Through the poet's eye

There has been a welcome surge in interest in regional poetry and translations. No better time then to celebrate A K Ramanujan, one of India’s pioneering translators and poet.

An interview of AKR by renowned Kannada poet and playwright H S Shivaprakash was aired on All India Radio, Bengaluru, on August 9, 1988. The stalwarts’ discussion on literature, translation and poetry is as relevant today as it was on the day they spoke and continues to provide us insights well into the 21st century. This is the transcript translated from the Kannada by award-winning translator and novelist Maithreyi Karnoor. Excerpts

HSS: Ramanujan, sir, you have written poems in Kannada and English. You have also ‘farmed’ much in the fields of linguistics, anthropology, folklore etc. So, I begin by asking you a few questions about your poetry, followed by questions about the disciplines of your research.

You have written some special poems in Kannada. You wrote poems at the beginning of the navya (modernist) phase. You pointed at (Gopalkrishna) Adiga as your ideal but wrote in a style that was unlike his. Your poetry exhibits an unprecedented idiosyncrasy in the use of language. I wish to know when began writing poems.

AKR: I started writing Kannada poems when I was about 14 or 15 years old. At first, I wrote humorous poems. They were published in journals such as Koravanji. I have also written poems for Prajavani. This was around 1950. I wrote regularly, but I didn’t publish all of them. I had begun writing English poems before 1955. A friend saw them and sent them to The Illustrated Weekly. That’s where it began – from then on, I started sending them myself. I hadn’t published anything in English before that.

HSS: Your collection Hokkulali Hoovilla is serious writing. When you were writing it, what were your objectives?

AKR: The objective of a poem shouldn’t be stated explicitly (laughs). I think preconceived intentions harm the poem. I discover the objective of my poem after I have written it. I know I’m sidestepping the question on objectives, but during the process of editing, when I ask myself why I am editing it the way I am, I see shapes and forms in my voice, the tempo of my speech, and the speech of others around me. There is a belief among navya poets that without chandas (prosody) there is no form to poetry. Although the navya poets strove to keep poetry close to spoken language, so many words were utterances in pentameter…

HSS: …they slip in without their knowledge…

AKR: …they did. There is a belief that without this, poetry lacks eloquence and does not reflect the flavours and finesse of the language. I do not subscribe to this belief. What I feel is, just like we find poetic shapes and forms, and experiences—empathy even—in common actions, we also get fleeting glimpses of natural shapes and forms within common language. As poets, we must pay keen attention to them.

HSS: Were there models for you from within the Kannada poetic traditions?

AKR: The ones who used spoken language in the most efficient way in poetry were the vachana poets. Even some of our older poets… Pampa and Kumarvyasa… in places where there is debate, or cursing. Tejaswi had written a wonderful essay on it. I see here the beauty and intensity of spoken language, a certain naturalness and the power to express with great depth.

HSS: When you wrote poetry, English poetry was a great influence on Kannada…

AKR: Yes.

HSS: Have you drawn inspiration from English poetry to structure the language of your poetry?

AKR: Certainly! Such efforts have been plenty in English. William Carlos Williams of America said ‘poetry is in things’ and added ‘there are no ideas but in things’. That is, ideas are not apart from the things they talk about – and this material should in itself form the language. I like this idea very much. There are many people with similar ideas. Robert Bly is one of them. It feels like I’m sitting next to them as they speak. You can even hear their own voice. That always becomes a poem. That is a matter of great marvel for me.

HSS: You have ‘harvested’ much poetry in English since the time you went to America. You wrote English poems at a young age. But when did it become a serious preoccupation?

AKR: It must have been around 1950. In retrospect it feels like I ‘farmed’ in Kannada, Tamil, and English all at once. Unknown to me, my mind and my interests flow in all three directions. If I dwell heavily in Kannada on a certain day, I read Tamil the next day. If I read too much Tamil, I turn to English. When talking about sociolinguistics, let me take my own example. I remember this from when I was about 17 years old: we spoke Tamil downstairs – on the ground floor where my mother and my grandmother spent their time. The upper storey had my father’s library where English was prevalent. And when I stepped out of the house, I encountered Kannada. There were spatial differences between the three languages. There were also functional differences. If someone knows three languages, they don’t necessarily use all three equally. Each one has its own context, own meaning…

HSS: …intentions…

AKR: … and intentions. These three languages came to me together. It’s a matter of good fortune in some ways. Now, when I use one language, the other two are constantly present like the reverberation of untouched strings of a sitar. They provide a certain kind of vibration.

HSS: I felt that unlike most Indian poetic traditions, your works do not have a great connection with Sanskrit poetry.

AKR: My thoughts on it of late—and I have discussed this in my recent essays—is that we have gotten into this habit of insisting that Indianness is only what is found in Sanskrit; our cultural elite showcase this to outsiders – and repeat this argument. They talk of advaita, and when talking of Ramayana and Mahabharata they only mention Valmiki and Vyasa’s versions of the epics. But as I study Indian cultures and read Indian literatures and languages, I realise this is a big lie. While the Ramayana’s roots lie in Valmiki, its spread across the country is not through Sanskrit but through our languages… with Kumarvyasa’s and Pampa’s and Nagachandra’s writing in Kannada, with Kamban’s writing in Tamil…

HSS: … there are folk versions of the Ramayana in many languages…

AKR: …and Ramayanas expressed in the colloquial idiom. There are as many as 300 versions of the Ramayana in certain languages. Without what they call the ‘little traditions’ we wouldn’t know what the ‘great traditions’ are. It is through little traditions that this has spread. Because of this, there has been a continuous dialogue within our Indian cultures: different traditions confronted and contrasted and even upended each other. Indian culture is not in Sanskrit alone; it is not in Kannada nor Tamil alone. I think it exists in these dialogues. Take bhakti, for instance. It is when Sanksrit and Kannada came face-to-face was the idea of bhakti born. That is how it was born in Tamil too.

HSS: There is a belief that people who write in English lack a sense of heritage and they cannot write good poetry. When people from other linguistic backgrounds write in a certain language—such as Africans writing in English or Latin Americans writing in Spanish, for instance—they bring a greater richness to literature. So, did your linguistic background cause problems or aid you in your relationship with English poetic traditions?

AKR: Owing to the fact that I have read, studied and taught English literature for many years, I don’t think of English as a language that is removed from me. When I was about 12 or 13 years old, I had started reading one English detective novel a day. Although that isn’t exactly great literature, I had a certain kind of familiarity and ease with the English language. So, in my mind English never felt like a foreign language. Secondly, in the beginning, I wasn’t writing ‘public poetry’. ‘Will others understand and accept my writing?’ was not a doubt or a question in my mind then. For about 8 or 10 years, I wrote for myself—even in Kannada— and because of this, a kind of dialogue developed between me and my poetry. Since I had said to myself all that I had to say—you know, when a man talks to himself, there is no problem of comprehension—I have understood so many of my thoughts. But there have also been certain kinds of difficulties. There are several cultural ideas that I have imbibed without my own knowledge. Take our puranas for instance. I am very fond of several stories from our mythologies. The experience of reading Ramayana, Mahabharata, Pampa’s work and the work of the vachana poets – if I don’t get the same pleasure while writing in English, I feel I am writing in a small, superficial medium. Similarly, I feel I can articulate my childhood experiences and my innermost feelings better in these languages. I don’t know if I can do that in English. I probably hide them in it. I don’t make explicit allusions to Ramayana or the Mahabharata in my English writing.

HSS: Be it vachanas or Tamil vaishnava poetry or marga literature, your translations are so good that they seem like creative works in their own right. But one little grievance is that your translations read more like new creations—almost like Ramanujan’s own poetry—rather than as English renditions of the original poem. Do you purposefully attempt to make it a new creation or do you try to bring the emotions and the associations of the original into English?

AKR: It is impossible to replace anything from one language by another word for word. They have different structures, different phrases, and different associations. New creation is the only way forward. But the new creation needs a certain harmony. And that harmony is achieved when we absorb the original poem in its entirety, hear its voice, pay close attention to its tempo, make it your own and then create it anew. Then, more than a re-creation, it can become an avatar of the original.

HSS: You have worked in the field of linguistics. A while ago, you made an excellent study of proverbs in Kannada. I hear you have applied the Generative Model to Kannada and have written its grammar. What do you feel about on-going work in Kannada linguistics?

AKR: I haven’t been paying much attention to the work happening in India in the field of Kannada linguistics. There have been certain changes in western ways of studying language. Earlier, there was Structuralism, and then it took a turn towards the Generative Model. While these two stressed on the anatomy of language, they did not explore its functions, its uses and purposes, and the new dimensions and layers that a language acquires when people talk to each other. But today we have moved from structure to function. This needs to be done in Kannada. Different kinds of Kannada are spoken by people of different castes. Social differences are contained within language. We need to look at all this with a new perspective. This work has begun only now, and it needs to be carried forward in a big way. Our Dravida languages are a mine of wealth in this matter.

HSS: You have worked in the fields of folklore and anthropology. You are about to bring out a collection of folktales in English translation. There is plenty of work happening in collecting of folk literature. Their study is based on western analytical models. But how do you look at our folklore – what were the thoughts that went into writing your rather introspective preface to your forthcoming collection? What models were handy for this?

AKR: There are about 3 or 4 points I’d like to talk about here. Firstly, we must dissect our folklore and look for parallel schemes with international narratives. For instance, a story we have heard in Mysore may also be heard in Germany or in Greece or in Russia.

HSS: Just like a universal grammar, is there a universal folklore?

AKR: I prefer to call it ‘international’ rather than ‘universal’. There are internationally existing stories, and proverbs… recently, I have even noticed riddles similar to ours being used in distant Africa. That’s because these things travel. Even when people don’t travel, if people speak two languages, proverbs, riddles—and stories in particular—travel between languages, cultures and countries. We must pay attention to this. When we do, we will see what is characteristic of Kannada. For that, we must first gather interregional and international data of this kind. Before we say this is Kannada, we must establish a contrast for it.

Secondly, we must look at it from an anthropological perspective. Let’s take stories read for religious rites for instance: they are accompanied by certain performances and rituals. We must look at the relationships between the stories and their performances. Take stories of Maramma, the village goddess, for instance. They are accompanied by occurrences of spiritual possession and animal sacrifice. The whole village with all its castes and classes and orders come together and each one has its own place.

HSS: There are sthala puranas…

AKR: Yes. Each place has a mythical significance associated with it. It is difficult to find histories to all of these. So, rather than historical, if we look at it from anthropological perspectives, we can understand their functions.

And thirdly, we must look at them through the lens of literature. Like I said earlier, there is this tendency to insist that Sanskrit is the only real way and everything else is local. One step ahead of this is the insistence that works of Pampa and Kumarvyasa—written literature—is all there is.

HSS: Each language has a marga parampare…

AKR: … a tradition of paths. We see in our folk traditions several new kinds of categories and critical theory even. This increases the range of Indian literature by tenfold. That is very important.

The fourth point is psychology. In the last 10 to 15 years, along with folklore, I have been reading people like Freud. Freud’s study of psychology was the family. In that, the relationships between father, mother, son and daughter—father-son, father-daughter, mother-son, and mother-daughter—are important. He has studied the internal conflicts of the mind and mental illness (and health) by making these relations the subject of his studies. The focus of our folktales also happens to be the family: they involve a character leaving the folds of the family; a family’s dreams and aspirations, their anxieties and fears. I feel that our Indian folktales work as the means of psychoanalysis. The more I see them, the more special and meaningful they appear to me. But when reading Freud, I notice he had certain prejudices: men being more important than women is one of his bigger prejudices. That is not the case in our stories. In some stories men are in the lead and some others are women-centric. They both have many differences between them. The more we study them we gain a certain kind of self-realisation about our culture, about ourselves and about our many social discourses.

HSS: What creative and translation works are you involved in at the moment?

AKR: I have translated 75 Kannada folktales from different districts of Karnataka – mostly ones I have learned and collected from women. I have written an epilogue which includes the thoughts I shared with you just now. I normally do not write prologues as I feel these stories are more important than me. So, I write epilogues which can be read later only if one wants to.

Since olden days, our country is known to be a country of stories. But we still do not have a comprehensive anthology of folktales derived from say 15 major Indian languages. We must do in our country what the Brothers Grimm did in Germany, and Afanasyev did in Russia. I have begun work towards creating such an anthology.

HSS: In English?

AKR: I will do it in English. I’m working on this with some of my anthropologist friends. I’m also working on an anthology of one hundred stories based on works collected over a hundred years.

Thirdly, I feel it is very important for translation to bring the works of modern Indian poets into English. That will also lead to an interregional communication within India. For that, I have selected about five or six poets each from 15 languages and chosen one poem I like the most per poet, used their English translation done by others, edited them, sought the permission of the poets and have made a small book to be published by Oxford University Press.

HSS: You have written short stories, translated a novel. Do you plan to work in other forms of literature?

AKR: I hope to write some stories. But I haven’t gotten around to doing it yet. I am caught up in a hundred other things.

The translator is the author of the novel Sylvia: Distant Avuncular Ends. She has won the Kuvempu Bhasha Bharati prize for translation and was shortlisted for the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation prize and twice for the Montreal International Poetry prize. She is the recipient of the 2021/22 Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship for translation and creative writing.