Alf Hiltebeitel

I have been very impressed by the fine papers presented on literature and translation for this colloquium: their emphases on passion, encounter, and discovery, to begin with. I'd like to define as my task for these brief comments the following: to offer some thoughts on translating translation itself, as a project, from Korea to India, which is where most of my translating work has been sourced, and, to a certain important extent, also targeted, since, unlike many Koreans, many Indians, and not only Indian intellectuals, have grown up for a few centuries learning to read, speak, write, and translate into English. I was particularly drawn to take this line in reading what Bruce Fulton had to say about choosing works to translate from Korea and Japan: the contrastive point that cultural receptivity, at least in America, for Korean fiction hinges not on exotica but on whether the stories have some connection with the U.S., whereas American readers apparently still like to find Japan to be exotic and perhaps take connections with the U.S. to be familiar enough to make fiction about it less interesting. I'd like to also pick up on Ch'oe In-ho's linking of Hahn Moo-Sook's modern novel, "Encounter," with two great works from classical Korean literature and thus comment not only on the axis of the exotic and the familiar, but on that of the classical and the modern.

Asking you to keep in mind that my main work has been on India's huge classical Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, and that that work has been primarily scholarly and not translation -- although you can expect me to qualify that statement -- here are some of the differences I see between translating from Korean and translating things Indian. In brief, it would appear that it is the Indian exotic that has fascinated and sold. But it is especially the classical exotic that has attracted the translators: Sanskrit first, and then classical Tamil and medieval Kannada, the last two, both thanks almost entirely to the work of one extraordinary translator, A. K. Ramanujan, who is also a poet in Tamil, Kannada, and English. But what are these works really about? Well, some of them are about different things, but let me borrow a phrase to make the point of what I think some of the most interesting and successfully translated ones are about. They are about "love in a dead language," to borrow the title of Lee Siegel's new novel about a professor who, while translating the Kama Sutra, falls in love with his thoroughly Americanized Indian-American student "Lalita," determines to help "Lalita" recover her Indian heritage with the aid of this manual on exotic erotica, and dies when his huge Monier-Williams Sanskrit Dictionary falls out of his bookshelf and knocks his head into his desk -- a novel replete with footnotes, index, and a cleverly false bibliography. As to Ramanujan's translations from Tamil and Kannada classics, what he is translating are poems about human love and love of God. And the Indian epics are also very much about this subject, especially along with being about grief.

On the contrary, there have been very few translations of modern works from Indian vernaculars to have had any success in the west, one small exception being, again, the same A. K. Ramanujan's translation of K. Anantha Murthi's Malayalam novel "Samskara," another love story, whose mainly academic success can be explained more by the renown of the translator than by the still considerable appeal of the novel.

Yet the modern India made familiar through contact with British and American people also sells--and indeed does so to much wider audiences--but no one needs to translate it since it's in English: Rudyard Kipling, E. M. Forster, R. K. Narayan, Salman Rushdie, Bharati Mukherjee, Arundhati Roy, and GW's own Vikram Chandra, to name some the best. Every one of them is of course "translating culture" in an interlingual situation as rich as that of any translator who translates directly from a work in one language into that of another. Since Rushdie put his foot in his mouth once again in a New Yorker article a year or two ago, saying that the best fiction in India is being written in English, and that fiction in the vernaculars is stagnant, there has been an enraged reaction, and the main form it has taken is to charge that all Anglo-Indian writing in English is simply marketing the exotic, that is, a false India, and is thereby untrue to the "real India." Ironically, the charge is being made most vociferously, as Vikram Chandra tells me, by a literary critic from Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, Meenakshi Mukherjee, whose writing and international audience are entirely English, although let me add that she has also translated Bengali poetry and fiction into English.

Against this background, let me turn to some comments on translating the "Mahabharata" into English. First, there have been three attempts to translate the Sanskrit text itself, and though it would be nice to speak about the translative ploys of Peter Brook's drama and film versions of the epic, and Shashi Tharoor's fusion of the Mahabharata and the Indian Freedom Struggle in his novel titled "The Great Indian Novel," the three translations will have to suffice. The first, which I will focus on shortly, is the 1884-1896 translation by Kisari Mohan Ganguli, who labored anonymously, leaving the credit for the work to its patron, fund-raiser, publisher, and spokesman Pratap Chandra Roy. The second, by Manmatha Nath Dutt (1895-1905), did little more than shamelessly crib from the Ganguli-Roy translation. It changed nothing substantial, and, quite gratuitously, did no more than try to improve the English. Ganguli, Roy, and Dutt were all Bengalis, and we may place their work in the setting of the so-called Bengal Renaissance, which occurred while the capital of the British empire was still in Calcutta, that is, in Bengal. Finally, the third translation, which can be called the Chicago translation because it is STILL being published by the University of Chicago Press, was launched by J. A. B. van Buitenen with three volumes from 1973-78 until he died with not quite 1/3 of the text translated, and has remained dormant till now, as we await a new volume that will finally come out next year translated by James L. Fitzgerald, who has been serving since the early eighties as the Chief Editor of what has evolved into a three-person translating team that intends to complete the project probably some time in the next decade. I have organized a panel called "Celebrating the Resumption of the Chicago Mahabharata" that will toast these translators next month at the American Academy of Religion, and give them all, and myself as well, a chance to talk about this resumption: what it means to resume someone else's translation after over twenty years; how three translators can work together; what it will mean that readers will pick up the translation in the middle of a huge didactic book that differs markedly in tone from the more "epical" books that van Buitenen translated, and so on. I know the three well enough to say that they will all do some different things.

Fitzgerald, in his Editorial Introduction to the new volume, titled "General Introduction: The Translation Resumed," defines his task as follows:

"My main goal in this translation is to make the Mahabharata, particularly its post-war didactic anthologies, as easily accessible and intelligible as possible for serious general readers of contemporary American English, whether they are students of ancient India or not." Further, "I always strive to find the most clear and energetic English syntax that verbal accuracy and fidelity to the meaning permit, and I try to avoid the opposite temptation to inject energy into the English translation when the Sanskrit simply is dry or pedestrian, which often it is." He acknowledges his debt to van Buitenen, who by the way taught both of us, but he sees it as "a hopeless prescription for disaster . . . to try consciously to emulate another translator's style." And he notes that each of his co-translators will be finding his or her own translating voice as well.

Fitzgerald offers one good justifaction for all this: the Mahabharata itself is probably the work of many hands. But let me just say this: He tends to flatten things out. Even though more prone to make obvious errors, van Buitenen was more playful. Fitzgerald's co-translators probably will be so too. In translating for general readers who may or may not know ancient India, he goes for energy of syntax, true, but risks little when it comes to the epic's enigmas and its multiple meanings (note how he speaks of meaning in the singular). I will close with two examples.

But first let us look back at the Ganguli-Roy translation, which for all its Victorianisms, remains for me _the_ landmark translation for its passion, insight, sustained consistency, and its unabashedly Indian spirit. It was Roy, the publisher, who usually spoke for the project. He hoped that the epic's publication in English would encourage the "patriotic hearts" of his countrymen by deterring them from the "sensational literatue of the present day in which, under the pretense of improvement, the plots and situations of fifth-rate French novels are introduced, vitiating the manly Aryan taste." Rather, it should turn "them to contemplate the purity of Aryan society, the immutable truths of Aryan philosophy, the chivalry of Aryan princes and warriors, the masculine morality that guides the conduct of men even in the most trying situations...". "The age is past when Indian students used to spout Byron over dishes of beef with the glass circling round in quick succession. Under influences more wholesome and due to a variety of reasons, the English-educated native of India has learnt to respect his ancestors." Roy envisioned the translation as serving not only the national aspirations of Indians, but the British empire in understanding those aspirations. Roy considers it "providential" that England with its dim past and bright present and future has linked up with India. Although there are "lapses" of "repression" by some who are "untrue to the traditions of Empire and the instincts of their own better nature, the "Queen-Empress . . . enunciates the noblest principles of government, and confesses to her determination of founding her rule upon the love and gratitude of the people." Near the end of his life, Roy mentions that "Some years ago I received permission to lay before Her Majesty, for her gracious acceptance, a copy of the English translation...."

Yet Rudyard Kipling, writing in 1886, typically belittles the Mahabharata in this Ganguli-Roy translation for "its monstrous array of nightmare-like incidents, where armies are slain, and worlds swallowed with monotonous frequency, its records of impossible combats, its lengthy catalogues of female charms, and its nebulous digressions on points of morality." Noting that the other Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana, had also been recently made available in English translation, Kipling continues: "the two national epics have their own special value, as the Rig Veda has for students of early forms of religions belief; but the working world has no place for these ponderous records of nothingness. Young India, as we have said, avoides them altogether. . . ; the bare outlines of their stories are known and sung by the village folk of the country-side as love ditties; but as living forces, they are surely dead and their gigantic corpses, like whales stranded by the ebbing tide, are curiosities to be regarded from a distance by the curious, and left alone by those who look for any solid return from laborious reading (Thomas Pinney, Kipling's India: Uncollected Sketches 1884-88 [Houndmills: Macmillan, 1986], 177-78). Although he makes it sound like he has full translations before him, writing by 1986 Kipling could have read no further into the Mahabharata than its fifth book (which is incidentally where van Buitenen left things off), since that is as far as the Ganguli-Roy translation had proceeded to that point. Two years earlier Ganguli anticipated such a reaction in his anonymous "Translator's Preface": "In regard to translation from the Sanskrit, nothing is easier than to dish up Hindu ideas so as to make them agreeable to English taste. But the endeavour of the present translator has been to give the following pages as literal a rendering as possible of the great work of Vyasa. To the purely English reader there is much in the following pages that will strike as ridiculous."

For my taste, I still say "hats off" to a translator whose first priority is his passion for the text rather than the tastes of his audience. But that is a luxury many translators cannot afford. But a scholar can afford it, and this is one of the reasons why I rejected an offer to be part of the Mahabharata translating team some years ago. To me, translation of the Mahabharata is not very interesting if it does not risk interpretation. The text declares itself to be ambiguous, to delight in subtlety, to pose enigmas. One of these is its portrayal of its author, Vyasa, who is also a character in his own work who mysteriously comes and goes in and out of the action, and the thoughts of his characters, from a place designated as the _pRSTha_ or "back" of a mountain--or, more accurately, of several different mountains, where he is said to have his "hermitage." The translators have all tamely taken pRSTha as the "top" of the mountain, but there are many words for "top" or "peak," and pRSTtha is not one of them. In fact, we would understand more about "the back of the mountain" if we began with the Korean "rear mountain," or "the hill behind the village" mentioned by Bruce Fulton. But the mountain that Vyasa comes from behind is variously the god Shiva's Mount Kailasa, the Himalaya as the earthly cosmic mountain, and Mount Meru as the mountain at the center of the universe.

Finally, as to the subject of love, let me just mention a few things about Draupadi, the heroine of the Mahabharata, who is married to its five chief heroes, with each of whom she has her different passions. One of the ways the poets choose to mark some of her most passionate exchanges is by emphasizing her epithet "Panchali," which can mean "puppet" or "doll." It seems no translator has appreciated this, and none, at least, has brought it into the translation. The heroine, however, could be the doll who defies her puppeteers, who also once complains, after she has been outrageously molested, of a God who treats humans as puppets, which her most righteous husband castigates her for as "heresy." I do not know how one would translate these things unless through scholarship, and unless scholarship is another form of translation.