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If there is one thing that flows like blood through the veins of these stories, it is helplessness. Their power is in the endurance and strength that lies after it. Tagore’s direct narrative prose is clear water. At times the light changes over it, a shadow passes, and when night falls the water too takes on night’s opacity. The reasons for power and pain cannot always be traced to their precise sources.
Charu can do nothing as the man she loves goes away, to a place she can never reach, like Ratan, the little girl whose employer goes back to the city, leaving her behind, and Uma, powerless as her only notebook is taken away from her. This is a woman’s helplessness, a woman in a certain place and time, but like any phenomenon seen keenly, it becomes more than itself, becomes a complex aspect of the human.
I use the word helpless, and no other can be substituted for it. That is what these women are, because there is no hope that anything will be redeemed in their lives. “Amal is in good health, yet he does not write. How did this complete and terrible break come about?” Charu wants to ask Amal this question and receive an answer, face to face, but there is an ocean in between and no way to cross it. Cruel separation, helpless separation, beyond all questions, beyond all redress, separation.
The only thing for them to do is endure, and this they are infinitely capable of. There is a significant presence of water in these stories, that predominant element in the Bengal landscape. But it is always the men who move, over rivers, across seas, and the women must allow everything to pass over and through them, shadows and brutality, sudden stars and indifference.
The profound connection, perhaps even an equivalence, between movement and human freedom is fundamental. The women must always be in stasis, because they can never leave, or return to their parents’ home or go with the one they love. There is Ratan falling at the postmaster’s feet, and the postmaster moving away from her on the river, Charu clutching the four-poster bed as her husband leaves her behind in an empty house, Uma falling to the floor after having to give up her notebook and clasping the earth in a tighter embrace.
Since they cannot run, they can only stand or fall to the ground, either way to be earthed, while movement surrounds them, uncontrollably.
This stasis is really the final and greatest suffering. In movement so much can be forgotten, left behind, made lighter. As the postmaster’s boat begins its journey he thinks he should go back and get Ratan, “but the sails had caught the wind, the monsoon current was flowing swiftly, the village had been left behind and the cremation ghats could be seen on the riverbank – and in the wistful heart of the traveller being borne away on the river there arose this philosophy, there are so many separations in life, so many deaths, what is the point of returning?”
In the brief paragraphs or lines where Tagore’s prose approaches the attitude of poetry, he brings one closer to the centre of the story’s consciousness. This can happen anywhere within the work, but it always happens once again at the end, where he separates the contexts of movement and stasis as if forever.
These are women of unbearable dignity, forced into a suffering to which they are almost always equal, and the only travelling they do is towards an acceptance of that stasis within which they must live. They do not have a helpless attitude towards helplessness, neither do they try to overcome it by trying to break whatever holds them back. Their greatness of spirit lies in the way they face their suffering and still continue to give.
“The Ghat’s Tale”, written in 1884, was Tagore’s first short story, and the earliest in the language. Writing over a hundred years ago, entering the lives of women across class and caste, across urban and rural contexts, Tagore’s understanding goes much further than compassion.
In a culture and a time where marriage and family were seen as the fulfilment of a life’s expectations, these stories shatter the complacency of those beliefs.
As Tagore makes his initial relationship with the form of the short story, the work is direct and as loosely held together as a tale being told to a listener. Authorial interventions and digressions recur.
Over the years, of course, his art in the medium of fiction grows complex. In these stories, the growth is in how he steps further into his characters, into their inner spaces. “Broken Nest”, the latest of the works collected here, is one of his greatest works of fiction. The other element which has evolved is Tagore’s mastery over what cannot be said. “Broken Nest” is an unusual achievement. The novella makes certain things manifest, but in a way that the recognition of these things does not need to be articulated. It is a reminder, strangely enough, of our tradition of the “akatha katha”, the narration of that which cannot be narrated, what is unutterable, unspeakable, unmentionable. This is a profound instance of a culture’s way of living that transforms itself into craft.
Bengali and English are vastly different languages, coming from vastly different cultures. If I have chosen to retain the long, winding sentences, the syntax, and the movement of the Bengali, as far as I can, I have done it to remain true to the centre of Tagore’s work, and to enable his voice in this other language. This sometimes makes the English a little difficult in places, takes away perhaps a certain smoothness. But any serious attempt at translation bends the host language somewhat, makes it go against itself. The goal of a translation should not be an attempt to make something that reads as if it were written in English. Instead, the translation should retain the dynamism of an encounter.
Essayist and translator Eliot Weinberger, who has been the principal translator of Mexican poet Octavio Paz, and has brought other major writers from Spanish into English, has said, “…The primary task of a translator is not to get the dictionary meanings right – which is the easiest part – but rather to invent a new music for the text in the translation language, one that is mandated by the original.”
This risk, if it is one, can also be taken because English is in many ways now an Indian language, and this English is capacious enough to accept certain Indian tones and ways of construction. What Raja Rao had said in the foreword to his novel Kanthapura, in 1937, holds as true today. “We are all instinctively bilingual, many of us writing in our own language and in English. We cannot write like the English. We should not. We cannot write only as Indians. We have grown to look at the large world as part of us.”
Compound words are common in Bengali and these words are very often multidimensional. A word like “phalparinamhin”, for example, has poetry within itself that cannot be translated. The dynamism comes from the yoking together of two words – fruit and without consequence – to form a new word, where each unit brings its own meaning and emotion. The English equivalent has to be a series of words.
Another difficulty is, of course, one of culture. The original contains many references to religious, social and philosophical traditions. The word “bisharjan”, which Tagore uses to describe what Bhupati does with his newspaper, has a certain force because of its cultural associations, the immersing of a deity into the river after its worship is over. Another example is the succinct adjective “abhagini”. It contains a woman’s whole life, and nothing in English comes close to its shattering force, its nearest meaning in English, a woman abandoned by fate.
Tagore also changes tenses, within a paragraph, and sometimes even within a single sentence. I have retained his way in most places, so that this sense of time which is special not only to Bengali but to most Indian languages carries through into the English. This coming together of tenses is of course much more than a way of sentence construction, it is a way of being that is embedded within the language.
There is moreover the challenge of translating certain ideas or emotions, one foremost example being the word “abhimaan”. This translates as a feeling of hurt which a person does not directly acknowledge, and it occurs only in a relationship of great intimacy and tenderness, between lovers, parents and children, or very close friends. There is no equivalent term in English.
Civilisations not only pass down gestures differently, but at times even certain nuances of emotion that impel them.
For a Bengali, Tagore is an overwhelming inheritance. But it is an inheritance one must earn. For a Bengali who is a poet and prose writer in English, educated almost solely in that language, but whose emotional world has its home in both, the relationship with that inheritance is extremely complex. The act of translation, for someone like this, becomes an act of facing a loss with confidence, and an act of retrieval at the same time. Only after will the writer see that these acts have had far-reaching and unpredictable consequences on her own relationship with the English language.
Excerpted with permission from ‘Broken Nest’ in Broken Nest and Other Stories, Rabindranath Tagore, translated from the Bengali by Sharmistha Mohanty, Ekada/Westland.
This article first appeared on Scroll.in
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