issue 22: winter 2020
Sharmistha Mohanty (SM): What drew you to translate Magadh?
Rahul Soni (RS): I don’t think I thought of what I was doing as translation until a very late stage, actually. What had happened was that a friend had recommended the book to me, saying something to the effect of I should read it, that he thought I’d find it exciting. Which I did, very much so.
And it was the language, more than anything else, which struck me, and which still is the thing I find most arresting about Magadh. The almost- paradox of its pared down, crystalline vocabulary with the repetitions, the circularity and the riddle-like ambiguities of its locutions.
And what I wanted to do, as someone who wrote in English, was to try and see if I could do that in the language I wrote in, and whether it would work – whether I could make it work – in that language. The idea of ‘translation’ was not something that had struck me. What I was thinking of it was merely as: ‘I want to do this in English.’
To what extent it has worked on the page, or in the verses, is not for me to say. I do recall, though, that while I was engaged in this, my own speech patterns had begun to acquire some of the repetitive and circular nature of the language in Magadh, and that it might have occurred to me at some point that this is not just a way of expressing but a way of thinking as well.
SM: Translation is a very intimate form of reading. How do you relate to the pastness of Magadh? And to the way Shrikant Verma claims that past as contemporary?
RS: I must admit that I approached the project (of ‘doing this in English’) with a great deal of naïveté and ignorance. I remember it was out of print in Hindi
(and still is, I think, quite astonishingly) and I’d got it Xeroxed – so I was doing this on the facing blank pages of my spiral-bound copy almost as soon as I read each poem. The immersion and the closeness to the text did not come before – it came more in the process, over the next few years, of the refining and revising and editing, because with that came the rereading and discussions and more rereading.
The ‘pastness’ of Magadh, at least in my reading of it – and this might merely be the reading that suits my purposes, of course, or what I find convenient / easy – is not a pastness that is rooted in the specifics of history, in the details of place or time, but more in an idea of history being cyclical, of the essential nature of things (i.e. people, kingdoms, power) remaining the same no matter when, that there are patterns that can be discerned which will repeat themselves, and the weariness, the sense of resignation and futility that realisation engenders.
In a way, then, the form and language (the repetitions and the circularity and ambiguities I mentioned earlier) mirror, I think, and are the perfect vehicle for, this idea or this vision of history.
SM: He begins with Vetal, a very old legend. Then he places the poems in various kingdoms, Magadh, Amaravati, Kosal. He brings in the tradition of the ghats at Kashi and the dom. What kind of shadow does this throw on the poems?
RS: The vetal – a reanimated corpse, and more specifically here, the riddling Vetal of the Vikram-Vetal tales – is a very potent symbol and a great starting point for this series of poems, I think, which also go into ideas of recurrence and futility that are indicated in those tales, albeit in a very different manner and tone, and to very different ends, of course.
I’ve always thought, however, that the specifics of the cities and kingdoms from myth and history that are mentioned in the poems, are not necessary for an understanding of the poems. They function more as totems of a sort – a vague idea of them as places and kingdoms that existed once, were once powerful, and now are no more, are almost forgotten, is what haunts the poems, and I actually think that a more detailed knowledge – or seeking to understand the poems in terms of specifics with respect to the places and names mentioned – might even distract from getting to what the poems are trying to say. They are meant to throw a shadow, exactly, and only that.
Likewise, attempts to read it specifically in context of its coterminous political situation also are a distraction. (It’s also why I’ve resisted providing, or having someone write, a glossary or a detailed, context-setting, scholarly introduction for the volume.) The poems are universal, and are for all times – for now, for instance. And they will remain so, for they get to something true about the nature of people, of societies and civilizations – which is what great art does.
SM: In the first couple of poems that open the book, there is a clear sense of loss. There are the phrases ‘have lost’ or ‘can no longer be found’. There is also throughout the book a presence of Kashi, the doms and corpses and death. I am wondering whether this means he was also mourning something that was once there? In the beginning, he mentions Ashoka, before and after Kalinga. Is he saying that at least power could look at itself then, that it was capable of remorse? Basically, I am wondering whether the thread of loss is embedded in the perhaps more all-encompassing sense of the rise and fall of things.
RS: There is definitely a sense of loss, a mourning for what was there, a search for something that can no longer be found. Is it a loss for something specific though? Or is Shrikant Verma pointing to a particular period in time and holding that up as exemplary in any way? I don’t think so. The range of periods and kingdoms and people that he explicitly invokes go from epic to puranic and mythic to ancient and medieval history (and all the while, in the background, there is the dark, glowering presence of the contemporary) – the sense of loss feels almost undiscriminating.
If there is a movement within the larger cyclical pattern of history, perhaps we see it in how the collection itself moves from mourning to resisting and searching to the realization of the futility of all things and then to some sort of acceptance – this is not any sort of clear-cut movement to be sure; it is more fuzzy than I, for the sake of argument, make it out to be here.
But in the end, we die, what was lost stays lost, and we start all over again having learnt nothing really, forever doomed to repeat ourselves. The only consolation here, if there’s any consolation to be had, is that, perhaps, in the larger scheme of things (whatever that may be) none of this matters at all. It is only fitting, then, that the last word in the collection goes to Time:
I’m old now
I write
my name
in chalk
on every blank wall
I come across
The next day I find
someone has rubbed it out
so thoroughly
as if it had never been written
Now when I shout –
Who’s done this?
I get the answer –
Time
Rahul Soni is a writer, editor and translator. He has edited an anthology of Hindi poetry in English translation, Home from a Distance (2011), and translated Shrikant Verma’s collection of poetry, Magadh (2013), Geetanjali Shree’s novel The Roof Beneath Their Feet (2013), a selection of Ashok Vajpeyi’s poetry A Name for Every Leaf (2016), and Pankaj Kapur’s novella Dopehri (2019).
Sharmistha Mohanty is the author of three works of prose, Book One, New Life, and Five Movements in Praise. Her most recent work is a book of poems, The Gods Came Afterwards. Her work has been published in several journals all over the world including Poetry, Granta, World Literature Today, and the Chinese journal Jintian. A chapbook made from a selection of poems from The Gods Came Afterwards appeared early 2020 from Ediciones Pen Presse in Spanish. The poems are translated by the acclaimed Argentinian poet, Mercedes Roffe. Mohanty is the founder-editor of Almost Island and the initiator of the Almost Island Dialogues, an annual international writers gathering held in New Delhi. She has taught for several years at the International Creative Writing MFA program at the City University of Hong Kong. She has also taught at the Creative Writing programme at Naropa University, set up by Allen Ginsberg. Mohanty has held fellowships at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany (2002), at Ledig House in New York (2004), had residencies at the La Napoule Foundation for the Arts in France (2004), and Yaddo, USA, 2009. She is a recipient of a Senior Fellowship from the Indian Ministry of Culture.