I HAVE—AND I am sure I share this misfortune with many—an uncontainable practical joker for a friend. A couple of years back, he had a group of us worked up in quite a lather over the sort of book he had ‘caught’ his teenage daughter reading.
‘She’s reading about some manic-depressive murderer!’ he had said, to general expressions of shock. ‘Fellow has hallucinations, thinks he is talking to his dead father, goes on a serial killer rampage . . . I think there’s even a part where he tries to rape someone. And here she’s trying to tell me that the book is in her school syllabus!’
We were all suitably horrified, and suggested ways to nip this delinquent taste in literature in the bud. It turned out, however, that the book was in fact in the school’s syllabus, and that it was Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
The prank served to underline an interesting cultural phenomenon for me. Often, when we speak of ‘classic’ fiction, the label triggers certain unconscious assumptions in our minds about a given text. That these are ‘serious’ pieces of literature, for example, and cannot—indeed, should not—be treated as entertaining stories to read for one’s amusement. It’s puzzling how this stereotype developed, for many of the fictional classics of the Western canon are, in essence, popular fictions from an earlier era—tales of high drama featuring grand romances, swashbuckling adventures, unabashed ribaldry, and tear-jerking tragedy. This disconnect between reputation and content has affected Pather Panchali as well. Its sombre cinematic treatment, coupled with its ‘classic’ tag, has often lent the novel a funerary air in popular imagination. Which is unfortunate, because the original Pather Panchali is very far from being a melancholic elegy. It is a vibrant ballad that begins with joy and ends in determination. As in life, its tragedies are many, but they are handled with fortitude and grace, and never dwelt upon merely to elicit sympathy. Instead, it brims with exuberant sensuousness; the joy of exploring benevolent woodlands, the delight of savouring unknown berries, the serene happiness of watching seasons change on a vast landscape of rivers, moors, and quiet groves. Pather Panchali chronicles the glorious discoveries along the path of everyday life—from spots for secret picnics and the true flavour of desserts, to the pleasure of fulfilled dreams and lessons embedded in disappointed hopes.
Unfortunately, the same attitude of reverence that confers a ‘serious’ mantle on a book also occasionally affects the tone of its translation, and not necessarily to its benefit. As Tagore famously said to the critics of his first two translations, Geetanjali and The Gardener:
Perhaps you miss that sense of enjoyment in the English rendering [for in my translations the verses are] bereft of their music and suggestiveness of language.1
In translating Pather Panchali, I have thus focused on preserving as much of this ‘music and suggestiveness’ of the original text as possible, to limit the scope of misreadings that might mar the spirit of the novel. Bibhutibhushan wrote about the daily lives of people by using the words and expressions that they used amongst themselves. The cadence of the common man’s everyday is central to the appeal of his works. Pather Panchali, too, is rich in rural turns of speech, local vocabulary, and references to the agrarian life of southern riverine Bengal. Of course, mapping local speech patterns of one language into another is an impossible task, but I have tried to remain as faithful as possible to the vibrant colloquial nature of the text, and to the author’s project of not ‘gentrifying’ his characters’ interactions for the sake of his more urbane readers.
Naturally, some of this has been challenging to translate directly into English. For one, certain idioms sat so uncomfortably in their English garb that I thought it prudent to trade in their direct translations for phrases that would be familiar to English speakers. For another, the world of Pather Panchali is replete with phenomena and institutions that have no equivalent in English that one can refer to for immediate clarity. Kuleenpratha, for example, is a caste phenomenon little known outside Bengal, and would require an explanation for both national and international audiences.
Finally, the world Bibhutibhushan lived in and wrote about has been so utterly transformed over the last century (Pather Panchali first came out in 1928) that translating certain aspects of it—the names of trees and plants that the characters spoke of with such easy familiarity, for instance—now require consultations with specialized lists of information. Much of the wood-ringed, moor-bordered region is now a bustling township, with few remnants of the rich and diverse botanical landscape that Bibhutibhushan chronicled so vividly. The old agrarian way of life has rapidly given way to an industrial and service-oriented economy, rendering many of the rituals and festivities mentioned in the book a set of barely remembered names. Thus, to adequately translate the landscape of that lost time and place, it was important to craft little cultural bridges into the text that addressed these losses in knowledge, so that modern readers could fully appreciate why Choitro Shonkranti held such a glowing place in Indir’s memory, or why Shorbojoya went to the Koluichondi feasts despite it reducing her to bitter tears.
Speaking of changes over time, I have made the conscious decision to move away from standardized spellings for Bengali names in this translation, choosing instead to be as phonetically accurate as I could without actually using the phonetic alphabet. While unfamiliarity might make these spellings appear visually cumbersome, I think it is an important step towards rectifying the received tradition of using spellings that nearly always mislead the reader about the local pronunciation of words and names. Indeed, in keeping with the spirit of preserving cultural authenticity, I have also kept as much of the local pronunciation of pan-Indian words as possible within the direct speech of characters. Brahmin has therefore become ‘brahmon’, Mahabharat ‘Mohabharot’, Dasaswamedh ‘Doshashwomedh’, and so on. In addition, I have not streamlined Bibhutibhushan’s habit of switching between the given names and nicknames, and of identifying characters (especially women) by their relationships with other characters instead of by actual names. ‘Mejo bourani’ has therefore become ‘the second-eldest [mejo] mistress [bourani]’, while Durga has been ‘khuki’ (‘little girl’) in her childhood and Dugga later in life, Chondro has become Chondor, and Rani has frequently been called Ranu.
Every translator has some regrets, for it is impossible to completely transpose an entire culture, place and time into a different language. My regret, happily, is a small one. As a postcolonial child who grew up on reams of popular English literature from the turn of the last century, I have been charmed and amused by the fascinating names that places seem to have in the United Kingdom. With the blindness that comes of familiarity, I had thought this phenomenon an exclusively British one, or at any rate one that was not prevalent in India. Upon rereading Pather Panchali, however, I realized that almost every place in the novel had just such a whimsical or meaningful name; constant use had simply inured us to their meaning. Of these, I have translated ‘Nischindipur’ to the Abode of Contentment, for it is a particularly thoughtful choice on Bibhutibhushan’s part. Certain other names have also found their way to their English counterparts, because when one discovers a pond called the Pond of the Sisters-in-Law, one has the irrepressible urge to share it. In other instances, however, I have limited myself to the original names, for fear of burdening the text with a little too much of the local colour. ‘Prawn Belly’ would have been rather a whimsically charming name for Ichamoti, for instance, but knowing that ‘icha’ means prawn in the local parlance—or that Holudbere is Yellow Pickets and Chuadanga is Perfumer’s High—was unlikely to affect one’s appreciation of the story.
Ironically, despite the immense changes it has wrought, it is the nature of our altered times that has made Pather Panchali immensely meaningful to the twenty-first century. Like a displaced Opu, we too are facing a near-irreversible destruction of our own homeland, and with it the cultures and ways of life that had sustained our joys and sorrows for centuries. In Opu’s desperate yearning for his lost homeland, we find echoes of our own anxieties for our threatened lands. In the ballad of his travel through life, we find the reflections of our hopes and dreams. And in the God of the Travelled Road’s exhortation to always move forward, we can only hope that we shall find the will to find a way.
Rimi
August 2019