Ravi Shankar

Translation Sourced from Sorcerers’ Stones and Market Conditions:

Celebrating the Five-Year Anniversary of W.W. Norton’s Language for a New Century

from Issue #5, Fall 2014 - Spring 2015. Versions of this essay were presented at the March 2013 conference of MELUS (Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States), and at the April 2013 conference of the ALSCW (Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers).

In 2008, W.W. Norton & Co. published Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, Middle East & Beyond, encompassing 450 poets from 61 different countries and territories (even those without acknowledged sovereignty such as Palestine, Tibet, Kashmir, & Kurdistan), written in over 40 different languages. It took me and my two co-editors, the poets Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, over seven years to put the book together and in the course of that arduous and gratifying shared endeavor, we learned an immense amount about how and why poetry is being translated in the Asian and Arab world.

The brief backstory about our impetus for putting this collection together is that the three of us were living in New York during 9/11, feeling both utterly violated as New Yorkers but also dismayed at the media reaction to the event that seemed to paint an entire region of the world with a broad brush, stereotyping Asians and Arabs both as terrorists, as dark, mysterious people who as George W. Bush famously stated on Capital Hill, "hate us for our freedom." It sounds obvious to state that nothing could be further from the truth, particularly given what we know about that part of the world and the rich cultural contributions of those being lumped together with a few radicals, yet at the time, it was not. All three of us experienced personal acts of racism that only compounded the grief we already felt and we were compelled to do something, anything to mitigate and to alter the energies we found swirling in the culture around us. Being poets, we thought to gather voices from around the world to contribute to the healing process.

Because we the three editors each come from a distinctive cultural background, each of us was primarily responsible for one region of the world. Tina, being Chinese-American, took on East Asia; Nathalie, a Palestinian-born Dominican, was responsible for the Middle East; and I, a first-generation Indian-American, curated the selections from South Asia. We envisioned this anthology as a dialogue between both Diasporic poets writing in English and those indigenous poets writing in their native languages, but we began modestly enough, asking those writers we knew and respected to recommend other poets to us, and we asked those poets to recommend others. We were put in touch with foreign embassies and translation centers, academics and monks, each one with their own recommendation about who the "essential" poets for their country might be.

Faced with such a deluge of work, we first sat down with an atlas to set our parameters—how did we define Asia and the Middle East? Would an African country like Egypt or Ethiopia count? What about the inclusion of a sixth generation Chinese-Canadian as opposed to a white inhabitant of Taiwan who had lived there all his life? And what role did translation play in all of this, as our book was ultimately going to be only in English? Our decisions were generated by intensive dialogue until we found a consensus; we decided that in the wake of 9/11, our ethnicities were written on the body, so that it made more sense to include Asian-Americans than someone of European descent who lived in Malaysia. We decided yes to Egypt in part because of the large Muslim population and no to Ethiopia. And finally we navigated a complicated and varied terrain when it came to finding translations of many of these poets, stumbling upon many transformative revelations often by accident, which is in fact what I'll uphold as the first principle of international reputations of many of the poets whom we know about today.

For example: quick! Who is the most famous Turkish poet of the 20th century? If you said Nâzim Hikmet, you get a metaphoric meza platter. He was probably the only Turkish poet I had heard of before embarking upon this project and assumed he was the country's giant, a former political prisoner shortlisted for the Nobel Prize and a friend of Pablo Neruda, widely anthologized in the United States. Imagine my surprise when the first three lists of contemporary Turkish poets (as an aside we chose only to include poets who published work after 1948, which seemed to us a pivotal moment in terms of world history because of the confluence of events that took place then to transform the global landscape) I was provided by experts in Turkish literature living in Turkey did not include Hikmet at all! I was perplexed and so I asked one of my contacts who wrote back to me attesting that, oh yes, Hikmet was important but that Ahmet Hasim, Necip Fazil Kisakürek, Orhan Veli Kanik, Ilhan Berk, Edip Cansever, Ece Ayhan and Lale Müldür, were at least as important as he was. I had never heard of any of those poets before because they had not been widely translated, if at all, into English. Hikmet had the good bad fortune to have been exiled in Russian for his communist views and later imprisoned in his native Turkey, becoming a cause célèbre for folks such as Pablo Picasso, Paul Robeson and Jean-Paul Sartre who campaigned for his release. As a result, he became well-known internationally even while at home, he had a reputation as something of an outsider. That's not to minimize his contribution to Turkish poetics, since he turned against the traditional Arabic metrical schemes of the palace poetry, for something simpler and more colloquial. As Samuel Stillen has written,

Hikmet created a distinctive rhythm, with alternating long and short lines, unrhymed. [and] his speech is that of the common folk, whose crisp images and wise proverbs he weaves into his verse. a shining miracle of clarity and directness, a fusion of political and personal strength which achieves extraordinary richness of feeling.

That's well and good, but someone like Lale Müldür was equally if not even more extraordinarily radical in her poetics. As she has said about her own work in an interview,

in my poetry sound structure and meaning is one and the same, because I think I write from a total spontaneity. It is automatic. I realize the importance of music as I first read it. From another angle, Brecht and Walter Benjamin going against Lukacs' concept of internal consistency. They give importance to the bits and pieces, unbalanced and contradictory forms. In other words mimesis is out. Frequently there is internal music in my poetry, which gets lost during translation. I attach special importance to the end of the poem. It can even be one broken line—my music.

As far as I can tell, there's nothing in Hikmet's work that approaches that kind of radical and painterly subjectivity, and if it were not for the "accident" of Hikmet exile and imprisonment, perhaps it would be another Turkish poet who became a household name. In the end, we included ten poets to represent Turkey in Language for a New Century.

As the primary curator of South Asia, I also had a number of very difficult decisions to make. First of all, according to the Indian government, 22 languages have been designated as 8th schedule, i.e. given "official" language status—that is, having at least a million native speakers. That figure doesn't include Hindi, the national language, and English the de facto lingua franca of many Indians from the time of British colonialization onwards. And that figure only scratches the surface; according to the 1991 census, there are 1,576 mother tongue languages and countless more regional dialects. So faced with such a startling polyglot culture, each with its own distinctive literary heritage, it was exceedingly difficult to find the exemplar poets to include in the anthology. Indeed my initial list of poets to include topped 100 and because space was—and always is in a book like the one we produced—at a premium, there was a lot of compromise involved in choosing which poets to include in the collection.

One of the ways we made this decision was based on the quality of work in English translation. Many Indian poets have not been translated, or translated well, into English, while others write naturally themselves in the English language. And in delving into this hodge-podge of linguistic traditions, itself a metonym for the eclectic Indian culture as a whole, we made a few startling discoveries that have remained with me, even after the editorial process was complete.

First, what was fascinating to me was that there is very little intralingual translation happening in India. According to Sunil Gangopadhyay, president of the Sahitya Akademi India's National Academy of Letters, an organization dedicated to the promotion of literature in the languages of India, has said, "We read western literature a lot. But Bengalis don't read Marathi literature, or Gujaratis don't read Tamil literature." In fact, according to the Sahitya Akademi, if there is a best seller written in Hindi, more often than not, it would be translated first into English, then into another Indian language. You'd rarely, if ever have a work translated directly from Punjabi to Telugu, or Bengali to Tamil, even though all of those languages are among the top 20 most spoken languages in the world! English is a kind of sorcerer's stone for translation, the gatekeeper for any work that is to be taken seriously nationally or internationally, which is a problematic situation on a number of levels.

First, ultimately market forces dictate what gets translated into English, because such an undertaking would only be made if there were a sense of potential commercial viability. And because there is already a wealth of Indian writing in English competing for the same space and same dollars, the vernacular languages in India are too frequently ignored. It is telling that the Indian writers that the world knows, folks such as Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Amit Chaudhuri, Pankaj Mishra, Anita Desai, Arundhati Roy, Aravind Adiga, even Salman Rushdie or V. S. Naipaul, are all writers working in English. According to Chandrahas Choudhury, "this surely has as much to do with the politics of literary transmission and reception as it does with the intrinsic quality of their work."

Choudhury has been a strong advocate for more translation of the vernacular languages of India into English, writing, "no single branch of India's literature can possibly encompass the representation of diverse social realities that a flourishing national literature requires. translations [are] a way of understanding India—its plural cultures, the variety of self-representations and existential dilemmas—not only for international audiences, but also, crucially, for Indian readers. Currently, the north of India is often unaware of what is going on in the literature of the south, the east of the west—and few seem to ever know what is happening in the remote but sizeable north-east. No literary scholar, let alone the general reader, possesses a map of the entire country."

Choudhury posits a few reasons for this situation, including the fact that while many Indians are multilingual, they are so functionally and not literarily, using language as an instrument of communication and not a tool of aesthetic contemplation. She also notes that because publishers already feel like the market for literary work written and published in English is small, the market for translations would be even smaller and less profitable. Finally, she describes the overwhelming heterogeneity of the country's linguistic landscape as making it overwhelming to try to understand the nuances and idioms of the other languages. It is much easier to read work that has already been written in English, than to spend time translating work into the language. It appears that this is changing somewhat, but no one can deny that when we think of Indian writing, whether in fiction or poetry, it is those who write in English who spring immediately to mind.

But even if as Choudhury hopes, more vernacular literary works are translated into English, there is a secondary problem, which is what ultimately is chosen to be translated? Poet, translator and activist, poet, Meena Kandasamy, wrote about just this predicament in The Hindu, ironically India's largest English language newspaper. "Because English in ensnared and held captive by those who are already powerful, if not oppressive," she writes,

one has to address these questions: What kinds of texts get translated into English? What is their liberatory potential? Why are sordid autobiographies that package poverty as exotica preferred as more 'translation-worthy' compared to provocative poetry that challenges social injustice?. The selectivity exercised by the mainstream publishing industry in undertaking translations ensures that social hierarchies like caste are replicated in the literary hierarchy.

Kandaswamy has claimed that the Dalits, traditionally the lowest caste, and women are relentlessly marginalized in society and that extends to the literary world, where their work is largely ignored. She has taken it as a personal duty to translate much of this work into English and into Tamil, creating a market where previously one did not exist. She views translation as "an emancipatory device in the quest for identity," and has made it part of her mission to translate writers from the regional languages into English, to give them a place at the table where power dines. In the end, we included 35 Indian poets in the anthology, though even that number left out a number of crucial voices that I would have loved to include but could not on the basis of space.

If I had trouble finding translations in India, then imagine the trouble I had with the other South Asian countries we choose to include in the anthology. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka all had considerably fewer translations available, and places like Bhutan, the Maldives Island or Burma/Myanmar? Forget about it! Much as I tried, I could only find one poet each from the latter three countries and even then I was stretching. Certainly the Burmese poet we included, U Tin Moe, was a literary giant who had published some twenty-five books, but Dorji Penjore, the poet from Bhutan, was known primarily for his translations of folk tales and Farah Didi, while publishing poetry widely on the BBC, has her Ph.D in Politics and lives in Bedfordshire in the UK. Much as I tried contacting universities and embassies, arts organizations and scholars, I had little luck finding work from these countries, let alone work that had been translated into English, and while we felt reluctant to only include one poet to represent an entire country, especially when it was difficult to ascertain if that poet was the most notable literary figure there, we felt even more determined to have at least one voice from each of the countries that constituted our imaginative map. Yet for all that struggle, I still got the sense that poetry as a cultural force was at least as strong and probably stronger in these places, than in many other Western countries and many of the folks I was put in contact with could recite some snippet of an ancient literary text, whether from the Ramayana or another work.

This difficulty of finding translations was the situation in other parts of the world as well, although for very different reasons. Many of the Central Asian poets we included had never been translated into English before, so we had to commission translations of Azeri poet Bahtiyar Vahapzade and Turkmen poet Ataburad Atabayev, and sometimes we had to do second translations when what we received was more literal than literary. We only found decent English translations of one Cambodian poet, U Sam Oeur, and that was directly attributable to the Cambodian genocide, Pol Pot's infamous Year Zero campaign, which essentially wiped out an entire generation of artists, writers and intellectuals. We also had a lot of difficult finding poets from the Gulf, countries like Kuwait, Qatar and Saudia Arabia, and in this instance, it was not so much that translations didn't exist as much as the ones that did were quite bad in English. Our criterion all along was excellence of the poem in English and we found that some of the Gulf translations we received were full of clichés and flowery language that even a second or third translation could not render successfully into a contemporary American idiom.

But undertaking this editorial process certainly made us rethink our own notions of "excellence," and what that might mean. The aesthetic sensibility of American poetics, with its emphasis on the image, concrete language and concision, is not necessarily shared in other parts of the world, particularly in poetry written in Arabic, where familiarity and allusiveness was considered a virtue and where what we as American readers might find maudlin or sentimental was considered a garlanded bridge to the divine or a polemic to enact political change. In the end we had to suspend our own biases and include work that might not have the frisson or edgy energy that we look for in American poetry, because it was ultimately more important to give poets from this region a voice.

And alternately, while in some cases, we had too few translations, in others we had too many and had to decide ultimately which one to choose for inclusion, a decision, we soon found out, that had political ramifications. Sometimes it was an easy decision like in the case of South Korean poet Ko Un, who incredibly has written over 135 books, including many books of poetry, but who luckily had a preferred translator into English, Brother Anthony of Taizé, who along with Young-Moo Kim and Gary G. Gach had brought out a definitive version of his work. The feminist Bangladeshi poet Taslima Nasrin was another case where there are a profusion of translations of her work into English but because we knew that she had worked closely with American poet and translator Carolyn Wright, who had written about their relationship for PEN and elsewhere, we took those translations as the preferred versions.

But in other cases, we were totally in the dark and had to make a decision based on our own subjective tastes. For example, in the case of Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, we had a profusion of translations of the same poem and we were delimited ultimately not only by which ones we could get permissions for, but also by which one we subjectively liked the best; and because we wanted the entire process to be about unity, rather than separation, we strove to find the one version that all three editors could agree upon. Same with Indian poets A. K. Ramanujan and Arun Kolatkar who helped or translated some of their own poems but preferred in some cases the translations of others.

The political nature of choosing an appropriate translation became particularly evident a few years after our anthology came out, in the Arab Spring where a rallying cry for many of the protestors have been taken from a poem from Tunisian poet Abu al-Qasim Al-Shabbi, written nearly a century before. Parts of this poem were chanted in Tahir Square in Egypt, in Palestine, in Tunisia, and elsewhere, creating solidarity of identity and a will for freedom that transcends national borders. As Elliot Colla has written about the use of poetry in the protests, "this poetry is not an ornament to the uprising—it is its soundtrack and also composes a significant part of the action itself."

And yet there is no one single sanctioned translation into English of the poem, called alternately "The Will to Live," "The Will of Life" or "If the People Choose to Live One Day," but rather a plethora of different versions, each drastically different from the next in terms of cadence, form and word choice. Compare the difference between just the first few lines in these different versions of the poem, starting with Elliot Colla's version, which begins:

If, one day, a people desires to live, then fate will answer their call. And their night will then begin to fade, and their chains break and fall. For he who is not embraced by a passion for life will dissipate into thin air At least that is what all creation has told me, and what its hidden spirits declare

Whereas as rendered by a native Arabic speaker, As'ad Abu Khalil, the poem begins:

If the people will to live
Providence is destined to favourably respond
And night is destined to fold
And the chains are certain to be broken

And he who has not embraced the love of life
Will evaporate in its atmosphere and disappear.

It seems Colla attempts to get something of the sonority of the original Arabic in his translation, with the languorous lines and the use of end, but Abu Khalil's version has been touted more frequently, perhaps because of the more forceful articulation of the "will to live."

The poem has also been included in anthologies of Arab literature, including Salma Khadra Jayyusi's Modern Arabic Poetry published by Columbia University Press in 1991, which includes this translation by Iraqi poet Sargon Boulus and the British poet Christopher Middleton:

When people choose
To live by life's will,
Fate can do nothing but give in;
The night discards its veil,
All shackles are undone.

Whoever never felt
Life celebrating him
Must vanish like the mist;
Whoever never felt
Sweeping through him
The glow of life
Succumbs to nothingness.

Rather than Colla's use of rhyme, this version uses repetition to accumulate power, the anaphora of "whoever never felt" providing a kind of refrain to the poem's opening. Finally, there is this version translated by Naomi Shihab Nye and Lena Jayyusi, called "The Strange Tale":

We laughed at the past.
Tomorrow the future will be laughing
at us.
This is the world, a tale spun
by some great magician.
The living perform the marvelous play
as if they were already dead.
The stage is sad
with its curtain of mist.
And beyond the curtain,
the audience of the future watches us, laughing.
They don't see how the script
is falling into their own hands.

Admittedly this one takes the most liberties with the original, eschewing any metrical precision or rhyme, and even altering the idiom of the poem to include the notion of dramaturgy and playacting, which allows for the memorable last two lines. Reading and appraising these different versions, I don't know that we are any closer to al-Shabbi's original, which, as Colla has written, include "opening lines [that] are more than famous. These are words that would be known by any educated person anywhere in the Arab world."

This was the kind of challenge we faced in including some of the translations in Language for a New Century, exacerbated in many cases by the fact that we ourselves could not speak or read the language in question. We had to trust the expertise of the translators and scholars who we had been put in contact with, again not always through a methodical process but sometimes through pure happenstance. In those circumstances, we called upon the quality of the work in English and according to the literary standards that we felt our readers would bring to the collection. Therefore, we might have left out a poem like "The Will to Live," even in spite of its obvious importance if we had not been able to find a decent translation. This assertion of course is pure conjecture. We wouldn't have included a poem by al-Shabbi anyway, since he predates our definition of "contemporary" as happening after 1948, plus there are wealth of translations of his work available and, as shown above, some are quite good.

Celebrating the five-year anniversary of our anthology, we have been asked by folks what, if anything, we would have done differently. There are always poets one wishes to have included but personally, I'm very proud of what we produced. Had we known more about each other's working processes and about the publishing industry as whole, I warrant we would have made some different decisions and cut down considerably the amount of time it took us to put the book together. But the seven years we worked on the project allowed us to evolve our vision and to discover more than if we had only half that time to put the book together. Ultimately we feel like the collection is ground-breaking for a Norton anthology and we are so pleased that we were able to structure the book as we did, with nine thematic sections around which the poems constellate, speaking to one another as if rubbing metaphors at a global cocktail party. We didn't want to replicate the same taxonomy of division that we felt had characterized the post 9/11 dialogue about international relations and so instead of grouping the poets chronologically, alphabetically or by country, we put poems that spoke to one another together. And we hope that in the sinuous movement from an established Indian poet to an emerging Korean American one, from a Chinese ink-wash painter and member of the literary avant-garde to a Filipino modernist giant there's a sense of shared humanity, that in spite of their geographical and cultural differences, these poets were speaking to us and to each other about our shared values. Recognizing those values was only made possible through the many translations we evaluated and ultimately included in the anthology and we owe a great debt to the many poets, editors and translators who helped us shape what we hope will remain a canonical work.

In the final tally, we think of this project not as a closing down, as many anthologies often are, representing the definitive vision of the East or collecting the best poems by any given international poet, but rather an opening outwards. If we left someone out, please go in search of that person's work and bring it back to us. If by only including one poem by each poet, we missed the opportunity to give certain voices ample enough space, we hope you'll seek out entire collections by these poets. We think of this book ultimately not as a static force but a dynamic one, and hope that it helps inspire a generation of translators and poets, and also hope that in its aftermath, there is greater dialogue and understanding of Asia and the Middle East. Because in the words of Mahmoud Darwish, one of the extraordinary poets we include in the collection,

As you prepare your breakfast—think of others. Don't forget to feed the pigeons. As you conduct your wars—think of others. Don't forget those who want peace. As you pay your water bill—think of others. Think of those who only have clouds to drink from. As you go home, your own home—think of others—don't forget those who live in tents. As you sleep and count the planets, think of others—there are people who have no place to sleep. As you liberate yourself with metaphors think of others—those who have lost their right to speak. And as you think of distant others—think of yourself and say "I wish I were a candle in the darkness.

Hopefully five years after its publication, Language for a New Century continues to throw off light to help us see each other a little better.

Ravi Shankar is a poet and former literature professor at Central Connecticut State University and City University of Hong Kong. He is founder of the online arts journal Drunken Boat, and co-editor with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal of Language for a New Century (Norton, 2008), an anthology of contemporary Arab and Asian poetry. His creative writing has appeared in such publications as The Paris Review, The Massachusetts Review, and The New Hampshire Review.

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