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bIrpuruSh: notes on translation

the valiant


in general, i don't like rhymed translations.  they are difficult to
execute with any degree of fluency, and in the end, they never repay
your effort in terms of giving you a decent flavour of the original. 

however, for bIrpuruSh, i was asked by a friend to provide a translation that
children in a kanpur school could perform to.  the free verse version 
turned out to be a damp squib for performance purposes, so some sort of a
verse rendering had to be done.

the question in front of me was, what would tagore the poet, have approved
of?  would he insist on the exact story, risking that it may sound stilted,
or would he encourage changes in the interest of flow?  looking at his own
translations where he has liberally amputated and reworked the originals,
there is little doubt about the answer.

i started out by trying a aabbcdcd rhyme as in the original, but i found i
could tighten the verses to six lines instead of eight, so it became aabbcc
in the end.  i also tried aabbaa for some time, but gave up in the end. 

i listened to the lines as they came out and somehow when i looked at it in
the end it seems to be sort of iambic pentameter (as it is in the original).
this is just how it happened to come out.  of course it deviates extensively,
but then these technicalities are the last of one's worries. 

a couple of points that need a dash of emphasis are italicized, e.g. "why can't
this be true at least sometime". Maybe this is redundant. 

CHANGES FROM THE ORIGINAL

-  the door of the palanquin is ajar "ekTuku fAm~k kare" - I had kept it in an
   original version: 
	imagine mother, you and i travelling
	somewhere far, you in a palanquin   
	     four beheras going heiya-ho	    
	     you have your door ajar, just so		
	you can see me outside, trotting along
	on my red pony, singing a song. 
   but like a friend pointed out, the rhyme was weak, especially the first
   two lines. during rework, i had to dropped this; i inserted instead the
   swing of the palanquin...

- khokA is humming a song - hope it goes well with the jolly sense of
  going "Tagbagiye" on the ghoRA.  i have some doubt as to whether "singing a
  song" would be better. 

- mA is afraid in verse two; this is also dropped.  but i think this comes
  out sufficiently later, in her prayer, trembling, etc. 

- jorAdighi actually means twin lake, but joRAdighir mATh may mean that the
  lakes are unimportant; i have used the lear-ish "heaths of jorAdighi" to
  capture the sense of brooding desolation 

- some parts of the story from verse 3 were inserted into verse 2 etc. 

- in the original, khokA can only see the dead river bed.  here, i have
  made them go over the dead riverbed.  i notice radice also hints at
  this in his freeverse translation.

- details like the cows have been taken into the village by the villagers
  would be too difficult to insert. 

- to my great regret, i had to drop the "kAne tAder gom~jA jabAr ful" - 
  the "jhAkRA chul" also hard.  I had this earlier:
	twirling lAThis, red hibiscus in ear 
	yell blood curdling, curled black hair, 
            they come.  i yell, "stand right there!...
	    beware my sword now, don't you dare!"
  or
	twirling lAThis in the flickering light
        red hibiscus in ear, skin dark like night
  but eventually i thought the skin glistening in the flickering light was
  good enough.  the "fearsome sight" i don't like still,  am working to see
  if i can put in a more specific item

  here too, "skins agleam"? or "skins glistening"? "skins gleaming"?  i think
  "skins glistening" would be the cleanest, but doesn't rhyme.  but i felt
  "agleam" had the right rhythm, but unfortunately it is perhaps not a word
  that a child may use. 

- "gAye debe kAm~TA" - i tried  "hairraising battle" but it was just so
   pale.  i had noticed that radice had "you'll faint" - perhaps that image
   was with me, when i decided on swoon.  these two lines are
   barely grammatical, but perhaps they get the point across. 

- the bengali word 'kata' is polysemous between "so many" and "how many" -
  "kata loker mAthA paRla kATA" here means "so many heads were cut off", but
  it can also mean "how many heads" - and as always, there is a bit of the
  other meaning leaching into this usage - to me, "how many" (which is also
  polysemous) has a nice ring here, and might actually have been a better
  rendering perhaps.

- the beherAs are emphasized much more in the english rendering.  this is
  deliberate, because i felt that english readers (or for that matter,
  today's bengali child) may not be familiar with the mechanism of a pAlki

- i used a sort of a present tense; the original uses it very occasionally
  ("bhAbchha khokA gelai bujhi mare", "Ami bali", etc.)  i am not sure how i
  came to use it - perhaps i felt it gives a better sense of drama if it's
  happening right now. i think some people call this the aorist tense (or
  aspect), but i am not sure this is the same thing.  it just seems to sound
  fine.

and if by now, you are wondering about my non-existent sense of
capitalization, that's because in mixed indic text, i prefer to use the upper
case to indicate indic letters...

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