Rabindranath Tagore

The Lover of God, trans. Tony K Stewart& Chase Twichell

Port Townsend, Copper Canyon Press, 2003.

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This little book is a gem, a firework, a trompe l’oeil, a jeu d’esprit, a subterfuge, a complete delight. Its 120 pages harbour a literary deceit that demands comparison with that of the teenage Thomas Chatterton, who in the late 18th century invented and inhabited the persona of a 16th-century monk called Thomas Rowley, precociously producing a set of “medieval” poems that were good enough to fool the experts.

In the present case, the deception involved the precocious fourteen-year old Rabindranath inventing the persona of a Vaiṣṇava poet called Bhānusiṃha — with Bhānu, “sun”, playing in a nudge-nudge equivalence with Tagore’s home name of Rabi. The poems appeared sequentially from 1875 in the family-sponsored journal Bhāratī and were in the well-established mode of the lush devotional narrative of Krishna’s love for Radha, as told by Bhānusiṃha, an (invented) older confidante of Radha’s. The text was “a notable discovery as scholars within the academy were at pains to construct a proper literary history for India, one of the earliest nation-building exercises in the political and intellectual ferment that was late-nineteenth-century Calcutta…At the time of this discovery, Rabindranath was beginning to distinguish himself from his enormously talented siblings, some of whom were probably privy to to the ruse…” (p. 3) In the following years, and indeed throughout his life, Rabindranath played on the deception, hinting that he himself was “Bhānusiṃha” while also denying it.

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In 1884 he even published a fictional biography for his alter ego, at one and the same time deepening the myth and hinting archly at its resolution; the text of this biography is usefully translated by Tony Stewart in an appendix.

The language of the songs is not Bangla but Brajabuli, a medieval mélange of Bangla and the Hindi dialect of Braj Bhasha. This confluence reflects the exposure of the followers of Caitanya (1486-1533) to the culture and literature of Braj through the their residency in that area, the focus of Krishna worship in northern India. Devotional texts in Braj, Bangla and Brajabuli all look back to such Sanskrit forebears as the approximately 10th-century Bhāgatava purāṇa and the 12th-century Gītagovinda, the resonances of the latter being particularly strong in the vernacular poetry of this romanticised bhakti genre.

This book features Bhānusiṃha’s twenty-poems in Bangla script with facing translations in English, an example of the double opening being scanned together into a single image below:

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Readers of Bangla will quickly notice that the translation is quite far removed from the original: much is added; and the many things that are taken away include the signature “Bhānusiṃha” itself, thereby — ironically enough — removing the signature from the forged cheque. The book’s introduction explains the method through which the translations were made: Tony Stewart made a transliteration and a maximal literal translation of the poems, and Chase Twichell “fired them into new poetry in English”.

Chase knows no Bengali or Brajabuli, and for that we are both grateful because it freed us from the constraints that plague most translators: the poems had to become hers in order to live — unlike me, she was not shackled by their original forms. Charmed by Rabindranath’s precocity and cheekiness, mesmerized by the intricacies of Vaiṣṇava aesthetics, she has rendered that which is most likely to cross barriers of language and culture: the songs’ intense emotion, Rādhā’s thrill, her anguish, her exasperation, and her confidante’s consoling. Even if Tagore was right that the conditions of their composition and his own proclivities made it impossible to judge the devotional mood of these poems as authentic to Vaiṣṇava standards, the Vaiṣṇava poets would still approve, I think, not only of the end product but of the processes that rendered the emotions intelligible. (pp. 8-9)

Stewart goes on to give a more detailed account of the journey from his literal and annotated translation to Twichell’s transcreation. The legitimacy of such processes is much debated in the hot-houses of translation studies; personally I feel that Stewart’s own gifts as a translator, amply demonstrated elsewhere, might have succeeded quite well here also, especially given a freer rein than traditional scholarly conventions allow. But I would not be without this book as it stands, which is as a mirror mirrored: a not-quite Vaiṣṇava ethos dressed in not-quite Bangla by not-quite Tagore, and not-quite rendered into versions that are not quite “translations” in the normal sense. Perhaps one subterfuge deserves another; perhaps Tagore’s chicanery is neutralised by the subversion of not-quite translation.

Though Tagore was not a card-carrying Vaiṣṇava, the devotional resonance of Caitanyite bhakti was deeply compatible with his own mystical propensities, and these Brajabuli lyrics sit comfortably within the genre. The whole question of authenticity is in any case ripe for deconstruction in a context where it was commonplace for poets to “borrow” (or delete?) the signature of a forebear when adding to the effusive stream of devotional verse, and in which the matter of authorship was negotiable and contingent.

As mentioned above, the book opens with a brief Introduction setting out the story of Tagore’s composition and an explanation of the processes followed

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“On Translating Bhānu”. Two appendixes offer, as mentioned, the further hoax of Tagore’s history of Bhānusiṃha, and the most articulate and beautifully written Postscript on Tagore and Bhānusiṃha’s Vaiṣṇava divertissement that one is likely to find anywhere.

Rupert Snell — HINDIDOX

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