Readers know Ranjit Hoskote the poet, art historian, curator, essayist, translator, speaker – but how many of those who admire his prolific and sensitive writing would have him down as the teller of adventure stories?
Reading the introduction to Hoskote’s latest work, a translation of Mir Taqi Mir’s poems entitled The Homeland’s an Ocean, I am suddenly in the grip of a political thriller, reliving the complexities of Mir’s time (1723-1810) through overhearing the conversation – or guftagu – of its courtly and street characters, privy to the highs and woes of a crumbling empire, its massacres and intrigues. The immediacy and energy with which Hoskote describes Mir’s fallen city of Shahjahanabad – our modern-day Delhi – has me following, like a sleepwalker, the wrecked, now-homeless citizens on their quest for sanctuary and “home”.
I died and still they pelted me with stones.
The tree of my mourning bore such fruit.(Divãn-e Duvuum: 11.757.2)
— Mir Taqi Mir, translated by Ranjit Hoskote.
The state of melancholia, or perhaps more precisely, of “solastalgia” of a people reeling from shock after shocking invasion (1730) and prolonged violation (1730-1767) by various warlords is a principal source of Mir’s verse and as we read, we realise that our contemporaneous global state is umbilically linked back through time by the same human emotions which govern, now as then, our actions during and reactions to extreme violence and carnage, both organised and seemingly random.
In amongst the rubble of both Mir’s time and our own, Hoskote reveals the poet to be a champion of the world’s miskin – the marginal and disenfranchised members of our every society whose lives exist at the peripheries of most people’s vision. We are made aware that ghurbat – the condition of exile – bears just as much resonance now as it did in Delhi/Shahjahanabad three hundred years ago. Citizens of present-day Darfur, Gaza, Homs, Kabul, flee now as they did then. The state of vahshat or desertification, and the subsequent ferocity this exile induces can be felt in the very essence of many of Hoskote’s translations, which play with the multiplicity of tongues, the many-splendoured meanings of their time. The language in which Mir composed his poetry, Rekhta, was a complex compound of Brajbhasha, Awadhi and Persian, with some Dakhani thrown in for good measure. Confused? Mir (and Hoskote) obviously were not, relishing the richesse of their multi-linguistic environment. Take, for example, the despair – Is it playful? Melancholic? Or quite simply someone at the end of hope? – of these translated lines:
Happiness…is a word in some other language.
I couldn’t find it when I looked it up in my dictionary.
The horror of the brutal hangama – the nightmare – intensifies as Mir stands witness to the rape and pillage of his beloved city, conjuring up living memories of holocausts, killing fields, genocides, and collective horrors of events within generational memory. The sheher ashob, voices wrung out of Delhi’s lamenting citizens chime with the poems, songs and protest chants we share in grief and solicitude with the more recently deceased, with those dying and others still fleeing their homelands. There is a direct and immediate understanding of Mir’s descriptions of bala (catastrophe), the shor (uproar and clamour) and resultant societal and individual pareshani (anxiety).
To understand, in Mir’s own words as translated by Hoskote, zamin-o-zaman har zaman aur hai, how place and time must keep up with the times, I asked Ranjit to take us a little deeper into the reasons he feels Mir’s three-hundred-year-old verses and philosophies still need to be heard by a modern audience.
You describe in your Introduction to The Homeland’s an Ocean how religious and social ideologies translate into linguistic norms, policies and eventually everyday realities so seamlessly that subsequent generations may no longer be aware of their own complex histories. How important do you feel it is to teach complexity to young people in our current culture of spoon-fed education and diktat? And how dangerous do you feel simplistic reductionism to be?
I believe it is crucial for young people to grow up with a vivid awareness of how complex and diverse their world is. It is a terrible tragedy that young people are indoctrinated, as early as primary school, into essentialisms of identity and binaries of choice even before they have had a chance to experience, comprehend and celebrate the potential pluralities of belonging. Before they have had the opportunity to craft their own space and way in the world. “Simplistic reductionism” is not only an insult to the young intelligence, it can also serve as a stepping stone to unquestioning, uncritical obedience in an authoritarian order.
Is it critical to read and write in more than one language, do you think? By doing so, is empathy fostered, along with an understanding of social and political grammar?
I would speak here as a monolingual writer who happens to be a multilingual reader. I write only in one language, English – but that writerly practice is richly informed and inflected by my reading in several other languages, including Sanskrit, Urdu, German, Hindi, and Kashmiri. We are somewhat different personalities when we operate in different languages, are we not? Each language endows us with its own temperament, its cultural ethos and history, its particular crises and predicaments. In transiting from one language to another, we become aware of and empathetic towards the situation inhabited by the speakers of that language.
For example, the grain of what you very precisely call the “social and political grammar” is revealed starkly in some languages by rules regarding the second-person pronouns – the distinctions between aap and tum and tu in Hindi tell us who is to be accorded what degree of respect, from whom might respect be withheld, how authority is distributed in a social field, and how it could be subverted playfully and creatively. In translation, we have to find ways of tweaking our all-purpose English “you” and its word-neighbourhood to match these micro-scales of social usage.
You’re so right. I often feel like a completely different person when I speak/write in French! And there is a sense of the playful about inhabiting different characters through dialogue in various tongues, as you say. Perhaps this very joyful exploration could be the thing that restores harmony in our world, a world you so correctly surmise as one stumbling to find its way towards “spiritual, material and ecological well-being”. Could poetry be our saving grace in “restoring and maintaining equilibrium” of our fractured body politic?
Poetry can be consolation and provocation, a restorer of balance and call to arms, a cornucopia of delights and austere testimony. Above all, poetry calls upon us to bear witness to the urgencies of our time, and to stand alongside the vulnerable and voiceless to give them strength and voice. To me, this is the pre-eminent role of poetry today.
Yes, I agree. The poetic voice, however playful, satirical, humorous or iconoclastic, has so much power: the power to protest about, speak up for and to testify. Does this mean, in your view, that the “gate of poetry” will really stand open until Doomsday? Or do you feel now that so much of our popular Instagram-style “poetry” could be written by robots, the dawn of AI actually spells doomsday for poets and the poetic?
The gate of poetry – as Vali Dakhani assured us – will indeed stand open until Doomsday. Poetry, like every art, is premised on the unpredictable and intuitive, the choreography of pattern and accident, on the expression of vulnerability, on our human imperfections and errors. AI is programmed on the basis of aggregations and algorithms, towards a sleek simulation of perfection. There is no room for genuine error or rupture in the AI world.
Phew, I’m so happy to hear this! I was beginning to think our days were numbered. But I guess the history of any human being’s experience, each one so absolutely unique and unable to be felt in exactly the same way by anyone else, is at very best able to be reimagined when a really fine, expressive poet hones his skill for long enough to put words together in a way that helps the reader to empathise as closely as is humanly possible with the emotion – or situation – described: once again, each in her own way! I wonder if this is what you mean by rabt, a word you translate as “fine joinery”? It implies that Mir’s poetry required an awful lot of craft, perfected by long labour and much practice. Would you say that in our world of quick writerly fixes, young writers have the adequate discipline and scholarship required to master the art of rabt, tah-dari and pech-dari the “craft and quest” required to produce truly great poetic writing?
What was good for Mir should be good for us, yes! As I’ve written in my Introduction to The Homeland’s an Ocean, Mir never wrote a treatise on poetics, but the values that he cherished are to be found in his prefatory remarks on the Delhi poets whose work he admired. Every art has its demands in terms of discipline, call it riyaz or sadhana, and in terms of craft, which lay, for Mir, in the ability to create poems finely connected by semantic and sonic linkages, deep in their resonance and layered in their patterns of association. Mir’s poems often seem like spontaneous utterances, but that spontaneity is the result of untiring, meticulous work.
This really comes across in your exact and clear, yet nuanced translations. As a non-Rekhta/Urdu/Hindi reader, I feel ecstatic about being able to match certain words to their English counterparts, mainly thanks to their translations being in a script I can decipher (the English alphabet). Sometimes, it almost felt as if I was reading a transliteration as well as a translation. Would you say that exactitude is very important to you? Or should a translator be permitted the luxury of interpretation some 300-years down the line?
To adapt a turn of phrase originally applied by Nietzsche to artistic expression at large, I have often thought of translation as an act of “dancing in chains”! The luxury of interpretation lies between the chains of exactitude and the dance of creative rendering. And to those who ask for a literal translation, my answer is this: There are no literal originals, so there can be no literal translations. An original poem, if it is truly enduring, is kaleidoscopic, vibrantly unstable in its range of meanings; to translate it, one must recognise that it can assume multiple, if closely related, avatars.
Bearing this “vibrantly unstable” world of the poem in mind, my lasting impression of Mir via Hoskote’s translated verses is rather like that of a relief print, or an optical illusion that occurs after staring at a circle painted a certain colour for a long time, then closing one’s eyes to see the same image in its complementary shade. “Open the heart’s eye to that other world and this one would be written off as a dream,” says Mir, reminding us of Prospero (We are such stuff/ As dreams are made on and our little life/ Is rounded with a sleep) and the Fox in Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince: (On ne voit bien qu’avec le Coeur; l’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux).
Only having realised the impermanence of every situation, no matter how horrific, can the writer and by some kind of divine linguistic default, the reader, transcend the nightmare horrors of the world to understand the “glorious diaphaneity” of intrinsic material emptiness in a state akin to the clear light mind practised by meditators of all faiths.
Make no mistake, though: Mir’s Sufi-esque path is not one for those oblivious to the rose’s inevitable thorns, but rather for those prepared to endure and see suffering through to the other side. As a social commentator, there is a certain reckless lack of self-care required to play wild in the sanctum sanctorum. Beware of bringing any trace of old ego along, as this will surely result in being “whacked on the head” with one’s own book of verse at the final reckoning (Divãn-e Chaharum: IV.1342.4). Best to read Mir, in this beautiful, witty, self-effacing translation as one of life’s true pilgrims: a human being capable of immense humility. On the other side of heartbreak, having been cast off, cast out, abandoned on the indifferent waves, the ocean itself becomes the much sought-after homeland in all its infinite wisdom and mystery.
