Modern Poetry of Pakistan

by Iftikhar Arif

  Giving shape to the idea of presenting the poetry of our two countries in companion volumes of English and Urdu translations has been a very fulfilling and exciting experience. I am aware of how hard the translators must have worked in order to capture at least the essence of the original poems, even where precise cultural equivalents might not have been easy to come by. I hope that this exchange will continue, and even be expanded, in the coming years. I am grateful to Dana Gioia, the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States, and to the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Culture here in Pakistan for supporting this immensely valuable project.

  IFTIKHAR ARIF

  Chairman, National Language Authority, Islamabad

  Former Chairman, Pakistan Academy of Letters, Islamabad

  INTRODUCTION

  Stirring Up a Vespiary

  We inhabit a world of translations. All around us, at all times, everything is changing, renewing itself. Things are constantly transforming, transmuting into something else, conveying life to one already evolving form by giving up their body and essence in another. We use language of all kinds—written, oral, visual, tactile, aural, mathematical—to translate our thoughts, impressions, calculations, and feelings, to find expression for what seeks articulation and communication. The striving to render our thoughts, feelings, and emotions into recognizable shape, into legible characters, into comprehensible, communicable speech or discourse lies at the heart of our experience of a lived life. The translations continue in our sleeping and waking hours, whether we will it or not, at times when our consciousness is alert and in moments of vacancy and reflection. Translation is a state natural to us, natural to our existence. Is it any wonder, then, that in such a world of continual transformations, some of us engage in the process of conducting the form, sensibility, and sense of one language into another, the texts of one language into the matrices of another?

  Yet it is widely recognized that literary translation is impossible, that as Tony Barnstone puts it, “all translation is mistranslation,” that we can render the original only in a version that is something other than the original (T. Barnstone 11). We do not necessarily need reinforcement of this idea from linguists and deconstructionists to acknowledge its truth. What we also know is that we engage in translations, literary and other, nonetheless. The arc of our ambition may be somewhat abbreviated, as with W. S. Merwin who suggests that “without deliberately altering the overt meaning of the original poem, I wanted the translation to represent, with as much life as possible, some aspect, some quality of the poem that made the translator think it was worth translating in the first place,” or in the case of Ok-Koo Kang Grosjean, for whom translation tries to capture “the rasa, or flavor, of the poetry,” rather than attempt fidelity to the original in a literal sense (Merwin 155, Grosjean 65). But translations are not abandoned just because they are “impossible” to do. In fact, this may precisely be the reason why the exercise fascinates so many poets and translators. “Is translation of poetry possible?” asks Willis Barnstone, the first translator of Mao’s poems into English. “Of course not,” he responds to his own question, and goes on to add, “It is impossible. And it should be understood that only the difficult, the elusive, the impossible lines are worth translating” (W. Barnstone 34).

  In charting his evolution as a translator and the contours of his translation process, Willis Barnstone offers a useful preliminary plan for would-be translators (and translation editors, for that matter):

  When I began to translate, I believed, as I do now, that fidelity to the poem meant creating a poem in English, a good poem, one that a poet (or, at the very least, one who is a poet in the act of re-creation) translates. To do this requires freedom, perhaps a lot of freedom. But as I have gotten older, my view has changed. I think now that one should try to be as close as possible to the literal meaning, but not in a clumsy way. Within that closeness, and aided by an immense amount of information provided by the fullest knowledge of that literal meaning (with all its connotative elements and music), one can operate with great artistic privilege. Like reproducing formal prosody, to be close is hard but saves one from being seduced by the obvious. Therefore, one is obliged to come up with ten or twenty solutions for each linguistic enigma, one must take greater imaginative leaps, and in the end, I believe, this allows the original poet to talk. (W. Barnstone 32–33)

  There is, however, in the strategy suggested by Barnstone’s evolving view of translation, a lurking danger spawned by the phenomenon of poet-translators who do not know the language from which they translate and rely instead on accidental native informants, narrow, often under-prepared academics, handy dictionaries and grammars, and even on other translations to help them make sense of the originals. The original may then come to be viewed primarily as an excuse for the work offered as a translation—a translation influenced (as it inevitably is) by the qualifications and quality of the native informants, the isolation of words from their colloquial use and context, the unfamiliarity with literary tradition and conventions, and the lack of experiential understanding of the original’s field of nuance and connotation. No wonder translators operating under these conditions would want to claim greater creative freedom in translation and be prone to indulging themselves in the name of art.

  A significant number of translators have succumbed to the seduction of this indulgence. Willis Barnstone’s son, Tony Barnstone—himself also a translator of Chinese poetry—observes: “From the early metrical and end-rhymed translations of Herbert Giles to the so-called free-verse translations of Ezra Pound, Arthur Waley, and Kenneth Rexroth, Chinese poems have been reinvented as American poems” (T. Barnstone 2). Later, in the same essay, he notes: “I have argued elsewhere that Chinese poetry in English has deviated deeply from the form, aesthetics, and concerns of the Chinese originals and that this is the result of willful mistranslation by modernist and postmodern poet-translators” (10). Pertinently, W. S. Merwin reminds us that throughout the nineteenth century the “notion of what translation really was or could be [was] undergoing a change…partly as a result of efforts to bring over into English a growing range and variety of originals” (Merwin 152).

  The trend Merwin identifies brings up yet another area of concern—the imperial absorption of texts from other parts of the world into the colonial language, whether in the name of scholarship or as a source of entertainment for the reading public, consciously or unconsciously complicit with the project of empire building, and the underlying belief that, the essence engrossed in the translation, there was no more need or value for the original anymore. Whether it is Sir William Jones rendering texts from Sanskrit, Persian, or Arabic into English, Edward Fitzgerald rewriting the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, or Pound working his “translucences” of Chinese poems from the notes left by Ernest Fenollosa (who knew almost no Chinese himself), there is something offensive to a native speaker of those languages in the attitude that informs these exercises. However much the translations may have contributed to the development of poetry in the language of translation, such reworking remains an act of intervention, subversion, and appropriation, especially when firsthand knowledge of and fidelity to the original become matters of remote interest, if any at all. When presumptions that the translation has improved upon the original, and, afforded the opportunity, that poets of the language of translation can exceed in design, theme, and accomplishment the achievements of the poets translated, are added to this lack of cultural, contextual, and linguistic immediacy or understanding, the matter becomes laughable indeed.

  Ironically, translations based on library-confined self-learning or on the misreading of texts paraphrased by accidental native informers have been known to inspire entirely new fashions and trends in the poetry of the language of translation. “All translation is mistranslation,” Tony Barnstone declares, “but a translator’s work and joy are to rig, out of the materials at hand, something that opens cans, or carries hay, or sends voices thr
ough the lines. We will never create a truly Chinese poem in English, but in this way we can extend the possibilities of the translation, which may in turn reveal to the imaginations of American poets unforeseen continents” (T. Barnstone 11). W. S. Merwin writes about the Chinese translations of Waley and Pound in the same vein: “Their relations to the forms and the life of the originals I will never be able to assess. But from the originals, by means and aspirations that were, in certain respects, quite new, they made something new in English and they revealed a whole new range of possibility for poetry in English. Poetry in our language has never been the same since, and all of us are indebted to Waley and Pound whether we recognize and acknowledge it or not” (Merwin 152). Such remarks are a study in the kind of appropriating impulse I have noted. Merwin seems reluctant to acknowledge any debt to the original Chinese poets. It is Waley and Pound’s “means and aspirations” (which, to his mind, are “in certain respects, quite new”) that have opened up a “whole new range of possibility in English poetry,” and our gratitude should accordingly be addressed to them. In the end, it matters little what the original Chinese poems are, how they function, or what their forms and strategies of composition are. They have been impressionistically absorbed by Waley and Pound and turned into English poems, and this has given English poetry a momentous charge to diversify in directions hitherto unknown to it.

  Two hundred and thirty years earlier, Sir William Jones had translated poems from Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit, partly with a similar hope of opening up new possibilities for European poetry. His work inspired a raging trend of “orientalist” poetry and prose in England (it had its effect in continental Europe as well), contributing significantly towards kindling the Romantic movement and keeping it stoked. A skilled philologist, Jones had learned the languages from which he translated. He spent the last eleven years of his relatively brief life (he died at forty-seven) in Calcutta engaged in scholarly work, in addition to his official duties as puisne judge of the Supreme Court of Bengal. He had a deep respect for the ancient and classical texts of these Oriental languages, and his eagerness to see in them a source of replenishment for European literary tradition is quite understandable. But, in the final analysis, despite his very genuine admiration for the literary achievements of the East, even he could not shed the propensity to look at that literature as a vehicle for what it might offer in terms of poetic possibilities to the literature of the West. He concludes his famous essay “On the Poetry of the Eastern Nations” (1772) with the following caveats and proposals:

  I must once more request, that, bestowing these praises on the writings of Asia, I may not be thought to derogate from the merit of the Greek and Latin poems, which have justly been admired in every age; yet I cannot but think that our European poetry has subsisted too long on the perpetual repetition of the same images, and incessant allusions to the same fables: and it has been my endeavour for several years to inculcate this truth, That, if the principal writings of the Asiaticks, which are reposited in our publick libraries, were printed with the usual advantage of notes and illustrations, and if the languages of the Eastern nations were studied in our places of education, where every other branch of useful knowledge is taught to perfection, a new and ample field would be open for speculation; we should have a more extensive insight into the history of the human mind, we should be furnished with a new set of images and similitudes, and a number of excellent compositions would be brought to light, which future scholars might explain, and future poets might imitate. (Jones 228–29)

  There is nothing wrong with this agenda on the face of it; in fact, it would even be laudable were it to operate as part of a voluntary and disinterested exchange on all sides, so that all parties could appreciate each other’s literary productions and learn of new creative and aesthetic strategies from each other. But the agenda could be, and was, all too easily appropriated by the empire builders of the day for their imperial project, not forgetting the proud claim that in their institutions of learning “every other branch of useful knowledge is taught to perfection.” Perhaps this complicity is built into the assumptions that undergird Jones’s proposal, for he is so caught in his fascination for the past literary “excellences” of England’s newly acquired territories that he disregards, or dismisses, contemporary literary production and activity in them. This neglect might have been less troublesome had it not coincided with the conclusion that these cultures were no longer vibrant and that the populations of these territories were therefore in need of suitable oversight. But there is the sense that the past literature, beliefs, and customs of the colonized peoples offer a means of control over them in that the person who gains this knowledge comes so thoroughly to understand these subjectivized peoples that he acquires also the right to legislate for them and determine categorically what may be good or bad for them. In his nine hymns to various Hindu gods and goddesses (Camdeo, Durga, Bhavani, Indra, Surya, Lacshimi, Narayena, Sereswaty, and Ganga), for instance, Jones often adopts the persona of a venerable Hindu poet who, after rehearsing the ancient wisdom of Hindu tradition, invariably endorses British rule in India as the condition, and hope, for its future success and prosperity. Michael J. Franklin correctly points out the “intended metropolitan destination [London] and propagandist purposes of these odes.” Noting Jones’s opposition to civil liberty and free government in India and his support of absolute rule and preservation of local laws and customs, Franklin also recognizes in this stance “a nexus of responsibilities not wholly dissimilar from what a century later became known as ‘the white man’s burden’” (Franklin 64). Thus, even a translator as dedicated and tireless as Sir William Jones was not above disregarding the contemporary context and apt, at the same time, to assume an understanding of the “native” speaker, its historical motivations, and its inclinations, that was superior to the “native’s” own self-apprehension or self-knowledge.

  What, then, does literary translation involve? How, despite what are seen as virtually insurmountable odds, can translation happen so that it does not undervalue, misrepresent, or (not an unknown phenomenon) utterly dispense with the original? The arrogation of both the privilege and power to translate into English often works in one direction, to the detriment of the text translated. Given the dominance of English and Euro-American institutions of production, dissemination, and interpretation as a natural historical fallout of Western imperialism, the determination of methodology and meaning lies essentially with the new centers of power in the West—academic institutions, university and commercial presses, print, visual, and digital media. The reverse is also true: literary and translation theory in, and translation of English texts into, regional and local languages of former colonies have neither the exposure nor the authority of their privileged Western counterparts. As a consequence, there is no real conversation or dialogue, by which I mean conversation and dialogue on the basis of parity, between the two sides that are inevitably crucial to the translation process. How can a translator ensure that the text being translated is accorded respect for its own sake, and on its own terms? Should the drive to find exotic avenues of development for the poetry of one’s own language and culture (and/or for one’s own work) override the responsibility one owes, when undertaking what one claims to be a translation, to transmit with fidelity a text from another language? Can literary translation be approached only in extremes, either creatively or literally? Is there no way of combining the two, no way to pursue what Ok-Koo Kang Grosjean calls the “middle way”?

  A good translator is an exquisite ambassador. Just as the creative artist suggests new ways of looking at the commonplace, the translator opens up to readers a whole new world, a whole new mode of perception and experience, they may hardly have suspected of existing. Although language is primarily a means of communication, with usage and exchange it acquires over a period the sensibility peculiar to the people that transact it, one that is, in many ways, itself dictated by the physical environment and material conditions o
f the language’s provenance and prevalence. This sensibility seems seldom, if ever, to be interchangeable between languages. The function of a translator, to my mind, is to find approximations that do the least violence to the original work while preserving to the greatest possible extent its significations and design. Since it is not always possible to find such solutions, the translator must also be creative and be able to produce a recognizable flavor (rasa) where the full taste of the original is not transferable.

  As form and cadence, too, are exclusive to each language, they further complicate the task of a translator. All too little account may be taken of the social and material conditions that, in some way or another, impinge upon a work of literature and upon language itself. Neither conceptual paradigms nor languages remain static or immutable, for practice and performance are constantly modifying them. Assorted vernaculars, dialects, and hybrids exist in distinct, yet interwoven, strains. An excessively close and sensitive reading may overdistinguish the subtle currents in the stream that conveys thoughts from one point to another, while an overly rigorous objective distancing may produce the illusion of homogeneity. We may tend to weight words and images with meanings they presently carry and so, we believe, must always have carried. We may also interpret behavioral patterns in the context of our current sociocultural background, understanding, and expectations, just as, in reverse, we may impose specific motives and intentions, picked up from our own reading, on situations and formulations that deserve to be appreciated with an open mind. Where, in translation, a clash of sensibilities occurs, or inadequate attention is paid to historical and cultural displacement, the result is liable to become banal, odd, or even ludicrous. It is a perilous process then, this translation, and one that succeeds less often than is generally assumed.