I Won't Let You Go (7 page)

Tagore has been called his own worst enemy in allowing his inadequate English translations to see the light of day, yet it would be quite naïve of us to blame him entirely for the process in which he became caught. It is doubtful if the reputation of
any
poet could survive for very long outside his own home territory if that reputation had to depend on the poet’s own capacity to
translate
himself into a second language. If Shakespeare’s reputation had depended upon his capacity to translate himself into French
or Latin, he might have had a tough time becoming famous! Shakespeare has been very lucky in that the language in which he wrote was subsequently disseminated throughout the world by the British Empire and large numbers of people all over the world are able to read him in the original language. The extraordinary demand made on Tagore, that he translate himself into English for the sake of publication in the West, was possible only in the colonial context. He was a busy man, busy writing new things and doing new things all the time. He was badly advised and badly taken care of by those who took charge of his publicity in the English-speaking world. They did not look after his real and
long-term
interests. One English edition which has been available for a long time does not even mention that the contents are
translations
, and there is no name of any translator given anywhere in the book. No wonder that recently I met an academic from Britain visiting Tagore’s university at Santiniketan, who thought that Tagore actually wrote his poems in English.

Tagore with Rani Mahalanobis (to his right), daughter-in-law Pratima Devi (to Rani’s right), and others in Italy, 1926.

Other factors entered into the decline of Tagore’s reputation in the English-speaking world. Changing fashions in the
Anglo-American
literary scene, Tagore’s repudiation of the knighthood after the Amritsar massacre, his open condemnation of the cult of
nationalism, his popularity in inter-war Germany: all took their toll. The English-speaking literary world was rapidly becoming a world dominated by fashions rather than guided by abiding
intellectual
curiosities. If a reputation fell, it would be quickly trodden over in the pursuit for the next craze. It was not fashionable to delve deeply to find out what might have gone wrong. English translations of selections of his poems were done from time to time by Bengalis, usually for the Indian market outside Bengal, but occasionally for publication outside India as well, but these did not help to put Tagore back on the map. Looking at the
phenomenon
from a historical perspective, it would be correct to say that the root cause of the decline was the fact that there was no one in the English-speaking world competent enough to translate this great poet from the original language. The days of the
Empire
did not favour the emergence of such individuals.

When the British were still establishing themselves in India under the aegis of the East India Company in the latter half of the eighteenth century, they were marked by a relative lack of arrogance. Intellectually they were shaped primarily by the
Enlightenment
, which meant that they were curious about India’s social, political, and religious institutions. This attitude was reinforced by their own expatriate social lives, their enjoyment of spiced dishes, hookah-smoking, nautches, Urdu ghazals, and Indian mistresses. The great surge of British Orientalist researches relating to India took place in the closing decades of the eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth. Its landmarks were the
foundation
of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta in 1784, the
regular
publications of which, the
Asiatick Researches,
were widely read in Europe and ushered in a new era of scholarship, the first English translations of classic Sanskrit texts, and the foundation of the College of Fort William in Calcutta in 1800 for the training of British civil servants who would be acculturated to India and fluent in Indian languages.
9

But as the British gained political confidence in India, these positive attitudes were gradually replaced by attitudes which were negative towards India and therefore less favourable to Indian studies. Waves of Christian fundamentalism in the shape of the Evangelical revival and of secular radicalism in the form of Utilitarianism gathered strength in Britain and hit India. To men moulded by such movements at home the Company’s Indian
territories
seemed a stage ready for action. The Evangelicals wanted India to be opened up for missionary enterprise; the Utilitarians
wanted to see India westernised by means of effective legislation and strong centralised administration; other radicals wanted India changed by means of English education. One of the most
powerful
of the anglicisers was T.B. Macaulay, whose 1835 minute on education, notorious in Indian history, swept aside the modern Indian languages as rude dialects and all Oriental literature as intrinsically inferior to Western literature, maintaining that ‘a
single
shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’, that ‘all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the
Sanskrit
language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England’. He proposed that a class of anglicised Indians should be trained to be interpreters between the British and the Indian masses, ‘a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in
opinions
, in morals, and in intellect’.
10
This new climate of ideas encouraged the Indian elite to acquire English to the best of their abilities and discouraged the British from learning Indian
languages
in any depth. It was the British understanding of the
modern
Indian languages that suffered most from this change. The foundations for the study of ancient India had already been laid, and in 1837 James Prinsep deciphered the rock edicts of the emperor Ashoka, the key to the rediscovery of Buddhist India. A few British scholars would continue to study Sanskrit and Pali, but the modern languages of India, in which exciting new
developments
were beginning to take place,
which were becoming the space in which the Indian Renaissance was taking shape,
were
neglected
. This re-awakening happened because the Indian elite
welcomed
the new influences without throwing their own traditions overboard. They managed to create a space for themselves in which they could express themselves, experiment with new things and still be themselves. The British could not take this space away from them or interfere with it.

No wonder, then, that no literary personality emerged in either Britain or in the British community of imperial India who could tackle the translation of Tagore’s poetry, despite the very long commercial and political connection between the two countries. Britain’s cultural attitude rubbed itself onto the rest of the Empire and the English-speaking world. A competent translator could have hardly emerged in Canada or the USA when Britain, with all her ties with India, could not produce such a person.

Generally speaking, this legacy of the Empire is still the
prevailing 
situation in the cultural interchanges between the
English-speaking
world and the world of the modern South Asian
languages
. If translations from the latter have to be done, it is the Asians themselves who have to do it. It is they who have to be the mediators and bridge-builders. The English-speaking literati are much more comfortable with those South Asian authors who produce literary works in the English language. It is assumed that these texts require no mediation, and they have been quickly and conveniently appropriated into the new academic category of ‘Commonwealth Literature’, bypassing the bulk of modern
literature
in the subcontinent, which continues to be written in the South Asian languages and is invisible in the English-speaking world. A new leviathan called ‘Third World Literature’ is also beginning to appear in discussions, and certain authors of Indian origin who write only in English are being co-opted by the West as representatives of the Indian segment of this mammoth category. Do anything, in short, except face the challenge, the intellectual effort, of acquiring new tongues and penetrating new universes! This latest tendency to co-opt certain authors who write in English to represent Indian literature is essentially a form of
cultural
neo-colonialism, a continuation of Macaulay’s old reliance on ‘a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’.

However, at long last, there are some signs of change. The first serious literary translator from Bengali to emerge in Britain is William Radice, whose translations of selected poems from Tagore appeared in 1985, and of his stories in 1991, both from Penguin. (Before him, E.J. Thompson, an Englishman who was a
contemporary
of Tagore, had learned some Bengali and written about Tagore, and done some translations also; Radice attempts an
analysis
of Thompson’s achievements and limitations in the preface to his own book of translations of the poems.) I am aware that
translators
from Bengali have emerged in the USA and Australia. Continental Europeans are also realising that they must translate directly from the Indian languages and not just re-translate from English translations.

These translations have therefore been undertaken in the belief that Tagore’s poetry (as indeed his other work) deserves to be
rescued
from the morass of misadventures and cultural politics in which it became bogged down, and looked at with fresh eyes, without any negative pre-judgments derived from colonial times.
My aim has been to put together a substantial selection which can give readers an idea of the quality of his poetry, showing them what a varied and exciting poet he is, how relevant to our times, and where there may be sufficient “inter-resonance” between the poems to produce a cumulative effect, conveying something of his total personality, his recurrent and obsessive images, and
something
, too, of his craftsmanship.

Tagore writing, Santiniketan.

This could not be done by means of academic decisions on what would be a “representative” selection. It was more appropriate to let my creative, artistic decisions as a translator determine the choice. In other words, I would go through the corpus, turn the pages, look at a poem, and ask myself: ‘Would this come out well in English? Can I do it? Is there a chemistry, a match, between this poem and my capabilities as a translator?’ So the poems have chosen me as much as I have chosen them. And my file of
translations
has grown. It was not possible to include something from every book of poems published by Tagore, but I hope that the poems chosen for this selection will give the reader some idea of the range and depth of his poetry. The translations follow the texts and arrangement of the West Bengal Government’s Tagore