Silver Filigree work. Courtesy – utkalika.com

Tradition, Context and Transformation:
Kalapurusa of Guruprasad Mohanty and Eliot’s The Waste Land

The long Odiya poem Kalapurusa by Guruprasad Mohanty is often considered a transcreation/transformation of Eliot’s The Waste Land. But it was also heralded as a radically original poem in Odisha in the 1960s-1970s. Nihilism, existential angst, loss of hope, innocence and culture were all epitomized, for its audience, in this poem. It also brought in a new style, a new sensibility and experimentations into the Odiya language. In this essay I wish to point out how one text influences another, how translations and transformations are related, and how in a different culture and context a new form and style can emerge out of such external influences.

Every poetic creation is influenced by other sensibilities, sometimes by other cultures. The same is perhaps true of Odiya literature. What with the loss of group-centric values, the emergence of individualistic values, the touch of modernism with all its sadness and agony, the realization that the world is changing, the hint of pop and hippy culture, Orissa –especially the sensibility of places like Cuttack and Puri (strongholds of Odiya literary sensibilities) – was deeply affected. Perhaps a poem like Kalapurusa was necessary to suggest the disjunction, the displacement and loss of a set of values, and the inability of giving birth to new ones. Interestingly, a discussion with other scholars and translators revealed that in certain other Indian languages also attempts have been made to translate The Waste Land and, more important, write something which “creates” the spirit of The Waste Land in regional languages – that make Kalapurusa representative of a certain trend.

Kalapurusa, in relation to The Waste Land, is interestingly located. The texts come from radically different cultures, at different points of time, yet cultures that go through rapid changes and angst. The former is inspired by the latter. Both are creative works. But without Eliot’s work Mohanty’s work would not exist. There is an act of translation. But this is also an act of transformation, because successful translation is often a transformational act. If we make a simplistic division between meaning and language, while the meaning remains the “same” (sic) or similar, the language undergoes total change or transformation. At a slightly more complex level, since separating language from meaning is problematic, a transformation of language and context (here even culture) also significantly modifies meaning. These are serious issues in cultural translation. I believe all this happens in Kalapurusa in spite of the fact that I it is not a translation of The Waste Land in the literal sense of the term.

Imagine communicating a feeling identical (or similar) to what The Waste Land evoked for its audience, imagine the need to create a text that fulfilled such a literary absence – can it be done by a literary translation of The Waste Land! No, a literary parallel has to be created born of its own culture, rooted in it, like a seed which is taken from its parent climate and which sprouts and grows in its own new way in its new environment. If we read Kalapurusa within its ambience of Cuttack with its mud, its canals, its smoke and fog, its incessant rains and its Kathajodi river it evokes a mood which perhaps The Waste Land evokes when we read it in its own context. But translate The Waste Land into Odiya, and the effect is lost. Here is an example from the translation of the first four lines of The Waste Land by Gyanendra Varma:

Baisakha bada nisthura, mati-ru
lilac phula phutai smrutiku basana sange
misai murmusa chera-sabuku basantara barsare
siharai …

April is “evoked” through its translation into the Indian month “Baisakha” which, with its hot and scorching sun, is cruel without any irony. But Lialc remains lilac and is not changed in the translation. Spring is evoked through “basanta” season. Yet Baisakha suggest the onset of Summer when Spring is already gone in the sequence of seasons and seems out of place. This problematizes translation for us – since it is successful only through an act of transformation.

In contrast, it is exactly those points where Kalapurusa is strikingly similar to The Waste Land (or say, “The Love Song”) that it is radically different in the meaning it communicates to an Odiya reader. And it is where Kalapurusa departs that a certain echo or similarity of sensibility can be discerned – akin to searching for appropriate “objective correlatives” in a different culture. Eliot wielded the English language in radically new ways. There are many occasions where Guruprasad Mohanty also does the same in Odiya. The results are extremely interesting and different.

Kalapurusa begins :

Cruel and heartless is the season of rains, sprouting purple flowers among
Dung dirt, at the base of fences, crack of walls, bringing the tremble of sap among bones
Drawing roots and herbs into the earth
Rain, rain trickles down shaking the vapid soul shorn trees
Along the root of plants, rain, the patter of rain, incessant rain.
The blazing sun of May and June – when under the tin roof of the sky
All was faint dizzy hurt, when all was without intensity
No desire in the bones, the vitality within arteries and veins
With no struggle of hope, anger or pining for anybody
The roof burnt out, a hollow-bellied dog’s panting tongue
Dripping a little saliva and below it faint life –
It was alright, it was fine.

The Waste Land begins:

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

In a place like Orissa, it is summer that is heartless, arid and actually cruel. July brings early showers and cools us down. If in England Summer regenerates, then in most of India it is the season of rain that regenerates the earth. While the two sets of lines talk of two different sets of imageries and visual evocations, the emotive evocations turn out to be similar:

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain. (Eliot)

Cruel and heartless is the season of rains, sprouting purple flowers among
Dung dirt, at the base of fences, crack of walls, bringing the tremble of sap among bones
Drawing roots and herbs into the earth
Rain, rain trickles down shaking the vapid soul shorn tree
Along the root of plants, rain, the patter of rain, incessant rain. (Mohanty)

Again:

Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers. (Eliot)

The blazing sun of May and June – when under the tin roof of the sky
All was faint dizzy hurt, when all was without intensity
No desire in the bones, the vitality within arteries and veins
….
It was alright, it was fine. (Mohanty)

It is surprising to see how emotionally close the two poems are in spite of (or perhaps because of) using radically different imageries drawn from earth and nature. With The Waste Land in hand, in the town of Cuttack what sense does it make to call April the cruelest month because it breeds flowers? After a pleasant winter and a still more pleasant spring, what ironic cruelty can one find in April when plants and buds begin to wither away in the wake of a hot summer? On the other hand, when after the hardest season (summer) rains come, the intensity of relief is perhaps very close to what is evoked by Eliot in talking of a mild summer after a hard winter. This poses an important question for translators. It is still all right to read Eliot in English. But translate him into Odiya. What sense will the lines make?

Baisakha bada nisthura, mati-ru
lilac phula phutai smrutiku basana sange
misai murmusa chera-sabuku basantara barsare
siharai …

Next, let us look at echoes in Kalapurusa which are similar sounding, but which, perhaps, evoke radically different images. In Kalapurusa the following image comes through very powerfully:

I will search on for your locus, search for my existence, my identity
The centre of gravity of this body
Who is it again? Who is where!
Wrong wrong wrong it is only the road of the storm the gale
But I am able to hear beneath the roar of the storm beneath flesh and blood
The sound of time.
Why are you quiet! Talk! Today is so lonely so intimidating –
Quickly, say something.
I hear, in my ears, just behind me
The footsteps, the whispered words of time. (part 2, lines 120-130)

Eliot, in The Waste Land, writes:

Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.
A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the king my brother's wreck
And on the king my father's death before him. 192
White bodies naked on the low damp ground
And bones cast in a little low dry garret,
Rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year.
But at my back from time to time I hear
The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring
Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.

Eliot’s lines (italicized) make use of intertexuality and echo Andrew Marvell’s lines from “To His Coy Mistress.” What is again and again left out is the reference to time. It is this “time” –which is left out – that insists on its presence in the poem by its very absence. Guruprasad Mohanty had no possible way of referring back to anything akin to it in the Indian context, and hence, in his poem “time” figures prominently. The insistence of “time” of “To His Coy Mistress” is integrated into the poem, made a part of it (and not left outside, as in Eliot). Besides, Eliot uses a style emulative of musical “cadence” which comes again and again, but doesn’t end satisfactorily thus leading towards another movement which (will perhaps) complete the musical phrase.

At the end, I will make one final observation about style and the way language is wielded and created. Often Eliot, on Pound’s suggestion, changed regular meter into irregular meter. The verse liber that he used flouted many of the norms of verse (poetry) of the time. Often the dictates of the times (and the contexts) decide the shape of literary form. Odiya in the hands of Guruprasad Mohanty is used in very interesting ways in many of the lines of Kalapurusa. Here is an example:

A barsara deha tale achi achi dhana kheta achi achi amba tota
Dura nai ara pari gan, (part 2, lines90-91)

Literally one can translate the lines thus:

Beneath the body of this rain is is the field of rice is is the mango grove
The village across the distant river,

Poetically

There is hope in this rain, blessing health vigour rest there is
Beneath the impenetrable darkness there are stories of old giantess ghosts and grandmothers
Under the body of this rain there is the corn field there is the mango grove
The village beyond the distant river’s other bank,

Eliot uses echoes as short refrains or cluster of notes used in music:

'What it that noise?'
The wind under the door.
'What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?'
Nothing again nothing.
'Do
'You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
'Nothing?' (lines 117-122)

It is interesting to see how the language of one writer evokes the music in the language of another in an entirely different voice. Musical echoes can often not be translated directly and transform language according to the context. Obviously Mohanty explored the musicality of Odiya differently from the way Eliot explored English. Without The Waste Land probably we would have no Kalapurusa, but then that is how texts relate, waiting for the appropriate climate to germinate in another incarnation. Texts thus have “rebirths” – new and yet a part of a continuity.

References

Eliot, T.S., The Waste Land (online version with notes an  comments: http://eliotswasteland.tripod.com/

Eliot, T.S., “Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock” (online version: http://people.virginia.edu/~sfr/enam312/prufrock.html

Mohanty, Guruprasad, Guruprasad Kavita (The Poems of Guruprasad), Cuttack: Subarnarekha, 2005.

Venuti, L., The Translation Studies Reader, London: Routledge, 2000.
 
¹A different version of this paper was presented at a seminar on Translation in Sambalpur University, Orissa, in early 2010.
²The Waste Land was translated into Odiya by Gyanendra Varma and Eliot knew about it as is indicated by a letter of appreciation and encouragement he wrote to Varma.
³Professor Kalidas Mishra, during a conversation, pointed out that Odiya poet Radhamohan Gadanayak inspired Mohanty to write something like The Waste Land in Odiya.
⁴All the translations in this paper are by the author.