Translating Ann Jäderlund on the Ghats of the Narmada

“A drop of blood that the soul itself has created.”[i]

This could well be the first sentence that Gregor Samsa spoke to his family. Soon after he turned into a gigantic insect. And we, somehow, are always the family that understands nothing when he speaks to us – our very own brother, our son. To us, who have often misused language to say things without any shadows. We have used language, and specific words, to make ourselves congruent with the world. To get things done. To submit our hours to empty chatter. To stifle what could have been left to breathe and cascade into the insect and the flower that we are contiguous with. Both inside and outside. “T h e r e  i  s  n o  o b s t a c l e. N o t h i n g.”[ii] And still, we want our premises restored to us without an ‘insect brother’. We sweep our house clean of his body, and find peace in an all too human household. “The world feels nothing.”[iii]

But does he, the Samsa thing, himself understand what he says – to us, or perhaps, to himself?

When (and where) the family is such,  crawling  from room to room, Gregor  goes on to speak what perhaps he himself does not understand. What has possibly come over him? This insect with human kin that he continues to recognize? As he still shares the space with the family, he must speak to them. It’s an enormous burden (and manic joy) to always have to speak, with connections that run deeper and darker than you can even begin to guess. “I think with my head dark.”[iv]

I have been given this head, and I misuse it. I look in the direction of Ann’s way of writing. It has always been there. Whereas she herself does nothing except move from room to room throughout the length and breadth of the day, pieces of paper in hand. She misplaces them – memory is not something she counts on. She seems to have forgotten a lot of things, erased others, and has sucked out the weight of words, and turned them unbearably light. Perhaps because the thought is always unfettered. (“I never learn a thing.”[v]) She is ‘supposed to be’ some kind of a poet who stirs up passions that have no name. Passions about herself, about the person she seems to be: someone in passion with the natural world and who speaks helplessly like an object placed at the heart of it. Among the poets who are vulnerable to her, skinlessly exposed to her, who are not even able to read her, she is someone who reminds them of one of the “girls” in her line “girls water purple violets.”[vi] No matter how much you want to say you’re reminded of a pagan deity, you do not say it. (Even if you think deities are nothing but things that have lost control.) All the same it’s almost embarrassing to admit that she can assume just about any form in your imagination.

*

She is everywhere. All over the place. And yet, nobody (you and the other poets) is able to read her, because it isn’t possible to read Ann Jäderlund:

Remain in the condition where everything streams. Streams and breathes.

A  w e a k

w e a k  p i n k  c o l o r .  H u m a n  b r e a t h.  H u m a n  c o l o r.

Wait and see what time can do.

W a i t  a n d  s e e ?  W a i t  a n d  w a i t ?  Wait and bend?[vii]

A “weak pink color” cannot read. You go sit in your patch of lean forest, fleeing from all this, from being pursued by an utter lack of meaning reflecting endlessly in facing mirrors. An utter lack of meaning or an excess of it? This is a kind of writing in which both can mean the same thing. Once you’re in this lean forest, she is there too. She is literally all over the place here too. You look back to see what is rattling behind your shoulders. A chameleon is descending a dry palash[viii] tree, and scurries through the fallen bamboo leaves. Everything is trying to speak. How much can you read? She is not responsible for all this, for the chameleon and all of it. She hasn’t created it (O, yes she has). In the face of what she has been given to write, she herself is a “weak pink color.”

You almost see her thin skin, this “weak pink color”, a web of blue veins. The skin shivers, always, while “a girl pours clean water over herself throughout her days.”[ix] Staffan Söderblom swears you have to believe she is not being fussy. She walks through the heavy breeze of the Indian Ocean in a landscape dotted with coconuts. Everything tries to kill her skin in the Indian subcontinent. The mosquitoes have raised huge red monuments where they bit her and flew away. The noise makes her completely forget her relationship with the Swedish language. Panic grips her as her English improves during attempts at translation and conversation. “There are very few words in Swedish,” she says, “The meanings are always floating. Words are not completely defined as they are in English. English has so many words. And yet when you look for the right word to replace the Swedish, the English doesn’t have it… Let us destroy the English language between us.”[x] Besides, her clothes are never right here in India. The ones she brought with her from Sweden don’t translate well in Kerala. She is trying Eva’s. Clad in a loose white cotton dress her skin thanks Eva Runefelt for the time being. When she returns to Sweden she realizes she has to take care of someone Ann begins to write again moving from room to room while taking care. She takes very good care. “The pupils are sucked s t r a ig h t  i  n  t o t h e b r a in\F r o m b e h i n d. Like living butterflies. Next to my son.”[xi]

“The calm that comes out of the pain.”[xii]

*

I sit. I sit in my lean forest overlooking a lean river. An empty river that still meanders under my eyes. The butterfly is yellow today. The hibiscus red. Soon enough the yellow flits to the red hole. I want to go back home and paint.

*

Ann demands rituals before you can work one of her lines into a language unbelievably removed from her own language(s). It won’t help me much to rue the differences between languages, point out words that are not verbs in my language, but are key verbs\words in this worldview of Ann’s that I have been pulling over to my side of the wall. “Wait” is one such word. But then there is no end to this exercise. I could tell you that English can’t compete with Hindi in supplying layers and layers of synonyms that will hug Ann in every possible way. Hindi is “a hungry violet”[xiii] that will suck the pupils out of sister or mother languages and you can’t even begin to count their numbers. The music in some literary texts in Hindi is almost always an outcome of the writers’ ability to fall to pieces and write like a “weak pink color”. It’s a kind of “nirguni”[xiv] writing, a vaporous dilution of the raw substance, written with the ruins of languages, and often coming out of mouths that have hardly spoken any English. And yet, in Hindi, you can’t say-“this kind of writing”. It’s not a kind of writing or a trend but individual voices; each blowing, in different ways, the fuse of language and ‘received’ thought in poetry. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that when they look around themselves, these writers who are “weak pink color” don’t even let on that they write. The secret of their writing is revealed only to the true seeker. They slink into their holes and stay put there. If this allows us to come back to Ann, let me say this: this way of writing has nothing much to do with the thinking in France. But it has always been in existence in India, in  texts of antiquity, in the finest of devotional poetry and music and even in a potter’s child who will hold the pot so weirdly over the wheel that a never-before-seen shape seems to emerge.

I am almost beginning to cry now. Besides the fact that Ann’s poetry ripped me apart when I first came across it through my friend Lars Hermansson, I was also deeply moved by the place she occupies in Sweden, especially among poets who are “weak pink color”. One of her readers referred to her as “the queen of Swedish poetry”. The German translator Paul Berf had to smooth down his gooseflesh when I asked him if he had tried translating Ann into German. And no, he didn’t dare. I’ve never seen anyone blushing while talking of poetry, but Berf did. I’m almost in tears thinking that in Hindi I personally know at least one poet who could have easily (or with great difficulty!) occupied a similar position here. Given the scenario in which there are clandestine poets who never stand in the light, and my own strange place in this scenario, it was impossible for me to resist Ann Jäderlund’s poetry. Ann is just the poet to be here if only to let us see how close to these poems we already are. And in doing so, to make some room, a home in my language for other poets; other, unknown, clandestine poets.

*

She drives me to the forest and demands that I sit and let my “eyes dissolve in the reeds”.[xv] You almost don’t believe that a poetry that is so still that you can hear your own eyelashes blink can make you wander from room to room, to the forest room, the river room where you should sit down and wait. You don’t believe that a source – this poetry – that instills such stillness can make you flit from flower to flower, in search of a way that does not mess with the sound of the poet’s voice. (The flower-pecker is so violent that the flower falls to the ground when the beak is pecking at it. She settles on another, and so on quickly from one to the other as she loses them one after the other.) I have to be quiet and yet be quick enough to be able to stream along with the poet I am visiting. And try not to drop any of the flowers. She wakes up just before going to her summerhouse and writes to me; exactly the time I am visiting her poems. Her letter will be there when I go home from here. And suddenly in the wake of her writing to me, I am besieged by communications from other poets who have helped me read her poems. It’s almost eerie that all of us should gravitate towards one another within moments and turn into this huge flower once again. And as the Ann effect trickles like a color under the surfaces, it finally dawns on me that here it is, at last, here’s the red I could paint with. This hibiscus[xvi] that looms into view when I have almost lost my head to Ann! The color that won’t hurt the river even if I go wash my brushes in it.

How much can a poet give to another?

*

When you have painted for a few hours, your hands can think a little, think Ann and become Ann little by little. To the extent that she takes birth in your underbelly as you also begin to move, from room to room. Alternating between painting, and breathing through one of her lines. This flute made of air that you’ve been given to play on for a few moments of your life. But translating Ann is no work. You think there is yet another step to the staircase. You lift your foot to descend it. But there is no step. You limber your muscles to lift a box. And it is empty. You go to a master and announce that you’ve brought nothing. The master asks you politely to go leave it outside.

The only hard work involved here is this (final?) act of leaving it all outside. Perhaps this is what Staffan Söderblom means when he says that when he heard Ann’s poems for the first time, even though he could not grasp them, he realized how irrelevant his own attempts at poetic craft were. This is not strictly true, however. It’s only a poet’s deep humility that he is willing to bend like grass when a breeze but begins to speak to him. He is already somewhere; where his poem, the one he is writing, becomes “the dead man’s laughter”.[xvii]

Ann doesn’t make anyone irrelevant. Neither Staffan nor me; as a poet and a painter. On the contrary, she just stands there without knowing it in the least that she will restore to you your own mirror albeit cracked beyond recognition. (“I have been working on the form of the poem – I don’t know why I’m doing it – as it is disappearing.”[xviii]) It is true that you get high on the cracks, once you have seen them. “Everything is broken down. And then appears.”[xix] Do you know what you could do? You could perhaps continue to write the way you do. For this is what you have been given to do. Write and even paint Ann Jäderlund in your own language(s) and colors.

But, now, you can also try and see your own writing in the cracked surface(s). You can hold your painting over this mirror and see.

This is a make-do thought, however. You have lost all ground beneath your feet, and you’re trying to make something up where a huge vacuum has appeared in your days as a poet and a painter. You wanted to bring her over to your climate, where she would hurt you even more, over to your part of the earth where you hoped she would cut a deep hole into a sort of indifference to “weak pink color.” (“To treat / each other as. One wishes that / Everyone should treat each other. / Almost in pieces.”[xx]) There is nothing new about her. She has always existed in thoughts that tend to cancel each other out. But she has never been seen before in configurations that are her thumbprints and hers alone. Here, much more than anywhere else, perhaps. Here, where I sit and try to translate her and find out how well I’ve known her all along. I had forgotten her, but only somewhat.

For long periods of time, I sat exposed to the passage of time as it pulverized me. She (does she ever forget herself too?) finds herself over and over again as she sits sliding a slim volume of the Upanishads into her hands. There is not much need to read. To think yourself into innocence. All of Ingmar Bergman rustles up layers of deep images in your mind. They stay there and drip into your inner lakes and send leaves falling into the crevices of your mind when it can’t hold itself together. Ingmar can appear just anywhere where his own eye has been. But not so with Ann. Barring a few watermarks that shine with dazzling sensuousness, there is almost nothing that will come to your eyes when you try and conjure one of her lines. Is this poetry then? Is this writing? Does she not, instead, unwrite those heavy things that have piled up all around us and have dragged us down into despair?

D o  n o t  t w i s t  t h e  h e a d.

When yellow dripping flowers are falling. And everything outside seems to breathe.

Is it not there then? Is it n o t  t h e n

i n  i t ?[xxi]

*

The place where I live is a ghat on the river Narmada. We moved here from up North because the river beckoned us to its destiny. To a water that has a memory of all that it has been. The turtles have been here too, but are gone now, like other things, many other things. There’s no rosary to tell the names of those who are gone from the water; and from all that skirted and surrounded it. Like a few of our friends, we have been drawn to this great body of water that is dying, or is perhaps dead, but it’s not for us to say it. We are not, yet, ready with our requiems[xxii], and perhaps will never be. When we utter the name of this river, it still sends a shiver through our bones. You who have never been here have heard what has befallen this mighty river. But on greeting the river and departing from it, folks here still touch their ears and ask to be forgiven. Just as some forest dwellers ask the herb to forgive them for having picked it from among living things. It was a common sight here, an everyday occurrence, to come across the sort of people who ask the plants to forgive them. Those plants have been here too, reflected in the water, the memory of whose images the water still holds for us.

There was a time, when in the evenings, we all used to make diyas from wheat flour and set cotton wicks on them. These home-made lamps floating during the dusk hours fed a lot of life in the river. The lamps nowadays are made from substances one refrains from naming in a text like this. The cotton clothing of the devotees has been replaced by fabric that does not breathe.

If a devotee is not able to come to the river, s\he may perform the rituals; do her ablutions, with a symbolic presence of the waters. A pot, a jar, or a bottle of the water you have brought from the river. But of late, there have been devotees who sit on the very bank of the river with a bottle placed in front. I don’t know if this is their death-song for the river or my blindness or if it is altogether something else. But they still come here from far away, worshippers of Lord Shiva, carrying sacred water from hundreds of miles on foot, to pour into another contour of the river. Into this daughter of the Lord who has now come to grief.

The Lord – Shiva – father of this river/mother goddess: his body is made of the letters of the alphabet I write with. The whole body – from head to foot, including the crescent moon (arguably standing for half a nasal sound[xxiii]). The left ear is the long u, the right the short one. The  i sounds are the eyes, and so on all the way down, with compound letters where the body gets a bit complicated:

गुलाब समुद्र को अपनी लाल पङ्खुडियों से आहत करना चाहता है

is one line by Ann in this body-script, the Devanagri. I’d like to be able to say that though my language may be far removed from Ann’s, too far removed even to make some of her poems possible in it, yet the poems could not have found a more appropriate script in translation. The poems, like this water here, have a memory of things once reflected in them, even when they have come this far. I pour them into another contour of the river .

Yes, the contours of the empty river still take your breath away, though much of the forest is lost along the banks; hungry trucks dig and even take the river sand away. During the monsoons the river “comes”, as they say, threatening to submerge living habitat. The mother will also “go” if she has come, and bring relief to low lying areas where many people are forced to live. But now the comings and the goings of the river are strange indeed. She is no longer free. And will kill her human children and buffalo children with unpredictable fury, fettered as she is. Earlier they knew when to watch out. Now human hands that control the flow, and manipulate all those turbines and reservoirs, don’t care what gets washed away. During river festivals people get swept away when the water is released to save a concrete structure. No warnings are issued, no evacuation takes place.

But look north, across the river, and the Vindhya ranges seen here from my window cling to their meager forest standing amid rocks of sculpturesque beauty. And in walk my children making me give up my window seat. They come, just to say that they have caught nine coconuts in the river. It’s Sattu Amavasya[xxiv] when the moon disappears and seven kinds of roasted grains are ground together to be turned into a drink for the hot season. But more than that today is the day when the sattu is shared with others, given in alms. Ablution in the river before grinding and giving is mandatory.

During the nine days of Durga Pooja, just a few days ago, women came chanting to the river with pots of growing wheat on their heads. These vegetation rituals of the immersion of wheat are among the most beautiful in the world. The chanting is very quiet and rhythmic, and the ritual erases many noises that come up in the life around an Indian river. But you can still hear the speech of the cricket, and the song of the golden oriole.

I am telling you all this because I can’t help doing this. I would like to show you the place where I have brought your poet Ann Jäderlund. I have seen the place where she lives, I have moved along with her from room to room in her living quarters, sat with her and tried to get some shadows of her cast on my Hindi. Just as I have done all this, I’d like to show you a patch of the earth where she acquires a new life, almost an incarnation, if you will allow me to say it. Having moved close to the river, I can no longer paint with tube colors without feelings of deep pain, of hurting the water more than ever before. These are not colors but things produced to catch my eye as a painter. In one of my Ann-blackouts of the head, I happened to see a yellow butterfly on a hibiscus flower. I was seized by an intense desire to paint with the hibiscus, but not the one I’d steal from a butterfly. Ann has taught me to extract paint from dry flowers, from deep within my attempts to translate her poems. Let the theories of translation say what they enjoy saying, but like the rituals of immersing pots of growing wheat, the body of Ann’s poetry in Hindi erases the noise within the human head given to me. The insects have been all over me in the morning forest, with a bee trying to check out my left ear for a hive. But now the evening is falling and the birds fly over my terrace in the direction of the sun.  I’d like to end my day with these lines written by this poet who has been given to speak not with a human tongue alone:

I am dying. Deep outside. Out of myself.

I was dying yesterday and since I was born.

I wasn’t born out of myself. I am being destroyed.

My body is decomposing all that I own. I can

not be in there.[xxv]

References

[i] From the collection “Rundkyrka och sjukhuslängor vid vattnet Himlen är förgylld av solens sista strålar” (henceforth “Rundkyrka”), dikter 1984-2000, Albert Bonniers Förlag (henceforth ABF), Stockholm, 2002, p. 286. All quotations in English from this collection are from translations by Lars Hermansson with Teji Grover.

[ii] From the poem “La Princesse de Clève | Le Duc de Nemours”, BLOMMAN OCH MÄNNISKOBENET (henceforth BOM) , ABF, Stockholm, 2003, p. 14. All quotations in English from this collection are from Eva Kristina Olsson’s translation.

[iii] From “Ari”, ibid., p.7.

[iv] From the poem “Andrei”, ibid., p. 7.

[v] In her recent mail to the writer of this essay.

[vi] From the poem “Vattenflickorna”, ibid., p.10.

[vii] From the poem ” Revben som spänner”, ibid., p. 11.

[viii] Flame of the Forest, a tree with flaming red flowers, shaped like a parrot’s beak.

[ix] The title of Ann Jäderlund’s forthcoming collection of poems.

[x] Coversation with Ann Jäderlund at the Baltic Centre in Visby.

[xi] From the poem “Ari”, op. cit.

[xii] Ibid.

[xiii] From the poem “Vattenflickorna”, op. cit.

[xiv] Without attributes, properties or qualities. A term that refers to a form of devotion in which the one who is worshipped has no attributes, as opposed to saguna devotion, which has an elaborate iconography of the deity in question.

[xv] From the poem “De gula irisarna”, BOM, p. 12.

[xvi] Chinese Hibiscus (Hibiscus rosa-sinensis). Cultivated as an ornamental plant in gardens, widely used in traditional home-remedies and is offered to the ferocious Kali. The bloodthirsty goddess with her tongue lolling out has a close resemblance with the flower.

[xvii] From the poem “The Dead Man is Poetic”, translated into English from Staffan Söderblom’s collection Den döde andas, 1993, by Lars Andersson.

[xviii] Conversation with Ann Jäderlund in Stockholm, October 2007.

[xix] From the poem “De gula irisarna”, op. cit.

[xx] From an unpublished poem translated into English by Ann Jäderlund with Teji Grover.

[xxi] From the poem “Ari”, op. cit.

[xxii] For the essay “Requiem for a River”, written by the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save Narmada Movement) activist Sripad Dharmadhikari, see The Hindu, April 16, 2006.

[xxiii] See Shiv Purana, Geeta Press Gorakhpur, for the chapter “The darshan of Lord Shiva’s body made of words”.

[xxiv] Sattu that is traditionally made from seven kinds of grain roasted and then ground together has been simplified to wheat and chickpeas mixed together in this part of the country. And I have been told everyone has to have at least a spoonful on the moonless night of the festival Sattu Amavasya.

[xxv] Unpublished poem by Ann Jäderlund, translated by the poet with Teji Grover in Visby, October 2007.

Textual Notes and Comments

First of all, almost all quotations in the text of the above essay are either fragments of Ann’s poetry or things she has been saying during the course of the translation. Since I don’t read Swedish, Ann’s poetry has been translated in the following manner. First with Lars Hermansson whose passion for the poet inevitably swept me in that direction too. We did several of Ann’s poems in English sitting together and these poems were then translated by me into Hindi for the anthology of Swedish poetry co-edited with me by Lars Andersson. The discussions were always intense and my questions innumerable. (I am planning to write a sequel to this essay regarding the intricacies of the process of translation.) In my last visit to Sweden, when it was clear that I was ready for the Hindi Ann, it was Niclas Nilsson and Lars Hermansson who worked with me over her poems, making selections from her collected works and the books published after that. After a while Niclas decided to work on the poems himself and translated her entire first collection for me and several poems from BLOMMAN OCH MÄNNISKOBENET. Later Ann and I sat together first at her own place in Stockholm and then in the Baltic Center at Visby. Ann revised the English versions rigorously, pointing out what invariably got normalized in English, given the differences in the languages. She added a bunch of unpublished poems to my now substantial treasure in English. Besides, we did a few poems from Rundkyrka and from some other collections too. This was a very helpful exercise since I needed to know the connotations and meanings of several words and phrases that were uppermost in her mind. If the word for leg and bone were the same, she could surely help. But her contribution to the process was to keep the English as raw as possible, without attempts at hammering everything into sense. All said and done, I still don’t have the music of the original when I try to write Ann in Hindi. I’ve been panic-stricken occasionally as quite a few of her poems are simply not possible in Hindi, like Gunnar Björling’s, but in ways very different from his. Besides, my impressions about Ann’s poetry come from being acquainted with not more than half of what she has written. I read her poems in Swedish anyway, to the extent I can, when I do the Hindi.