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| Sunday, May 2, 2004 |
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| Sunday, May 2, 2004 |
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Dreams and Desires: Seventy Poems of Mohan Singh
Love, in its varied shades, is a recurrent theme not only in Mohan Singh’s early poetry of the 30s but even in his last collection Buhe (1977). Hence, memory too becomes an important preoccupation of the poet. At least five poems in the collection have the title Memory, though the "fragments of countless memories" are scattered in many more poems. There are poems about reminiscing (Those Were Also the Days), poems of beautiful memories of togetherness (Beneath the Mango Tree and Intimate Feeling) and of haunting or "smouldering" memories of lost love which bring "stings and pain along" or leave "a shudder in life’s twigs". Love frequently figures as a dream, a tender emotion, an intangible longing, a constricting passion at times and at times a delicate desire as in Tajmahal: "Creepers hung round tree-trunks/And buds on creepers slept,/Fragrance frolicked with buds/Tangled in sound sleep," and "Quiet lay the Jamuna banks/So fresh and green,/They held water’s sleepy flow/In loving tight embrace." But the poet is also conscious of the harsher aspects of reality and the latter part of the poem spells out the suffering of the labourers exploited in the name of Moghul Art. (A) Soldier’s Feeling is remarkable for the way it blends youthful desire with patriotic fervour in the pre-Independence days of the poet’s youth. Ghazal sounds the poet’s regret in the 70s: "How against the state we could wage a fight,/Nothing we had except the poetic might". Some lyrics are in the nature of philosophical contemplations on the idea of self, God and life. The poems abound in familiar nature imagery of the sun, moon, stars, clouds, rain, etc. The English translation largely captures the melody and lyricism of the original, as in another poem entitled Ghazal: "Let me bedeck your shoulders/With love’s wings to fly,/Let me make your beauty/Worthy of a swing in the sky", or as in Memory: "In the sky’s blue mortar/Grinding gems into Henna,/To the soles of the West/The sun diligently applied,/On the feet thus bedecked/Wearing gold sandals/Your memory arrived". However, in some poems such as Mother, the translation falls short of capturing the intensity of thought and the ease of expression of the original. Could it be that some poems are more challenging and do not yield easily to a different idiom? Partly, it seems, the translating strategy employed is at fault, where "the focus is always on rhythm, utterance and discourse, rather than on diction, metre and syntax", as the translator states in the introduction. Explication or the effort to foreground the ‘discourse’ of the poem better remains the domain of the critics. The translator should render the poem as closely as possible to the original. For example Sipahi da Dil could have been literally translated into English rather than changing it to Soldier’s Feeling or Kuri Pothohar Di to Pothohari Lass. Otherwise the very purpose of translation is undermined. The introduction by Tejwant Singh Gill usefully gives an overview of Mohan Singh’s poetry, though there are a few linguistic slips and oddities which needed copy-editing. Attractively brought out in terms of paper, print and design, and virtually free from printing errors, the book is much better produced than many earlier publications of Punjabi University. |
TRANSLATION, its limitations notwithstanding, has the
undisputed virtue of taking a literary work beyond its linguistic and
cultural confines. Mohan Singh’s poems translated into English by
Tejwant Singh Gill offer to the non-Punjabi readers a fairly
representative glimpse of the creativity of one of the finest Punjabi
poets of the 20th century. Free from self-conscious virtuosity, most
poems are short lyrics straight from the heart and in this almost
typical of Punjabi sensibility and expression.