In the Translator's Workshop: Featuring Victoria Moul on a Short Poem from the Subhāsitaratnakosha

Amit Majmudar, George Steiner Editor for Poetry and Criticism

George Steiner wrote one of the most perceptive books we have on translation and based its title on one of our most profound parables on ambition and communication: After Babel. As a sometime translator myself, I know first hand the Babel-like misunderstandings that bedevil all those who would dismantle and rebuild a tower of words.

I am aware, accordingly, of the poet-translator’s background sense of the endeavor’s futility, one that writers have lamented for hundreds of years. In Don Quixote (quoted here in John Rutherford’s translation), the priest who helps burn Quixote’s books of chivalry remarks, “...He [the translator] left behind much of what was best in it, which is what happens to all those who try to translate poetry: however much care they take and skill they display, they can never recreate it in the full perfection of its original birth.”

As Cervantes notes, a translator’s problems compound specifically with poetry, so deeply dependent on nuances and idiosyncrasies in the language of its composition. Readers rarely learn about the “inside baseball” behind a translator’s choices and sacrifices, about dilemmas of etymology and connotation, about the slippages between counterpart, counterfeit words. In poetry translation, when it’s done correctly, no detail is too pedantic, no feature of syntax or diction is irrelevant, and no choice is trivial.

I reached out to poets who translate from languages or cultures far afield from English: Norse, Russian, Ki’che’ Maya (Castilian), Chinese, Sanskrit. I asked the poet-translators to focus on a line or stanza and share the nitty-gritty of moving poetry between the original and English. This series features the translators' mini-essays, showing us how much thought and hard work go into what poetry translators do.

Amit Majmudar

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Victoria Moul: On a Short Poem from the Subhāsitaratnakosha

Here Victoria Moul read in the poem in Sanskrit and English:

My example is a well-known short poem taken from the Subhāsitaratnakosha, an anthology of Sanskrit court poetry compiled around 1100 AD by a Buddhist scholar named Vidyākara. The anthology survives in only two manuscripts and contains 1738 short poems and extracts, dating mostly from between the eighth and eleventh centuries. It includes several poems by women, including this one, which is attributed to Śīlabhattārikā, about whom, as far as I am aware, we know nothing except for her name. Here is a transliteration of the Sanskrit text, in which long compound words, a distinctive feature of Sanskrit literary style, have been broken up into their constituent parts, divided by hyphens:

yaḥ kaumāra-haraḥ sa eva ca varas tāścandragarbhā niśāḥ

pronmīlan-nava-mālatī-surabhayaste te ca vindhyānilāḥ

sā caivāsmi tathāpi dhairya-surata-vyāpāra-līlā-bhrtāṁ 

kiṁ me rodhasi vetasī-vana-bhuvāṁ cetaḥ samutkaṇṭhate.^[1]

Sanskrit poetry uses quantitative metres based on the patterned alternation of long and short syllables, similar to those of classical Latin and Ancient Greek. This particular poem is in the metre known as Śārdūlavikrīḍita, which is by far the single most common metre in the collection. In this case, the poem consists of four metrically-identical sequences of nineteen syllables each, arranged in two couplets. These are sometimes printed as two long lines, and in Sanskrit poetics each of the four metrical sequences is in fact conceived of as a ‘quarter-line’, meaning that the whole poem, though consisting of four repetitions of the same metrical sequence, is understood to be a single unit.

As the poem is in a metre which would be familiar to any experienced reader of Sanskrit lyric, I thought it was important that the style and form of the translation should be readily accessible to an Anglophone reader. For this reason, I made no attempt in this instance to reproduce or even suggest the original metre in my translation, as this would be likely to produce quite an unusual-sounding poem, which is the opposite of my aim. On the other hand, a free verse translation would set aside entirely the considerable formal constraints of the Sanskrit poem, which are a considerable part of its beauty, memorability and, for Sanskrit readers, its familiarity. Instead, I tried to combine ordinary English diction and word order to create a sense of accessibility with stanzas, end-rhyme, half-rhyme and also quite a high degree of assonance to suggest a formal structure: in the first stanza, for example, there is a concentration of words containing similar vowel sounds (first, is, this, evening, nights, I, filled, moonlight, Vindhya, hills, thick, jasmine, first time). Here is my translation of the poem:

The first man I lay with is my husband now

And this evening is just the same

As those nights when I felt filled

By moonlight, and the breeze came

Down from the Vindhya hills thick

With the scent of jasmine opening for the first time.

And I too am the same. So why

Does my heart so yearn again to lie

Behind a screen of reeds, in pleasure

So tender and so long to take

On the slope of the bank, on the rise of my waist.

In my translation each couplet has become a whole stanza, one slightly longer than the other. Within the stanzas, I have attempted to reproduce the order of thought of the Sanskrit and something of its effect. In the original, for example, the first half-line refers to the husband and the next line-and a half to the nights they spent together when courting: so in my version only the first line of the first stanza describes the speaker’s husband, and the rest of the stanza deals with the nights.

Sanskrit poetry of this type achieves particular density and concision in various ways all of which create a challenge for the translator. One of these is by assuming knowledge in the reader of the wider cultural and literary tradition to which it belongs. Sanskrit lyric is particularly rich in erotic verse, which is divided into many different types and typical scenarios: there is no real parallel for this in any Western literary tradition. Similarly, several elements of the poem assume specific cultural knowledge. There are, for instance, many different Sanskrit words for different types of jasmine, each of which has its own cultural and literary connotations. The type mentioned here, mālatī, is known for its strong scent, abundance of flowers, its use as a woman’s hair decoration, and for flowering in the evening. The Anglophone reader is very unlikely to be aware of different types of jasmine, let alone their different possible associations, so to introduce a qualifying adjective here would risk alienating the reader. On the other hand, jasmine is, I think, familiar enough even to an Anglophone reader (and its strong scent sufficiently obvious and evocative) that I was not tempted to replace it with a more familiar flower with broadly similar connotations, such as honeysuckle.

Victoria Moul, translator

Sanskrit is a highly inflected language, which makes for considerable concision: just as with Latin, Ancient Greek or Russian, any translation into English is forced to add a relatively large number of ‘little’ words, especially articles and prepositions, in place of case endings. But an additional challenge for the translator, which is not encountered in the same way in Latin, Greek or Russian, is that Sanskrit poetry of this type is characterised by its use of complex compounds, in which a series of elements are juxtaposed and the case ending applied only to the final element. The relationship between the series of elements is left to the reader to deduce, based largely on various conventions, but often leaving a considerable margin of suggestive ambiguity. In the third line here, for example, we find the word dhairyasuratavyāpāralīlābhrtāṁ, which in the text given above has been divided to indicate the different elements of the compound: dhairya-surata-vyāpāra-līlā-bhrtāṁ. Taken literally, this means something like ‘constancy-tender-exertion-play-full-of’ and it is an adjective agreeing with the reedbeds in the next line. Each of these words, of course, has its own range of meaning: dhairya, for example, can also mean intelligence or courage. In most cases, the English translator has no option other than to translate compounds of this type into clauses (or even sentences) of their own. Here, this compound corresponds approximately to the English words ‘lie . . . in pleasure so tender and so long to take’. One of the most untranslatable features of Sanskrit poetry in this style is the counterpoint between a highly inflected language, filled with precise case endings, and these long compounds, in which the relationship between the elements of the compound is inferred without the use of case or tense markers.

In the first line of the Sanskrit, it is the nights (not the speaker) that are ‘filled with the moon’ (candragarbhā, literally, ‘moon-filled’). When placed as the final element of a compound, garbha is a common way of saying ‘filled with [something]’, but its literal meaning is ‘womb’. The word is related to the verbal stem ‘grabh’, meaning ‘to conceive’. This meaning contributes to the erotic atmosphere of the lines, but English does not form compounds as freely as Sanskrit, and the English suffix ‘-ful’ does not have the same connotation. In this case, I have attempted to suggest the erotic flavour of the Sanskrit term by expanding the compound adjective into a clause in the first person, ‘when I felt filled / By moonlight’.

There is a similar difficulty in the last line of the poem, when the speaker’s heart pines or longs for the pleasure of love-making rodhasi, ‘on the bank’. In erotic poetry of this type, the river-bank is a popular location for love-making – so much so that even the mention of reeds, for instance, can suggest an erotic connotation to the reader. ‘Bank’ or ‘slope’ is the primary meaning of the noun rodhas, but it can also mean a woman’s hips, because they are curved like a bank. Since the mere mention of reeds or riverbank does not in itself carry an erotic association in English, I expanded here, translating the word twice and also glossing it (‘slope of’, ‘rise of’) to emphasise the connection and suggest something of the lingering eroticism of the original.

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Victoria Moul is a critic, poet and translator living in Paris. Recent poems and translations have appeared in PNReview, Poetry London, The London Magazine, The Dark Horse, bad lilies, Black Iris, Modern Poetry in Translation, Interpret, The Brazen Head, New Verse Review and Ancient Exchanges. She writes weekly about poetry and translation on her substack, Horace & friends: https://vamoul.substack.com/ 

^[1] The Sanskrit text I used is the edition of Vidyākara’s Subhāsitaratnakosa edited by D. D. Kosambi and V. V. Gokhale, with an introduction by D. D. Kosambi (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957). The numbering of the poems is taken from this edition. I am also indebted to the notes, introduction and prose translations in Daniel H. H. Ingalls, An Anthology of Sanskrit Court Poetry. Vidyākara’s “Subhāsitaratnakosa” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). The edition of the Subhāsitaratnakosha most easily found online contains a different version of this poem, with several significant textual variants.