Sumedha Raikar-Mhatre: Burning Troy in Hindi

IRISH playwright J M Synge had said in 1911 that his absorption of local life and the flavoured speech of peasants fishermen and beggars turned his writing into a joy In 2016 Thanebased Hindi translator Arunkumar Sharma 64 quotes Syngersquos belief in the living language as the core inspiration behind his Hindi renderings of English worksAwaiting his third translation mdash Angreziki Chuni Hui Adhunik Kavitaye 52 Select Modern Poems mdash in June by New Delhibased Prakashan Sansthan Sharma says ldquoSyngersquos willingness to listen to the servant girls in the kitchen shows the importance of the spoken word against heavily loaded dictionary terms which sound hollowrdquoArunkumar Sharma 64 at his Thane residence Sharma has translated three of modernist American poet T S Eliotrsquos most famous works in Hindi Titled T S Eliot Ki Teen Utkrisht Kavitayen the translations have won a stamp of approval from the UKbased T S Eliot Society of which Sharma is member PicSameer MarkandeSharma says the urge to translate was beyond reason and came with no great experience He decided to pursue his passion and follow his gut feeling Since 2006 when Sharma started his selfdriven pursuit of bringing greats like Shakespeare and T S Elliot into the Hindi realm he consciously banked on spoken Hindi and a HindiUrdu mix rather than the Sanskritised officialese that passes off as impressive Hindi in India Urdu buff Tariq Shafiq has been his longtime consultant in the translation processIn fact Sharmarsquos choice of Hindi translations as a postretirement fulltime activity stemmed from his frustration with the bureaucratese that he resented during his professional life as a banker Ever since he served in the Mumbai and Patna offices of the Reserve Bank of India and later at National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development NABARD he experienced a convoluted usage of Hindi in banking circles During his tenures in several second and third tier cities he sensed a similar linguistic crisis in sectors with a people interface ldquoIf we consider Hindi as a uniting factor either for banks or any public sector undertaking why should we estrange our audience with scary bombastic usagerdquo Sharma has a list of the particularly vahiyat atrocious or jarring Hindi terms he is against For instance aarakshi police prakratik pita natural guardian and samvidhik taralta anupat statutory liquidity ratio ldquoThey sound like psychiatric disordersrdquo he adds in jest while explaining why he retains the original flavour during translation especially when there are limited equivalents provided by the Hindi thesaurus For instance he refused to use the word lsquodoorbhashrsquo preferring to stick to lsquotelephonersquo similarly with radio which is itself an abbreviation canrsquot be akashwani he has decided as a general principle He says zealots put these words in the dictionary and then expect their popular usage while usage should drive the dictionary in factSharma says the popular image of a writertranslator referring to hardbound lexicons is false While working on poets like W H Auden Philip Larkins Yvor Winters and Archibald MacLeish he realised that their Hindi rendering couldnrsquot be restricted to finding equivalent words Their thought had to be first located in world history and Western philosophy after which the Indian context becomes apparent Thatrsquos when the appropriate Hindi words flow In No Second Troy he used the Urdu word lsquofizarsquo to explain ldquoin an age like thisrdquo and felt lsquosamayrsquo could not have captured the exact feeling Achillesrsquo Heel became lsquodukhti ragrsquo ldquoThoughts come in the form of words They are not the clothing but the substance itself In translations we have to responsibly recreate someone elsersquos thought in our regional idiom naturally a supple expression ensures an easy read which is what we owe to the original creator and the readerrdquoQuite often Western expressions eluded Hindi terms he acknowledges For instance the word lsquoGodrsquo is particularly difficult as its substitutes ishwar bhagwan allah uparwala jagadish hold different connotations in the mind of the Hindi readerWhile translating King Lear Sharma chose lsquoMy Lordrsquo over lsquoMere Swamirsquo as the latter did not stand for the King as intended in the original Yeatsrsquo No Second Troy has the line ldquoWas there another Troy for her to burnrdquo Sharma thought of substituting Troy with Ravanarsquos Lanka but then settled for the original reading the political implications of the word lsquoLankarsquo Similarly in rendering Eliotrsquos The Dry Salvages he used lsquoDevirsquo for the Lady ie Virgin Mary as the Hindi translation of the Holy Bible uses Devi ldquoIn section III of Burnt Norton by Eliot I coined the word lsquobekagratarsquo for lack of concentration from the Hindi word lsquoekagratarsquo One day this word may become acceptable to userdquoThe reason for zeroing in on American and British poets is Sharmarsquos fascination with the existential concerns they spell out Sharma says the 52 poems by 37 poets in his selection mdash poems written roughly between 1901 to 1950 mdash are creations of those who grew up as writers in the most turbulent time in history witnessing two World Wars the invention of the aeroplane and the nuclear bomb It is no coincidence that in this random showcase there are many poems dealing with death mdash not as a terrifying abstract theme but a routine closely felt experience A few poets had served the army and died during the first World War ldquoAlmost all modern poets are products of the Universities bringing in an intellectual attitude and rigor to poetry Contrary to the romantic and Edwardian style of 19th century poets these poets are conscious of their role and the subject and form of poetryrdquo Sharma observes He feels close to them because they are city dwellers lamenting the loss of an animated intimate village existence Sharma who has lived in various cities Mumbai Guwahati Chandigarh and Jammu and has a postgraduate degree in English literature from the University of Rajasthan in Jaipur appreciates poems that dwell on peripatetic lives particularly the problems and opportunities of city life and the loneliness of the individual in a crowd Another theme that appeals to Sharma is the poemsrsquo focus on the boon and the curse of the machine ldquoThe gadgetloaded Indian of today knows what these poems predictedrdquoAppreciation for Sharmarsquos translations has emerged from varied quarters The UKbased T S Eliot Society has made a note of Sharmarsquos work whereas the late Khushwant Singh whom Sharma had met as a literature student in 1973 also admired the cadence caught by the translator Visitors to the recent Delhi Book Fair showed interest in his translations However Sharma has had little luck in becoming a part of a larger multilingual body of translators He feels the Sahitya Akademi can play a role which it hasnrsquot in attracting recognition and funding for Indian translatorsSumedha RaikarMhatre is a culture columnist in search of the subtext