Archive for the ‘literature’ Category
Danda-padyam
Viṣṇu, appearing before Bali as Vāmana, transformed into Trivikrama, filling the universe, covering all the earth and the heavens in two steps.
The verse that opens the Pūrva-pīṭhikā of Daṇḍin’s Daśakumāracarita plays on this imagination, and on the word daṇda / daṇḍin. Here’s the verse (in Sragdharā metre of pattern GGGGLGG—LLLLLLG—GLGGLGG):
May the leg of Trivikrama,
pole for the parasol that is the universe,
stem of the lotus that is Brahma’s seat,
mast of the ship that is the earth,
rod of the streaming banner that is the river of the Gods,
axle-rod around which the zodiac turns,
pillar of victory over the three worlds,
rod of death for the enemies of the Gods,
favour you with blessings.brahmāṇḍa-cchatradaṇḍaḥ śata-dhṛti-bhavan’-âmbhoruho nāla-daṇḍaḥ
kṣoṇī-nau-kūpa-daṇḍaḥ kṣarad-amara-sarit-paṭṭikā-ketu-daṇḍaḥ /
jyotiścakr’-âkṣa-daṇḍas tribhuvana-vijaya-stambha-daṇḍo ‘ṅghri-daṇḍaḥ
śreyas traivikramas te vitaratu vibudha-dveṣiṇāṃ kāla-daṇḍaḥ //ब्रह्माण्डच्छत्रदण्डः शतधृतिभवनाम्भोरुहो नालदण्डः क्षोणीनौकूपदण्डः क्षरदमरसरित्पट्टिकाकेतुदण्डः । ज्योतिश्चक्राक्षदण्डस्त्रिभुवनविजयस्तम्भदण्डोऽङ्घ्रिदण्डः श्रेयस्त्रैविक्रमस्ते वितरतु विबुधद्वेषिणां कालदण्डः ॥
[The Mānasataraṃgiṇī-kāra, agreeing with Santillana and von Dechend the authors of Hamlet’s Mill, considers the “pole” or “axis” motif central to the conception of Vishnu (e.g. matsya‘s horn, Mount Meru as the rod on kūrma, nṛsiṃha from the pillar, etc.: see here), sees much more depth in this poem, and that Daṇḍin was remembering this old motif.]
The translation above is mildly modified from that of Isabelle Onians in her translation (“What Ten Young Men Did”) of the Daśa-kumāra-carita, published by the Clay Sanskrit Library:
Pole for the parasol-shell that is Brahma’s cosmic egg,
Stem for Brahma’s lotus seat,
Mast for the ship that is the earth,
Rod for the banner that is the rushing immortal river Ganges,
Axle rod for the rotating zodiac,
Pillar of victory over the three worlds—
May Vishnu’s leg favor you with blessings—
Staff that is the leg of him who as Trivikrama reclaimed those three worlds in three steps,
Rod of time, death itself, for the demon enemies of the gods.
Ryder, in his translation (“The Ten Princes”), takes some liberties and manages verse in couplets:
May everlasting joy be thine,
Conferred by Vishnu’s foot divine,Which, when it trod the devils flat,
Became the staff of this and that:The staff around which is unfurled,
The sunshade of the living world;The flagstaff for the silken gleam
Of sacred Ganges’ deathless stream;The mast of earth’s far-driven ship,
Round which the stars (as axis) dip;The lotus stalk of Brahma’s shrine;
The fulcrumed staff of life divine.
For another verse that fully gets into this “filling the universe” spirit, see The dance of the bhairava on manasa-taramgini.
The Indian theory of aesthetic appreciation (rasa)
Here’s a great, simple write-up aimed at a Western audience, from the Clay Sanskrit Library edition of Kālidāsa’s The Recognition of Shakuntala, written by Somadeva Vasudeva:
Imagine that you find yourself going to see a performance of “Romeo and Juliet.” You are in the right mood for the play, no mundane worries preoccupy your mind, you have agreeable company, and the theatre, the stage, the director and the actors are all excellent—capable of doing justice to a great play. Your seat in the theatre is comfortable and gives an unobstructed view.
The play begins and you find yourself drawn into the world Shakespeare is sketching. The involvement deepens to an immersion where the ordinary, everyday world dims and fades from the center of attention, you begin to understand and even share the feelings of the characters on stage—under ideal conditions you might reach a stage where you begin to participate in some strange way in the love being evoked.
Now, if at that moment you were to ask yourself: “Whose love is this?” a paradox arises.
It cannot be Romeo’s love for Juliet, nor Juliet’s love for Romeo, for they are fictional characters. It cannot be the actors’, for in reality they may despise one another. It cannot be your own love, for you cannot love a fictional character and know nothing about the actors’ real personalities (they are veiled by the role they assume), and, for the same reasons, it cannot be the actors’ love for either you or the fictional characters. So it is a peculiar, almost abstract love without immediate referent or context.
A Sanskrit aesthete would explain to you that you are at that moment “relishing” (āsvādana) your own “fundamental emotional state” (sthāyi-bhāva) called “passion” (rati) which has been “decontextualised” (sādhāraṇīkṛta) by the operation of “sympathetic resonance” (hṛdayasaṃvāda) and heightened to become transformed into an “aesthetic sentiment” (rasa) called the “erotic sentiment” (śṛṅgāra).
This “aesthetic sentiment” is a paradoxical and ephemeral thing that can be evoked by the play but is not exactly caused by it, for many spectators may have felt nothing at all during the same performance. You yourself, seeing it again next week, under the same circumstances, might experience nothing. It is, moreover, something that cannot be adequately explained through analytic terms, the only proof for its existence is its direct, personal experience.
[…]
It is, moreover, a blissful experience. The fact that sensitive readers often weep while reading poetry does not mean that they are suffering, rather the tenderness of the work has succeeded in melting the contraction of their minds or hearts.
The non-ordinary nature of such aesthetic sentiments makes it possible for the spectator or reader to derive a pleasurable experience even from what in ordinary life would be causes of grief.
The Indian scholarly tradition has a lot more, including some very thoughtful deliberation and perceptive observation, but it seems good to start a discussion of rasa with an example like this, than to start with the technical details.
[Another good start may be via film. See for instance:
How to Watch a Hindi Film: The Example of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai by Sam Joshi, published in Education About Asia, Volume 9, Number 1 (Spring 2004).
and perhaps (and if you have a lot of time):
Is There an Indian Way of Filmmaking? by Philip Lutgendorf, published in International Journal of Hindu Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Dec., 2006), pp. 227-256.
Previously on this blog: On songs in Bollywood]
The letter in Roister Doister
An early English example of resegmentation for change of meaning: Merygreeke’s letter to the Dame Custance, from Ralph Roister Doister (c. 1553), the first comedy to be written in the English language. [Aside: Shakespeare born in 1564 started had written all his plays before 1613, only 60 years from then.]
The example also shows that enjambment (no pause at end of line) did indeed exist in early English as well.
|
Scene 4
Sweete mistresse where as I loue you nothing at all, |
Scene 5
Sweete mistresse, where as I loue you, nothing at all |
Wodehouse on Conan Doyle
I have noted before, while reading Right Ho, Jeeves, how much it draws from and parodies the Sherlock Holmes stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In fact, the whole book can be read as if Bertie Wooster is Sherlock Holmes, or at least that he imagines himself to be. Rereading it this way threw up a surprising number of examples (as did Psmith, Journalist), all the way from obvious ones like “You know my methods, Jeeves. Apply them.”, to references so subtle that it’s not clear whether Wodehouse is consciously parodying Sherlock Holmes, or it’s a simple case of one author influencing another. (But perhaps they only seem subtle to those of us who aren’t as steeped in the Holmesverse as the readers of the early 1900s would be.) And of course, when in his stories he directly mentions detectives (such as in The Man With Two Left Feet), it’s laid on thick:
He had never measured a footprint in his life, and what he did not know about bloodstains would have filled a library.
and
A detective is only human. The less of a detective, the more human he is. Henry was not much of a detective, and his human traits were consequently highly developed.
And I knew, too, (see previous post) that both authors enjoyed cricket, and even turned out occasionally for the same celebrity cricket team.
Despite all the preceding, I still was surprised by the existence of this:
An edition of The Sign of the Four, with introduction by P. G. Wodehouse!
It appears that PGW was a fan of ACD: in 1925, in a letter to his friend William Townend, he wrote:
“Conan Doyle, a few words on the subject of. Don’t you find as you age in the wood, as we are both doing, that the tragedy of your life is that your early heroes lose their glamour? As a lad in the twenties you worship old whoever-it-is, the successful author, and by the time you’re forty you find yourself blushing hotly at the thought that you could ever have admired the bilge he writes.
Now with Doyle I don’t have that feeling. I still revere hls work as much as ever. I used to think it swell, and I still think it swell.
[…]
And apart from his work, I admire Doyle so much as a man. I should call him definitely a great man, and I don’t imagine I’m the only one who thinks so.
[…]
And the introduction to The Sign of the Four was written in the 1970s, when Wodehouse must have been over 90. He echoes much the same lines. The full introduction is attached, pieced together from some rather excellent sources on the internet.
When I was starting out as a writer—this would be about the time Caxton invented the printing press—Conan Doyle was my hero. Others might revere Hardy and Meredith. I was a Doyle man, and I still am. Usually we tend to discard the idols of our youth as we grow older, but I have not had this experience with A.C.D. I thought him swell then, and I think him swell now.
We were great friends in those days, our friendship only interrupted when I went to live in America. He was an enthusiastic cricketer—he could have played for any first-class country—and he used to have cricket weeks at his place in the country, to which I was almost always invited. And after a day’s cricket and a big dinner he and I would discuss literature.
The odd thing was that though he could be expansive about his least known short stories–those in Round the Red Lamp, for instance—I could never get him to talk of Sherlock Holmes, and I think the legend that he disliked Sherlock must be true. It is with the feeling that he would not object that I have sometimes amused myself by throwing custard pies at that great man.
Recently I have taken up the matter of Holmes’s finances.
Let me go into the matter, in depth, as they say. I find myself arriving at a curious conclusion.
Have you ever considered the matter of Holmes’s financial affairs?
Here we have a man who evidently was obliged to watch the pennies, for when we are introduced to him he is, according to Doctor Watson’s friend Stamford, “bemoaning himself because he could not find someone to go halves in some nice rooms which he had found and which were too much for his purse.” Watson offers himself as a fellow lodger, and they settle down in—I quote—a couple of comfortable bedrooms and a large sitting room at 221B Baker Street.
Now I lived in similar rooms at the turn of the century, and I paid twenty-one shillings a week for bed, breakfast, and dinner. An extra bedroom no doubt made the thing come higher for Holmes and Watson, but thirty shillings must have covered the rent and vittles, and there was never any question of a man as honest as Watson failing to come up with his fifteen bob each Saturday. It follows, then, that allowing for expenditures in the way of Persian slippers, tobacco, disguises, revolver cartridges, cocaine, and spare violin strings Holmes would have been getting by on a couple of pounds or so weekly. And with this modest state of life he appeared to be perfectly content. Let us take a few instances at random and see what he made as a “consulting detective.”
In the very early days of their association, using it as his “place of business,” he interviewed in the sitting room “a grey-headed seedy visitor, who was followed by a slipshod elderly woman, and after that a railway porter in his velveteen uniform.” Not much cash in that lot, and things did not noticably improve later, for we find his services engaged by a stenographer, a city clerk, a Greek interpreter, a landlady, and a Cambridge undergraduate.
So far from making money as a consulting detective, he must have been a good deal out of pocket most of the time. In A Study in Scarlet, Inspector Gregson asks him to come to 3 Lauriston Gardens in the Brixton neighborhood, because there has been “a bad business” there during the night. Off goes Holmes in a hansom cab from Baker Street to Brixton, a fare of several shillings, dispatches a long telegram (another two or three bob to the bad), summons “half a dozen of the dirtiest and most ragged street Arabs I ever clapped eyes on,” gives each of them a shilling, and tips a policeman half a sovereign. The whole affair must have cost him considerably more than a week’s rent at Baker Street, and no hope of getting any of it back from Inspector Gregson, for Gregson, according to Holmes himself, was “one of the smartest of all the Scotland Yarders.”
Inspector Gregson! Inspector Lestrade! Those clients! I found myself thinking a good deal about them, and it was not long before the truth dawned upon me, that they were merely cheap actors, hired to deceive doctor Watson, who had to be deceived because he had the job of writing the stories.
For what would the ordinary private investigator have said to himself when starting out in business? He would have said ‘Before I take on work for a client I must be sure that the client has the stuff. The daily sweetener and the little something down in advance are of the essence,’ and he would have had those landladies and those Greek interpreters out of his sitting room before you could say ‘bloodstain.’ Yet Holmes, who could not afford a pound a week for lodgings, never bothered. Significant!
Later the thing became absolutely farcical, for all pretence that he was engaged in a gainful occupation was dropped by himself and the clients. I quote Doctor Watson.
“He tossed a crumpled letter across the table to me. It was dated from Montague Place upon the preceding evening and ran thus:
Dear Mr. Holmes,
I am anxious to consult you as to whether or not I should accept a situation which has been offered to me as a governess.
I shall call at half-past ten tomorrow, if I do not inconvenience you.
Yours faithfully
Violet Hunter.”Now, the fee an investigator could expect from a governess, even one in full employment, could scarcely be more than a few shillings, yet when two weeks later Miss Hunter wired “Please be at the Black Swan at Winchester at mid-day tomorrow,” Holmes dropped everything and sprang into the 9:30 train.
It all boils down to one question–Why is a man casual about money?
The answer is–Because he has a lot of it.
Had Holmes?
He pretended he hadn’t, but that was merely the illusion he was trying to create because he needed a front for his true activities. He was pulling the stuff in from another source. Where is the big money? Where it has always been, in crime. Bags of it, and no income tax. If you want to salt away a few million for a rainy day, you don’t spring into 9:30 trains to go and talk to governesses, you become a Master Criminal, sitting like a spider in the center of its web and egging your corps of assistants on to steal jewels and navel treaties. I saw daylight, and all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fell into place. Holmes was Professor Moriarty.
What was that name again?
Professor Moriarty.
Do you mean that man who was forever oscillating his face from side to side in a curiously reptilian fashion?
That’s the one.
But Holmes’ face didn’t forever oscillate from side to side in a curiously reptilian fashion.
Nor did Professor Moriarty’s.
Holmes said it did.
And to whom? To Doctor Watson, in order to ensure that the misleading description got publicity. Watson never saw Moriarty. All he knew about him was what Holmes told him on the evening of April 24,1891. And Holmes made a little slip on the occasion. He said that on his way to see Watson he had been attacked by a rough with a bludgeon. A face-oscillating napoleon of Crime, anxious to eliminate someone he disliked, would have thought up something better than roughs with bludgeons. Dropping cobras down the chimney is the mildest thing that would have occurred to him.
P.S. Just kidding, boys. Actually, like all the rest of you, I am never happier than when curled up with Sherlock Holmes, and I hope Messrs Ballantine will sell several million of him. As the fellow said, there’s no police like Holmes.
–P.G. Wodehouse.
Sources:
http://bullyscomics.blogspot.in/2008/01/wodehouse-week-wodehouses-introduction.html
http://bakerstreetbeat.blogspot.in/2012/01/pg-wodehouse-fan-for-life.html
http://bakerstreetbeat.blogspot.in/2013/03/a-master-humorist-takes-on-sherlock.html
http://plausive.dreamwidth.org/519931.html
http://always1895.net/post/46231822597/2013-links-mar16-mar22
http://lists.topica.com/lists/wodehouse/read/message.html?sort=d&mid=1000432020
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/littlestuffedbull/2173532528/
Other stuff:
(All written during the time between the publication of Sherlock Holme’s death in FINA published December 1893, and his reapparance in EMPT published September 1903. The Hound of the Baskervilles had been serialized from August 1901 to April 1902. Doyle had announced the impending return of Sherlock Holmes in the Strand, whcih is why Wodehouse wrote “Back to his Native Strand”.)
* Wodehouse wrote (unsigned) a parody called “Dudley Jones, Bore Hunter” (http://thenostalgialeague.com/olmag/dudley-jones.html), in Punch on April 29, 1903 (http://madameulalie.org/punch/Dudley_Jones_1.html) and May 6, 1903 (http://madameulalie.org/punch/Dudley_Jones_2.html)
* Wodehouse wrote (unsigned) a poem called “Back to his Native Strand” for Punch on May 27, 1903: http://madameulalie.org/punch/Back_to_his_native_Strand.html
* Wodehouse did an “interview” of ACD in “VC” magazine, July 2, 1903: http://madameulalie.org/vc/Grit.html
* Wodehouse wrote (unsigned) “The Prodigal” for Punch on September 23, 1903: http://madameulalie.org/punch/The_Prodigal.html
Cricket poems
Arthur Conan Doyle played 10 first-class matches between 1900 (when he was over 40) and 1907, playing for the MCC. He averaged close to 20 with the bat, with a high score of 43. On 25 August 1900, against London County at Crystal Palace, he took his only first-class wicket: that of W. G. Grace, who was batting on 110 at the time (and declared his team’s innings immediately after getting out). He wrote a poem about it.
A Reminiscence of Cricket
Once in my heyday of cricket,
One day I shall ever recall!
I captured that glorious wicket,
The greatest, the grandest of all.Before me he stands like a vision,
Bearded and burly and brown,
A smile of good humoured derision
As he waits for the first to come down.A statue from Thebes or from Knossos,
A Hercules shrouded in white,
Assyrian bull-like colossus,
He stands in his might.With the beard of a Goth or a Vandal,
His bat hanging ready and free,
His great hairy hands on the handle,
And his menacing eyes upon me.And I – I had tricks for the rabbits,
The feeble of mind or eye,
I could see all the duffer’s bad habits
And where his ruin might lie.The capture of such might elate one,
But it seemed like one horrible jest
That I should serve tosh to the great one,
Who had broken the hearts of the best.Well, here goes! Good Lord, what a rotter!
Such a sitter as never was dreamt;
It was clay in the hands of the potter,
But he tapped it with quiet contempt.The second was better – a leetle;
It was low, but was nearly long-hop;
As the housemaid comes down on the beetle
So down came the bat with a chop.He was sizing me up with some wonder,
My broken-kneed action and ways;
I could see the grim menace from under
The striped peak that shaded his gaze.The third was a gift or it looked it—
A foot off the wicket or so;
His huge figure swooped as he hooked it,
His great body swung to the blow.Still when my dreams are night-marish,
I picture that terrible smite,
It was meant for a neighboring parish,
Or any place out of sight.But – yes, there’s a but to the story –
The blade swished a trifle too low;
Oh wonder, and vision of glory!
It was up like a shaft from a bow.Up, up like a towering game bird,
Up, up to a speck in the blue,
And then coming down like the same bird,
Dead straight on the line that it flew.Good Lord, it was mine! Such a soarer
Would call for a safe pair of hands;
None safer than Derbyshire Storer,
And there, face uplifted, he standsWicket keep Storer, the knowing,
Wary and steady of nerve,
Watching it falling and growing
Marking the pace and curve.I stood with my two eyes fixed on it,
Paralysed, helpless, inert;
There was ‘plunk’ as the gloves shut upon it,
And he cuddled it up to his shirt.Out – beyond question or wrangle!
Homeward he lurched to his lunch!
His bat was tucked up at an angle,
His great shoulders curved to a hunch.Walking he rumbled and grumbled,
Scolding himself and not me;
One glove was off, and he fumbled,
Twisting the other hand freeDid I give Storer the credit
The thanks he so splendidly earned?
It was mere empty talk if I said it,
For Grace had already returned.
Incidentally, W. G., like Conan Doyle, was also a doctor with no time for that profession. Here’s another article about Conan Doyle. He also made up a story about a “high dropping full toss” (lob bowling?) that fell on the stumps from the air. (Discussion.)
P. G. Wodehouse wrote a happy little poem about a fielder who misses a catch.
Missed
The sun in the heavens was beaming,
The breeze bore an odour of hay,
My flannels were spotless and gleaming,
My heart was unclouded and gay;
The ladies, all gaily apparelled,
Sat round looking on at the match,
In the tree-tops the dicky-birds carolled,
All was peace — till I bungled that catch.My attention the magic of summer
Had lured from the game — which was wrong.
The bee (that inveterate hummer)
Was droning its favourite song.
I was tenderly dreaming of Clara
(On her not a girl is a patch),
When, ah, horror! there soared through the air a
Decidedly possible catch.I heard in a stupor the bowler
Emit a self-satisfied ‘Ah!’
The small boys who sat on the roller
Set up an expectant ‘Hurrah!’
The batsman with grief from the wicket
Himself had begun to detach —
And I uttered a groan and turned sick. It
Was over. I’d buttered the catch.O, ne’er, if I live to a million,
Shall I feel such a terrible pang.
From the seats on the far-off pavilion
A loud yell of ecstasy rang.
By the handful my hair (which is auburn)
I tore with a wrench from my thatch,
And my heart was seared deep with a raw burn
At the thought that I’d foozled that catch.Ah, the bowler’s low, querulous mutter
Points loud, unforgettable scoff!
Oh, give me my driver and putter!
Henceforward my game shall be golf.
If I’m asked to play cricket hereafter,
I am wholly determined to scratch.
Life’s void of all pleasure and laughter;
I bungled the easiest catch.
Both Conan Doyle and Wodehouse played cricket at one point for J. M. Barrie’s team Allah-akbarries (named in the belief that “Allahu Akbar” meant “God help us!”, but of course probably more for the “barries” in the name), some of whose other players included Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton, Jerome K. Jerome, A. A. Milne.
Here’s another great article about Conan Doyle and Wodehouse.
A. A. Milne wrote some poems about cricket as well.
An article about authors.
Casey at the Bat is the most famous baseball poem. (Wikipedia article)
Stephen Fry’s “The Ode Less Travelled”: Foreword
I reproduce below the line below Stephen Fry’s entire foreword to his book The Ode Less Travelled, because I find myself frequently referring to it and would like to be able to direct friends to some place to read it — this is now such a place.
I HAVE A DARK AND DREADFUL SECRET. I write poetry. This is an embarrassing confession for an adult to make. In their idle hours Winston Churchill and Noël Coward painted. For fun and relaxation Albert Einstein played the violin. Hemingway hunted, Agatha Christie gardened, James Joyce sang arias and Nabokov chased butterflies. But poetry?
I have a friend who drums in the attic, another who has been building a boat for years. An actor I know is prouder of the reproduction eighteenth-century duelling pistols he makes in a small workshop than he is of his knighthood. Britain is a nation of hobbyists—eccentric amateurs, talented part-timers, Pooterish potterers and dedicated autodidacts in every field of human endeavour. But poetry?
An adolescent girl may write poetry, so long as it is securely locked up in her pink leatherette five-year diary. Suburban professionals are permitted to enter jolly pastiche competitions in the Spectator and New Statesman. At a pinch, a young man may be allowed to write a verse or two of dirty doggerel and leave it on a post-it note stuck to the fridge when he has forgotten to buy a Valentine card. But that’s it. Any more forays into the world of Poesy and you release the beast that lurks within every British breast—and the name of the beast is Embarrassment.
And yet…
I believe poetry is a primal impulse within us all. I believe we are all capable of it and furthermore that a small, often ignored corner of us positively yearns to try it. I believe our poetic impulse is blocked by the false belief that poetry might on the one hand be academic and technical and on the other formless and random. It seems to many that while there is a clear road to learning music, gardening or watercolours, poetry lies in inaccessible marshland: no pathways, no signposts, just the skeletons of long-dead poets poking through the bog and the unedifying sight of living ones floundering about in apparent confusion and mutual enmity. Behind it all, the dread memory of classrooms swollen into resentful silence while the English teacher invites us to ‘respond’ to a poem.
For me the private act of writing poetry is songwriting, confessional, diary-keeping, speculation, problem-solving, storytelling, therapy, anger management, craftsmanship, relaxation, concentration and spiritual adventure all in one inexpensive package.
Suppose I want to paint but seem to have no obvious talent. Never mind: there are artist supply shops selling paints, papers, pastels, charcoals and crayons. There are ‘How To’ books everywhere. Simple lessons in the rules of proportion and guides to composition and colourmixing can make up for my lack of natural ability and provide painless technical grounding. I am helped by grids and outlines, pantographs and tracing paper; precise instructions guide me in how to prepare a canvas, prime it with paint and wash it into an instant watercolour sky. There are instructional videos available; I can even find channels on cable and satellite television showing gentle hippies painting lakes, carving pine trees with palette knives and dotting them with impasto snow. Mahlsticks, sable, hogs-hair, turpentine and linseed. Viridian, umber, ochre and carmine. Perspective, chiaroscuro, sfumato, grisaille, tondo and morbidezza. Reserved modes and materials. The tools of the trade. A new jargon to learn. A whole initiation into technique, form and style.
Suppose I want to play music but seem to have no obvious talent. Never mind: there are music shops selling instruments, tuning forks, metronomes and ‘How To’ books by the score. And scores by the score. Instructional videos abound. I can buy digital keyboards linked to programmes that plug into my computer and guide me through the rudiments, monitoring my progress and accuracy. I start with scales and move on to chords and arpeggios. There are horsehair, rosin and catgut, reeds, plectrums and mouthpieces. There are diminished sevenths, augmented fifths, relative minors, trills and accidentals. There are riffs and figures, licks and vamps. Sonata, adagio, crescendo, scherzo and twelve-bar blues. Reserved modes and materials. The tools of the trade. A new jargon to learn. A whole initiation into technique, form and style.
To help us further there are evening classes, clubs and groups. Pack up your easel and palette and go into the countryside with a party of like-minded enthusiasts. Sit down with a friend and learn a new chord on the guitar. Join a band. Turn your watercolour view of Lake Windermere into a tablemat or T-shirt. Burn your version of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ onto a CD and alarm your friends.
None of these adventures into technique and proficiency will necessarily turn you into a genius or even a proficient craftsman. Your view of Snow on York Minster, whether languishing in the loft or forming the basis of this year’s Christmas card doesn’t make you Turner, Constable or Monet. Your version of ‘Fur Elise’ on electric piano might not threaten Alfred Brendel, your trumpet blast of ‘Basin Street Blues’ could be so far from Satchmo that it hurts and your take on ‘Lela’ may well stand as an eternal reproach to all those with ears to hear. You may not sell a single picture, be invited even once to deputise for the church organist when she goes down with shingles or have any luck at all when you try out for the local Bay City Rollers tribute band. You are neither Great Artist, sessions professional, illustrator or admired amateur.
So what? You are someone who paints a bit, scratches around on the keyboard for fun, gets a kick out of learning a tune or discovering a new way of rendering the face of your beloved in charcoal. You have another life, you have family, work and friends but this is a hobby, a pastime, FUN. Do you give up the Sunday kick-around because you’ll never be Thierry Henry? Of course not. That would be pathologically vain. We don’t stop talking about how the world might be better just because we have no chance of making it to Prime Minister. We are all politicians. We are all artists. In an open society everything the mind and hands can achieve is our birthright. It is up to us to claim it.
And you know, you might be the real thing, or someone with the potential to give as much pleasure to others as you derive yourself. But how you will ever know if you don’t try?
As the above is true of painting and music, so it is true of cookery and photography and gardening and interior decoration and chess and poker and skiing and sailing and carpentry and bridge and wine and knitting and brass-rubbing and line-dancing and the hundreds of other activities that enrich and enliven the daily toil of getting and spending, mortgages and shopping, school and office. There are rules, conventions, techniques, reserved objects, equipment and paraphernalia, time-honoured modes, forms, jargon and tradition. The average practitioner doesn’t expect to win prizes, earn a fortune, become famous or acquire absolute mastery in their art, craft, sport-or as we would say now, their chosen leisure pursuit. It really is enough to have fun.
The point remains: it isn’t a burden to learn the difference between acid and alkaline soil or understand how f-stops and exposure times affect your photograph. There’s no drudgery or humiliation in discovering how to knit, purl and cast off, snowplough your skis, deglaze a pan, carve a dovetail or tot up your bridge hand according to Acol. Only an embarrassed adolescent or deranged coward thinks jargon and reserved languages are pretentious and that detail and structure are boring. Sensible people are above simpering at references to colour in music, structure in wine or rhythm in architecture. When you learn to sail you are literally shown the ropes and taught that they are called sheets or painters and that knots are hitches and forward is aft and right is starboard. That is not pseudery or exclusivity, it is precision, it is part of initiating the newcomer into the guild. Learning the lingo is the beginning of our rite of passage.
In music, tempo is not the same as rhythm, which is not the same as pulse. There are metronomic indications and time signatures. At some point along the road between picking out a tune with one finger and really playing we need to know these distinctions. For some it comes naturally and seems inborn, for most of us the music is buried deep inside but needs a little coaxing and tuition to be got out. So someone shows us, or we progress by video, evening class or book. Talent is inborn but technique is learned.
Talent without technique is like an engine without a steering wheel, gears or brakes. It doesn’t matter how thoroughbred and powerful the V12 under the bonnet if it can’t be steered and kept under control. Talented people who do nothing with their gifts often crash and burn. A great truth, so obvious that it is almost a secret, is that most people are embarrassed to the point of shame by their talents. Ashamed of their gifts but proud to bursting of their achievements. Do athletes boast of their hand-eye coordination, grace and natural sense of balance? No, they talk of how hard they trained, the sacrifices they made, the effort they put in.
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp
Or what’s a heaven for?
Robert Browning’s cry brings us back, at last, to poetry. While it is perfectly possible that you did not learn music at school, or drawing and painting, it is almost certain that you did learn poetry. Not how to do it, almost never how to write your own, but how, God help us, to appreciate it.
We have all of us, all of us, sat with brows furrowed feeling incredibly dense and dumb as the teacher asks us to respond to an image or line of verse.
What do you think Wordsworth was referring to here?
What does Wilfred Owen achieve by choosing this metaphor?
How does Keats respond to the nightingale?
Why do you think Shakespeare uses the word ‘gentle’ as a verb?
What is Larkin’s attitude to the hotel room?
It brings it all back, doesn’t it? All the red-faced, blood-pounding humiliation and embarrassment of being singled out for comment.
The way poetry was taught at school reminded W. H. Auden of a Punch cartoon composed, legend has it, by the poet A. E. Housman. Two English teachers are walking in the woods in springtime. The first, on hearing birdsong, is moved to quote William Wordsworth:
TEACHER 1: Oh cuckoo, shall I call thee bird
Or but a wandering voice?
TEACHER 2: State the alternative preferred
With reasons for your choice.
Even if some secret part of you might have been privately moved and engaged, you probably went through a stage of loathing those bores Shakespeare, Keats, Owen, Eliot, Larkin and all who came before and after them. You may love them now, you may still hate them or perhaps you feel entirely indifferent to the whole pack of them. But however well or badly we were taught English literature, how many of us have ever been shown how to write our own poems?
Don’t worry, it doesn’t have to rhyme. Don’t bother with metre and verses. Just express yourself. Pour out your feelings.
Suppose you had never played the piano in your life.
Don’t worry, just lift the lid and express yourself. Pour out your feelings.
We have all heard children do just that and we have all wanted to treat them with great violence as a result. Yet this is the only instruction we are ever likely to get in the art of writing poetry: Anything goes.
But that’s how modern poetry works, isn’t it? Free verse, don’t they call it? Vers libre?
Ye-e-es…And in avant-garde music, John Cage famously wrote a piece of silence called ‘4 Minutes 33 Seconds’ and created other works requiring ball-bearings and chains to be dropped on to prepared pianos. Do music teachers suggest that to children? Do we encourage them to ignore all harmony and rhythm and just make noise? It is important to realise that Cage’s first pieces were written in the Western compositional tradition, in movements with conventional Italian names like lento, vivace and fugato. Picasso’s early paintings are flawless models of figurative accuracy. Listening to music may inspire an extraordinary emotional response, but extraordinary emotions are not enough to make music.
Unlike musical notation, paint or clay, language is inside every one of us. For free. We are all proficient at it. We already have the palette, the paints and the instruments. We don’t have to go and buy any reserved materials. Poetry is made of the same stuff you are reading now, the same stuff you use to order pizza over the phone, the same stuff you yell at your parents and children, whisper in your lover’s ear and shove into an e-mail, text or birthday card. It is common to us all. Is that why we resent being told that there is a technique to its highest expression, poetry? I cannot ski, so I would like to be shown how to. I cannot paint, so I would value some lessons. But I can speak and write, so do not waste my time telling me that I need lessons in poetry, which is, after all, no more than emotional writing, with or without the odd rhyme. Isn’t it?
Jan Schreiber in a review of Timothy Steele’s Missing Measures, says this of modern verse:
The writing of poetry has been made laughably easy. There are no technical constraints. Knowledge of the tradition is not necessary, nor is a desire to communicate, this having been supplanted in many practitioners by the more urgent desire to express themselves. Even sophistication in the manipulation of syntax is not sought. Poetry, it seems, need no longer be at least as well written as prose.
Personally, I find writing without form, metre or rhyme not ‘laughably easy’ but fantastically difficult. If you can do it, good luck to you and farewell, this book is not for you: but a word of warning from W.H. Auden before you go.
The poet who writes ‘free’ verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor—dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor.
I cannot teach you how to be a great poet or even a good one. Dammit, I can’t teach myself that. But I can show you how to have fun with the modes and forms of poetry as they have developed over the years. By the time you have read this book you will be able to write a Petrarchan sonnet, a Sapphic Ode, a ballade, a villanelle and a Spenserian stanza, among many other weird and delightful forms; you will be confident with metre, rhyme and much else besides. Whether you choose to write on the stupidity of advertising, the curve of your true love’s buttocks, the folly of war or the irritation of not being able to open a pickle jar is unimportant. I will give you the tools, you can finish the job. And once you have got the hang of the forms, you can devise your own. The Robertsonian Sonnet. The Jonesian Ode. The Millerian Stanza.
This is not an academic book. It is unlikely to become part of the core curriculum. It may help you with your English exams because it will certainly allow you to be a smart-arse in Practical Criticism papers (if such things still exist) and demonstrate that you know a trochee from a dactyl, a terza from an ottava rima and assonance from enjambment, in which case I am happy to be of service. It is over a quarter of a century since I did any teaching and I have no idea if such knowledge is considered good or useless these days, for all I know it will count against you.
I have written this book because over the past thirty-five years I have derived enormous private pleasure from writing poetry and like anyone with a passion I am keen to share it. You will be relieved to hear that I will not be burdening you with any of my actual poems (except sample verse specifically designed to help clarify form and metre): I do not write poetry for publication, I write it for the same reason that, according to Wilde, one should write a diary, to have something sensational to read on the train. And as a way of speaking to myself. But most importantly of all for pleasure.
This is not the only work on prosody (the art of versification) ever published in English, but it is the one that I should like to have been available to me many years ago. It is technical, yes, inasmuch as it investigates technique, but I hope that does not make it dry, obscure or difficult-after all, ‘technique’ is just the Greek for ‘art’. I have tried to make everything approachable without being loopily matey or absurdly simplistic.
I certainly do not attempt in this book to pick up where those poor teachers left off and instruct you in poetry appreciation. I suspect, however, that once you have started writing a poem of any real shape you will find yourself admiring and appreciating other poets’ work a great deal more. If you have never picked up a golf club you will never really know just how remarkable Ernie Els is (substitute tennis racket for Roger Federer, frying pan for Gordon Ramsay, piano for Jools Holland and so on).
But maybe you are too old a dog to learn new tricks? Maybe you have missed the bus? That’s hooey. Thomas Hardy (a finer poet than he was a novelist in my view) did not start publishing verse till he was nearly sixty.
Every child is musical. Unfortunately this natural gift is squelched before it has time to develop. From all my life experience I remember being laughed at because my voice and the words I sang didn’t please someone. My second grade teacher, Miss Stone would not let me sing with the rest of the class because she judged my voice as not musical and she said I threw the class off key. I believed her which led to the blockage of my appreciation of music and blocked my ability to write poetry. Fortunately at the age of 57 I had a significant emotional event which unblocked my ability to compose poetry which many people believe has lyrical qualities.
So writes one Sidney Madwed. Mr Madwed may not be Thomas Campion or Cole Porter, but he believes that an understanding of prosody has set him free and now clearly has a whale of a time writing his lyrics and verses. I hope reading this book will take the place for you of a ‘significant emotional event’ and awaken the poet that has always lain dormant within.
It is never too late. We are all opsimaths.
Opsimath, noun: one who learns late in life.
Let us go forward together now, both opsimathically and optimistically. Nothing can hold us back. The ode beckons.
Translating metaphor into English: Time and Motion?
In a book called A History of Kanarese Literature, by Edward Rice (1921), he makes the following comment (p. 106):
The other is that a Kanarese poem defies anything like literal translation into another language. To give any idea of the spirit of the original it would be necessary to paraphrase freely, to expand the terse and frequent metaphors into similes, and to give a double rendering of many stanzas. An example will make this clear. The opening stanza of the Jaimini Bharata is given in Sanderson’s translation as follows:
May the moon-face of Vishnu, of Devapura, always suffused with moonlight smile, full of delightful favour-ambrosial rays—at which the chakora-eye of Lakshmi is enraptured, the lotus-bud heart of the devout expands, and the sea of the world’s pure happiness rises and overflows its bounds—give us joy.
The following is an attempt, by means of a freer rendering, to retain something of the spirit of the original:
When the full moon through heaven rides,
Broad Ocean swells with all its tides ;
The lotus blossom on the stream
Opens to drink the silv’ry beam ;
And far aloft with tranced gaze
The chakor bird feeds on the rays.So, when great Vishnu’s face is seen,—
Whom men adore at Devapore—
Like to the sea, the devotee
Thrills with a tide of joy ;
Like to the flower, that blissful hour
The heart of the devout expands ;
And Lakshmi Queen, with rapture keen,
Watches with ever-radiant face
For her great Consort’s heavenly grace.
O may that grace be ours !
I’m wondering about this change. Apart from the versification—you know, being an actual poem instead of stilted prose—when it comes to just the idea, is it better? Why? How? Is it more readable? More understandable? Most importantly, does this change better “retain the spirit of the original”?
[Aside: just to be mischievous, we can with the wonders of technology do the following:
| moon | moonlight | rays | chakora bird | lotus | sea |
| Vishnu’s face | smile | his grace | Lakshmi’s eye | heart of the devout | world’s happiness |
to ruin the poem.]
For one thing, he has changed the metaphor (rūpaka) of the original into simile (upamā).
Probably the reason is that the compressed quality of the original, a prominent characteristic of Sanskrit and other classical Indian literature, is unsuitable for English, whose readers are typically unprepared for it. Is there more to it? Is this a general difference between the two literary cultures?
I’m wondering all this because Daniel Ingalls says something along similar lines in his honestly-written general introduction “Sanskrit poetry and Sanskrit Poetics” (from his translation of the Subhāṣita-ratna-kośa anthology):
As a result, Sanskrit is lacking in what is perhaps the chief force of English poetry: its kinesthetic effect. What I mean can be shown by an old ballad:
Martinmas wind, when wilt thou blow
and shake the green leaves off the tree…One can feel the leaves shaking, and one shivers in the next line to the “Frost that freezes fell / and blowing snow’s inclemency.” One can find verses that produce this muscular effect in Bengali, and although I cannot speak at first hand of other modern Indian literatures, I imagine that one can find the effect in them as well. But it is only rarely that one finds it in Sanskrit. The powers of Sanskrit are of a different order.
[…]
[The following verse] is by Yogeśvara, an excellent poet who is capable of better things. In it he uses a strikingly elaborate metaphor:Now the great cloud-cat,
darting out his lightning tongue,
licks the creamy moon
from the saucepan of the sky.The effect here is gained by intellectual, entirely rational means. The metaphor is complete in every detail: cat, tongue, cream, and saucepan—cloud, moon, lightning, and sky. It is almost like an exercise from a manual of logic under the chapter “Analogy.” Compare the verse with a well-known passage of T. S. Eliot which uses several similar ideas, but uses them very differently:
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, …This from one who is often called an intellectual poet. And yet Eliot gets his effect in every line from the irrational, the strong but imprecise memory we have of fog and cats, the childhood associations of certain words and idioms. Consider the line: “Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening.” It brings to sudden flower certain homely and completely natural phrases: “licks his tongue around the bowl,” or “licks his tongue into the corner of the dish.” The idiom is suddenly transfigured by bringing it into juxtaposition with the last three words, “of the evening.” This transfiguration of language becomes impossible without a natural-language basis.
Is there a general point here that English poetry uses vague, fuzzy, but “kinesthetic” effects where Sanskrit (or classical Indian) poetry uses compressed metaphors that paint a precise and detailed picture? I think there is some merit to the idea that, by and large, Sanskrit poetry is “static”, not “dynamic”. It is not a stream in motion; it hasn’t any “flow”. It is more a pearl in itself, that dazzles as you read. If poetry is imagination and the evocation of something other-worldly, it seems to me that Sanskrit poetry in general / at its best, conjures a world that one can calmly dwell in for a while, not an evocative fleeting idea that escapes as you try to grasp it, one which has appeal more in the chasing. Consider the importance accorded ultimately to stability / sthāyī-bhāva in all Indian arts, from poetry to theatre to dance.
This requires more thought and elaboration, but one may as well quote the final lines of Ingalls’s introduction (emphasis mine):
One may argue today, as the Sanskrit critics argued in the past, the relative importance of the various factors of Sanskrit verse which I have discussed. Vocabulary, grammar, meter: these are all necessary. Figures of speech, both verbal and intellectual, furnish delight. Mood is what is sought, though the grand successes of Sanskrit I would say go beyond mood to a sort of universal revelation, to what James Joyce, drawing on the vocabulary of religion, called an epiphany. To achieve this success impersonality is a prerequisite and suggestion is the chief instrument. If I were to single out for admiration one factor above the others in this complex it would be suggestion, not because it is unknown in other languages but because the Sanskrit poets use it with such brilliance and because it seems to me the most intimately connected of all the factors with the excitement, the sudden rushing of the mind into a delightful, calm expansion, that one occasionally derives from Sanskrit poetry and that brings one who has once known it constantly back for further draughts.
ऋष्यशृंग
The story of the ascetic Ṛṣyaśṛṅga (ऋष्य-शृंग, “deer-horned”) occurs in the Puranic literature. His father brought him up in an atmosphere of innocence, and he had never seen a woman. (Later, in the Rāmāyaṇa, he officiates at Daśaratha’s sacrifice for children, and it is thus through his grace that Rāma is born.) Pollock:
The Ṛśyaśṛṅga episode appears also [i.e, besides the Ramayana] at MBh 3.110-13, PadmP, Bengali recension, Pātālakhaṇḍa, 13 (reprinted in Lüders 1897), Bhāratamañjarī 3.758-95, Bhadrakalpāvadāna 33, Avadānakalpalatā 65, Alambusā and Naḷanikā Jātakas, etc. The episode is clearly of great importance to traditional India…
Here is the story from the Vana Parva in the Mahabharata (taken from GRETIL), accompanied by a pleasant translation in simple rhyming verse, by Arthur W. Ryder. (Scroll horizontally to read the English text and/or compare. Or to read just the English text, click here.)
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AE
XXVII
“Is my team ploughing,
That I was used to drive
And hear the harness jingle
When I was man alive?”Ay, the horses trample,
The harness jingles now;
No change though you lie under
The land you used to plough.“Is football playing
Along the river shore,
With lads to chase the leather,
Now I stand up no more?”Ay, the ball is flying,
The lads play heart and soul;
The goal stands up, the keeper
Stands up to keep the goal.“Is my girl happy,
That I thought hard to leave,
And has she tired of weeping
As she lies down at eve?”Ay, she lies down lightly,
She lies not down to weep:
Your girl is well contented.
Be still, my lad, and sleep.“Is my friend hearty,
Now I am thin and pine,
And has he found to sleep in
A better bed than mine?”Yes, lad, I lie easy,
I lie as lads would choose;
I cheer a dead man’s sweetheart,
Never ask me whose.
Us
यूयं वयं वयं यूयम् इत्यासीन्मतिरावयोः । किञ्जातमधुना येन यूयं यूयं वयं वयम् ॥yūyaṃ vayaṃ vayaṃ yūyam
ity āsīt matir āvayoḥ |
kiṃ jātam adhunā yena
yūyaṃ yūyaṃ vayaṃ vayam ||
Translated by John Brough (1977):
In former days we’d both agree
That you were me, and I was you.
What has now happened to us two,
That you are you, and I am me?
A simple poem, simply translated, and I was struck both by its simplicity and how popular it seems despite (because of?) it. Here’s the place to mention something trite, like “even the simplest poems can be beautiful”. It’s also an example where word order does matter in Sankrit; rearranging the words wouldn’t give the same meaning.
The poem is attributed to Bhartrhari, which, given the nature of such attributions, may mean we don’t know exactly who wrote it. (It doesn’t appear in all recensions.)
[Ryder, probably translating from the variant reading that has “kiṃ jātam adhunā mitra” (so it’s addressed to a friend specifically), does:
FRIENDSHIP’S END
Yes, you were I, and I was you,
So fond the love that linked us two;
Alas, my friend, for friendship’s end!
Now I am I, and you are you.
Unrelated: Regina Spektor, Us
Why good translations matter
Sonnet by Keats, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer. Keats was familiar with other translations of Homer, such as the one by Pope, but reading Chapman’s work was a different experience altogether:
Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Unwilling translators
Besides the Mahabharata’s translation into Old Javanese (and other Southeast Asian languages) in the 10th/11th century, the first translation into a non-Indian language was into Persian, commissioned by Akbar in 1591.
The translator, Badāyūnī or Badāōnī, relates how it came to be:
The following considerations disposed the emperor to the work. When he had heard the Shāhnāmah, and the story of Āmīr Ḥamzah, in seventeen volumes transcribed in fifteen years, and had spent much gold illuminating it, he also heard the story of Abu Muslim, and the Jāmi’-ul-hikāyat repeated, and it suddenly came into his mind that most of these books were nothing but poetry and fiction; but that, since they were first related in a lucky hour, and when their star was in the act of passing over the sky, they obtained great fame. But now he ordered those Hindu books, which holy and staid sages had written, and which were all clear and convincing proofs and the pivot on which all their religion, and faith, and holiness turned, to be translated from the Indian into the Persian language, and thought to himself, “Why should I not have them done in my name? For they are by no means trite, but quite fresh, and they will produce all kinds of fruits of felicity both temporal and spiritual, and will be the cause of circumstance and pomp, and will ensure an abundance of children and wealth as is written in the preface of these books.”
So apparently, Akbar thought they (Hindu books) were more than mere poetry and fiction, and yet fresh, and he even believed (essentially) the phalashruti told in the books.
But the translator Badāōnī himself, an orthodox Mullā, doesn’t seem to have agreed with his emperor, or liked the job:
The Emperor sent for me and desired me to translate The Mahābhārata, in conjunction with Nāqib Khān. […] The consequence was that in three or four months I translated two out of eighteen sections, at the puerile absurdities of which the eighteen thousand creations may well be amazed.
<!–(The sections are parvas. The “18000 creations” is a Muslim belief, and unconnected with the recurrence of the number 18 in the Mahābhārata.)–>
Besides finding sections full of “puerile absurdities”, he also found sections objectionable and disturbing to his Muslim sentiments. It led him to complain:
But such is my fate, to be employed on such works. Nevertheless, I console myself with the reflection that what is predestined must come to pass.
Akbar seems to have been merely amused by this reaction:
We thought that [Badāōnī] was an unworldly individual of Ṣūfī tendencies, but he seems to be such a bigoted lawyer that no sword can sever the jugular vein of his bigotry.
The rest of the translation had to be completed by others.
Snip
Some random cute or frivolous verses, dumped here so I can close those tabs. (Though inevitably I ended up opening more tabs…)
एकवस्तु द्विधा कर्तुम् बहवः सन्ति धन्विनः । धन्वी स मार एवैको द्वयोः ऐक्यः करोति यः ॥eka-vastu dvidhā kartum
bahavaḥ santi dhanvinaḥ —
dhanvī sa māra evaiko
dvayoḥ aikyaḥ karoti yaḥ
Cute and clever! Here, māra is kāma, often depicted with an arrow (as Cupid is). Saw here, see here.
[Edit: Fixed एकवस्तुम् (eka-vastum) → एकवस्तु. ]
If you’re too lazy to click, here’s a rough translation that loses the one-two-many-one-two-one play on words:
To split a single thing in two
There’s many an archer under the sun—
But Love’s the only bowman who
Can start with two and make them one.
There’s no “under the sun” in the original; I just couldn’t think of a better rhyme. :P
कमले कमला शेते हरः शेते हिमालये । क्षीराब्धौ च हरिः शेते मन्ये मत्कुणशङ्कया ॥kamale kamalā śete, haraḥ śete himālaye,
kṣīrābdhau ca hariḥ śete — manye matkuṇa-śaṅkayā !
kamalā = Lakṣmī (I think, though one source gave it as Brahmā), śete = sleeps, manye = I guess, śaṅkayā = out of suspicion/fear, of matkuṇa = bedbugs :D
Originally saw here,[dead link] so see here or here.
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Poems
But to remember her my heart is sad, To see her is to know Bewildered thoughts, and touching driveth mad — How is she dear that worketh only woe? (P.E. More, 1899) The thought of her is saddening, The sight of her is fear, The touch of her is maddening— Can she be really dear? (Ryder, 1910)
These are both translations of Sanskrit poems, and quite obviously of the same one.1 The difference in style is not entirely due to the 10 years between them. :-)
Following the previous post, which egregiously violated “Show, don’t tell” — with a whole lot of telling and nothing to show for it — here are a couple more random examples of short verses that I feel are successful in translation. [As I started gathering examples, this post started turning into a tribute to Ryder, so I’ve cut that off for another time. What I like is obviously subjective, and I’m easily delighted by a simple rhyme. :-) Of course, most good poems can be translated into prose or free verse and still remain beautiful; the below are merely examples of translations being cleverly coerced into the verse forms of English.] I avoided commentary on the poems — for attempting it would be futile — and only touch on the translation.
This is from Amaru:
SHE ONLY LOOKED She did not redden nor deny My entrance to her room; She did not speak an angry word; She did not fret and fume; She did not frown upon poor me, Her lover now as then; She only looked at me the way She looks at other men.
The core of the poem, its sting, is in the last two lines, and it may owe more to the inherent rhythms of the English language than to the skill of the translator that the natural way of expression fits so neatly into metre, but few other translators would have exploited it so well.
Also from Amaru:
WHEN MY LOVE DRAWS NIGH When my love draws nigh, When his voice I hear, Why am I all eye? Why am I all ear?
How simple! As is the next one:
SIMPLE JUSTICE If, maiden of the lotus eye, Your anger hurts you so, 'Tis right you should not let it die, You hardly could, you know. But once I gave you an embrace, To keep it would be pain; And once I kissed your willing face, Give me that kiss again.
On Translation: Exhibit 1
Translating Sanskrit poetry into English presents unique difficulties. To be sure, translation is always tricky. Passing to a different language invariably loses some nuances and overtones. What can be naturally expressed in one language may require more effort in another.
With Sanskrit, though, even essential features are often untranslatable to a native English audience.
[Disclaimer: Before going further, I must point out that I am an amateur. Everything below is probably wrong, they are banal and pointless observations, anyway, and I amaze myself by my ability to take something interesting and make it boring. I thought I had something to say, but it took writing it out to realise I didn’t.]
The Decline and Fall of The Decline and Fall
(Yes, this post is written just for the title. More details would be received gratefully.)
Over a period of 17 years from 1770 to 1787, Edward Gibbon wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It was, among other things, a mammoth history (6 volumes, 71 chapters) of the last days of Rome, which for Gibbon apparently meant several centuries. (The book covers over thirteen centuries of history; here’s an outline.)
The work received instant praise. Adam Smith’s letter to Gibbon is typical:
“I cannot express to you the pleasure it gives me to find that by the universal consent of every man of taste and learning whom I either know or correspond with, it sets you at the very head of the whole literary tribe at present existing in Europe.”
The Decline and Fall became the model for all historians that followed — including its pessimism (history as “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind”), its overarching narrative, and its indictment of religion.
It became a literary monument of the 18th century, and one of the works that every educated man was expected to have read, a part of every bookshelf. Churchill (“I devoured Gibbon. […] I rode triumphantly through it from end to end and enjoyed it all”), Carlyle (“how gorgeously does it swing across the gloomy and tumultuous chasm of these barbarous centuries”), Virginia Woolf (“not merely a master of the pageant and the story; he is also the critic and the historian of the mind […] We seem as we read him raised above the tumult and the chaos into a clear and rational air”)… everyone read The Decline and Fall and spoke of it in the highest terms. (Gandhi read it in jail, and considered it an inferior version of the Mahabharata.) It was read by doctors, politicians, lawyers, novelists, even Sanskrit professors.
But then times began to change. Education stopped being the reading of “classics“, and became the learning of “subjects”. Today, no one I know has read The Decline And Fall, nor considers it worth the time.
Frederik Pohl on science fiction
Frederik Pohl is one of the important writers and editors from the “Golden Age” of science fiction. He began writing in 1937, and over the last seventy years has written, edited, agented, and done several other things besides. I read his somewhat-obscure story Shaffery Among the Immortals when I was 12 (my own Golden Age), and I have long considered it the funniest story about a scientist ever written. (Disagreements most welcome.) Of course, at that time, I imagined all scientists to be heroic characters, every one a genius—so the story was indeed all fiction. It seems less funny when I reread it as a struggling graduate student myself. :-) [Despite dropping out of school at the age of 14, Pohl has an excellent knowledge of science, and, even more amazingly, about science: he seems to write with the familiarity of an insider about the life of scientists, how science gets done, what goes on at conferences, the way papers are written… he is a bit cynical occasionally, but that’s his job.]
In his introduction to the collection Day Million, Pohl offers the following pleasant description of science fiction. Writing in December 1969, he notes:
I put “science fiction” in quotes because I’m not always sure what that is, either. “Science fiction” is a poor name for a field of writing. It would be an uninspired one even if it were exact, and of course it is far from exact: there is a great deal of “science fiction” that doesn’t contain any science at all. (You will find some specimens herein.) But it is not entirely a misnomer, because just as “science” is a state of mind and a systems approach to inquiry rather than test tubes and facts, so “science fiction” is a way of writing stories. Harlow Shapley, talking of something else, once described this perspective as “the view from a distant star”. It is a look at the human race and all its affairs from outside.
One of the most popular sports at science-fiction gatherings is defining science fiction: it is that kind of story which deals with events that may happen, but as far as we know haven’t happened; it is that kind of story which takes some real event or trend and extrapolates it to its logical conclusions; it is that kind of story which would not exist if it were not for some central supposition which is based on scientific theory. Et cetera. I play this game as little as possible, because I am an inclusivist and try to avoid setting up barriers which might make me refrain from buying a story for a magazine or anthology I may be editing, or refrain from writing a story of my own, because it could be excluded by one of those barriers. But I do have a suggestion toward a definition, which seems to me attractive if only because it employs that favorite writer’s trick of standing a question on its head. It goes like this:
A science fiction story is that story which might really occur anywhere in space and time, except that stories of our own real world are a special and less imaginative kind of science fiction.
In those terms, Hamlet and War and Peace and Little Women are examples only of a subclass within the general framework of sf. For reasons of vanity as a science fiction writer, it gives me some pleasure to think that this is so. But vanity is not the only reason. Our world is but one of a very large number of planets—no one on Earth knows exactly how many there are, but a reasonably good guess puts it at 60 million or so—in our own galaxy, which in turn is but one of some hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe. The events that Shakespeare and Tolstoi and Louisa May Alcott wrote about pertain to the history and customs of a certain kind of vertebrate, mammalian, carbon-based, two-sexed, air-breathing creature. We know a great deal about this species, and we can see how complex its societal and ecological systems are; but since they are the systems we move in, it is hard for us to see that they are the product of chance. Science fiction gives us the perspective that makes the job a little easier. Not always perfectly, in fact not always even very well, it does give us a look at our churches, politicians, addictions, morals, family relationships, vices and pleasures from the point of view of a frame of reference that takes none of them for granted.
When you think of how many millions of human beings have shot, stabbed, gassed, clubbed and burned other human beings because they thought their way of life was the uniquely best and proper one, it appears that this point of view could have saved us all a lot of heartburn over the centuries. It could save us some right now.
As I write, we are in the last days of the year in which human beings first walked on the surface of another world. It’s only the Moon. It’s really just our own back yard. There’s not much there to want, and little enough of even that worth the cost of hauling back to Earth.
But it’s a doorstep to the universe, and out there are many very wonderful things indeed, and to reach and master them we shall probably need all the wisdom and objectivity and freedom from parochial prejudice we can come by. We need them badly enough here on Earth, heaven knows, and if science fiction can help us attain these goals, it will have done more than a good many Messiahs.
Serial novels
For N.
Dickens and the Victorian Serial Novel and Great Expectations as a Victorian Serial Novel: By students of English 434: Nineteenth-Century English Novel at The University of Michigan-Dearborn. Includes a helpful How To Read a Victorian Novel :)
The nineteenth-century Victorian serial novel was a way for readers and writers to make a novel last years and be talked about endlessly like the daily soap opera of this century.
No time to be idle: the serial novel and popular imagination: Shawn Crawford. An authoritative essay, cited by the above.
In January 1841, passengers arriving in New York from Europe would be greeted by anxious people on the docks. They all had the same question: “Is Little Nell dead?”
[…] the conditions of Victorian England made serialization the primary mode of novel publication for fifty years. Everyone published serially, including George Eliot, who hated it, and Henry James, whose work hardly seems suitable […]
Of the 192 novels published serially in the Victorian Era (1836–1889) [..]
Dickens and Serial Publication: Joel J. Brattin.
Most of Dickens’ novels were serialized in 20 monthly installments […] always included precisely 32 pages of text, two engraved illustrations, and, usually, 16 pages of advertisements.
The death of Mary Hogarth, Dickens’ beloved sister-in-law, in May 1837 led him to miss the only professional writing deadline of his career.
(I presume that means it was the only one he missed!)
Other topics:
Dickens and His Readers: E. D. H. Johnson. On “Dickens’ dependence on public approbation”
All of Dickens’ novels made their first appearance in serial form. Nine came out in monthly installments: Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Five were composed for weekly serialization: The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge in Master Humphrey’s Clock; Hard Times in Household Words; and A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations in All the Year Round.
Dickens and the Classic Serial: Robert Giddings, presenting long paper on classic serials on BBC.
Dostoevsky and the English Novel: Dickens, John Cowper Powys and D. H. Lawrence
All Dickens’s novels had been translated into Russian by the time of Dostoevsky’s death in 1881. He was virtually an honorary Russian and to this day many Russian homes boast a complete set of his novels. Readers queued up for the latest serial instalment of them in Moscow just as they did in London and New York.
Also see:
- Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund, The Victorian Serial, University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville, 1991.
- Graham Law, Serializing fiction in the Victorian press, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000
The Lumber Room 