Godsong

by Amit Majmudar

  * * *

  I love you. Why is this the “secret of all secrets”? After all these complex metaphysical discussions, all this Sanskrit poetry—sancta simplicitas, sacred simplicity. Or is this secret all that simple? This is the same love that Dante wrote of, the love “that moves the sun and the other stars.” It is the same love that Rumi and the other Sufis meant when they wrote their poems to the Beloved. For God so loved the world…Here, at the end of the Gita, we have been taught how to understand love. We can place this love of Krishna for Arjuna, friend for friend, in its metaphysical context—along with filial love, the love between siblings, parental love, romantic love.

  If Brahman and atman are the same, so are atman and atman, yours and that of the one you love. Atman experiences union with another atman, the boundary between them gone. Love’s bliss is practice bliss for the yogic union of atman and Brahman. Two bodies seem like two separate beings, but love dispels that delusion, as any lover or parent knows, until physiology itself reflects the new unity. We know of these things happening, but we do not read enough into them. How a mother sometimes wakes up moments before the sleeping infant registers hunger. How a reflex will hurl a parent in front of an oncoming car to snatch her child out of danger. That unity can expand the definition of self, of atman, to include the people of your country, your faith, your race. Act accordingly, and you work toward the state of a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King, Jr. Beyond this lies identification with all humankind, and to live this agape transfigures the self, more effectively than sacramental bread and wine, into Christ. Beyond this lies identification with all living things. “I bring it all to be, / And from me, all evolves.” And beyond even that, identifying with all things living and nonliving, the self unites, at last, with all of Being. With Brahman. This is the state the Godsong sings, and is, and sings us toward.

  So when Krishna says he “loves” Arjuna, he means that between his “self” and Arjuna’s “self” there is no barrier but delusion. Love can dissolve that barrier by reminding Arjuna of his origin, when he was at One, when he was still a song the Singer had not sung. When Arjuna answers,

  nashto moha smritir labdha,

  he is saying that he has lost his delusion and has gained—regained—his memory. Love has taught him to remember who he always was.

  * * *

  I find it sweet that the God is unsure of himself at the end. His last lines to Arjuna in the poem are questions, desperately asking if all these verses are enough to dispel his doubts.

  They are. Arjuna realizes the white horses are yoked to the chariot. The chariot is yoked to the will of the Charioteer. He realizes he must yoke himself to the Charioteer and go where he is driven, releasing arrow after arrow in the coming battle. All this talk of “yoking” and “release” has come down to these white horses yoked to this chariot, and the arrows on the ground that he alone must string and release.

  “I will do what you command.” At that, Krishna turns to the horses, and without so much as a shake of the reins, the chariot begins to move across the plain of Kurukshetra, back to the Pandava Army. The dust behind the chariot rises in a dense cloud, and this fills the sky.

  * * *

  When this cloud clears, we are at the court of King Dhritarashtra. Sanjaya is at his side as before.

  We are back at the opening scene—but everything has changed. “My delusion has perished. My memory gains.” Plato once wrote that what we call “learning” is really a way of reminding the soul of what it once knew. That is what the Gita has done for Arjuna; it has reminded him who he is. For centuries, the Gita has been reminding Hindus around the world who they are. This expansion of memory is an expansion of being, on the same scale as Krishna’s in Session 11.

  No wonder Sanjaya finishes out the Gita by telling the blind King that, having heard this Godsong, he remembers and remembers it—and that the memory makes him, again and again, rejoice.

  A NOTE ON TECHNIQUE

  At the gate of the Bhagavad-Gita there stands a line. It is a line that dares and discourages the translator who thinks of stepping across it:

  dharmakshetre kurukshetre

  Twin tetrasyllables in tight succession, a construction altogether untranslatable. Or at least untranslatable with either the grace of prose or the grace of verse.

  “On the field of dharma, on the field of the Kurus” proliferates articles, making a mouthful out of Sanskrit’s efficient yokewords. “On Dharma Field, on Kuru Field” makes it seem like “Dharma Field” is a place name, when it’s really a metaphor for an actual place, Kurukshetra (which exists to this day), where dharma and adharma battle it out. The line is perfect because it sets the literal and figurative scene for the entire poem in a single line, the two halves of the line balanced as though by an equal sign.

  I remain dissatisfied with my own solution—“On that field of dharma, Kurukshetra”—but I love how much I had to think about it. That probably explains why I decided to translate the Gita in the first place. I wanted a closer way to read it.

  * * *

  Translate—to move something in space—and metaphor—to carry over—are related in their Greek and Latin etymologies. To make metaphor or to make a translation, you have to keep moving. You aim to move a reader by moving words about.

  Ideally, in the flush of inspiration, the words move on their own. Translation doesn’t quite give you the sense of “automatic writing,” of language coming alive and seizing free will for itself—at least not if you are finicky-faithful to your original text. It is hard work the whole way through.

  Sanskrit’s grammar, like Latin’s, is flexible about word order. Sometimes I felt the word order was important to the meaning, and in those cases, I preserved it carefully. In other instances, I reserved the right to shift a clause from its place within the Sanskrit sloka to a new location in its corresponding English sentence. Sanskrit also has a tendency to construct sentences in the passive voice. If you plugged the Sanskrit into a translation engine, most sentences would come out in the “This was done by him to me” format. Sometimes the passive voice struck me as crucial to accuracy of meaning, and I preserved it; other times, it’s just a quirk of the language.

  I once made a version in prose, but the Gita is, unabashedly, a poem. The Gita-poet, in fact, was actually something of a show-off. When Arjuna is starstruck by the cosmic form of the divine, he stammers and bows down as he asks a question. Or, as our poet would have it:

  sa-gadgadam bhitabhita pranamya

  “Kneeling, he spoke / To Krishna in a terror-struck stutter.” A master technician of the verse line, the Gita-poet makes the Sanskrit line itself stammer twice, doubling the sounds gad and bhit in quick succession. That is only one example of the sly verbal marvels he pulls off. He does it even in the midst of a standard epic catalogue, playing with the warrior Bhima’s name, calling him not by his name but describing him, instead, as bhimakarma, “fearsome in action.” Elsewhere in the first session, the Gita-poet sets up a parallel between Bhima’s name and the name of the opposing army’s highest leader, Bhishma—quite readily contradicting history (Bhima was not, in fact, his own army’s leader) for the sake of a sound effect. The poet sometimes privileges the ludic element in a way not usually expected of a scripture, although the first lines of Genesis contain their share of double meanings and self-delighting word-music, too, like that lovely phrase tohu wabohu. The Gita-poet is also enamored of anaphora. I have used the structural and musical resources of American verse to preserve these rhetorical and poetic elements wherever the English language, or my own abilities, made it possible.

  * * *

  The Gita is the scripture of multiplicity, and its multiplicity extends to its form and structure. Considered as a dialogue, it’s actually two dialogues, nested one inside the other.

  In the “frame story,” the advisor Sanjaya speaks with the blind King Dhritarashtra. What Sanjaya says, for the m
ost part, is the dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna, a story-within-the-story. Krishna, in a few instances, quotes verbatim the claims of rival philosophers about the universe—speaker quoting speaker quoting speaker.

  But that is not the only formal multiplicity. The Gita’s quatrains are cast in one of two different meters, most frequently the sloka, much more rarely the tristubh. Sometimes the poem skips for a stretch into the rarer meter, then reverts; in these cases, most commentators are at a loss as to why the poet chose to switch things up. Mere variety for variety’s sake isn’t the explanation, given that several of the longest didactic passages are in sloka meter straight through.

  The only clearly deliberate use of the rarer meter occurs in the long run of tristubh quatrains in Session 11, when Arjuna beholds Krishna’s Universal Form. Arjuna, Sanjaya, and Krishna himself all use this meter for the duration of the theophany. This sets apart that moment in the poem: During recitations, the music of the incantation changes, abruptly and unmistakably. The use in Session 11 also reflects Krishna’s “expansion” because the verse line itself expands in the rarer meter. The expansion is so striking that I flirted, for a while, with printing the whole run in CAPS LOCK. Instead I have opted to “expand” the verse line itself.

  The original Sanskrit does not rhyme, although there are plenty of other sound effects and intricate rhetorical structures. In this translation, the characters speak in two ways, also. All the characters except Krishna (who delivers the bulk of the Gita) speak in nonmetrical, sometimes spikily alliterative, often enjambed quatrains. Krishna speaks in a much more measured, regular verse. This embodies, formally, the contrast between the despairing, uncertain Arjuna and the calm, didactic Krishna. Arjuna’s rhythm is irregular turbulence; Krishna’s rhythm is mostly serene, except when he gets cosmic and expansive—and when he gets irritated, as in his snarling references to hypocritical priests and nihilists. Usually, when he is teaching Arjuna, his meter stays fairly regular.

  This rule changes only for the expansive meter of the tristubh quatrains. This rule also changes at the very end of the poem, when Arjuna and Sanjaya both—having heard the Gita in its entirety, their inner turbulence resolved—“fall in” and match Krishna’s rhythm.

  Essentially, I have created and imposed a pattern, not present in the original poem, that represents its dynamic. Simultaneously I have preserved, by orchestrating different sounds for the sloka and tristubh meters, the pattern that is present in the original.

  I had three advantages when approaching this project. I already knew the script of Sanskrit, the Devanagari, because it is the same as modern-day Hindi’s; I have been studying this poem, and Hinduism generally, off and on for more than a quarter century; and I have spent the same amount of time studying, and practicing, the art of poetry.

  These advantages were counterbalanced, and then some, by the fact that I had to translate from a dead language. All the instincts, all the instant implicit understandings in the languages I grew up speaking, English and Gujarati—these were out of reach when it came to Sanskrit, and permanently so. My eyes glazing over as I gazed at declension tables, I longed for somewhere I might travel to immerse myself. Sanskrit was far away, not geographically but temporally. There were not even television shows and movies I could watch to pick up the rhythms and connotations of the language, as I did in my boyhood with Hindi.

  I knew I had to compensate for this lack of living exposure. I did it the only way possible: I made up with diligent knowledge for what I lacked in instinctive know-how. Accordingly, I made every last word of this poem its own little research project.

  What was its meaning in nineteenth-century dictionaries prepared by British scholars, and how did those definitions compare to those in modern-day Sanskrit-English dictionaries? What was its root word? What was its etymology? What were its relatives in other Indo-European languages I might be familiar with, like Latin, French, or Greek—and did it find its way, through any of these channels, into English? Where else was it used in the Gita, and did its connotation change based on its context there? How did other translators translate it? What were the etymologies of potential English candidates, and did they match up? Finally—given that some of the worst translations of the Gita have issued from excellent Sanskritists—was this an instance in which I should privilege my instincts in the living language over my research in the dead one?

  That is how I worked through this poem, twice. I have actually translated this poem three times now: Once, years ago, I rendered the first sessions in a singable, alliteration-studded English equivalent of the two meters of the original:

  Krishna, I have no wish to kill,

  Keen to kill though my kinsmen are.

  The form required me to lose too much information in the transfer. A second time, I translated the Gita into highly conversational American prose, in screenplay format, with the commentary embedded in the dialogue as stage directions. It was probably more “accessible” than this version, but it wasn’t a poem. Finally, with a nudge from my editor at Knopf, Deborah Garrison, I have translated this poem of more than one meter as a poem of more than one meter.

  The Gita’s meter is always strict, but I dilate and contract my counts as necessary, keeping up a regularity of rhythm for Krishna, as I mentioned. The original is strange: Its line length can carry, in one case, the same amount of information as three English monosyllables; the very next line packs down a treatise’s worth of metaphysics.

  The thing is done, and the reader can judge if the third time has been the charm. I suspect I will circle back to the Gita in the future at some point and have a fourth go at this. I am still haunted by my failed first attempt, for example; I still think it would be a signal feat of translation to make this Godsong actually singable in English as it is in Sanskrit. Maybe in my next version, if not in my next life.

  * * *

  Three men once ventured into the part of an Indian rainforest known for a bird of paradise never photographed or caged before. That part of the rainforest was so dense, the birds of paradise were invisible. Only their songs could be heard crisscrossing the midnight under the canopy.

  One man was an ornithologist whose research centered on avian communication. He wheeled out his equipment with him, and after recording a snippet, he would clap enormous headphones on his ears and play it back, over and over, scribbling in a notebook, trying to figure out what each combination of notes meant. If only he could develop a grammar, his reasoning went, he could persuade the bird of paradise into a cage.

  The second fellow, a bird-watcher with a camera, laughed at these ornithological labors. He pointed out that the birds of paradise were not “communicating,” they were singing, which was something entirely different. Over years of trying to photograph this bird of paradise, he had gotten very good at its call. So he puckered his lips and flared his nostrils and let out a run of heavenly coloratura. He sounded, to the ornithologist, exactly like a bird of paradise; but the birds of paradise knew the difference and broke out into a clamor that sounded a lot like laughter. That run of notes was fine-sounding nonsense. It was nothing an actual bird of paradise would actually sing or say or even think. It was just the imitation of a sound. Or rather, it was a human being reproducing what a human being thought a bird of paradise should sound like.

  The third man was neither an ornithologist nor a veteran bird-watcher. He was nothing at all, in fact, except a poet in love with paradise, everything about it, including its birds. His advantage was that he hadn’t always been a human being. In his past life, he had been a bird of paradise himself—so what fascinated his companions as something exotic fascinated him as something familiar. He strolled out and recited a poem about paradise in the human language he was used to, and the birds of paradise recognized their long-lost cousin right away.

  That dense rainforest canopy came to life, opening black eyes and flaring green-gold crests. Leaf-green wings thrown wide,
the birds of paradise flew off their perches. The canopy thinned, and sunlight poured down on ornithologist and bird-watcher and poet alike, but the birds of paradise settled on the shoulders and outstretched arms of the poet alone. The two others hurried forward, one with his open cage, one with his camera, but the poet told the birds to hurry and fly back up to their invisible perches. And that is what they did—only they took him with them, bearing him aloft with so many gently pinching birdfeet, to be their guest awhile. When he closed his eyes he felt like he was flying.

  Amit Majmudar

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Amit Majmudar lives in Ohio with his wife and three children.

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