Unwittingly the deed was done;
It is my destiny,
O fear not thou, but pity one
Whose fate is thus to die.66
The kind of suffering one suffers is immaterial, what matters is how he accepts these sufferings; the kind of death one dies is immaterial, what remains significant is how he accepts death. Toru’s ballads and miscellaneous poems do suggest that her thought about life and death became mature day by day and ultimately she got herself ready for the journey that she had to undertake after her inevitable death. She was not afraid of her approaching death but like a brave warrior she welcomed it wholeheartedly as the will of God on her part.
If to consume us be thy will,
We shall retire within Thy breast;
Send chains and gibbets, famine, war and pest,
We shall adore and love Thee still.
In fears and ills of every sort
We shall obey Thee, long as reason lasts,
Well knowing that Thy roughest blasts
Lead us but quicker to the port.67
References :
Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali, (Macmillan India Ltd. 1913),
Srimad BhagvadGita, 2:27
Harihar Das, LLTD, (Oxford University Press, London, 1922),
Toru Dutt, A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields, (Kegan Paul & Company, London, 1880),
Ibid.
Harihar Das, LLTD,
Padmini Sen Gupta, Toru Dutt, (Sahitya Akademi,New Delhi,1982),
Sheaf,
Ibid.
Ibid.
Padmini Sen Gupta, Toru Dutt,
Sheaf,
K.R.S.Iyengar, Indian Writing in English, (Sterling Publishers, Delhi, 1985),
Sheaf,
Ibid.
Ibid.
Toru Dutt, Notes attached with A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields,
Govin Chunder Dutt, ‘Prefatory Memoir’, A Sheaf Gleaned in French fields,
Sheaf,
Ibid.
Ibid.
Idem.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
A.N.Dwivedi, ‘Toru Dutt’, Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, (Prakash Book Depot, Bareilly, 1994),
Toru Dutt, Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, (Kitabistan, Allahabad, 1969),
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Idem.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
K.R.S.Iyenger, Indian Writing in English,
Idem.
Harihar Das, LLTD,
“Revelation” (11:10), The Bible, revised standard edition, (William Collins Sons & Company Limited, New York, Glasgow, & Toronto, 1952),
Genesis, (11:9), Ibid.
Padmini Sen Gupta, Toru Dutt,
Ancient Ballads,
Hari Mohan Prasad, ed. Indian Poetry in English, (Parimal prakshan, Aurngabad, 1983),
Ancient Ballads,
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Sheaf,
06. Poetic Technique
Part-1
Keeping in view the understanding and the interpretation of the nature of Toru’s psyche and her world view, a consideration of her poetic style is essential. The aura of a poet’s personality as a felt presence in his idiom has been universally acknowledged. As F. L. Lucas says ‘Style is personality clothed in words’.1 Similarly Susan Santag quotes ‘style is the principle of decision in a work of art, the signature of the artist’s will’.2 Although the words a poet uses are drawn from the common pool of language, there is always a certain degree of freshness and uniqueness about the way they emerge in cluster of images and associational patterns from the crucible of his personal consciousness.
Blossoms of language have their roots in the soil of culture. Hence the identity in terms of language! To house one’s sensibility in a language one has acquired and to which one is not exposed round the clock is a real challenge. Idiom is the vertebral column of poetic configuration. Genuine poetry is born out of a delicate balance between the potency of the language exploited and the richness of the operative sensibility. People across the globe have seen the potency of English language to cohabit with varied sensibilities. Neither logic nor rhetoric can blow off the tangible corpus of Indian English poetry that has emerged through decades. The question is no longer of correctness and competence but of genuineness and authenticity.
Language and the artist are reciprocating partners associated in a kind of wedlock, clashing, coalescing and creating. The difference between one writer and the other and particularly between writers belonging to two different countries arises from “overlapping morphology of language and experience.3 The sub verbal structure of experience relates the artist to his culture. His word-order is the camera eye of his world-order. Language is the verbal behavior of the artist, a response to the stimuli of life’s experience. This brings the writer to the orbit of social racial, national and cultural consciousness. The idioms, images, metaphors, symbols, allusions and the tissues of experiences that constitute the world of the writer’s work come both from his conscious and unconscious self.
In the unconscious of the writer lies in latent form the collective unconscious of his race and his conscious is the active part of what he has acquired from his times and the world. Man is thus a complex construct of multitudinous forces working cummulatively and dissolving themselves into his total consciousness. All these forces exist in the language of the writer in a cellular form. Thus apart from the gestalt of an individual style there is also a national gestalt of language that envisions the ethos of a particular culture.
It is in this sense that we may justify a distinct Indian variety of English. The success of Indian verse in English depends largely on acquiring a national gestalt of poetic style. The history of this new poetry reveals our poet’s genuine attempts to mould the language into transparent co-relate to their intrinsic experience and spiritual language. The process entails both failures and achievements. In the beginning the ideals of approximation were more operative than the conscious attempts towards experimentation. But the poets of the first crop never fell short of the poetic talent required. Each of them has a distinct individual style and yet the style of each is distinctively Indian. In the context of Toru Dutt it may be noted that she is intensely conscious of language qua language and an effective use of English is one of her major achievements. English is a difficult language and one has to struggle hard with sentence and constructions but to Toru it comes as naturally as leaves come to tree and she uses its rhythm and diction with perfect skill and control. C. D. Narasimhaiah points out that Toru Dutt shows ‘a rare feeling for words coupled with a reliance on speech rhythm’. 4
Process of evolution
The total literary output of Toru Dutt includes two books of poetry and two novels. A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields contains poems translated from French into English while Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan gives poetic translations from Sanskrit into English, along with some original pieces of her own. Le Journal de Mademoiselle d’ Arvers is her attempt at writing a novel in French, whereas Bianca or The Young Spanish Maiden is her unfinished novel in English. The short poetic career of Toru Dutt may be interpreted as the process of development from a translator into a poet. The poems from her two volumes fall into convenient groups that mark the stages of the evolution. She is a faithful translator of the original text at the first stage of her poetic career. All translations from A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields and the two piece
s – Dhruva and The Royal Ascetic and the Hind from Ancient Ballads belong to the first stage. The translator grows into a transcreator in poems like Lakshman, Sindhu, Buttoo, Prahlad and Savitri from Ancient Ballads. The transcreator matures into an original poet in Jogadhya Uma and Sita in the same volume.
As a faithful translator at the first stage of her poetic development, Toru Dutt endeavours to manipulate English for the purpose of translation, in the pieces from A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields. The translator struggles to convey the spirit of the original by sticking to the original metrical pattern in spite of occasional failures. In Dhruva and The Royal Ascetic and the Hind from Ancient Ballads, she is almost exclusively concerned with finding the literal equivalents for the original Sanskrit expressions. For instance, The Royal Ascetic and The Hind, retells the story from the Thirteenth canto of the second section of Vishnu Purana. In the course of the verse narrative, the Sanskrit poet describes the grass after the deer have grazed on it a beautiful simile:
ete lunasikhastasya dasaniracirodgataih
kusakasa virajante batavah samagaiva.5
Toru Dutt translates it faithfully as:
The shaven stalks of grass,
Kusha and Kasha, by its new teeth clipped,
Remind me of it, as they stand in lines,
Like pious boys who chant the Samga Veds.
Shorn by their vows of all their wealth of hair.6
As a beginner in the field of translation her anxiety to provide a literal equivalent for the original often leads her to awkward expressions. For instance in the legend of Dhruva taken from the eleventh canto of the first section of Vishnu Purana she translates the Sanskrit words Sunityatmno Janma 7 as thou art sprung from Suneetee’s Bowels (p- 108)
Toru Dutt reaches the second stage of her poetic growth when she learns to submit her translative impulse to the guidance of her creative impulse. The creative impulse ushers itself in the form of her tendency to select, omit or elaborate the particular passage from the original texts, in order to accomplish the desired artistic effect. For instance a piece from the forty fifth canto of Aranya Kandam of the Ramayana chosen for translation in Lakshman contains the following speech of Lakshman:
Vakyamapratirupam tuna citram strisu maithili
Svabhavastvesa narinamevam Lokesu drsyate
Vimuktudharmascapalastikna bhedakarah striyah
…………………………………………………..
Striva dustasvabhavena guruvakey vyavasthitam.8
Romesh C. Dutt echoes its sense faithfully in the condensed translation of the Ramayana:
Daughter of Vedeha’s monarch – pardon if !
do thee wrong,
Fickle is the faith of woman, poison dealing
In her tongue.9
But Toru Dutt omits these remarks in order to chisel out a psychologically consistent portrait of noble hero. The conversational structure of the piece is however, the result of her attempt to imitate the original conversational pattern although critics like Harihar Das10, P.C. Kotoky11 and Dwivedi12 seem to regard it as one of the welcome discoveries of Toru Dutt.
Savitri is the most significant expression of Toru Dutt’s transcreative impulse. The awareness of the difference between the translated legend and its original has encouraged critics like Lotika Basu, Amarnath Jha, Alokranjan Das Gupta, Padmini Sen Gupta, P. C. Kotoky and C. D. Narasimhaiah to define its nature in various ways. The two pieces differ extensively mainly because of Toru Dutt’s creative activity relates to her condensation of the original story through a mission of the events and details. Although she accepts the five fold structure of the original, she achieves organic unity of the theme of Savitri’s struggle against Death by omitting events like Savitri’s birth, her journey in search of a suitable partner, the meeting between the fathers of Satyavan and Savitri and the actual marriage ceremony in the forest. The creative impulse of Toru Dutt participates further in translative activity in the form of the poet’s invention of certain characters and events. She not only adds the characters of the mother of Satyavan and Savitri but even gives them independent roles in the story. She is also bold enough to invent the whole scene of the court of God of Death in heaven in the third section of her narrative. Perhaps it is based on her acquaintance with Milton’s Paradise lost.
In Buttoo she analyses elaborately Buttoo’s reaction to the bitter experience of humiliation at the hands of his teacher while narrating the event of his departure to the forest whereas the original winds it up in a single couplet. Technically the poem is ‘one of the happiest and least affected of Toru’s compositions’13.The most remarkable feature of this poem in connection with the development of Toru’s genius is the growth of conciseness, as in the moment of Buttoo’s sacrifice where it would have been easy to succumb to the temptation to linger, and draw out sentiment :
Glanced the sharp knife one moment high,
The severed thumb was on the sod.
In Prahlad, the technique of the poem is ‘far in advance of that of the earlier poems’14. Scarcely do we meet the false rhyme (as in the ‘heart’ and ‘thwart’) or a line, which mars the poetic effect by its colloquialism (e.g. ‘or there will come a fearful crash’). The poem reveals too a growing talent in selection on the poetess’s part.
Jogadhya Uma marks the final stage of Toru Dutt’s maturity as a poet. Though she succeeds in evoking the supernatural element in the narrative, her intellectual sensibility seems to be reluctant to come to terms with it. Hence, the poet is compelled to state in the concluding stanza:
Absurd may be the tale I tell,
Ill- suited to the marching times,
I loved the lips from which it fell,
So let it stand among my rhymes.15
The sentimental plea for the justification of the story however weakens its artistic effect.
Sita, the last of the legends from Toru Dutt’s Ancient Ballads and legends of Hindustan can be safely regarded as an original poem. The poem is also one of the earliest instances of the effective use of memory in Indian poetry in English. The poet’s creative impulse is possibly activated by the only stanza from the forty eighth section of Uttarkandam of Ramayana:
Sa dukhabharavanta yasasvini yasodhara,
nathamapasyati Sati;
rurodasa bahirnanadite vane mohaswanam
duhkhaparyana sati.16
These lines transform the objective translator into a subjective poet. Toru’s simplicity, vividness, pathos and felicity of idiom that characterize her style may be seen in the closing lines of Sita:
When shall ah me! as erst at eventide?17
At the end of Ancient Ballads, there are seven miscellaneous poems, which immediately display Toru’s creative power at its best. Toru Dutt’s sonnet Baugmaree is perhaps, the first artistically satisfying example of those texts in Indian writing in English that occupy the space between translation and transformation. Baugmaree or Bagmari, is on the outskirts of Kolkata, it is where Dutt’s family had a country house. In a climate in which most of Dutt’s contemporaries and predecessors were writing of historical figures or events or turning to English literary conventions for their models Dutt takes a form – the sonnet – that came to her from the English language and opens it on to a vista such as the English language had not known before.18
The last poem of the volume Our Casuarina Tree is one of the finest examples of her creative power. E. J. Thompson regards it as the most remarkable poem ever written in English by a foreigner.
S. V. Mukerjea is of the view that this poem as well as the sonnet Baugmaree will live in literature for the superb construction of its stanza and the succession of rich and vivid images with which it is filled. He thinks that it is ‘one of the great architectural pieces in English poetry’. 19 Lotika Basu also praised the ‘riper perfection’ 20 attained in this poem. Our Casuarina Tree, in true sense stands out for its sweet music and perfect texture. The poetic diction is free of all unnecessary twists or twangs and the rhythm has a flow
and sure movement in it.
Diction
Beauty of form in poetry depends on the style and diction of a poet. Toru’s command of English language and the richness and variety of her poetic idiom are amazing. A glance at Toru’s use of language is enough to show the difference between her style and that of her predecessors. The poem her father and uncle wrote, and before them Derozio, Kasiprasad Ghose, Madhusudan Dutt, In her poetic volume A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields besides displaying a profound knowledge of English and French, Toru shows rare ability and promise of great achievements. The translator has furnished in this volume to lovers of literature some of the brightest gifts of the French muse in a neat, elegant and charming English dress. The vigour and naturalness of the following stanza from Victor Hugo’s lines for instance is remarkable:
Ha! There’s the sea gull. See it springs
Pearls scattering from its tawny wings
Then plunges in the gulf ’s once more
‘Tis last in caverns of the main!
No! No! It upward soars again
As souls from trails upwards soar.21
The genuineness and spontaneity of Toru’s rendering of Gautier’s What the Swallows Say is simply marvellous:
Leaves not green, but red and gold,
Fall and dot the yellow grass,
More and even, the wind is cold,
Sunny days are gone, alas! 22
Toru’s diction is usually simple, clear and sweet though this is not literally true in case of some of her translations. Here is an example of her sweet diction:
What was the meaning – was it love?
Love at first sight, as poets sing,
Is then no fiction? 23
And this is an illustration of her imperceptive diction to be found in some of her translations:
Dante, Old Gibelin! When I see only in passing
The plaster white and dull of this mask so puissant
That art has bequeathed us of thy features majestic
I cannot help feeling a slight shudder O poet;
So strongly the bond of genius and that of misfortune
Have imprinted upon them the dark seal of sorrow. 24
But, this is exceptional. In many of her translations she writes with an inherent force that seems to have come spontaneously from her. In this context, one may quote To those who sleep by Victor Hugo :
Toru Dutt Page 16