7 Apr 2002 ... Farida Majid writes about the shock with which the West received the news of Rabindranath Tagore's winning of the Nobel prize. It was the first ...
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April 7, 2002
Translating the inner depth
Farida Majid writes about the shock with which the West received the news of Rabindranath Tagore's winning of the Nobel prize. It was the first instance of the coveted prize going to a non-white writer ON November 13, 1913, the world learnt that the Nobel Prize for literature that year had been awarded to Rabindranath Tagore. The English public had some acquaintance with his name due to the publicity generated by the India Society around their own publication of his book Gitanjali earlier that year. But for the rest of the world it was startling news. The New York Times could not even get his name right, and the mistake was repeated for two weeks before it was corrected.
In all American papers much was made of the fact that the award to a Hindu of Bengal was the first instance of any of the Nobel prizes going to a brown, black or yellow man. Could not the Nobel Committee find a more deserving writer from the white race? — was the kind of question many of them were posing quite blatantly. The piece in the Los Angeles Times was entitled "The ignoble decision: Hindu poet unworthy of the Nobel prize". The New York Times offered an anthropological consolation on November 15, "Babindranath (sic) Tagore, if not exactly one of us, is, as an Aryan, a distant relation of all white folk."
This, of course, was not the whole picture. There were a few papers that were kinder and saw the award as "a sign of the times. The races of the earth are ever drawing closer together, growing ever more ready to recognize and acclaim service, whoever the servitor and brother, far or near". But the stunning display of racism in American and Canadian papers in announcing the news of the award makes it part of any attempt to assess Rabindranath's reception in the English-speaking world. Moreover, given that English, the only language in which he translated his own work, was the language of his colonial masters any evaluation of his work as a translator is essentially a "colonial discourse".
Tagore's award was given, according to the inscription on the prize, "for reasons of the inner depth and the high aim revealed in his poetic writings: also for the brilliant way in which he translates the beauty and freshness of his Oriental thought into accepted forms of Western belles-letters. The English poet and a Fellow of the Royal Academy, Thomas Sturge Moore, had submitted Tagore's name to the Swedish academy. The chairman of the Committee was hesitant, but other members were enthusiastic about Tagore's "enchanting poetry".
They were finally persuaded by a written argument made by Verner von Heidenstam, who was himself awarded the Nobel prize three years later. His verdict was that if ever a poet may be said to possess the qualities that make him entitled to a Nobel prize, it was Tagore. For the first time, he pointed out, "and, perhaps for the last for a long time to come", a great name would be discovered by the Committee before it appeared in all the newspapers. It was also the first and last instance of the skill in translating one's own work being a major consideration for awarding the prize.
Krishna Kripalani's biography relates how the present century had opened disastrously for Rabindranath. His wife died in 1902 and within the next five years he lost his second daughter, father and youngest son. Short lyrics and songs written over this period were understandably "austere and devotional". They were collected in the Bengali Gitanjali published in 1910. William Radice reminds us in his "Introduction" to Selected poems of Tagore that the poet's literary entree to the West came at this particular phase in his art, setting the tone for all that was later expected of him abroad.
At home in Bengal, despite his popularity through prolific writings in various genres and particularly through his marvellous songs, he had won a grudging and limited admiration amongst the intelligentsia. His biographer Kripalani reports that for a long time local pundits and purists used to set passages from his writings to schoolboys saying, "Rewrite in good Bengali". In 1912, the intelligentsia of Bengal decided to rectify the neglect of their greatest poet by celebrating his fiftieth birthday in the Town Hall of Calcutta (now Kolkata) — a very rare honour for a non-white in those days. Needless to say, there was a string of other jubilee-celebrations that left the poet physically and emotionally exhausted. He decided to have a vacation in England.
Tagore was due to sail from Calcutta (Kolkata) on March 19 but was taken ill the night before. He retired to the family estate in East Bengal (now Bangladesh) for rest and recovery. And it was there that he began to translate some of his Gitanjali songs into English. In a letter to his niece, a year later, he wrote: "That I cannot write English is such a patent fact that I never had even the vanity to feel ashamed of it... I had not the energy to sit down and write anything new. So I took up the poems of Gitanjali and set myself to translate them one by one." Once again, one should remember that these were not "poems" as such in terms of Tagore's entire canon. Being the verbal parts of short musical compositions, their brevity was a factor singularity suitable for a novice translator's enterprise under the circumstances.
All of Tagore's writing was done in a language whose new artistic expressionability seemed almost like a discovery of his own genius. He made a rich language richer and more beautiful by rendering in it a certain sophisticated simplicity....
From the time he was well enough to travel and his arrival in London a few months later, Tagore filled an exercise book with English renditions of the Gitanjali songs. He presented it to William Rothenstein, the artist he had met in Calcutta the year before and who was the founder-member of the prestigious India Society in London. Rothenstein showed them to A.C. Bradley and they were both very impressed. They sent the translations to W.B. Yeats to seek his opinion. Yeats' response, recorded in his "Introduction" to Gitanjali was as follows:
I have carried the manuscript of these translations about me for days, reading it in railway trains, or on the tops of omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me. These lyrics — which are in the original, my Indians tell me, full of subtlety of rhythm, of untranslatable delicacies of colour, of metrical invention — display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my life.
Yeats came over to London and he and Rothenstein arranged for a private reading of Tagore's poems. The glittering crowd of men and women of letters that gathered in Rothenstein's drawing room on that evening of June 30 marks not only the respectability Rothenstein enjoyed among the British artists and intellectuals of his time, but also the beginning of a lifelong friendship with Tagore that was to become the most valuable and trustworthy asset Tagore ever had in the West. The evening's performance included Yeats reading out the poems in "his musical ecstatic voice" to a gathering of Ezra Pound, May Sinclair, Ernest Rhys, Alice Meynell, Charles Trevelyan, Arthur Fox Strangways, Thomas Sturge Moore and Charles Freer Andrews among others. Tagore may not have sung the songs in Bengali that night, but Pound and Yeats had heard him sing, possibly the evening before. The translations were received by almost everyone present in euphoric terms of praise.
Yeats must have gone over the translations at Tagore's own request and made alterations before the fabulous evening took place. When the India Society decided to publish a private edition of 750 copies of Gitanjali, Yeats was obviously chosen to be the editor and to write the preface. Rothenstein confirms that the corrections by Yeats were limited to suggestions and changes made here and there; but one would not know that from the following bravado from Yeats in a letter to Rothenstein (September 7, 1912):
I have had an interminable letter from a man called Strangways suggesting alterations in Tagore's translation. He is the sort of man societies like the India Society fatten. He is a manifest goose. I want you to get the society to understand that I am to edit this book and that they are to send me proofs as any other publisher would. I cannot argue with a man who thinks that "the ripples are rampant in the river" should be changed because "rampant" suggests to his goose brains "opposition to something". I am very busy — I work like a clerk — and I cannot carry on a correspondence with this man. I have replied politely saying I would go carefully through the text in proof, but do please see that he goes back to his pond.
Actually, Arthur Fox Strangways, in his capacity as the secretary of the society, worked very hard to get Gitanjali into English print, to arrange for Tagore's publicity through the press and other honorary societies, and to secure the profitable contract with Macmillan & Co. The India Society's Gitanjali came out in November that year while Tagore was in Urbana, Illinois, and it was very favourably received in the British press.
At this stage Pound had had a hand in making a few changes in the new translations that Tagore was producing. Pound had sent some 25 of these poems to Poetry (Chicago), and Naresh Guha contends: "It is probable that he had changed the syntax or order of words in some of them. That was what he usually did with the poems which he sponsored for publication. He had thus changed some poems by Yeats himself."
Needless to say, Yeats was "in a fury and threatened to wire to his (Pound's) editor to withdraw the poems. Tagore had requested Pound to correct the English grammar if and when necessary ."I do not know the exact value of your English words. Some of them may have their souls worn out by constant use and some may not have acquired their souls yet. So in my use of words there must be lack of proportion and appropriateness perhaps, that also could be amended by friendly hands."
In her book Imperfect encounter, Mary Lago gives an account of how, after his return from the US in the summer of 1913, Tagore had sought the help of Thomas Sturge Moore to correct the mistakes Yeats had left in the proofs of The gardener. Lago sees these events as evidence of Tagore's lack of confidence in himself and his collaborators which "proved to be the most serious weakness in his method of dealing with his translated works".
She concludes that there were too many translators, too many editors, and too little communication between them and the author. It is not clear to me why the imperfections of these encounters should be the basis of the title of her book which is a collection of letters of William Rothenstein and Rabindranath Tagore, 1911-1941. That encounter, as Lago's well-edited and annotated book itself proves, was just about the only one without any imperfection.
Lago reflects in these observations her own experience as a translator of Tagore's work in collaboration with Tarun Gupta (The Housewarming and other selected writings, 1965). But she misses the glaring point that none of Tagore's celebrated collaborators and editors could be "translators" since none knew Bengali. Tagore was bringing them material that had already been translated by himself so their task was confined to refining and polishing the English.
The Gitanjali manuscript in which Yeats pencilled his corrections appears to be lost, but Guha cites Pound's corrections (when Pound quoted poem 84 from The Gardener in The free woman, June 1913), giving us a notion of the extent to which such changes may improve a translated version without any power to solve problems of liberal or mistranslations. Hence, I do not think Tagore's initial trepidation about his own English should be equated with a "lack of confidence in himself".
In fact, after the success of the India Society's Gitanjali, the trepidation was rapidly replaced by an over-confidence, not so much in his English, which is what his disappointed and often embittered collaborators wrongly assumed, but in his own idea of knowing what he wanted his writings to accomplish in the West.
The literary partnership between Tagore and Yeats did not last long, and there are indications that it did not end amicably. Naresh Guha's reason for Yeats' sudden change of attitude towards Tagore is sound and closely related to what I have to show later. He thinks the cause was intellectual: "Yeats came to realize that Tagore was not sufficiently a traditionalist of the kind he presumed him to be. Preferring the symbolic conceptions of mythological Hinduism, Yeats had at first supposed that Tagore's poetry confirmed his own preoccupations."
Excerpts from
Revisioning English in Bangladesh
Edited by Fakrul Alam,
Niaz Zaman and Tahmina Ahmed
The University Press Ltd, Red Crescent Building, 114 Motijheel C/A, P.O. Box 2611, Dhaka-1000
E-mail: upl@bangla.net Website: www.uplbooks.com
ISBN 984-05-1586-1 186pp. Tk350
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