The Absent Traveler: World Literature as Intimacy

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Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam

Nachiket Joshi

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The Absent Traveller: World Literature as Intimacy

Research Master’s in Cultural Analysis: Thesis Nachiket Joshi

Student Id: 10864946

Email id: achiket.oshi@gmail.com

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Cervantes’ text and Menard’s are identical as to their words, but the second is almost infinitely

richer. (More ambiguous, his detractors will

claim, but the ambiguity is itself a richness)

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The point of departure for this study is the idea of ‘world literature’, as a theoretical category, historical construct and analytical concept for the study of literary texts. The notion, and its varying prestige has its roots in Johann Wolfgang Goethe, whose visionary impulses, and literary erudition found expression in the term Weltliteratur during the first half of the nineteenth

century. Since then, the term has been translated variously as world literature, literature monde,

vishwasahitya, and come to connote a common human endeavor of artistic and creative practice,

rooted in language(s). What distinguishes world literature, from the study of literature tout court, is in a sense, akin to the distinction between International Relations and Political Science, where the latter is devoted to elucidating concepts from the field of human activity known as ‘politics’, while the former takes as its starting point, the multiplicity of its occurrences. World literature is in a similar way, embedded in multiplicity, and the network of interactions along which this multiplicity is mapped and charted. This has thrown up a variety of approaches accounting for literary multiplicity and circulation, and inspired multiple interpretations, as well as informed a range of theoretical, institutional and archival practices.

In the following pages, I will explore the concept of world literature, by looking at a book of translations by the Indian modernist poet, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, of a corpus of secular, erotic poetry written in the Prakrit language, and compiled around the 1st century C.E. The Sattasai, or the Gathasaptasati as it is known, has been an immensely influential, and highly unique body of verses in Indian literary history, with multiple commentaries, and imitations being produced right up till the 18th century. Beginning with the 19th century, it also became the subject of learned translations into German and Persian, with three notable German translations by Albrecht Weber appearing between 1870 and 1883, through which it entered a wider field of literary circulation.

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The Gathasaptasati is composed of hundreds of short, two line stanzas, that deal with matters of love and love-making, all set in an abidingly rural context. The sophisticated language, and metre of the verses however suggests, that while the poetry offers up vignettes of village life, they were meant to be recited in front of an erudite and sophisticated urban audience, probably in a courtly setting. The concise nature of the verses, have resulted in a body of forceful and

imaginative images with which to convey emotion, eroticism and the twin motifs of desire and longing.

It is this ‘imagistic’ material, and the transfigurations contained therein that Mehrotra relies on in his translations of about two hundred of the Gathasaptasati’s verses, published in 1991, as

The Absent Traveller. Mehrotra himself is an accomplished poet in the English language,

consistently productive since the1960s, and with an independent body of work that spans over four decades. Born in 1947, in the provincial town of Allahabad, Mehrotra’s poetic universe is constituted through intimate interactions with the currents of international modernist poetry, from Pound, Borges and the Surrealists to the Beat generation of American poets who were his contemporaries. This cosmopolitan idiom, self-fashioned in a prosaic, provincial setting enlivens and transforms the most mundane, and familiar aspects of small-town life in Mehrotra’s poetry. Mehrotra’s translations of older traditions of poetry have benefited from the same unique voice and poetic techniques. I will chart this complex web of interactions in The Absent Traveller- as a work that enters the fluid domain of literary circulation- and interrogate in what way it can help us re-formulate and re-vitalize the complex notion of world literature.

The first chapter is thus devoted to mapping out the multiple trajectories of world literature, and following Eric Auerbach, situating it in world-historical processes, governed here by the global unfolding of modernity. But modernity, much like world literature, is to be construed as

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polyvalent and polycentric, speaking in disparate, but convergent voices, all of which assume diverse lineages, poetic traditions and models of historicity. I have therefore chosen to inflect world literature, with the particular artistic phenomenon of modernism, and its history of cross-influences, creative appropriations, translations and readerly and writerly encounters across the globe. Once we expand our disciplinary horizons of the study of modernism, beyond the Euro-American sphere, a different relationality between languages, traditions and aesthetics comes to light, one which foregrounds porosity, multiplicity, multilingualism and linguistic dynamism on the part of its practitioners.

This overlapping of particular contexts, irrigated through a planetary network of textual and linguistic circulation, calls for a methodological innovation on the part of the scholar aiming to study its literary dimension. The methodology, that suits my study the best is what I call, after Jessica Berman, a form of ‘comparative thick description’, sensitive to the space of cross-local and multilingual interplay, while delving deep into the particular context of each modernism (qtd. in Friedman 19). Following this methodological imperative, in the second chapter, I will consider different models of translation, to challenge the mono-lingual biases of critical theory and blur the distinction between ‘source’ and ‘target’ cultures that inform the study of

comparative literature. In order to do this, I will consider the cosmopolitan, and multilingual spheres of literary production in the metropolitan centers of South Asia, and explore the

convergences between Anglophone modernism, and pre-modern devotional poetry in the works of two poets, Arun Kolatkar and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra.

The world of Anglophone writing, to which the above poets belong, has been described as ‘a globally devolved network’ of ‘dispersed influences’, which is today fundamentally ‘polycentric’ in its composition (Ross 293). This demands a ‘thick’ understanding of its multiple locales, and

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the specific ways in which the idiom of English poetry is reactive to and transformed by the locations in which it is practiced. And yet, the search for specificity and lineages, is not meant as a search for ‘origins’ or authenticity, but is instead a quest for different forms of relationality, of concepts and points of view from which to re-vitalize our understanding of world literature. Indeed, it is the complex relationship with, and selective re-appropriation of older literary

traditions by modernist writers of great cosmopolitan sensibility, that forms the crux of my study of world literature. The evolution of the concept, from a static, archival notion, to a fluid and dynamic domain of literary practice, is mapped in this thesis, by these processes of translation and appropriation.

In the final chapter, therefore, I will arrive at the central object of my thesis, Mehrotra’s book of English translations of erotic verses in the Prakrit language, called The Absent Traveller (1991). I will proceed to a two-fold analysis of the poems, relying on the work of philologists and literary scholars, deeply acquainted with the original language and literary context, while also elaborating upon the multilingual ethos and writerly practice of Mehrotra, who translated them. In this manner, I aim to shed light upon the space of interplay that Prakrit poetics offer to a canny translator such as Mehrotra, and the way in which his “imagistic” transfigurations, and sharp, concise diction secrete themselves into it. This is a process, that Mehrotra himself defines as “osmosis”, a lateral, horizontal process whose linguistic egalitarianism, and dynamism can re-configure the space of world literature. An osmotic process of translation also suggests a particular form of “intimacy”, which along with separation, is one of the abiding themes of the love poems in The Absent Traveller.

Separation, longing and intimacy, aren’t merely the content of the scenes depicted by verses in this collection, but exert a veritable poetological force upon them. It is in this poetics of

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longing and separation, and its lack of shame, that an alternate relationality between literatures, languages and texts, i.e. the domain of world literature, comes to light. By observing the ‘fraying’ and the looping back and forth between Anglophone modernism and the poetic universe of classical Prakrit verse, I am opening up a field for textual analysis, that takes world literature as its horizon. The planetary field of circulation, opened up by modernity, continues to inform my analysis, and through it, I aim to substantiate world literature as a vital, and dynamic concept for examining literary texts. This thesis interrogates the manner in which a body of ancient love poetry enters world literature, through translation. In doing this, I have tried to not only look at classical poetry, through a contemporary, comparative lens, but to furnish alternate lineages, and literary concepts with which to re-define our understanding of world literature itself.

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II. World Literature and Modernism

II.1 Introduction

In this chapter I will engage with the notion of world literature as an entry point into

discussions on poetic and literary modernism. World literature has been both a controversial and persistent notion in the conversation about literary circulation and the dialogue between disparate national literatures. The notion carries both a utopian and patrimonial charge, signifying at once the accumulated heritage of artistic and textual production of different cultures across epochs, as well as the possibility of interesting links and convergences between them. Since this thesis sets out to examine the ways in which a set of translated verses from a highly particular and ancient tradition might enter into a world literary domain, it becomes crucial to examine this constantly mutating field in detail, laying out its different incarnations and interpretations by a range of theorists and authors. Ultimately however, the aim of this chapter is to explore world literature in all its fecundity and complexity, and to renew it as critical tool for examining a work such as The

Absent Traveller. To this end I will emphasize the intimate relation between notions of world

literature and that of modernism and modernity more generally1. This chapter will then move on to examining how the notion of world literature can be productively inflected with the domain of modernism, not in its limited Anglo-European incarnation, but as a literary and artistic

movement with multiple iterations across the globe. As pointed out before, this will involve engaging with an expanded spatio-temporal realm within which to situate modernism, thus clearing a space for a dynamic and truly global domain of world literature that is attuned to the

1_{Modernity, here is understood as a global and relational phenomenon, both recurrent in time and spatially}

polycentric; it signals acceleration and ruptures in domains as varied as culture, philosophy, art, religion, commerce and war. Modernism, emerges as the aesthetic dimension of any given modernity. (Friedman 10). For a further elaboration on the definitional debates that have irrigated discussions on modernity, refer to Planetary Modernism: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (Friedman, 2015).

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particularity of local traditions without losing sight of the trans-national currents that nourish them.

II.2 World Literature

Every discussion of world literature must recognize as its foundational moment a

conversation between the German poet Goethe and the young Johann Eckermann in 1827, where the former stated that “Nowadays national literature doesn’t mean much: the age of world

literature (Weltliteratur) is beginning, and everybody should contribute to hasten its ascent” (qtd. in Moretti 54). Goethe, who had earlier attempted a fusion of western literature with eastern poetry with the West-Östlicher Divan in 1819 and was drawn to ‘oriental’ subjects as early as 1774 with Mahomets-Gesang seemed nevertheless to have mostly European literature in mind when making his comment (Lewis 313). Taken together with the fact that this proposition for a world literature appeared during the time of European ascendancy and the consolidation of imperial gains in the East, the category of world literature appears as immediately problematic, if not ideologically complicit with Western imperialism. It is important to set a different point of departure for exploring the notion of world literature, in order to not restrict one’s understanding of it to the specific moment of European expansion. Thus, I propose to identify a particular historical conjuncture that transcends the boundaries of Europe as my ansatzpunkt or point of departure for the study of world literature. This point of departure has to do with the emergence of a certain notion of the ‘world’ itself, related to the unfolding processes of global modernity.

Much attention has been devoted to the implications unfolding from Goethe’s proclamation, and this chapter will examine them in detail. However, the Welt of Weltliteratur, or the idea of the ‘world’ itself is a historical construct, emerging in the Early Modern period on different continents more or less simultaneously (Subrahmanyam 28). It is self-evident that without such

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an idea emerging at a particular time in the history of early modernity, no conception of world literature could be possible. To be sure, older processes of the ‘worlding of literature’ have existed in pre-modern times (Levine and Mani 143). Examples range from the dialogue between Sumerian and Akkadian literature in the third millennium or the ‘Sanskrit Cosmopolis’ that existed across South and South-East Asia in the first millennium BCE (Pollock 39). The impact of Manuscript Mercantilism or the spread of Greek, Latin, Persian and Arabic Codices in the Middle Ages also comes to mind. Similarly, one could talk about the Indo-Persian cultural sphere that stretched all the way from the Safavid Empire to Mughal India, and whose routes were traversed by thousands of travellers, some of whom left behind written accounts of their journeys (Gruzinski 137). This corpus of travel literature also represents a similar ‘worlding’ of literature in the Persianate sphere, which transformed literature and the arts across regions, especially North India.

The ‘world’ of world literature however implies a truly planetary scale and ambition, and to trace its origins one must turn to another site of textual production that concerned itself with matters on a global scale. This is the domain of history, and more specifically World History, a phenomenon unknown before the 16th century that sets the precedent for and parallels world literature in both its historical evolution and diversity. Indeed, the first mention of the term world literature in print comes to us not from Goethe, but from August Ludwig von Schlozer, in whose

Islandischen Literatur und Geschiste (Icelandic Literature and History), published in 1773, it

first finds mention (D'haen 5). Von Scholzer had also written a world history in 1779, thus confirming the historical link between world literature and world history. World history as a genre of historical writing emerged as an innovation in the specific historical conjuncture of the 16th century, a period defined not by a singular European expansion, but by vast and increasingly

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inter-connected imperial domains that spanned Asia, Europe and the Americas. (Subrahmanyam 28)2_.

So for instance, Francisco de San Anton Munon Chimalpahin Cuauhtlehuanitzin (1579–c. 1650) wrote a world history from Mexico, in the local language of Nahuatl, dividing the world into four parts, and giving a history of each. Similarly, Antonio Galvao’s Tratado dos

Descobrimentos, written in Portuguese, proceeded to juxtapose the arrival of Hernan Cortes in

Mexico with Portuguese activities in South-East Asia. Ottoman chroniclers and historians too concerned themselves with writing about the ‘New World’, with the first of such texts appearing between the years 1570 and 1580 (Subrahmanyam 44)3. world history, was thus not written from a single vantage point, with Galvao writing from the Moluccas, or Tahir Muhammad writing from his specific Mughal location, or indeed Sir Walter Raleigh writing from the viewpoint of England. This attests to a new consciousness of the world, spurred by contact with the Americas, and represents in that sense the first instance of a truly globally connected economy. Examining the origins of world history also highlights the historicity of the concept of the ‘world’ itself, and helps to de-center the account of modernity as originating from a single location in Europe and then spreading to the rest of the world. Indeed, world history in this sense, is at the very

antipodes of the Hegelian notion of Weltgeschiste, which is Europocentric in its thrust and relegates ‘all non-European parts of the world to a secondary (and at times totally insignificant) role in a history of modernity’ (Subrahmanyam 28). I will return to the relationship between

2_{Subrahmanyam also writes of how this period saw sovereign rulers adopt titles such as Jahangir (World-Seizer),}

Shahjahan (World-Emperor) or royal mottos like Non sufficit orbis (The World is not Enough) adopted by Phillip II of Spain (Subrahmanyam 29).

3_{Such histories by far exceeded the scope of the Ottoman domains, with a certain Faridun Beg, historian and}

administrator under the Sultan Mustafa Ali, even commissioning a history of the French kings, from the Merovingian rulers of the Middle ages, to the contemporary Valois ruler, Charles IX.

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modernity as a global and conjectural phenomenon, and the domain of world literature in the second section of this chapter.

For now, however, it is important to acknowledge that Goethe’s remarks continued to provide the impetus for ideas of world literature throughout the 19th and 20th century. The pre-condition of this foundational moment may also lie in the discovery of linguistic continuity between the classical languages of the East (Persian and Sanskrit) with those of the West (Greek and Latin) in what became known as the philological revolution of the 18th_{century (Lewis 336)}

Moreover, both sacred and literary texts from non-western cultures were becoming increasingly available to reading publics in Europe at the same time, causing a “gestalt shift” in culture itself (Lewis 336). This laid the foundation for an “international literary space” that had existed in Europe since Early Modern times, but was now made to accommodate several non-western materials as well (Lewis 336). Goethe himself was reading a Chinese novel at the time of his remarks to Eckermann, who later published their conversations in 1835, thus popularizing the term (Hamilton 1016).

The European literary space, thus altered by the infusion of non-western materials, remained nonetheless bound to the models of its Classical Antiquity. The colonial space

meanwhile was being slowly transformed by massive economic and social upheavals, with both courtly and oral contexts of literary production coming under immense strain and in some cases vanishing entirely. Ever since, classic works from the pre-modern non-west and especially those that came to be considered national epics (such as the Mahabharata or Firdausi’s Shahnameh) have been projected into the space of world literature with all its utopian connotations (Levine

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and Mani 142)4. The privileged methodology that this has given rise to comprises comparing the classical Epics of Ancient Greece with those of the Eastern civilizations, or of making

comparative studies in their poetic and critical traditions to point out commonalities and disjunctions (Zhang 319). This paradigm, however seems to restrict world literature to a static category; a notion that I will seek to problematize in the coming paragraphs.

Levine and Mani without severing themselves from the utopian connotations of Goethean

Weltliteratur seek to provide a trajectory for the evolution of the term across two centuries while

leaving open the question of whether to define world literature as a static category or as a social practice. In this account, after Goethe the second important step is the creation of such

collections as the Universal-Bilbliothek in Leipzig or the Loebe Classical Library in the United States at the turn of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century (Levine and Mani 143)5. The post-war creation of Comparative Literature as a discipline and the inclusion of world literature, as a separate subject in University syllabi across the United States constitute the third major milestone. However, as Damrosch reminds us, even these projects remained excessively beholden to literatures produced in the West, and the expansion was mainly beyond the two or three main Western European countries to those of other European vernaculars (Damrosch, World Literature in a post-literary age 153). The fourth and final flashpoint that marks our present moment according to the authors is 1993, ‘marked by the escalation of migration and the amplification of technological, financial and commercial interdependence between nations’

4_{In the case of the Persian epic Shahnameh, a history of the rulers of pre-islamic Iran written sometime around the}

beginning of the 11th_{century, the trajectory to the status of World Literature has passed through multiple translations}

by both European and Asian Orientalists, beginning with the work of Sir William Jones who first praised it in the same breath as Homer (albeit acknowledging the latter to have no peers among the world’s poets) (Lewis 315).

5_{Theodore Mundt invoked World Literature in the service of German Nationalism and favoured an archival notion}

of the term (deliberately defining I t against the cosmopolitanism of Goethe) that was to be heavily influential in the latter half of the nineteenth century. (D'haen 13)

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(Levine and Mani 144)6. Levine and Mani however do acknowledge a more fluid, democratic and cosmopolitan space connoted by world literature that proves elusive to easy periodization and that has been influential throughout literary history. Such an understanding may be encapsulated in a quote from the Hindi writer Mahadevi Varma, in which he proclaims that7-

On the literary terrain, Kalidasa and Tulasidasa are as much ours as they belong to the whole world, and Shakespeare, Gorki, Tolstoy belong as much to their own nations as they belong to us. . .. They belong to everyone because they belong to each one.

- Mahadevi Varma (Levine and Mani 141)

World literature has however not been theorized solely in these cosmopolitan terms, which might appear naïve when faced with the political and historical context in which it first came to light. Thus, theorists such as Pascal Casanova and Franco Moretti have preferred to see world literature, as closely paralleling the longue duree of the expansion of global capitalism, with a dominant centre in the West, and several more or less distant peripheries. Franco Moretti, subscribing to this view in an influential essay, proposes to approach world literature as a

problem demanding methodological innovation. His solution is what he calls ‘distant reading’ as opposed to the close reading techniques that have held sway in literature departments for the last few decades (Moretti 56). He borrows important intellectual scaffolding for his project from the World Systems theory of Emmanuel Wallerstein along with its notion of centers and peripheries

6_{Novelist and critic Amit Chaudhuri discusses this moment in literary history as one defined by fast travelling,}

world conquering novels, and the coming of age of the practice of handing significant advances to new novelists from countries in the former colonies, such as Arundhati Roy or Vikram Seth (Chaudhuri 115).

7_{It is, in a sense, a notion closer to that defined by the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, or the Soviet Writer Maxim}

Gorky, both of whom appear to have been influenced by Goethe, and for whom the scope of World Literature brought home the ideal of a common and universal Humanity (D'haen 23).

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to describe the dissemination of literary forms across the World8 Distant reading is a quantitative method that aims to provide insights into the evolution of forms, and even more ambitiously to provide ‘laws’ of literary evolution (Moretti 58). The diffusion of the novel from the Anglo-French centre to peripheries in Asia, Africa and Latin America is taken to be a case in point. And since the study involves a multiplicity of literatures in many languages, it depends more upon collation and analysis of multiple scholarly works, rather than the study of the texts themselves by any one individual researcher. World literature in this sense is an unequal transaction, contingent on histories of violent suppression and conquest, but also multiple instances of compromises and collaboration. It is the instances of compromise that are, according to Moretti, revealed in the instability of imported forms, as demonstrated in Robert Schwarz’s study on the novel in Brazil (Moretti 58)9. World literature, as a concept thus becomes the site of conflicts and contestation, of cross-cultural influences and critique, and designates more a space of literary and linguistic circulation than a fixed or growing archive10. The manner in which this diffusion and circulation occurs, is however in Moretti’s account, stabilized according to the flow of capital and the ‘ordered anarchy’ of a world system.

Moving further in the direction of an approach to world literature predicated on the intricacies of literary circulation and reception, David Damrosch offers an ‘elliptical’ model for

8_{World System’s theory seeks to describe a system of ordered anarchy where disparate and conflicting forces reveal}

a consistent and systematic pattern (Arrighi 31).

9_{Another example might be the Reverend Lal Bihari Day’s novel in English ‘Bengal Peasant Life’ whose realism}

couched in turgid dialogue and a near anthropological tone betrays the strange conjunction of form and subject. Twenty years after its publication however, the novel was the subject of a sophisticated critique in the form of another novel, this time written in Oriya, by Fakir Mohan Senapati. Senapati’s novel, Six Acres and a Third, also written in a realist mode, has a narrator whose irony and unreliability however has more in common with

postmodern literary exercises than with 19th_{century realism. Moreover, this work operates as an ideological critique}

whose significance exceeds the ‘purely linguistic or formal’ domain and whose achievement would thus not be apparent in a quantitative study alone (Senapati 23).

10_{Pascale Casanova has proposed another interpretation of a World literary system with a dominant center, and}

peripheries in A World Republic of Letters, which takes Paris as the center of arbitration of literary tastes and movements.

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understanding the concept (Damrosch 14). Damrosch writes that three models exist for interpreting the notion of world literature - the first looks at it as a fixed archive of celebrated works and Great Books which establishes a canon for world literature; the second is an ever-accumulating and ever-growing body of masterpieces that does not exclude contemporary works; and the last is world literature as offering ‘multiple windows on the world’ (Damrosch 9). While Damrosch calls for expanding the canon and modernizing it, he fears that this may lead to a certain degree of ‘presentism’, or bias towards contemporary literature. Instead he proposes a model that is ‘elliptical’ in nature, focusing on how a work is translated and framed in the context of its reception in a new literary and linguistic space, a process he qualifies as

‘transculturation’ (Damrosch 13). Taking as an example two English translations of the same poem by the Chinese poet Bei Dao, Damrosch compares them to highlight the relative inefficacy of a literalist approach, while lauding the other for creatively acknowledging the modernist moorings of the original. However, as Susan Friedman points out, Damrosch’s approach ‘ignores the transnational cultural traffic in the originary sites of creativity’, assuming ‘a certain

cultural/national insularity’ for texts before they enter the elliptical space of world literature (Friedman, World Modernisms, World Literature, and Comparativity 3).

Further departing from the notion that world literature is a static category, Grant

Hamilton posits the notion of entropy as the guiding principle for his understanding of the term. For him the organizing principle informing the creation of canons of national literature leads inevitably to the breakdown of those canons, from which world literature emerges as a ‘leak’ (Hamilton 1020). Carrying forth Julia Kristeva’s insight that books leak and that all texts are quotations of other texts, he posits literature as a ‘multi-dimensional space’, of which cross-cultural influences and dialogue are inescapable attributes. This also implies that the ordering

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literature into national or linguistic categories remains a fraught exercise, producing its own disorderly leaks between them. Indeed, this understanding of world literature puts greater

emphasis on the reader, under whose gaze this cosmopolitan and multi-dimensional space comes into being. It is no longer a static category that we are dealing with, but an entropic process, a verb rather than a noun, or a ‘becoming’ in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms (Hamilton 1028). The process of “leaking” and the porosity and permeability it indicates will become central to my readings in the following two chapter. For now, it sufficient to acknowledge that conceived in this manner, world literature retains a dynamic charge and allows for multiple approaches to emerge in its light. The following section will explore how literary modernism allows us to consider the trans-national flows that agitate all cultural spaces, and to formulate an

understanding of world literature as a space of circulation and convergences across literary/cultural horizons.

II.3 Modernism as World literature

In tracing the evolution of world literature from a utopian proposition, through its static and archival incarnations, to its present understanding as an ever-changing, accommodating and fluid domain, one is urged to seek out literary and textual instances of its crystallization. At first glance, modernism might seem an unlikely candidate for such crystallization, since it has come to be associated with a very specific instance in Anglo-European literary history and with opportunistic appropriations of non-western forms by many of its practitioners. The early internationalism of its proponents however could only have been possible, and deemed productive in a context where the national literary and artistic space was opened up to outside influences, partly through the growing awareness of a possible world literature. Many celebrated

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examples of this internationalism are available to us, whether it is the faux-tribal incantations in the Dadaist poetry of Tristan Tzara, or Ezra pound’s Imagisme inspired by the visual and poetic cultures of the Far-East, or the African masks in Picasso’s paintings, or even the fleeting Hindu symbolism in Eliot’s Wasteland. It is not surprising that looking back at many or all of these examples, one is confronted with a misplaced Orientalism at play in them, or to use a more contemporary jargon, to see them as blatant forms of ‘cultural appropriation’. The African or Asian elements in Modernist art function merely as local raw material, that the European artist must recover from those dark continents in order to invigorate his own art. Pound was criticized in his own time for his lack of deep first-hand knowledge of Chinese while making the

translations that were to later appear in Cathay. These legitimate points of criticism however tell us only one part of the story. Equally important is the growing awareness of artists outside Europe, of European literary forms, in cities such as Calcutta and Shanghai and that “far from representing an essentially Western initiative with its roots in Europe, modernism should be seen as a product of the complex cultural interplay between metropolitan centers across the globe” (Arrowsmith 40).

If we were to further tease out the implications of this ‘cultural interplay’, then it is not only the ‘exoticization’ and ‘orientalism’ of Western artists dealing with Eastern material that comes to our attention, but equally the way in which Eastern artists imbued with a modern sensibility engaged with their own heritage and surroundings. As the writer and critic Amit Chaudhuri points out, the exotic has been ‘a necessary, perhaps indispensable constituent’ of the ‘self-expression and political identity’ of artists outside the imperial centres in the West from the very onset of modernity (Chaudhuri 92). This form of native Orientalism forms in fact the greater part of the project of producing the Orient of which western practitioners and colonial

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agents constitute a minority. The example of Abindranath Tagore, the leading modernist painter in India in the early 20th_{century, not only testifies to this project of producing an Orient that is}

distinct from the West, it equally testifies to the convergence of Western modernism and Japanese art in a metropolitan centre such as Calcutta. As Rupert Arrowsmith tells us, Tagore’s paintings are distinguished not only by his engagement with Indian miniatures but equally with the ‘wash technique’ he had picked up from visiting Japanese artists in the company of scholar and intellectual Okakura Kakuzo (Arrowsmith 28). Kakuzo’s book ‘The Ideals of the East’ proved particularly influential on the British Museum curator Laurence Binyon, who gave lectures on the topic of Pan-Asian Art at the Royal Albert Hall in 1910 (Arrowsmith 29). One of the members of the audience of those lectures in London was none other than Ezra Pound, who was to frequently accompany Binyon to study and observe closely the collection of Japanese Art that Binyon was busy putting together at the British Museum. These were the very viewing sessions from which Pound’s movement of Imagisme was to later emerge. It is thus limiting to regard modernism solely as the product of an insular national literary culture, without taking into account the trans-national encounters and influences that provoked innovation and

transformation of artistic domains during what became known as modernism’s ‘high period’. Similarly, modernist experiments in the early 20th_{century in the domain of the plastic arts}

were incubated through interactions and engagement with modernist artists and intellectuals from Britain’s then colonies in Asia. Often, these engagements of artists from the metropolis began with colonial institutions like the British Museum, before proceeding to a more substantial engagement than leisurely browsing through a museum could allow. The British modernist sculptor Jacob Epstein, largely credited for revolutionizing sculptural aesthetics and techniques, adopted stone carving, combined with motifs from Indian sculpture after being introduced to

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them by the Indian critic A. Coomaraswamy. Indeed, the art historian and scholar Rupert Arrowsmith has qualified the emergence of these modernist movements in early 20th_century

London as a process of metissage with ‘no dominant center or point of origin’ (Arrowsmith, Jacob Epstein- The Indian Connection 748). Indian artists, on the other hand, who adopted forms of cubism to their own visual idiom were seen as having lost their ‘Indian self’ by contemporary western critics and were treated systematically as part of a Picasso-manqué syndrome (Mitter 537). This might be the near inevitable result of models of literary and artistic circulation based on a centre-periphery dynamic. Instead, these avant-garde productions and experiments need to understood as coeval and part of a wider network of cultural interplay across increasingly interconnected metropolitan spaces.

Indeed, another typically modernist form strongly associated with modernism’s high period in Europe, the little magazine has been instrumental in constituting a cosmopolitan and global literary field. As Eric Bulson tells us, the little magazine, far from being a European invention was already flourishing in places as geographically and culturally distant as Argentina and Japan at the same time as in England and the United States (Bulson 2). Discussing the history of the medium in Africa, he notes its affiliations to the pamphlet culture in India as well as the thriving Francophone and Lusophones journals published in various parts of Africa in the 1940s (Bulson 2). Looking at the influence of the little magazine in fostering global modernisms also forms an interesting critique of the implicit book-based bias of Pascale Casanova’s World Systems based La Republique Mondiale des Lettres. The little magazine, in fact allowed writers across cities in Africa to put their work into circulation without having to make the obligatory passage through European capitals11_{. These magazines became a cosmopolitan and travelling}

11_{It’s worth noting that Goethe too seemed have journals and magazines in mind when speaking about Weltliteratur,}

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form, whose content was often intended to shore up regional and trans-national bonds of solidarity, and helped create a local context for modern literature through their critical interventions (Bulson 3).

Black Orpheus, for instance, a magazine published from Lagos in Nigeria between 1957

and 1967 did not aspire to be an ‘avant-garde’ publication, aiming instead at delivering literature and literary criticism to as wide an audience as existed at the time. This does not however

preclude it from being part of global modernism’s legacy, which needs to be calibrated to the local contexts within which each textual or artistic movement arose. Black Orpheus’

Francophone predecessor was Presence Africaine, a literary revue published from Paris, which hosted within its pages such important writers and intellectuals of the Pan-African, Negritude and anti-colonial movements as Aime Cesaire, Leopold Senghour and Franz Fanon. Transition was another significant publication, this time from Uganda, which at its height could boast of a trans-national, and even global readership. Eric Bulson has some perceptive remarks to make about the images and advertisements that appeared within its folds, like a subscription flyer that came up in several issues, depicting a bookstand in a street, with the caption “What kind of magazine do you read?”. Bulson writes of the ‘generic, placeless quality’ of the image,

emphasizing the fact that it could be picked up and read anywhere in the world (Bulson 10). It was images such as these, and advertisements for foreign cars, steel and manufactured

commodities that reflected the content of the magazine itself, both in its unassuming modernity and de facto cosmopolitanism.

In this way, it becomes clear that modernism was forged not in seclusion in London, Paris or Zurich alone, but on the circuits that connected those places and the artists and practitioners inhabiting them, with those in cities further afield such as Calcutta, Lagos and

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Tokyo. It also provides a refreshing break from the notion that unlike their western counterparts, artists elsewhere were linked organically to both their audiences as well as to their pre-modern literary and artistic heritage. Leaving the diffusionist bias of World Systems theory aside, one may be more inclined to look at modernity and modernism as, what the historian of connected histories Sanjay Subrahmanyam calls, “a global and conjectural phenomenon, not a virus that spreads from one place to another” (qtd. in Friedman 433). This means expanding the spatial and temporal boundaries of modernism beyond its ‘High’ period in Western Europe to consider the currents that linked writers, poets and artists in metropolitan centers across the decolonizing world.12 To adopt this view of modernism is to see world literature as a phenomenon of circulation along a chain of highly particular local contexts.

II.4 Conclusion

As Jahan Ramazani has pointed out, poetry with its ‘rhythms and tropes, stanza patterns and generic adaptations’ becomes a propitious site for reading and highlighting trans-national

currents in literature (Ramazani 7). In the following chapter therefore, I will examine a particular context within which Modernist verse was produced, and from which the translations that are to occupy my attention in the third chapter arose. This entails a degree of what Jessica Berman refers to as ‘comparative thick description’, closely attuned to ‘specific local modes [that] co-exist with a dynamic and varied global interconnection’ (qtd. in Friedman 11). Comparative thick description of this kind is aimed at exploring a field of literary and artistic production, and its different lineages, where the historical, local and transnational operate along a single

continuum. My contention here is that this continuum is established and mediated by acts of

12_{In a monograph on the Indian modernist Arun Kolatkar, Laetitia Zecchini stresses the need to ‘abandon the}

historicist teleology… that considers modernism beyond the Euro-American axis and beyond the canonical period of high modernism as parasitic, derivative, belated or manqué’ (Zecchini 15)

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translation, understood as a force of renewal of poetic language and expression. Thus while the story, so to speak, takes place within the bounds of a local context, the local context itself is revealed as inherently multi-lingual and richly irrigated with the cultural flows of a dynamic and interconnected field of world literature.

World literature can therefore be understood as more than just an ever-growing archive of great texts, and becomes a notion that is imbricated in the processes and connections of global modernity. Modernism, as the creative expression of this modernity, thus comes across as locally situated, with multiple iterations across the world, with interesting and illuminating

convergences between them. These local lineages, and multiple points of convergence, can be discerned through a close attention to texts in which both elements find expression. Close reading of this sort, which is attuned both to the local contexts and the global flows that nourish them, can also further our understanding of how literary modernism flourishes in different

periods and locations. In the following chapter I will proceed to a ‘comparative thick description’ of the way translation operates in a multilingual context, and where the usual, hierarchical

relation between language is jettisoned in favour of a lateral and intimate approach. This will also have the benefit of illustrating a different form of relationality between languages and literatures, and between local contexts, and global literary-cultural flows. The act of translation, like world literature itself, can thus cease to be seen an instrumental operation or an archival category, and emerge as an intimate act of creation, amidst a literary field pulsating with multiplicity.

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III. Translation, Mediation and Modernism

III.1 Introduction

In the previous chapter, I discussed world literature as a notion with multiple lineages, and diverse outcomes ranging from a utopian community of letters, to a world system based on hierarchies of power. I then proceeded to inflect the idea, with a fluid and dynamic process, which manifests itself on the global circuits of modernism- in the domain of fine art and

literature, but also in its material and formal aspects, as exemplified by the phenomenon of ‘little magazines’. Modernism, as constituted through circulation and convergences, becomes an instance of the crystallization of the idea of world literature I argue for in this thesis. This is the very opposite of the totalizing framework within which previous incarnations of world literature have operated, and forces one instead to reflect on the multiplicity of its occurrences. However, the multiplicity of literatures, and the diverse modernisms I have sought to highlight can yield a fragmentary and overlapping picture. It is here that the process of translation becomes central, as a mediating force between multiple modernisms, and one which lends vitality to the aesthetic and poetic convergences between them.

Thus, in the following pages, I will explore the way in which translations mediate the formation of a fluid and dynamic domain of world literature, and help recover and inject earlier modernisms onto this fluid domain. Different models of translation, and their relation to world literature exist for this purpose, from Emily Apter’s notion of the ‘untranslatable’, rooted in European philosophy and cultural history, to David Damrosch’s pragmatic approach based on the transfer between ‘home’ and ‘receiving’ cultures. Both approaches add to our understanding of ‘translatability’ as the invisible authority upon which claims to world literature rest. What I have set out to examine however, in this thesis, is how a body of verses, from a highly specific

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and ancient context, enters the dynamic circuits of world literature. In order to understand this central question, and explore it in all its fecundity, it becomes imperative to examine the literary lineage from which these body of verses first arose. Consequently, this becomes a question of understanding the specific role of translation in ‘Indian’ literary history, and its reformulation and appropriation by modernists working in the latter half of the 20th century. Such a move, will allow me to explore a specific literary context, and see how its problematizes and alters the models of translation mentioned above.

The first section will thus be a brief survey of the ethos of translation in the vernacular languages of South Asia. It will provide an account of what the relation between different languages, and between old tropes and new poets has been, in a space rife with multilingualism. In the second and third sections I will examine how this process was re-appropriated by Indian modernists writing in English in the second half of the twentieth century. These include the late bi-lingual poet Arun Kolatkar, whose translations of medieval and early modern Marathi poets, complement his intensely tactile and revelatory verse about the modern metropolis of Bombay. In the last section I will proceed to examine a more recent book of translations by A.K Mehrotra, the author/translator of the object of this thesis, of the medieval North Indian poet-saint Kabir. In both instances, I will highlight the cosmopolitan, world literary ethos that they bring to their translations, and show how it resonates with and re-vitalizes the history and aesthetic of the original verse. This will also set the ground for my close readings in the last chapter, by illustrating the kind of intimate mediation between divergent poetic traditions that these translations operate.

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III.2 Translation’s Multiple Lineages

The role of translation in the ‘worlding’ of literature has been a fundamental one. The idea of

Weltliteratur, that emerged in Europe with Goethe’s declaration proceeded directly from the

increased availability of translated works, at a time when the “age of comparison” was in its ascendancy. The discovery of the linguistic filiations between Greek, Latin, Sanskrit and Persian fostered an enthusiasm for the common roots of ‘Indo-European’ culture, and both philology and linguistics became highly comparative disciplines. The idea of a ‘pure’ language, semantic equivalence, and the renewed hope of emerging from the ‘post-babel crisis’ of humanity were all a direct result of this historical conjuncture. However, while works of translation were rarely accorded a place in the various national literatures of Europe, and thus never had the prestige of the ‘originals’, the very possibility of a world literature, remained predicated on translations.

Does world literature then remain a mere placeholder term for an increased appetite in some parts of the world, for easily accessible translations of ‘world classics’ and ‘great books’? This is a notion that has been criticized by Emily Apter in her polemically titled work, ‘Against World

Literature: On the politics of untranslatability’. She refers to the static and archival notion of

world literature, via Derrida, as an ‘encyclopedic and totalizing project’, and opposes to such a project, the concept of the ‘untranslatable’ (Apter 48). The untranslatable in her exposition, is any word that escapes semantic equivalence in another language, and thus helps expose, the rigid boundaries, and ‘checkpoints’ that underlie any such ‘totalizing’ project. Apter’s critical use of the term ‘untranslatable’ however is rooted in western literary history and criticism (where nearly all her examples are located), and this has serious implications for her claims.

It is important to note that in the process of western canon formation, works of translation remained stigmatized for coming ‘after the original’. The relation of the translation, to its

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original, was chronologically determined, and the ‘temporal subsequentiality’ of translated works, ‘[was] held as a proof of diminution of their literary authenticity’ (Devy 402).From this perspective, any canon of world literature, predicated on translations, remains haunted by its ‘ontological uncertainty’, and is perceived more as ‘an intrusion (if sometimes pleasurable intrusion)’ in discreet national literatures (Devy 402). But, world literature, if it needs to substantiate itself as a category, needs to accommodate, both theoretically and institutionally, a multiplicity of ansatzpunkts. This will have the benefit of tending it away from a merely canonical or ‘encyclopedic’ project, to one where the outward, entropic process of ‘leaks’ between different literatures is adequately theorized.

In a more multilingual literary culture, such as India’s, where the porosity of languages has precipitated canon formation, the practice of translation can have a very different role and status. According to the literary historian and critic G.N Devy, Indian literary history does not suffer from the ‘metaphysics of origins’ that places a translation as inevitably subsequent to, and therefore merely derivative of the ‘original’ (Devy 402). Translation, in this context, has always been a matter of creation, and in fact the ‘origins’ of literature in several modern Indian

languages can be traced to acts of translation13. Several canonical figures in Indian literary history have been bi-lingual writers, who produced bodies of work in two or more languages. For instance, in the Telugu tradition of South India, a story regarding the fourteenth century poet Srinatha is particularly revelatory about the relation of translations to their ‘originals’.

13_{For an account of the canon formation, and the vernacularizing processes in South Asia, refer to the work of G.N}

Devy (After Amnesia) and Sheldon Pollock (Language of the Gods in the World of Men). Translations from Sanskrit often provided breakthroughs in the creation of literary cultures in several modern Indian languages. Indeed, in several ways this is true of European literary history, just consider Chaucer, whose Canterbury Tales were partly an exercise in emulating Boccaccio, or the so-called Celtic revival in the late 18th_{century, spurred by Macpherson’s}

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Sometime in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, Srinatha had embarked upon the task of translating the Sanskrit epic, Mahabharata, into his native Telugu diction. An oral legend about Srinatha’s Telugu ‘translation’, mocks the young poet for having lifted verses wholesale from the Sanskrit original, adding only the occasional ‘Telugu case-endings- du, mu, vu and lu’ to them (Rao and Shulman 27). However, as Shulman and Narayan Rao remind us, the tale which seems to take the poet to task for a lack of originality, is interesting precisely because it misses ‘the subtleties of Srinatha’s Sanskritizing techniques, [which are] often deeply transformative of tone despite [the] surface impression of wholesale, almost mechanical

transposition’ (Rao and Shulman 29). Compared to the Sanskrit ‘original’, the protagonists of Srinatha’s rendition are endowed with astonishingly new levels of interiority, self-reflexivity and emotional complexity14. While the oral legend about Srinatha presupposes a vertical,

chronological relation between the Sanskrit original and its Telugu translation, the poet himself has operated a lateral relation between the two. Translation becomes a process of lateral

mediation, between a dominant, cosmopolitan language and a vernacular, and between epochs and cultural contexts, that tend often to overlap in a multilingual literary culture15.

The co-authors of the above study have also produced a series of beautiful translations into English of other early-modern literary texts in Telugu. Shulman and Narayana Rao’s English translations such as The Story of Manu and The Demon’s Daughter are acts of recovery of a

14_{Another significant example would be the Persian ‘translation’ of the Sanskrit tale of Nal and Daman, that}

narrates the fraught romance between the king Nal, who loses his kingdom and is exiled with his wife Daman in the forest, to return triumphantly at the end of the tale. The ‘original’ tale which frames the Mahabharata was re-told at the court of the Mughal Emperor Akbar, by his poet-laureate Abu’l Faizi, who used it to reflect upon notions of kingship, and the tension between love (ishq) given to excesses and the intellect (aql) which maintains equilibrium at all costs; a motif that was itself borrowed by Islamic philosophy from a much older strain of Hellenistic

provenance (Subrahmanyam and Alam 109).

15_{For an account of the vernacularizing process in India, refer to Sheldon Pollock’s illuminating study of the}

Cosmopolitan Vernacular, where a cosmopolitan space for literary ‘circulation defined and structured the local literary and cultural imagination’ (Pollock, The Cosmopolitan Vernacular 37).

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vernacular modernity, couched in mythological tropes. Indeed, it is important to consider these texts, because they give us glimpses of an incipient modernity that is not haunted by the ‘metaphysics of origins’, or entirely beholden to ideas of the ‘individual genius’ that tend to privilege the ‘original’ work over its subsequent translation16. This is the dimension of translation that Apter’s critique misses by treating it as merely a question of finding semantic equivalences between two separate languages. Instead translation, in this context, works to ‘transform, re-vitalize and restate the original’, and as the Hindi word anuvaad suggests, is more a re-telling than a mere transfer of content (Devy 405).

The English language, once it entered India, underwent a similar process in which translations became crucial to its indegnization as a language of cultural and literary production. A.K Mehrotra points to a remarkable book, A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields published in 19th century Calcutta, which combines within its pages, English translations of French poets, from Joachim du Bellay to Baudelaire, as well as translations from the Sanskrit Upanishads. The author of this book was a nineteen year old girl called Toru Dutt, and her translations from the French were greeted as highly accomplished renditions. Here is her translation of Bellay’s celebrated invocation of his native town, praised in comparison to the classical glory of Rome-

Dearer to me that home my grandsires built,

Than Roman palaces with pillars brave,

16_{Susan Friedman has pointed out in her study of ‘Planetary Modernisms’ that modernity need not be reductively}

defined as a series of developments confined to a narrow stretch of land in Europe in the 16th_{or 17}th_centuries.

Instead she proposes to approach modernity as ‘multiple, contradictory, inter-connected, polycentric and recurrent for millennia across the globe’ (Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time 4). Shulman in reference to his colleague Velceru Narayana Rao’s work on 16th_{century Telugu and Tamil literatures}

speaks of a ‘concept of the autonomous, subjective individual’ emerging quite organically, and without western intervention in this period, along with ‘a vogue for scepticism and realism…the appearance of a full-throated, unfettered female voice…and a concept of nature as a rule-bound domain, separate from the human and amenable to disciplined observation and extrapolation’. Invalid source specified..

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Dearer those roofs of slate than marble gilt, Dearer my Loire than Tiber’s sacred wave, Dearer my Lyre than the Palatine

And oh how dear, thou climate Angevine!

- (Dutt 1)

This is an interesting choice of verse with which to open Dutt’s collection, since Bellay represents, according to Pascale Casanova, the foundational moment for French literature, against ‘the empire of Latin’ (qtd. in Orsini 324). Its translation into English, on the other hand, represents an important moment in the process of vernacularizing English in India, the process of making English, into an Indian language (Mehrotra 431). What is equally remarkable, is that this process occurred through Dutt simultaneously translating works from a European literary

tradition as well as the classical Indian one. In such a book, world literature manifests itself through the close proximity of different literary universes, brought together, through overlapping English translations of French and Sanskrit verse. It also attests to the cosmopolitanism of

growing cities such as Calcutta, whose cultural life was irrigated by a variety of streams, as languages, literatures, cultures and peoples crossed paths in its midst.

Indeed, circulation is almost intrinsic to the word translation, which like metaphor, is etymologically linked to ideas of displacement, moving over, and of putting across (Apter 53). This can be the movement of meaning from one language to another, or of two literary universes coming together within a single book, or equally the movement of a translated text, from its original source, to a foreign reading public. As I have discussed in the previous chapter, David Damrosch has promulgated an idea of world literature based on the last model, as occurring on

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the ellipsis between a text’s source and receiving culture (Damrosch, What could a message mean to a cloud? Kalidasa travels west 14). In a text titled ‘Reading Kalidasa in the West’, Damrosch considers Leonard Nathan’s English rendition of the Sanskrit poem Meghaduta (the cloud messenger), and asks how a reader with little knowledge of a text’s original language, or cultural context can receive such a work? Damrosch’s answer is interesting and revelatory, for he commends the useful introduction and footnotes in this edition, but also remarks, that to a reader in the West, certain verses are bound to remind her of texts in her own literary-cultural universe. Thus an invocation of lovers’ separation in Kalidasa’s poem, reminds Damrosch of a sixteenth century English verse; it is equally evocative to him of a twentieth century Argentinian poem by Alejandra Pizarnik (Damrosch, What could a message mean to a cloud? Kalidasa travels west 51)

Thus a text’s journey into another culture, and language, can highlight its links to other texts that inhabit that culture. Although based on a certain model of circulation, Damrosch’s pragmatic distinction between the source and target cultures, has the disadvantage of obscuring a fact already evident in Toru Dutt’s 19th_{century translations. Texts such as A Sheaf Gleaned in}

French Fields, demonstrate that mere decades after the introduction of the English language into

the sub-continent, writers had begun to notice affiliations between ‘their’ classical heritage, and poetry from places further afield, such as France. It is not therefore, merely a question of Western readers becoming alert to such connections, but of translators and writers from the ‘source culture’ itself, being attuned to a cosmopolitan world of literary influences, and then incorporating these influences into their translations. World literature then starts to appear as a practice and a process, that operates across ‘source’ and ‘target’ cultures, slowly crystallizing in literary texts. Modernism, with its multiple iterations in various metropolitan and provincial

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locations, its trans-national horizons and local lineages, becomes a suitable illustration of the literary-textual dynamism I have argue for here. Thus, in the following two sections, I will move to specific examples of how modernism, translation and circulation have inflected local lineages with a world literary ethos, and the writerly and poetic practices that have made this inflection possible.

III.3 Bhakti, Translation and Modernism

The decades immediately after Independence, saw an outpouring of literary and artistic activity in the large, metropolitan centres of India. Poets, writers, artists and film-makers came together to form new modes of expression, free from the conflictual dialectics of foreign

imperialism and anti-colonial nationalism. As Laetitia Zecchini has documented, this period also saw the city’s streets literally inundated with a variety of cheap paperbacks and a flurry of translations that brought world literature home in unprecedented numbers (Zecchini 34). A new generation of writers began forming small presses, and counter-cultural little magazines with names like Damn you: A Magazine of the Arts, founded by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra or Shabda, which was started by the bi-lingual poet and translator, Dilip Chitre. These little magazines, and the carefully crafted editions of poetry books, brought out by small presses, circulated liberally among the city’s artistic set, and provided a cosmopolitan and experimental platform for new voices in poetry and literature. Moreover, a close proximity between visual artists and writers was taking shape in this period, around city institutions such as the Jehangir Art gallery, and the J.J school of Arts, at the height of their activity and influence then (and fallen into an

unproductive stupor since) (Zecchini 37). Soon, some of these poets turned to what scholars have recently referred to as ‘the pre-1500 modernisms’ in vernacular languages, and began translating

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them into the modernist idiom forged mainly amidst the currents of Anglophone and Francophone modernism.

i. Arun Kolatkar: A Modernist Devotion

Arun Kolatkar, was one of the most original voices of Indian poetry in English in the 20th century, and also produced a separate, if sometimes overlapping, body of work in his mother tongue, Marathi. Kolatkar’s poetry displays an extreme sensitivity to the realm of sensible experience and the concrete, taking its cue from a variety of Anglo-American modernists such as Pound and William Carlos William, but also French poets like Tristan Tzara, Baudelaire and Guillaume Apollinaire. Kolatkar went on to produce a dazzling series of flaneur-like

explorations of his adopted home, Bombay, and was a poet deeply attuned to the material life of the modern metropolis and its various street-wise characters. Kolatkar’s poetry crosses several thresholds, between the public and the private, the local and the trans-national, but also those of language and idiom. His poetry can at one moment produce perambulations through city streets with poetic techniques reminiscent of Apollinaire’s Zone and alight upon a Dadaist breakdown of language, before suddenly infusing the verve and zest of Bombay slang into the verse itself. Concepts such as ‘hybridity’, typically associated with post-colonial situations, can only provide a faltering description of Kolatkar’s poetry, for the porosity of linguistic, national and communal barriers is a given in his work. The adoption and invention of this new kind of poetic language for writing about ‘Indian subjects’ also went into the creation of translations of medieval devotional or bhakti poetry.

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Among the abiding themes of the vast corpus of bhakti poetry is the porosity and

permeability of barriers- between languages, genders, castes and between the human and the divine (Zecchini 270). Indeed, even the author is not a self-contained entity within this corpus, as hundreds of poems continue to be attributed to a particular poet, centuries after his or her death (Hawley 274)17. Kolatkar who translated the poems of Janabai, Namdeo, Eknath, and most prominently Tukaram, seemed to want to ‘take possession’ of their verse through his

translations, rather than simply transfer their content from one language to another. Kolatkar versifies his idea of translation in a poem sequence called ‘Making love to a poem’,

reconstructed from his notes by his friend and editor A.K Mehrotra-

Translating a poem is like making love/ having an affair Making love to a poem/ with the body of another language […]

Getting to know the poem carnally gaining carnal knowledge

- (Kolatkar 345)

Gayatri Spivak in recounting her experience of translating an 18th_{century Bengali poet}

into English, refers to the task of the translator as ‘surrendering’ to the original, and of developing an ‘intimate’ relation with its specific rhetorical modes (Spivak, The Politics of Translation 183). The above lines by Kolatkar are a literary acting out of this lateral, intimate relationship he bore with the bhakti poets he translated. Indeed, intimacy and a sense of

17_{The point of the author’s signature in a poem, often conveyed through recurring tropes or the simple addition of a}

‘so and so says’ at any point in the verse, is to lend it the authority of a word that arises out of a personal experience associated with the poet’s life

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affectionate longing are abiding elements of bhakti poetry with the deity often addressed in teasing, hectoring and endearing terms. Kolatkar equally sensed a filiation between his favourite

bhakti poets, and the American folk blues singers he listened to so enthusiastically since both

represented a popular voice of poetry, and whose songs showed a similar degree of elasticity and adaptability as they passed from one singer to the other (Zecchini 37). One may note the

distinctly bluesy diction in his translation of a Janabai song, addressed to the deity - God my darling

do me a favour and kill my mother-in-law I will be lonely when she is gone

but you will be a good god won’t you and kill my father-in-law’

- (Kolatkar 301).

This desire to liberate oneself from family and societal ties, so current in the bhakti corpus, must have also reminded Kolatkar of the Beatniks who were his contemporaries, for he translates a Tukaram poem as- ‘We are the enduring bums. / Thieves regard us with consternation.’, which is quite possibly a reference to Jack Kerouac’s, The Dharma Bums, published in 1958(Kolatkar 310). Elsewhere, Tukaram, singing in Kolatkar’s voice repeats the lamentation of the itinerant bard-

They call him idle, a madman. He becomes a problem for everyone.

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He’s usually found in deserted places. - (Kolatkar 304)

The poems, apart from deriding social hierarchies, and the encumbrance of family life, strive to present a vision of the divine as immanent to daily life and to the most mundane of situations. This is a quality that can be found in Kolatkar’s own poems, where dung beetles, dogs, cracked tiles and old bicycle tyres are recycled, and transfigured into irate, restless, mobile and joyous entities. In one translation of a poem by the female saint-poet Janabai, the immanence of the divine is expressed through stanzas devoid of capitalisation and very little punctuation, in a style reminiscent of E.E cummings-

i eat god I drink god I sleep on god god is here god is there void is not devoid of god jani says: god is within god is without and moreover there’s god to spare.

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- (Kolatkar 299)

As noted earlier, Kolatkar’s poems about the city of Bombay, and its surrounding

countryside make a great use of the objects and creatures that proliferate everyday life. Ants, scorpions, kites, begging bowls, drums, bullock carts, stone arches and rubbish vans, part of his inventory as a poet, recur in his bhakti translations, slightly altered, but restating the rapturous quality of the mundane. Thus, in a poem by Tukaram, translated as ‘wonder of wonders’, we are treated to a ‘temple windblown’ where ‘the steeple shot across heaven/ the foundation fled/ to the recesses of hell/and the wall wandered/ from door to door’ (Kolatkar 303). Matter and the seemingly stable contours of objects, take on a life of their own, unhinged from their stable moorings, to wander ‘from door to door’ as it were. In a surprising way, the very sensibility that drove Kolatkar’s poetic explorations and transfigurations of the urban, is to be found in the

bhakti insistence on capturing and transforming the realm of sensible experience, expressed in

lines such as ‘Form/is out of place’, or ‘Sugar transcends/The sugarcane’ (Kolatkar 320). The following stanzas of Tukaram, translated by Kolatkar, seem to restate the poetic ethos of a rapturous view of the quotidian -

How singular Pandurang Are all things!

The world belongs To no one in particular.

We are all

Bejewelled, bespangled. Each one of us sparkles

The Absent Traveler: World Literature as Intimacy

Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam

Nachiket Joshi

The Absent Traveller: World Literature as Intimacy

Table of Contents