Let me admit that I am a votary of the following falsifiable proposition that is almost a cliché among those who follow Urdu poetry: A great poet creates a new idiom for the language. This proposition yields the following corollary for the translator: The translation of a great poet, especially a translation that positions itself as a presentation of the great poet to the target language’s audience, must create a new idiom in the target language. On this count, Ranjit Hoskote’s The Homeland’s an Ocean: Mir Taqi Mir translated from the Urdu is, unfortunately, a failure.
Not wanting to disadvantage the translator, I deliberately did not read the Urdu originals of the poems translated in this volume, although they are presented alongside their translations. Competing with Mir’s sonorous, metrical and allusive poetry would have been challenging. But even on their own the translations disappoint. The regular incursion of contemporary turns of phrase fall like clanging plates. Sample this American idiom that shatters the attempt to evoke a premodern world of language: “Don’t go by how things have panned out for me / Stuff happens.” Even the jaunty contraction that makes it into the title— “Homeland’s”—evokes the world of a globalised English-speaking culture that sits at odds with the world of the nightingale and the rose.
The Homeland’s an Ocean
Penguin
Pages: 272
Price: Rs.499
Stepping away from these linguistic equivalents of invasive species, we find little succour. A verse like “the throat fills with a wave of rose breath / tinged with the loved one’s bloodthirsty sword” offers no easy pathway for an English speaker to enter into its tangle of metaphors. How then is one to make a way to the pleasure that lies within? Overall, the translations feel hurried and stiff and do not cohere as a collection.
A critical introduction is customary for a volume of translations, but The Homeland’s an Ocean suffers from too much of what is normally a good thing. Hoskote’s introductory essay runs to 83 pages. A review of poetry translation is usually not a space for data analytics but 150 translated couplets with 83 pages of introduction comes to around 2 couplets per page of commentary. A similar calculation for Shamsur Rehman Faruqi’s translation of Mir’s ghazals that came out just a few years ago (around 700 couplets and 11 pages of introduction) yields a more satisfactory number of 63.6 couplets per page of introduction.
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Is this then a case of the verse supporting their commentary rather than the other way round? That too can be a legitimate exercise, but Hoskote’s introduction lacks both the rigour of good academic writing and the carefully devised structure that makes popular writing on arcane topics accessible to a wider audience. At times, the essay takes up unnecessary straw men, for example, the question, “Why is Ghalib more popular than Mir?” No measure of popularity is provided to establish that Ghalib is indeed more popular than Mir, but an explanation is provided: Mir missed the era of print, whereas Ghalib took advantage of it. What then of the fact that Urdu poetry was widely consumed and transmitted in the 19th century by people who could not read? What then of the fact that in the current day, baitbazi competitions, in which the person who has memorised more Urdu couplets is more likely to succeed, are growing in popularity?
Critical gaps
In another place there is a two-page argument on why ghazals cannot or should not be translated in their entirety. But then, is not failure built into the process of translation, and should we not continue to translate despite the fear of failure? If Hoskote had said, “I didn’t translate whole ghazals because I didn’t feel like it”, that would have made much more sense than to say something that implies that all translators of whole ghazals are on a fool’s errand (conflict of interest alert: I have translated ghazals in their entirety and published them). Such critical gaps emerge in many of the claims made through the essay.
The Homeland’s an Ocean was published in August 2024. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement
Eventually, after finding myself outraging on several rather loose sections—the one-paragraph summary, for example, of the development of Hindi that flattened a century of a complex history into not much more than a potshot at Hindutva—I settled on the idea that rather than reading this introduction as an academic essay, it should be viewed in the way that commentary on the Ramcharitmanas is developed by kathavachaks (people who recite and expound on Tulsi’s Ramayana): reading the text gives rise to thoughts and feelings, referred to as bhav, that are then used to fill out the explication of the text.
As with these kathavachaks, in The Homeland’s an Ocean, it appears that the secondary texts that Hoskote has read have moved him in different ways and given rise to different kinds of bhav over a period of time, and the essay expresses and elucidates these feelings. This is very well for a private conversation between friends on a boozy evening, but when we see Hoskote talking about a “far more political” Mir than has been presented before, we wonder if that more political Mir exists anywhere outside Hoskote’s own imagination, and if by attempting to create that Mir on the page, the author is not doing a disservice to the poet.
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At the end of the day, it is not clear what role this volume is expected to play in the field of writings in English about Mir. Faruqi’s translations of Mir’s ghazals are better crafted and provide an immersive experience simply by being more in number. C.M. Naim’s translation of Zikr-i-Mir (Mir’s autobiography) provides a wonderful glimpse of Mir’s prose and also contains an academically sound introductory essay. But Hoskote’s greater standing in the world of Indian English poetry is likely to bring Mir to a wider English-speaking audience in this country who might not be aware of the works of the experts on Urdu, and that, in itself, is perhaps a good enough reason to publish the volume under review.
Amitabha Bagchi has translated the ghazals of Muneer Niazi. His new novel, Unknown City, releases soon.
