CHRISTI A. MERRILL
The Riddle
I begin this paper by asking a riddle, but in order for you to appreciate its implications you need to understand that I speak both as a theorist of translation and also as a practitioner. The riddle revolves around a story I myself have translated into English from a Hindi short story Vijay Dan Detha wrote that itself was inspired by a Rajasthani folktale. I call my version “A True Calling” and Detha called his Hindi version “Rijak ki Maryada,” while the Rajasthani version(s) have neither title nor name—at least, as far as I know. The riddle, then, is this: If I have written this story in English from a story written in Hindi that in turn was written from a story told (several times, and in several ways) in Rajasthani, then who can be said to have authored the English version?
Convention dictates that as the translator I name Vijay Dan Detha author of “A True Calling,” but in doing so I become caught in the same snarl of contradictions Detha himself gets caught in, conforming to modern (European) notions of single authorship when the creative process itself is decidedly plural. In this paper I am going to suggest that a more productive approach to Detha’s dilemma and mine would be to create a new category called “storywriter,” which can apply equally to author and translator, and be used as the literary equivalent of a “storyteller.” In short, I suggest that the truest answer to the riddle “Who authored the English version?” turns out to be: “The folk.”
Detha’s Short Stories as Folktales, or Folktales as Short Stories
“Rijak ki Maryada” was published in Kathadesh in March 1997, but that was not my first encounter with it. I had already translated a yellowed manuscript version of the same tale a decade earlier while working with Vijay Dan Detha and his Hindi translator Kailash Kabir in Jodhpur in 1990, and had included it in my M.F.A. thesis in 1993.1 If you want to be crassly legalistic, you could argue that since my English translation of “A True Calling” was the first copyrighted version of that tale, then the story can be said to belong to me. Or if you’re more conventional, you could argue that since my English version was directly derived from Detha’s Hindi version, then the tale should belong to him. Or you could insist that the story should be claimed by the person who originally told it. But I would argue that we need to ask the question a different way. I would argue that the story belongs to Detha and to me, and to anyone else who has told it, will tell it, has heard it, or will hear it. I would even venture to say that the question of ownership when you’re discussing translations—especially translations of self-professed lok-katha (folktales)—is not just misleading but downright dangerous. Dangerous not just for myself, and for Detha as the “author,” but for the storytelling tradition more generally.
It must be said that Detha sits somewhat uncomfortably between the designations “folklorist” and “author.” At the beginning of his writing career he unabashedly thought of himself as a folklorist, and made it his life mission to put into print the exceedingly varied and vibrant oral tales he grew up hearing in his native rural Rajasthan. When I met him in 1988, he had already published fourteen fat volumes of tales written in Rajasthani as part of a series called Batan ri Phulwari (A Garden of Tales),2 and from those fourteen volumes Kailash Kabir had culled two collections’ worth of stories he then translated from Rajasthani into Hindi. Of course we know that writing in a regional—and, it must be admitted, less prestigious—tongue such as Rajasthani does not command the same cultural capital as writing in a national language such as Hindi. While we could talk about the implications of this inequality from many different angles, here I will focus on the vexing question of authorship, since Detha’s national—and you could even assert international—reputation as an author has been based primarily on the Hindi versions written by Kailash Kabir.
The contradiction at the heart of my riddle is this: Detha may be considered the author of these stories so many people have read and lauded in Hindi, but he is not their writer. At least, not exclusively. I can testify as one of those many readers that part of what moved me in reading these texts was the way Detha re-created the oral quality of the tales in his written (Rajasthani) versions, and part of what moved me was the way Kabir was able to convey a certain Rajasthani inflection in the Hindi prose. In short, it wasn’t simply the tale itself I was responding to, but the way the tale was performed. The problem is that we expect to hold only one person accountable for this artistic success.
It would be easier if we could assume the problem arises from the fact that stories such as “Dohari Zinadgi” or “Anekhon Hitler” are translations, and that we just have to work out more carefully what part is the translator’s input and what part the author’s. But when we look again we can see that analogous issues arise from reading stories Detha wrote himself—whether in Rajasthani or in Hindi (as is the case with “Rijak ki Maryada”). By trying to identify a single person responsible for the creation of a story, we spend much of our time gathering evidence to ascertain whether Detha is a folklorist or an author. The assumption is that if Detha is labeled a folklorist, then he should become a completely transparent conduit for the stories and should name the true creators of the stories as the original authors; or else that if he is an author, then he shouldn’t claim any true kinship to the oral culture he evokes in his tales so that we can designate the origin of the stories as his (godly) imagination. What I would like to assert here is that the distinction between the two is somewhat false, and that if our main goal is to keep storytelling (or storywriting) alive and well, it would behoove us to create a new set of criteria whose goal isn’t so much to assess ownership as liveliness, eloquence, even emotional, political, or moral relevance. We need to adjust our expectations so that we think of the written text as yet one more performance of a story in a tradition necessarily various and multiple.
What Is an Author?
Part of what I’m calling into question is the definition—you may even say the institution—of the “author.” Here I rely on the observations Michel Foucault makes about the (mostly European) history of authorship in his famously provocative 1969 essay, “What Is an Author?” He points out that an author’s name begins to be linked to a literary text as copy-rightable property when the discourse contained in it is thought to be transgressive—that is, when the work is considered to represent a significant departure from the tradition—and so the individual’s name is supplied in order to vouch for the material set forth as a way of holding one person responsible for said transgressions.3 Of course, we know that the effect of this maneuver has been to romanticize the singular transgressiveness of literary creation to such an extent that we now do not consider a work sufficiently literary unless it is deemed to be a complete departure from previous norms. A writer is not considered a true “author” unless s/he can prove that her/his work is in no way derivative—a significant problem for a storywriter such as Detha whose stories are based on folktales.
Such expectations have not always obtained, however. “Even within our civilization,” asserts Foucault via Bouchard and Simon’s English,
the same types of texts have not always required authors; there was a time when those texts which we now call “literary” (stories, folk tales, epics, and tragedies) were accepted, circulated, and valorized without any question about the identity of their author. Their anonymity was ignored because their real or supposed age was a sufficient guarantee of their authenticity.4
In this quasi Golden Age of identityless literature, according to Foucault, only scientific texts had to prove their authenticity by stating the author’s name. Then in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries scientific texts began to be “accepted on their own merits and positioned within an anonymous and coherent conceptual system of established truths and methods of verification,” while suddenly literary texts were required to carry the author’s name, date, place and circumstance of writing to guarantee their authenticity.5 My point here is not to open up a historical debate on literary versus scientific discourse in Renaissance Europe, but rather to challenge these received notions of authorship as they shape our reading of literary texts today—most specifically our reading of folktales. If, as Foucault concludes, “these aspects of an individual, which we designate as an author … are projections, in terms always more or less psychological, of our way of handling texts …” then how do these projections onto a single individual shape our reading of a story such as “Rijak ki Maryada”?6 The danger is that reducing an ongoing creative process to the text of a single performance does not fully account for the story’s multiple origins—oral or otherwise.
Albert Lord suggests in The Singer of Tales that part of the problem lies in our discomfort with multiplicity. In oral tradition, he claims, “the words ‘author’ and ‘original’ have either no meaning at all … or a meaning quite different from the one usually assigned to them.”7 A folklorist may hear numerous versions of a song, but if he is called upon to single out an author, then he will name the performer before him. After all, explains Lord: “A performance is unique; it is a creation, not a reproduction, and it can therefore only have one author.”8 How is this possible, that a story can be one and many at the same time? Lord replies:
Actually, only the man with writing seems to worry about this, just as only he looks for the nonexistent, illogical, and irrelevant “original.” Singers deny that they are the creators of the song. They learned it from other singers. We know now that both are right, each according to his meaning of “song.” To attempt to find the first singer of a song is as futile as to try to discover the first singing. And yet, just as the first singing could not be called the “original,” so the first man to sing a song cannot be considered its “author,” because of the peculiar relationship … between his singing and all subsequent singings. From that point of view a song has no “author” but a multiplicity of authors, each singing being a creation, each singing having its own single “author.”9
What Lord fails to take account of in such a scenario, however, is the role played by the invisible, nameless scribe setting these songs to paper. If Lord can insist that each performance of a song is a creation unique in its own right and not a mere reproduction, then he should consider a written version as yet another performance.
I say this not to disparage Lord’s documentary skills, but rather to point out that he himself gets caught in the same impossible demands made on someone trying to re-create the experience of these songs or tales through writing. What do you do if you are a Vijay Dan Detha or one of the brothers Grimm, inspired by the tales you hear as part of your everyday life, because in them you sense something special, something worth preserving, a certain spiritedness you wish to have captured for posterity? You may very well do as the Grimm brothers did—at least according to Jack Zipes—and modify the stories for greater effect. Theirs is an instructive example because we know the outcome: the Grimm brothers succeeded in their goal of popularizing a corpus of stories that might otherwise have dropped out of circulation.
The way Zipes tells it, the Grimm brothers would invite family, friends, and other “educated young women of the middle class or aristocracy” into their drawing room and have these women repeat stories they had heard growing up from their “nursemaids, governesses, and servants, or tales they may have read.”10 Zipes takes care to note that the Grimms’ informants would often draw on both “the oral and literary tradition of tale-telling and combined motifs from both sources in their renditions.”11 The brothers did not seem to distinguish authenticity based on oral versus written sources, but rather would write down as many versions as they heard, and then begin the arduous process of refining them in order “to create an ideal type for the literary fairy tale, one that sought to be as close to the oral tradition as possible, while incorporating stylistic, formal, and substantial thematic changes to appeal to a growing bourgeois audience.”12 In other words, they reworked the various versions they elicited to conform to the ideals they shared, namely:
… the endeavor to make the tales stylistically smoother; the concern for clear sequential structures; the desire to make the stories more lively and pictorial by adding adjectives, old proverbs, and direct dialogue; the reinforcement of motives for action in the plot; the infusion of psychological motifs; and the elimination of elements that might detract from a rustic tone. The model for a good many of their tales was the work of the gifted romantic artist Philipp Otto Runge, whose stories in dialect, The Fisherman and His Wife and The Juniper Tree, represented in tone, structure, and content the ideal narrative that the Grimms wanted to create.13
If you did not know the names of these writers who endeavored to make their stories livelier, stylistically smoother, with clearer sequential structures, but I asked you to categorize them as “author” or “folklorist,” I don’t imagine you would have chosen “author.” But you might also have felt uncomfortable choosing “folklorist,” for such aesthetically minded mediations do not fall under the domain we like to think of as folklore. I say this not to disparage the validity of the Grimms’ work, but quite the contrary: to point out that they were able to preserve these stories because they paid such careful attention to the ways they wrote. Categories of “author” versus “folklorist” become incidental in the face of their larger success.
What matters to us is that their work as storywriters has become valued. I would therefore like to suggest that instead of investigating whether writers like the Grimms or Vijay Dan Detha craft the stories they present, we should look instead at how. In order to do this successfully, our job as critical readers should be to develop a more complex language for appraising the writers’ work that takes into account the inherent multiplicity of their stories.
Detha’s Professional Honor
If we don’t, then what’s the danger? In Detha’s case, we can see that the pressure to fit him into the slot of either folklorist or author has opened him up to criticism, either for improvising too much (and therefore tampering with the “original”) or not enough (to call his version an “original”). This demand for a single, singular original forces us to disregard any elements in a story that reveal a dynamic relationship with folk tradition, even if they are the most distinctive and compelling aspects of the story. In short, this demand for a single, singular original forces us to misread, whether the work is attributed to an author, the folk, or both at once, as is the case with Detha’s stories.
Detha’s particular writing gift lies precisely in the ways in which he plays with and against the storytelling tradition. He retains enough elements of it to create a fuller context for the rhetorical and political transgressions he makes, so that the departures represent a critique of the tradition from within. Such artistry is difficult to appreciate if we cannot tolerate multiplicity. Stories like Detha’s are not created in a vacuum and are not meant to be read in a vacuum. They represent a particularly fruitful relationship with the various lok brought together in the stories—and here I mean lok in the sense of people or folk, but also in the sense of worlds. If we are serious in calling these stories lok katha, it behooves us to ask: Who are these lok, what, and where?
Alan Dundes asks a similar question in the essay, “Who Are the Folk?” The essay sets out to challenge the stereotype of “folk” as a monolithic, homogeneous mass of illiterate, uncivilized peasants.14 Instead of a blurry mass of romanticized peasants, he suggests,
The term “folk” can refer to any group of people whatsoever who share at least one common factor. It does not matter what the linking factor is—it could be a common occupation, language or religion—but what is important is that a group formed for whatever reason will have some traditions which it calls its own. … . A member of the group may not know all other members, but he will probably know the common core of traditions belonging to the group, traditions which help the group have a sense of group identity.15
He explains that people may identify as being in a group because they are part of the same family, ethnicity, race, nation; because they are all baseball players, computer programmers, coal miners, cowboys, fishermen, surfers … the possible varieties are infinite.16 He ends the essay by answering the question, “Who are the folk?” by proclaiming cheerfully, “Among others, we are!”17
The implicit moral to Dundes’s story is that folklore functions in part to create a sense of belonging: the answer to his question can be “we are” because lore binds us together, makes us feel part of that particular lok (as people, and as world). And yet, the feeling of inclusiveness a performance creates gives rise to a certain attendant anxiety: suddenly we feel we must know exactly who this is performing our identity for us. To know our identity we must know the identity of the singer of this song, the teller of this tale, this single entity who speaks of and for the lok. The singing, telling, speaking, performing redefines what and who the lok is, and the more acutely we sense the definition of the lok shift, the more we insist on holding an individual performer responsible for the collective movement. We crave this shift in the plural, but blame the performer in the singular. It is this gesture toward artistic scapegoating that Detha highlights in his version of the lok katha he calls “Rijak ki Maryada.”
In brief, the story revolves around the plight of a bhand or shapeshifter who is said to be so good at his trade that he fools one person after another with his excellent disguises. (A lovely analogy for a storywriter!) By the rules of the game, no one can hold the bhand responsible for what he does when he’s impersonating another character; he explains that his professional honor (the “rijak ki maryada” of the title) requires him to enter fully into whichever persona he adopts for the designated period of time. When he’s a mahatma he refuses to let his ascetic vows be compromised by all the riches dangled before him, and when he’s a dayan he drinks the blood of the queen’s own brother when he crosses their path. Of course, the queen has trouble accepting the rules of the game once it has been played to the death and sets out to seek revenge for her brother’s horrific murder. But the king and his courtiers realize they can’t put the bhand to death for a crime he committed while he was in disguise, especially after he had so specifically and publicly warned them. Finally, when there seems to be no way to avenge the murder of the queen’s brother, a lowly barber thinks up a way to outwit the bhand in his own terms: have the bhand assume the guise of a sati who must immolate herself on her husband’s funeral pyre.
In the version Detha heard—or so I heard from his friend, Komal Kothari—a barber told the tale in such a way that celebrated the cleverness of the fictional barber by showing how he outsmarted not only the bhand but the mighty king and all his stumped courtiers as well. In the nameless barber’s version, the issue of the sati’s sacrifice served as only an instrument to a different kind of justice, but in Detha’s version he uses the traditional story form to highlight the atrociousness of such a practice by sympathizing deliberately with the bhand, and adopting a sorrowful tone rather than the whimsical delivery common to many folktales:
Detha’s version treats the bhand’s decision to go through with the sacrifice as a tragedy, figuring the bhand not so much as a mischievous trickster who must be taught a lesson but as an unparalleled artist with a laudable commitment to his art. The story ends with what at first appears to be a somewhat heavy-handed judgment about the bhand’s honor compared to the king’s:
It’s only when we read this line in the context of other folktales in the Rajasthani oral tradition that we hear a parodic edge to the narrator’s voice. These are the moments when Detha uses traditional storytelling conventions not only to comment on the events within the story, but to comment on the traditions themselves.
After all, Detha himself is an artist who has been so effective at mimicking other people’s voices that the line between who he is in play—i.e., a storyteller—and who he is in reality—a writer—becomes irrevocably crossed, and as the performer of that play he runs a greater risk of being singled out as scapegoat for the resulting transgression. We could read the story as a version of “The Death of the Author,” Rajasthani folktale style. For just as French theorists such as Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes critique a system that mythologizes the author of the text so that it may sacrifice him, so does “Rijak ki Maryada” critique a system that demands a performance to the death.
The remedy, suggests Susan Stewart in her Nonsense, which combines folklore and literary studies, is to protect the welfare of the players by protecting the welfare of the play.20 The main difference between play and reality? According to Stewart, play is repeatable, reversible, intangible, temporary.21 This is the difference between seeing Detha’s version of the story as one performance in a line of many, and regarding it as a definitive and original piece of literature.
By locating a storywriter in the plural—as part of the lok—you are allowing there to be play in the re-creation (and here it is important to think of “play” both in the sense of dynamic movement and in the sense of fun). Play for Detha, as well as for the storywriters and storytellers who preceded him and for those who will follow. Thus while logocentricity encourages us to believe the power of the story can be reduced to specific words in a fixed text, lok-ocentricity forces us to embrace the ambiguity and temporality inherent in plural play. This isn’t a distinction based on oral versus written media, but on the expectations surrounding the performance of a story. If you want to keep not just the individual storyteller or author alive, but the whole tradition, you would then want more people to feel part of a lok that has play, has movement. You would want that lok to keep re-creating itself through an endless line of performances. You would want the play to continue on through a revolving series of players.
Now, you may ask, what does this have to do with translation?
Some of you may have noticed that I didn’t offer my English versions of the passages I just quoted from Detha’s story in Hindi. But now I will do my own bit of “A True Calling” and offer my translation:
After that the incomparable bhand did just what he said he would. Thousands gathered to see a man assume the guise of a sati. Soon a cremation pyre was laid of sandalwood. She mounted the funeral pyre with the natural bearing of a true sati. Such was the power of her conviction that flames leapt up from the pyre of their own accord.
The sati disguise had been fully realized.
I refrained quite intentionally from offering my version, not wanting to follow Detha into the allegorical flames already raging. After all, in a world that would sacrifice an author, the translator would be next to go. I’m not ready for a fire test like that.
Sherry Simon has a similar worry. She points out in Gender in Translation that the identity of the translator is bound up with the identity of the author as “exclusive proprietor of the text.”22 Her metaphors underscore the tangible and therefore permanent nature of our expectations. Her theory is an easy one to test. When you read the question with which the story concludes—
How to compare a monarch’s false pride with the natural honor of a bhand?
—what moral do you draw, and with whom do you imagine sharing it? My hope is that you are able to imagine me, and Detha, and the nameless barber, and a long line of other storytellers and writers who have passed on this tale, each of us offering a version that is repeatable, reversible, intangible, temporary, playful. My hope is that in the moment when you came to the end of the story, you were able to feel part of this lok somehow.
For a lok-ocentric vision of a story would see translation as less of a tangible carrying across, in the English sense of the word, and more of an intangible telling in turn, as is suggested by the Hindi word for translation, anuvad. Such an approach would allow us to embrace the inherent multiplicity of storywriting, in such a way that individual performers wouldn’t be placed in the unenviable dilemma of having to demand entire credit for the work or none at all. Just as the relationship between Detha and the nameless barber can be cast as a one-on-one, winner-take-all contest for possession of the (tangible) text, or can be seen as two of many instances in on ongoing line of (an intangible) story performance, so I suggest we recast the author–translator relationship in such a way as to emphasize the creative enterprise we both participate in. I have confined my discussion to the literary re-creation of folktales, but for me these examples simply offer a heightened version of the situation any translators—nay, any storywriters—are in. All of us are potential translators, redefining the lok in the way we pass along stories.
I will then end with a beginning, of a story I wrote in English after a story Vijay Dan Detha wrote in Hindi after a story he heard told in Rajasthani. It belongs to us and them and him and you. After all,
Nothing happens to a story if all you do is listen. Nothing happens if all you do is read, or memorize word for word. What matters is if you make the heart of the story part of your very life. This story is one of those.
Notes
1. A version of my translation of “Rijak ki Maryada” has been published on Words Without Borders as “A True Calling” (wordswithoutborders.org/article/a-true-calling/). “Untold Hitlers,” another of my translations of Vijay Dan Detha’s work, can also be read there.
2. Vijay Dan Detha, Batan ri Phulwari, 14 vols. (Borunda: Rupayan Samsthan, 1964–88).
3. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. D. Bouchard, trans. D. Bouchard and S. Simon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 124–25.
4. Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 125.
5. Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 126.
6. Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 127.
7. Albert Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), 101.
8. Lord, The Singer of Tales, 102.
9. Lord, The Singer of Tales, 102.
10. Jack Zipes, The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), 10.
11. Zipes, The Brothers Grimm, 11.
12. Zipes, The Brothers Grimm, 12.
13. Zipes, The Brothers Grimm, 12.
14. Alan Dundes, “Who Are the Folk?” in Interpreting Folklore (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1980), 2.
15. Dundes, “Who Are the Folk?” 7 (italics his).
16. Dundes, “Who Are the Folk?” 7–8.
17. Dundes, “Who Are the Folk?” 19.
18. Vijay Dan Detha, “Rijak ki Maryada,” Kathadesh (March 1997):15.
19. Detha, “Rijak ki Maryada,” 15.
20. Susan Stewart, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 57–66.
21. Stewart, Nonsense, 118–123.
22. Sherry Simon, Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 46.
