A Transaction in Light and Clarity
by Rajesh Sharma
Is the translation of poetry even possible? How can anyone ferry the whole stuff across? Sound, vision, sense, context, suggestion, voice, tone, style, place, time, position, perspective, atmosphere—the sheer cargo overwhelms.
And yet people translate. Some have a gift for translation, some have only the ability. Ability cannot take you far in the absence of gift, but it can be honed. But the gift also, in the absence of practice, will rot.
With its subtle ambiguity, the Sanskrit word pratibha partakes of both ability and gift. As a gift that can be augmented by practice that refines ability, pratibha is the mind’s reflective power to illuminate in your deepest inwardness what you contemplate. It bestows insight and makes execution possible. To love doing translation is to love being waylaid by surprises, which test and enlarge pratibha.
Translations have a way of feeling unfinished even after they have been completed. There is something loamy about them, fertile, stirring and gleaming with forms still enveloped in darkness. As much as languages tend to withhold some secrets from other languages, they like to tell certain secrets only to some languages. And then there is the work of time, which may take its own time to excavate what lies embedded in a language, asleep and waiting to be touched by another breath. Translations tell languages that they do not know even themselves enough. That they sometimes do not know what they have lost and forgotten. That they know even less of what all they possess, until it comes to season, or until serendipity blows away the dust of ages.
Literary translation, kavyanuvada, has to wrestle with these things far more than the non-literary kind, shastranuvada.In the space of literature, languages play in ways that not only enlarge our circles of experience and sensibility but also renew and make strange our worlds. A thousand years ago, in his work Kavya Mimansa, Rajashekhara described the poetic in terms of the delights that attend on it as an adventure into the unthought: kavya is avicharita ramaniya, he says.
The experience of translating a literary work makes this adventure richer and stranger. The sense of the unfinished, of an infusible remainder, that often shadows translation is a sign of intimations of infinity—which will endlessly draw the reader to a work, inspiring at once dissatisfaction and delight. Shastranuvada makes other demands, for shastra, unlike kavya, is, broadly speaking, determined and definitive, neatly bounded, and it tells instead of suggesting. Kavya is tentative, wandering, shape-shifting, elusive, self-birthing. Of course, kavya and shastra gain from mutual intimacy.
For the great German novelist Herman Broch, literature is “always an impatience with knowledge”. It wants more—more knowledge, more than only knowledge. Shastra inclines to settling down, to definitive statement. Rajashekhara defines it as vicharita sustha. He is probably invoking a useful traditional distinction.
Writing about style, Walter Benjamin unstitches the inscrutable duality of language and thinking. “If style is the power to move freely in the length and breadth of linguistic thinking without falling into banality, it is attained chiefly by the cardiac strength of great thoughts, which drives the blood of language through the capillaries of syntax, into the remotest limbs,” he writes in his essay on Karl Kraus. In literature, style is not ornament, opulence, elegance, even grace. It is language probing consciousness in search of what can be thought.
Kavya, then, is not just a matter of writing, or reading. It is a style of thinking. Of thinking as a self-aware activity of consciousness. Of thinking as a probing, exploratory, intrepid adventure that encompasses the whole sensibility. Of thought become experience, in the ripeness of what Bharatmuni calls rasa.
Attempts to translate the word “translation” allow a glimpse into translation’s several layers and facets. In Hindi, for instance, is it to be rendered as anuvada? Or would anukarana (or anukriti) be a finer choice? Or pratikriti? Translation is all these, and more. Anuvada implies unpacking, elaborating, doing the work of bringing out what may have been put there with a stone carver’s finesse or what may have accumulated there outside of the carver’s will. Anukarana and anukriti evoke a trudging after, a fidelity to process and outcome, a mimetic pursuit. Pratikriti suggests a parallel, alternative work—from which the work contemplates itself, an other it once carried unseen but that stands apart now, delivered, outside. As pratikriti, translation is an act in which language reveals its talent for reflexivity and autonomy at the same time.
And so translations bring out, follow, set free, are set free. What sometimes may look like infidelity in a translation may be its way of being faithful. In translation, it is not possible to sunder ethics from aesthetics at all.
Nor is it at all possible to make one’s peace with translation without arriving at a clear view of language. Where does language dwell? What is its relation with reality? What is its nature?
A word has three homes, Panini says. It lives at once in the throat, in the intellect and in the heart. So a wordsmith works simultaneously on speech, on thought, and on his inwardness. Vaikhari, madhyama and pashyanti as the three orders as well as elements of language denote, among other things, the three dwellings. In literature, pashyanti dominates. As pashyanti, language is the meaning and the word become one so that literature is experienced as reality of the order of truth.
A translator has to be a good reader (one looks and listens with care), for which he is required to be an accomplished wordsmith. He has to realise the word in all its three homes. He has to know it, has to know tattva, has to be (like the discerning critic in Rajashekhar’s opinion) a tattvabhiniveshi: one who does not let go of tattva, the itness of what is. He needs to possess an unfailing sense of the correct and the appropriate. Not for him the error of cognition, viparyayaya, the mistaking of one thing for another. To be a vikalpa, an alternative, the text’s own other, a translation has to be free from viparyaya. The ability to notice the errors of cognition requires that one experience the word in hrdaya, in one’s deepest inwardness. Flaubert rightly said that there are no synonyms. A writer cannot afford to mistake, take something for what it is not. He must see what is and reach out for the only right word. Inferior writers settle for substitutes. And so do uncaring translators.
That means the translator needs to possess, like a critic does, bhavayitri pratibha, in addition to karayitri pratibha (to borrow again from Rajashekhara)—the ability to be in a work as distinct from the ability to make it. It is an alchemical gift with two faces: it works on the translator as much as it does on the work, so that both are reborn in the process. At the core of the process is empathy that makes acceptance of the constraints not only possible but pleasant. To be trusted, the translator has to trust. He has to be faithful to the work in its freedom to be itself in translation. It is in guarding this freedom that his actions sometimes look like infidelities.
The ability to enter a work, bhavayitri pratibha, gains from performative reading, from abhinaya, outer as much as inner: you act out a work physically or in the mind’s theatre. Aristotle advises an aspiring dramatic poet to mobilise all his affects to imagine himself as the character to be created. The Russian poet Nikolai Gumilev mentions gesture as the key to poetic imagining. Gesture becomes the key to rasa-avesha, to affective opening up to experience, and to poetry as experience. You act out the work—with, in, on yourself. You live it, become it. You achieve samadhi with it.
Samadhi is something a poet seeks to achieve, as a yogi does, or anyone does who would make something—who would, to use that magnificent word the Greeks used, practice poesis. Rodrigo Garcia recalls that his father Gabriel Garcia Marquez, while writing, would be so absorbed in thought that he did not notice when somebody entered his study and left. Cézanne’s wife says that the painter was all eyes even in his last moments, looking hard at things around him, his eyeballs almost falling out. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke speaks of the poet becoming the song itself so that not a trace of the effort remains.
Samadhi with the object of contemplation gives antarajnana: the insight that comes from attentive looking that is intense to the point of absorption and that leads you into the object where the object bares its mysteries. Buddhist Tantra artists, as Ananda Coomaraswamy says, hold this to be a necessary stage in the process of making: you make the work inwardly before it is rendered outside. The making of art—at the level of form as an abstraction—beyond mere depictive imitation, or miming, proceeds through inner knowing, by way of working in the freedom of one’s inner studio. William Tucker, in The Language of Sculpture, traces the most significant phases of Auguste Rodin’s artistic journey along this path. As he reminds us, Rodin’s advice to the young Rilke was to patiently practice looking: “Why don’t you just go and look at something—for example an animal in the Jardin des Plantes, and keep on looking at it till you are able to make a poem of it?” Objects unfold their mysteries to a patiently contemplating consciousness. The sacred leaps forth, the sacred which is outside in you.
The paradox suggests the enigma of the transcendence that art affords: the way art reveals the world as much as us to us as more than we thought the world was and we were, revealing something essential that we didn’t know of, that seemed alien but wasn’t, that is a part of us, of which we are always a part, that touches us without exhausting its mystery. We don’t just witness but live art’s mystery. And this makes the journey into art a pilgrimage. A going across, a passing over, a tirtha yatra.
Tirtha is a sacred place, a place outside in us, a promise waiting to be redeemed, a potentiality awaiting actualisation. It is a sacred place in that it opens a way beyond what we had followed so far, drawing us into strangeness. But if the strange is that which is unfamiliar, how do we recognise it if not through some forgotten familiarity now recovered?
One is reminded of Keats’s “sweet remembrance”, of Plato’s knowledge as remembering. Of the Shaiva pratyabhijna, re-cognition, remembered knowing. On another register, that of the cattle herds, tirtha denotes the site where the cattle herd walks his cattle across a stream. Two orders of the ground of being become intimate there. You work between two languages and glimpse what is there in them yet outside them. You taste inexhaustible mysteries.
Translation is sandhya, the sacred twilight music. The music of becoming. Your world expands and changes and makes a different music when a world you knew becomes intimate with another, and hidden potentialities are not only discovered but actualised, and the unconscious of the text-world wakes from sleep. And srishti vistara happens, the cosmos expands. Between two languages, over them, a third hovers, almost glimpsed but not grasped. This is the language of translation, a Sandha Bhasha, a between-language, the speech of a generative coming together, the language of there as elsewhere. Language that breathes the aspiration of music.
Translation creates; and it becomes, for that reason, a metaphor for creation. A work’s translations are the dreams the work saw when it was a seed, and then forgot them. Now they return as visitants from outside, from an outside in the work. Imagination in this sense is the making intrinsic to the thing. It is and is not vikalpa. An other that was always already there. Vikalpa is born of prajna, which looks far out; viparyaya mistakes.
Kalpana—the word for imagination—means also, as in Shaivism, thought constructs. And kalpa is an eon, a period of cosmic time. Like time that engenders by bringing things to fruition, translation ripens to manifest. Its way of working is to make over time; developing, un-veloping, as in old-world photography. Translations are promises, often unforeknown, in the process of redemption. Waiting for them, a work waits for time’s waking touch.
Translations are carved out of the normally inaudible noise that huddles around a work like an infrared aura. To the translator-sculptor, the work to be translated sometimes appears like a stone: a form beckons, asking to be freed.
Translation asks for more than a familiarity with the languages. In fact, it needs more than the study of languages. The translator, like a poet, should know many things, as Rajashekhara says; he should be a polymath of sorts. You write from inside your circle of experience, but you translate essentially as an outsider. And you need extraordinary stamina for abhyasa, practice. This is difficult to sustain if shraddha, faith in your calling as a translator, is lacking. Abhyasa brings a sense of ease: you come gradually to settle in the translator’s seat. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you are translating well: it only means you can now begin to be attentive to the work in hand. Here too Sukhasana, sitting easy is a necessary condition for dhyana, as in Yoga, but not its substitute. The sense of ease prepares you to see better, so that one day you are able to accept the object of contemplation in an uninhibited embrace. The acquired ease, sahaj, with which you settle down to translate is the first step towards the immersion, the becoming-one with the object of contemplation, that will come with samadhi.
Like the writer, the translator too seeks the word that will go straight to its destination. This is the sadhu shabda, the word that is clear and does not deviate. Translation is a sadhana, a rigorous practice in pursuit of lucidity and exactitude. Vyakarana, understood in the Indian tradition as the study of language, is a study of language in its relation to light and distance. The sadhutva of language is the shortest and clearest distance between the meaning and the word. Words, Bhartrihari says, shine like stars reflected in a stream; the poet brings to them the meanings he wants them to hold. That means to begin with the words is, for a poet, to begin at the wrong end. He begins with the meanings. That is how poetry protects itself from cliche and rejuvenates language. And one must remember that the simile of stars reflected in a stream points to the light that lasts though it appears in what passes.
Translation is thus a transaction in light and clarity. You search for meanings to be translated into meanings, so that words will follow and not lead. Clarity without cliche: Aristotle also probably meant this when he praised the style that is clear without being commonplace. The clarity of meaning and word, the absence of murk and turbidity, is prasada—the precondition of dhvani. Prasada is the quality of luminous grace and openness, which evokes a sense of light and freedom in the mind that witnesses. For dhvani is not noise but a wealth of subtle registers. That is why translation’s biggest enemy is cliche, that corpse of an overkilled word.
The translator’s dream is to be a siddha anuvadaka--to be the translator who has achieved ripeness, which shows in his decisive, defining touch. He mirrors the siddha kavi who has achieved ripeness in the use of the word and the sentence--shabda paka and vakya paka, as Rajashekhara puts it. Like a ripened poet, an accomplished translator harnesses the powers of memory (smriti), of the presence of mind (mati) and of intuition (prajna). Translation blossoms when remembering, ready wit and the mind’s leap beyond the manifest come together.
And siddhi is not the termination of sadhana, but another reason to go on, to seek more adventure. It is a sign that affirms and deepens your faith in your calling. For translation is a process, not a boundaried and finished thing. It is metamorphosis.
And yet people translate. Some have a gift for translation, some have only the ability. Ability cannot take you far in the absence of gift, but it can be honed. But the gift also, in the absence of practice, will rot.
With its subtle ambiguity, the Sanskrit word pratibha partakes of both ability and gift. As a gift that can be augmented by practice that refines ability, pratibha is the mind’s reflective power to illuminate in your deepest inwardness what you contemplate. It bestows insight and makes execution possible. To love doing translation is to love being waylaid by surprises, which test and enlarge pratibha.
Translations have a way of feeling unfinished even after they have been completed. There is something loamy about them, fertile, stirring and gleaming with forms still enveloped in darkness. As much as languages tend to withhold some secrets from other languages, they like to tell certain secrets only to some languages. And then there is the work of time, which may take its own time to excavate what lies embedded in a language, asleep and waiting to be touched by another breath. Translations tell languages that they do not know even themselves enough. That they sometimes do not know what they have lost and forgotten. That they know even less of what all they possess, until it comes to season, or until serendipity blows away the dust of ages.
Literary translation, kavyanuvada, has to wrestle with these things far more than the non-literary kind, shastranuvada.In the space of literature, languages play in ways that not only enlarge our circles of experience and sensibility but also renew and make strange our worlds. A thousand years ago, in his work Kavya Mimansa, Rajashekhara described the poetic in terms of the delights that attend on it as an adventure into the unthought: kavya is avicharita ramaniya, he says.
The experience of translating a literary work makes this adventure richer and stranger. The sense of the unfinished, of an infusible remainder, that often shadows translation is a sign of intimations of infinity—which will endlessly draw the reader to a work, inspiring at once dissatisfaction and delight. Shastranuvada makes other demands, for shastra, unlike kavya, is, broadly speaking, determined and definitive, neatly bounded, and it tells instead of suggesting. Kavya is tentative, wandering, shape-shifting, elusive, self-birthing. Of course, kavya and shastra gain from mutual intimacy.
For the great German novelist Herman Broch, literature is “always an impatience with knowledge”. It wants more—more knowledge, more than only knowledge. Shastra inclines to settling down, to definitive statement. Rajashekhara defines it as vicharita sustha. He is probably invoking a useful traditional distinction.
Writing about style, Walter Benjamin unstitches the inscrutable duality of language and thinking. “If style is the power to move freely in the length and breadth of linguistic thinking without falling into banality, it is attained chiefly by the cardiac strength of great thoughts, which drives the blood of language through the capillaries of syntax, into the remotest limbs,” he writes in his essay on Karl Kraus. In literature, style is not ornament, opulence, elegance, even grace. It is language probing consciousness in search of what can be thought.
Kavya, then, is not just a matter of writing, or reading. It is a style of thinking. Of thinking as a self-aware activity of consciousness. Of thinking as a probing, exploratory, intrepid adventure that encompasses the whole sensibility. Of thought become experience, in the ripeness of what Bharatmuni calls rasa.
Attempts to translate the word “translation” allow a glimpse into translation’s several layers and facets. In Hindi, for instance, is it to be rendered as anuvada? Or would anukarana (or anukriti) be a finer choice? Or pratikriti? Translation is all these, and more. Anuvada implies unpacking, elaborating, doing the work of bringing out what may have been put there with a stone carver’s finesse or what may have accumulated there outside of the carver’s will. Anukarana and anukriti evoke a trudging after, a fidelity to process and outcome, a mimetic pursuit. Pratikriti suggests a parallel, alternative work—from which the work contemplates itself, an other it once carried unseen but that stands apart now, delivered, outside. As pratikriti, translation is an act in which language reveals its talent for reflexivity and autonomy at the same time.
And so translations bring out, follow, set free, are set free. What sometimes may look like infidelity in a translation may be its way of being faithful. In translation, it is not possible to sunder ethics from aesthetics at all.
Nor is it at all possible to make one’s peace with translation without arriving at a clear view of language. Where does language dwell? What is its relation with reality? What is its nature?
A word has three homes, Panini says. It lives at once in the throat, in the intellect and in the heart. So a wordsmith works simultaneously on speech, on thought, and on his inwardness. Vaikhari, madhyama and pashyanti as the three orders as well as elements of language denote, among other things, the three dwellings. In literature, pashyanti dominates. As pashyanti, language is the meaning and the word become one so that literature is experienced as reality of the order of truth.
A translator has to be a good reader (one looks and listens with care), for which he is required to be an accomplished wordsmith. He has to realise the word in all its three homes. He has to know it, has to know tattva, has to be (like the discerning critic in Rajashekhar’s opinion) a tattvabhiniveshi: one who does not let go of tattva, the itness of what is. He needs to possess an unfailing sense of the correct and the appropriate. Not for him the error of cognition, viparyayaya, the mistaking of one thing for another. To be a vikalpa, an alternative, the text’s own other, a translation has to be free from viparyaya. The ability to notice the errors of cognition requires that one experience the word in hrdaya, in one’s deepest inwardness. Flaubert rightly said that there are no synonyms. A writer cannot afford to mistake, take something for what it is not. He must see what is and reach out for the only right word. Inferior writers settle for substitutes. And so do uncaring translators.
That means the translator needs to possess, like a critic does, bhavayitri pratibha, in addition to karayitri pratibha (to borrow again from Rajashekhara)—the ability to be in a work as distinct from the ability to make it. It is an alchemical gift with two faces: it works on the translator as much as it does on the work, so that both are reborn in the process. At the core of the process is empathy that makes acceptance of the constraints not only possible but pleasant. To be trusted, the translator has to trust. He has to be faithful to the work in its freedom to be itself in translation. It is in guarding this freedom that his actions sometimes look like infidelities.
The ability to enter a work, bhavayitri pratibha, gains from performative reading, from abhinaya, outer as much as inner: you act out a work physically or in the mind’s theatre. Aristotle advises an aspiring dramatic poet to mobilise all his affects to imagine himself as the character to be created. The Russian poet Nikolai Gumilev mentions gesture as the key to poetic imagining. Gesture becomes the key to rasa-avesha, to affective opening up to experience, and to poetry as experience. You act out the work—with, in, on yourself. You live it, become it. You achieve samadhi with it.
Samadhi is something a poet seeks to achieve, as a yogi does, or anyone does who would make something—who would, to use that magnificent word the Greeks used, practice poesis. Rodrigo Garcia recalls that his father Gabriel Garcia Marquez, while writing, would be so absorbed in thought that he did not notice when somebody entered his study and left. Cézanne’s wife says that the painter was all eyes even in his last moments, looking hard at things around him, his eyeballs almost falling out. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke speaks of the poet becoming the song itself so that not a trace of the effort remains.
Samadhi with the object of contemplation gives antarajnana: the insight that comes from attentive looking that is intense to the point of absorption and that leads you into the object where the object bares its mysteries. Buddhist Tantra artists, as Ananda Coomaraswamy says, hold this to be a necessary stage in the process of making: you make the work inwardly before it is rendered outside. The making of art—at the level of form as an abstraction—beyond mere depictive imitation, or miming, proceeds through inner knowing, by way of working in the freedom of one’s inner studio. William Tucker, in The Language of Sculpture, traces the most significant phases of Auguste Rodin’s artistic journey along this path. As he reminds us, Rodin’s advice to the young Rilke was to patiently practice looking: “Why don’t you just go and look at something—for example an animal in the Jardin des Plantes, and keep on looking at it till you are able to make a poem of it?” Objects unfold their mysteries to a patiently contemplating consciousness. The sacred leaps forth, the sacred which is outside in you.
The paradox suggests the enigma of the transcendence that art affords: the way art reveals the world as much as us to us as more than we thought the world was and we were, revealing something essential that we didn’t know of, that seemed alien but wasn’t, that is a part of us, of which we are always a part, that touches us without exhausting its mystery. We don’t just witness but live art’s mystery. And this makes the journey into art a pilgrimage. A going across, a passing over, a tirtha yatra.
Tirtha is a sacred place, a place outside in us, a promise waiting to be redeemed, a potentiality awaiting actualisation. It is a sacred place in that it opens a way beyond what we had followed so far, drawing us into strangeness. But if the strange is that which is unfamiliar, how do we recognise it if not through some forgotten familiarity now recovered?
One is reminded of Keats’s “sweet remembrance”, of Plato’s knowledge as remembering. Of the Shaiva pratyabhijna, re-cognition, remembered knowing. On another register, that of the cattle herds, tirtha denotes the site where the cattle herd walks his cattle across a stream. Two orders of the ground of being become intimate there. You work between two languages and glimpse what is there in them yet outside them. You taste inexhaustible mysteries.
Translation is sandhya, the sacred twilight music. The music of becoming. Your world expands and changes and makes a different music when a world you knew becomes intimate with another, and hidden potentialities are not only discovered but actualised, and the unconscious of the text-world wakes from sleep. And srishti vistara happens, the cosmos expands. Between two languages, over them, a third hovers, almost glimpsed but not grasped. This is the language of translation, a Sandha Bhasha, a between-language, the speech of a generative coming together, the language of there as elsewhere. Language that breathes the aspiration of music.
Translation creates; and it becomes, for that reason, a metaphor for creation. A work’s translations are the dreams the work saw when it was a seed, and then forgot them. Now they return as visitants from outside, from an outside in the work. Imagination in this sense is the making intrinsic to the thing. It is and is not vikalpa. An other that was always already there. Vikalpa is born of prajna, which looks far out; viparyaya mistakes.
Kalpana—the word for imagination—means also, as in Shaivism, thought constructs. And kalpa is an eon, a period of cosmic time. Like time that engenders by bringing things to fruition, translation ripens to manifest. Its way of working is to make over time; developing, un-veloping, as in old-world photography. Translations are promises, often unforeknown, in the process of redemption. Waiting for them, a work waits for time’s waking touch.
Translations are carved out of the normally inaudible noise that huddles around a work like an infrared aura. To the translator-sculptor, the work to be translated sometimes appears like a stone: a form beckons, asking to be freed.
Translation asks for more than a familiarity with the languages. In fact, it needs more than the study of languages. The translator, like a poet, should know many things, as Rajashekhara says; he should be a polymath of sorts. You write from inside your circle of experience, but you translate essentially as an outsider. And you need extraordinary stamina for abhyasa, practice. This is difficult to sustain if shraddha, faith in your calling as a translator, is lacking. Abhyasa brings a sense of ease: you come gradually to settle in the translator’s seat. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you are translating well: it only means you can now begin to be attentive to the work in hand. Here too Sukhasana, sitting easy is a necessary condition for dhyana, as in Yoga, but not its substitute. The sense of ease prepares you to see better, so that one day you are able to accept the object of contemplation in an uninhibited embrace. The acquired ease, sahaj, with which you settle down to translate is the first step towards the immersion, the becoming-one with the object of contemplation, that will come with samadhi.
Like the writer, the translator too seeks the word that will go straight to its destination. This is the sadhu shabda, the word that is clear and does not deviate. Translation is a sadhana, a rigorous practice in pursuit of lucidity and exactitude. Vyakarana, understood in the Indian tradition as the study of language, is a study of language in its relation to light and distance. The sadhutva of language is the shortest and clearest distance between the meaning and the word. Words, Bhartrihari says, shine like stars reflected in a stream; the poet brings to them the meanings he wants them to hold. That means to begin with the words is, for a poet, to begin at the wrong end. He begins with the meanings. That is how poetry protects itself from cliche and rejuvenates language. And one must remember that the simile of stars reflected in a stream points to the light that lasts though it appears in what passes.
Translation is thus a transaction in light and clarity. You search for meanings to be translated into meanings, so that words will follow and not lead. Clarity without cliche: Aristotle also probably meant this when he praised the style that is clear without being commonplace. The clarity of meaning and word, the absence of murk and turbidity, is prasada—the precondition of dhvani. Prasada is the quality of luminous grace and openness, which evokes a sense of light and freedom in the mind that witnesses. For dhvani is not noise but a wealth of subtle registers. That is why translation’s biggest enemy is cliche, that corpse of an overkilled word.
The translator’s dream is to be a siddha anuvadaka--to be the translator who has achieved ripeness, which shows in his decisive, defining touch. He mirrors the siddha kavi who has achieved ripeness in the use of the word and the sentence--shabda paka and vakya paka, as Rajashekhara puts it. Like a ripened poet, an accomplished translator harnesses the powers of memory (smriti), of the presence of mind (mati) and of intuition (prajna). Translation blossoms when remembering, ready wit and the mind’s leap beyond the manifest come together.
And siddhi is not the termination of sadhana, but another reason to go on, to seek more adventure. It is a sign that affirms and deepens your faith in your calling. For translation is a process, not a boundaried and finished thing. It is metamorphosis.
Rajesh Sharma is an essayist, critic and translator. He teaches literature at Punjabi University, Patiala. He has published seven books, including Re-reading Aristotle's Poetics and Pash and Dil: Critical Essays and Translations.