the coherent
one, which is perhaps
a little step (laughs) forward, you know,
in at least western scholarship.
Okay, so I'll leave it there.
Gopal, we were just talking about the fact
that we have an allergy to the idea
of the definitive and I love the way
you framed that at one step.
But, what strikes me
about all three of us,
and I'd love to hear
your thoughts on this,
is the role of commentary in poetry,
particularly in ancient
classical work, right?
So,
you know, we all laugh with,
there are so many commentaries
on the Gita and it's sort of assumed
to be ideological in precisely
the way you're talking about.
It's laughter, because there is so many,
that you are sort of overwhelmed,
but you know that each one
is going to give you the key,
you know, and claim that
key in a particular way.
So, that question of commentary is,
commentary can do two things in a poem.
One is enliven it in way
that you never thought,
you know, or help you with,
(speaking in foreign language)
you know, words that only occur once,
where meaning is, you know, there are two
or three levels of obscurity, right?
And then, there's also
commentary that deadens,
and this is something I think about a lot,
commentary that gives you
alternative words, but they're
simply, sort of, it's almost
like a thesaurus, almost.
And so, I've noticed in my own
(coughs) writing of poetry,
as well as in translating ancient poems,
that my relationship to commentary is
highly dichotomous, right?
I go back and forth in
my relationship to it,
every time I try and do translation.
I don't know if either of you have,
Vivek mentioned commentary earlier too,
so I'm really delighted that that
has come up for all three of us.
GOPAL: Yes, yes and, yes, in fact,
well, perhaps Vivek can speak to that,
because it is, well,
let me put it this way.
You have to use the commentaries.
(laughs) We have to use them.
And, as you say, there are often very,
very valuable things in it.
(chiming)
But, you know, as Vivek put it,
what silting do you get rid of
and what silting do you keep?
And, the silting is, you know, in case
of ancient languages such
as Chinese and Sanskrit,
it's thousands of years
old, in many cases.
Vivek, any thoughts?
Well, you know, I mean, one thing
I should explain about the Valmiki,
how I got into the Valmiki was,
Arshia Sattar, who is the translator
of the Penguin abridged Valmiki,
but also, I think, really
a groundbreaking scholar
of Valmiki, in that I would
say her readings of it
are more, like, closer
to, less Indological,
if that makes sense, and more closer
to kind of literary criticism.
And, my project is dedicated to her
and about a decade ago,
she called a workshop
for Indian-English poets
to engage with Valmiki.
So, that was a kind of, that
was an entry point into it,
which kind of opened that out,
that there was something more
immediate about that reading,
whereas much of what is
written on the "Ramayana"
kind of relies very
heavily just on the kind of
commentaries and in the way
trying to kind of convey
supposedly what the tradition
from within transmits.
That's one thing, the other thing is,
of course, the "Ramayana"
is an incredibly layered,
in terms of the various commentaries
that have appeared of it, and
really the various Ramayanas
and that's one thing that's
kind of interesting about it,
which is that I think what
you could call translations,
when the "Ramayana", Valmiki moves
from Sanskrit into Tamil or Tulsi.
I think that these can legitimately
be called translations,
because they've clearly studied
the Valmiki very closely
and when they want to,
the Hindi "Ramayana",
Tulsi's Hindi "Ramayana", they follow it
very closely when they want to,
but then at other times,
the translation diverges,
it draws from elsewhere,
it cuts scenes short,
it rewrites scenes, so the
history of the versions
of the "Ramayana" or
the sort of translations
of the "Ramayana" has also been a process
of kind of rewriting and reinventing.
Which is to say that every translation,
in a way, is also a commentary.
A translation, I think,
encodes a certain reading
of the text and sometimes a
willful reading of the text,
even though it may not
be explicit about that.
And so,
essentially, what it does,
what these commentaries
and these different Ram, it
produces multiple Ramayanas,
many Ramayanas as Ramanujan said.
And, I would argue what
I think is fascinating
is that Valmiki itself,
as a singular text,
also contains many Ramayanas in it.
Like, it is already multiple.
So, while, in a sense, if we're going
to kind of rest on a particular commentary
or rest on the most recent commentary,
it can be suffocating, there's
another way to look at it,
which is that, essentially,
produces multiple texts,
produces a kind of multiplicity
of texts and that's what,
so I think that that's perhaps, for me,
that became a very empowering thing,
that when I could see these
different commentaries
and different versions,
where actually creating this
kind of multiplicity that were
in dialog with each other,
that then created a space for me to create
my own "Ramayana", which, let's face it,
is just another reading of the "Ramayana",
with its own limitations and
something I kind of threw
onto that massive pile of
Ramayanas that already exist.
Although, you make a
really interesting point,
which is, and Arshia,
by the way, is a friend
from graduate school, and
so we have worked together,
she's amazing and I use her translations
for my early India classes,
and I agree with you
completely around the compelling
interpretations of Valmiki and "Ramayana".
The thing I would say
that's so interesting
about this though, is
that that call for poets
to engage, you know, with the "Ramayana",
that you were mentioning, it also suggests
that poetry itself is
a form of commentary.
And, I actually, you know, the
three works that I've done on
all of them are, the first
is "Poems to a Hindu Year",
which are, they are really
commentaries on Hindu holidays.
The second is based on
the Jewish tradition and
very much commentaries
on biblical passages,
you know, various kinds.
The third is based on
home and commentaries
on architectural elements like roof,
window, hallway, et cetera,
but I realized a long time ago
that the poetic voice
I am most happy with,
including in the Gita
translation, is one where there is
a structure upon which I am commenting.
And so, I think, you
know, the Sanskrit is,
(speaking in foreign language)
this sort of self-originating
understanding of poetry
I've always been somewhat suspicious of,
even though the earliest
Vedic poets in India
understood themselves to be, in some ways,
(speaking in foreign language)
but they were apprehending something,
a deity usually, a vision of a deity,
to which they were
responding, so even there,
there's a dialogical, but
also commentarial element
to poetry, which I think is, you know,
so interesting and
fascinating in its own right.
I can't wait to hear what
Gopal says about this,
since he brought up the commentary
and got us going on this.
Gopal, are you still there?
Can we hear you?
Yes, I'm here.
Okay, perfect, yeah.
Can you hear me?
Yeah, we can hear you, we can't see you,
but hearing you is lovely.
GOPAL: I don't know what's going on.
But, we can hear you, so.
Yeah, so just jump in.
Okay. (laughs)
(laughing)
It's very interesting, of course,
I'm also gonna talk to
you about commentary
and, of course, you are the Sanskritist,
and so what I'd like to ask you
is, from your point of view,
was there ever a time
in India when commentary
was controlled by a central authority?
You mean culturally or in terms of,
religiously, or?
GOPAL: Well, yeah, let me
give you a counter example.
In China, it was the imperial government
set what was orthodox
commentary and what wasn't.
And, this system broke down
only after a few thousand years.
Yeah.
So, it's an interesting question.
I would say a couple of things about that.
The first is, I think I
did a paper comparing,
not being in anyway focused on Chinese
or educated as you are, but
comparing Sun Tzu's view
of language and an early etymologician
in Sanskrit Yāska view of languages.
And, the scariest thing for Sun Tzu
is that there could be
several meanings to a word.
And, I'm sure you know much
more about this than I do,
and the best thing for
Yāska is that there are,
and the more alternative
etymologies that you can give
for a word, this is the
first etymological dictionary
in the fifth century C.E., roughly,
the more powerful the
word is, and of course,
I'm, you know, very much
attracted to the second
and fascinated by the first,
but so I'm somewhat familiar
from having read Sun Tzu,
what you're talking about.
I think you certainly, within
particular monasteries,
particular schools of
thought, particular Vedangas
in early Indian history, there
would be orthodoxies, yes.
And, there are certainly
kingdoms where patrons
would want a particular
kind of translation, yes.
But, the kind of thing that you see,
or that I am only a
student of and learning
just a little bit about, in
China, you wouldn't see at all.
You see, instead, something
like a proliferation.
And, when I was part of a
comparative China-India panel,
we all decided we would
read the others' texts,
so I was reading Chinese
texts and Sinologists
were reading Indian texts and we laughed,
because we all came to this
very interesting thing,
which was exactly the stereotypes
we were trying to get away from,
where the Sinologist would say,
you know, the Indian texts seem
a little too loose and free,
and the Indologist would say,
yes, and the Chinese texts
seem a little uptight
about language, you know,
and there we were again,
back in our stereotypes.
But, that's a long
answer to your question,
but it's a question that delights me,
so I'm grateful for it.
GOPAL: Well, this is very interesting,
because when Vivek was talking about,
you know, the proliferation of Ramayanas
and also what you said,
what I'm talking about it,
what I had to break through in China is,
at least in one instance
and maybe in a few,
a commentarial tradition that
precluded certain readings.
In other words, instead of
allowing a proliferation,
it controlled the readings and controlled,
if you want, different
versions of the story.
And,
this was so intensely applied
to the particular poem
that I was concerned with
that it turned it into an incoherent poem.
Now, when I say incoherent, of course,
you know, one could argue
about exactly what that means,
but I do believe in a thing
called world literature.
And before, what my project was,
was to take this poem out of the context
of purely Chinese culture with
all the controversy at least,
and to make it available
for various readings.
In other words, to break the hold
that the commentators had
on it in China itself.
And, well, perhaps I
can give you an example.
And, I should say that
this, what the Chinese
commentarial tradition did was a bit
what the Romanichal and
the early church fathers
did to, for example,
the "Song of Solomon",
I mean, which is an example
that's used over and over again.
In the early church
fathers, you had this idea
that the "Song of Solomon"
is not an erotic poem.
It is about Christ's love of the church.
And, of course, part of that, of course,
is a whole hermeneutical culture,
which, because, of course,
if Solomon wrote it,
which everyone believed, how could he
be talking about Christianity?
But, of course, there is
the hermeneutical theory
that what is the in the Old Testament
prefigures what's in the New Testament,
and this was all part of
that hermeneutical maneuver
to turn the "Song of Solomon"
into a Christian poem.
A similar thing goes on in China,
in traditional Confucianism.
I could give you an example of it,
but perhaps, you know, perhaps
you want to talk about--
Well, I have to salute the speakers today
for their intrepid response
to our technical difficulties.
And, all of you have performed so well
and we're grateful to
you for powering through,
because it has been a
fascinating conversation
already and we're sorry to break in.
We tried to give you a few extra minutes
to continue the conversation, but we do
have a couple of very
interesting questions
that have come in, so actually,
I'm going to, we have some from
Peter Cole, who is watching.
And, I think Larissa's
going to read his question.
Yes, he says, this is Peter Cole
and I'd like to thank everyone
for the excellent conversation so far.
My question is initially for Vivek,
but really for Laurie and Gopal too.
I would love to hear more from you
on what you're calling the soul
or soul dimension of
the work of translation.
You spoke of it in relation
to the mystery of the poem.
People are so wary of
bringing the language
of mysticism and even
psyche into translation,
and yet it has been so
central to the history
of translation throughout the world
and certainly in my own experience.
Could you say a bit more?
And, Laurie, Gopal, how
does this sit with you?
Yeah.
GOPAL: Who wants to go first?
I think Vivek should answer
and then I can jump.
Well, yeah.
I mean, yeah, I think of it
as soul fusion technology,
because, you know, there's also,
there are technical aspects to it somehow,
to the process of translation.
But,
I mean, if I were to say, I mean, like,
sometimes I think that what, the place
where we can actually see our souls
is somewhere kind of trapped in a poem.
And so, that raised the question of what
a translation is, as some kind of thing.
And, on one hand, it draws
on all the sort of apparatus
and there are specific
things that go together,
but on another hand, you
know, each translation
produces a kind of unique object.
And, I've often, at
least in my experience,
sometimes I feel like I find myself
using translation to bury
my secrets in plain sight.
(laughing)
So.
Love that.
I love the question, Peter,
and it's so lovely to hear from you.
I would say it's really interesting
and it's, I think, with the
Gita translation in particular,
I wanted it to be really simple and direct
and poetic, you know,
all at the same time,
because it's frequently translated
in prose or as philosophy and so on.
And, I think that move, I was worried
always about mysticizing the text,
because of the influence
of the images, right?
So, I was gonna go off with Vivek
before Gopal jumped in on
this question of images,
poetry and the tradition that, you know,
some of us still labor
with and for and under.
But, there was only one
person who wrote and said,
(laughs) your translation
is too contemplative
for a warlike poem, you know, the Gita.
And, of course, back to
our commentaries, right?
We had some many commentarial traditions
that make it contemplative
and others make it warlike.
So, I didn't mind that
I was too contemplative.
If you're gonna be too something,
it would be fine for me to be that.
But, I worried about it all the time,
because I think, in moving
to the concrete simplicity,
there's a sort of over-evoking
that I worried about doing,
especially with philosophical terms,
making them too poetic or too concrete.
But, in the end, I was
happy to take the risk.
Gopal, would you like to respond?
GOPAL: Yeah, so I'll answer that.
I suppose, I don't know
if I'd use the word soul.
I'm a Buddhist, so we don't believe in it.
(laughing)
But, at the same time, there is something
that happens between
the reader and the text,
that is a truly wonderful thing.
I guess we call it poetry.
And, it's important
to see what that is, and not everyone can.
And, some people will, you know,
let's put it this way, there
has to be some poetic skill,
if you want, to make a poem
accessible to a reader,
but accessibility means not only,
bringing a poem that has a certain amount
of cultural viability,
in terms of the culture
from which it came.
But, at the same time, it has to connect
with some sort of world
that the reader inhabits.
That's a very, very important thing
and that's a very, very
complex thing to achieve.
It's something that is
achieved not only in imagery,
but also in sound and diction.
Well, I'll leave it there.
I do want to add, this
is really just a comment,
but I would like to say,
we've had a response
from Amil Alkalai, who would like to add,
like to say that, soul fusion technology
is a superb term that
should be generally adapted.
So, there's an endorsement for you.
(laughing)
I think we had one other
question that came in early on,
perhaps a little bit more technical.
How do you preserve, in the translations
in your poems, the ancient social
and cultural class-bound language levels,
so that today's American or I should say
English language readers
can understand them?
Does anyone--
This is,
I'll just jump in and then be brief,
but it's a wonderful question.
And, the issue of footnotes is something
you struggle with in
translation, so how many notes
do you put in to do that
sort of cultural work?
So, what I decided to do was to put,
I did not translate many
terms that others had decided
to translate, others had not, so.
Yoga is not translated,
guna, the qualities,
is not translated, but I
explain them in the beginning.
I also provide a glossary.
But, for the really key terms that have
so many of the social and cultural
connotations that you're talking about,
and class-based connotations,
varna-based connotations.
It's very important for the
reader to know that first,
and so that's what I decided to do.
But, I think, secondly, I just appreciate
the spirit of the question too,
because I wrote this Gita for
my Hindu students in America,
who wanted something that
they could connect to.
And, I kept providing
better, or not better,
again, translations that
were better for them
in my classroom and I said, well,
it's better to think
of them as an audience,
to get at some of the
issues that really provide
plain-spoken, in the best sense,
accessible ways of thinking,
but they're gonna have
to do the work upfront to understand some
of those connotations in
order to be better readers.
So, that's the way I
design the translation
and the terminology to get at some
of the issues that you're talking about.
GOPAL: Well, all right, this is Gopal.
(clearing throat)
Certainly, these texts, if they are read
within the cultures that produced them,
are very often read, especially
if they're old texts, right?
They're very, very often
read with commentaries.
And,
the problem, of course, is that even
within a culture, something from
another time can appear very foreign.
And so, I think that
the idea of footnotes,
which many people find in Athamma,
is unfortunately an
inevitable thing, right?
You're going to have to set the
thing in some sort of frame.
And, the other problem, of course,
is that even within a culture,
there is very often a
kind of stereotypical
depiction of its own ancient time.
And, we have to often deal with
that as well, which is to say,
well, you know, take, for example,
the way Shakespeare used to be presented.
It would be presented in
simply contemporary clothing.
And, although we've reverted,
we've come back to that,
but there was a time when
they tried to recreate,
and of course, you have
now, in early music, right?
The recreation of the sound
of that ancient western time.
And so, we have to do work
a little bit like that,
but the problem is always the
accessibility for the reader.
In other words, when terms get in the way,
you have to let them go,
especially if you want there
to be a kind of lyrical impact
of the poem, of the text.
In other instances, it
doesn't matter so much.
So, I mean, I feel like, basically,
this is a question about the
impossibility of translation.
And, if you're a skeptic at first,
you can say all translation is impossible,
especially poetry translation.
But, I would counter with that is
that translation is always possible.
And, the reason why it's always possible
is that we forget that a translation
is actually the bringing of
something new into the world,
something that has not existed before.
And, to the extent that it, you know,
real translation, lyrical
translation is something new.
It represents a kind
of a new conversation,
it represents the exploration
of what is possible.
And so, in that sense, you
know, every translation finds,
no translation can find
any absolute strategy,
but every fine translation finds
new things to add to the conversation.
And so, in my case, in
some ways, you know,
the answer about classes would
be to think about, for instance,
the kind of class divisions
that exist in our society.
And, how can you produce resonances
and create an object that, in a way,
looks backwards to that earlier text,
but also reflects on the
world we live in today?
Thank you.
Thank you all so much.
Again, thank you for your efforts
to get through these
technical difficulties,
but Laurie, Gopal and Vivek,
it was a wonderful conversation
and we're sorry to have
to cut you off here now.
Thank everybody for watching.
Once again, we'd like
to thank our partners,
HowlRound, PEN America,
the Center for the Humanities
at the Graduate Center, CUNY,
the Cullman Center for
Scholars and Writers
at the New York Public Library,
the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
and, of course, Laurie
and Middlebury College
for their support of today's event.
Thank you again, and we
hope to see you next week.
