It’s the poetical history of mankind - Jean-Claude Carriére's Mahabharata - it’s pure as glass, yet nothing is omitted

The third India-related book I read was The Mahabharata, not the ancient Indian epic itself, of course, since it is endlessly long and also bears a curse, but the superb French theatrical adaptation by Jean-Claude Carriére (1985) written for and with Peter Brook (who is also the translator).  I was a bit too young to remember the excitement when Brook brought the play to New York in 1987, but I do remember reading about, in The New Republic (RIP), and never finding, the 1989 film (Carriére is best known as a screenwriter).  The film is three hours long, cut down from a six hour television version, itself reduced from the play’s nine hours.

So of course this is really A Mahabharata, maybe even Several Mahabharatas.  The scale is reduced, although I can fill in what Carriére and Brook cannot.  He can say that an army of millions is fighting and dying, but onstage he has a dozen or two.  I have millions, and dozens, too.  I imagine what is in the theater; I imagine what I want.

YUDHISHTHIRA:  What’s this flame that’s devouring the world?  Elephants are howling in terror, snakes are hurling themselves into the sky.

BHIMA:  Aswatthaman has just released his father’s sacred weapon.

YUDHISHTHIRA:  What can we do?  Men, animals, the earth itself – all are shriveling to ashes.

GANDHARI:  I see a white heat.  (199)

The detonation of a mystical nuclear weapon by the desperate Kauravas is just one of the visual opportunities for a theater director, and one of the many surprises for the reader.  I have read versions of the epic before, yet it is so rich that I am always surprised.

The war that ends the play – by ends, I mean fills the last third – including the difficult argument of the Bhagavad-Gita is outstanding, and the myths, origin stories, and heroic deeds that occupy the early two-thirds are just as exciting, but what is really makes the play effective, and is an innovation of Carriére’s, is the narrator figure Vyasa, by tradition author of The Mahabharata, who wanders in and out of the action.  Here is how the play begins:

A boy of about twelve enters.  He goes toward a little pool.  Then a man appears.  He is thin, wearing a muddy loincloth, his feet bare and dirty.  He sits thoughtfully on the ground and, noticing the boy, he signals him to come closer.  The boy approaches, slightly fearful.  The man asks him:VYASA:  Do you know how to write?

BOY:  No, why?  The man is silent for a moment before saying:

VYASA:  I’ve composed a great poem.  I’ve composed it all, but nothing is written.  I need someone to write down what I know.

BOY:  What’s your name?

VYASA:  Vyasa.

BOY:  What’s your poem about?

VYASA:  It’s about you.
[skip a bit]
It’s the poetical history of mankind.  If you listen carefully, at the end you’ll be someone else.  For it’s pure as glass, yet nothing is omitted.  It washes away faults, it sharpens the brain and it gives long life.  (3)

I was pretty much captured several lines earlier, even before I learned about all the prize I would win.  And at this point, Ganesha appears, offering his services as a scribe.  These three wander through the rest of the play which it turns out has not only not been written but not performed, or the history has been imagined but has not happened.  We watch it happen along with its author.

There are other good ways to read The Mahabharata.  R. K. Narayan’s prose retelling, for example, or William Buck’s.  Maybe not better ways, though.

Other people's sorrows don't hurt us - the Clay Sanskrit Library and the value of translation

When I emphasized the social value of translation, independent of actual readers or reading, I was thinking of projects like The Clay Sanskrit Library, which has published over fifty volumes of English translations of Sanskrit literature in a uniform, attractive format.  The project seems to be complete, which means, I think, that it ran out of money.  This was a philanthropic enterprise.  Please investigate this David Shulman article in The New Republic for more information.

Who was all of this for?  Students of Sanskrit, certainly.  Each translation has facing page Sanskrit, in Roman script, and is lightly annotated.  Who else?  University libraries bought them.  I can only guess about readers in India.  Then there are a few restless readers like me.  I’ve never noticed another book blogger reading one, at least, so I assume "few" is right.

All of the work – the translation and scholarship and editing – was in the service of enlarging the opportunity of theoretical readers, future readers, maybe just that one reader whose life will be completely transformed by this stuff.  There’s no money here, and the potential audience is tiny.  Yet it is obvious to me that the mere existence of the Clay Sanskrit books is valuable.  Our cultural possibilities are greater than they were, whatever that means.

I’ve read three of them now – Ashvaghosha’s Life of the Buddha, the first volume of The Ramayana, and now the play How Úrvashi Was Won by Kālidāsa (translated by Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman), supplemented by the Oxford World’s Classics version of Kālidāsa’s The Recognition of Sakuntalā, translated by W. J. Johnson.  They have all been worth reading, although I would recommend that a first-time reader of The Ramayana start with a shorter retelling, like R. K. Narayan’s or William Buck’s.

The Kālidāsa plays (4th or 5th century CE, maybe*) are both stories of noble couples united and separated and reunited.  The Recognition of Sakuntalā was more melancholy, more serious, often resembling The Winter’s Tale.  How Úrvashi Was Won is altogether sillier.  Donald Frame, in the article I mentioned yesterday, talks in terms of percentages – no more than 20%, say, of a book can possibly be translated, and he’s happy if he gets to 15%.  Those numbers seem about right for these plays, which would have included music and dancing (and costumes and sets and actors) all of which are left to my inadequate imagination.  Nevertheless, 15% of something this good is worth experiencing.

The fourth act of How Úrvashi Was Won is especially impressive, or odd, or delightful.  It’s a solo mad scene, with the king wandering the forest looking for the lost Úrvashi, who has been turned into a vine, don’t ask.  Has the cloud seen her?  No?  How about the peacock?  No answer.  The cuckoo?

Other people’s sorrows don’t hurt us.
It’s true what people say.
Arrogant, self-centered, the cuckoo
doesn’t even notice that I’m suffering
in love. She’s absorbed in tasting
the ripe rose-apple, red
as a woman’s lip.

The geese, the bees, the king of the elephants, the waterfalls, no one can help him.  The king sings and dances through the forest, and his songs are sad but sweet, and somehow everything works out in the end.  I’d love to see this performed.  I’ve never read anything quite like it.

* The imprecision of the dating of Sanskrit literature is in itself startling and marvelous to a Western reader.

A prospect that is intolerably, inconceivably bleak - does translation matter?

Some credentialing:  Over here we find the admirable Orbis Terrarum Reading Challenge, which encourages geographically diversified reading.  Books from eight different countries is the rule now, I think.  I am not joining, on the principle that a challenge should be challenging.  In 2010, I hit eight countries on February 19, with Tolstoy’s Childhood.  Iceland, Norway, UK, US, France, Russian, China, and “German” – the notion of “country” is not so useful in 19th century Germany.  Since then, I have visited Austria, Argentina, Chile, Spain, Mexico, Yiddishland, and Sanskritland.

What I mean is, translation matters a lot to me.  Not as much as it matters to Edith Grossman, who gets to chat with Gabriel García Márquez as part of her normal work day, but a lot.  But any argument about Why Translation Matters has to move past personal taste, and has to contribute something beyond the important but obvious – that translation allows us to, say, read books in languages we don’t know.

The best piece I’ve seen about Edith Grossman’s Why Translation Matters is by Chad Post, proprietor of the admirable Three Percent Blog, which is devoted to current literary translation and nothing but.  Post’s essay is good reading just for his thoughts about the biz side of publishing, where he provides helpful context for Grossman’s complaints but also offers much more realistic ideas about what is really possible.  He dismantles Grossman’s arguments that publishers have a “moral obligation” to publish translation (his term, not Grossman’s, but it’s accurate).

What does translation offer to the reader?

Imagine how bereft we would be if the only fictional worlds we could explore, the only vicarious literary experiences we could have, were those written in languages we read easily.  The deprivation would be indescribable.  Depending on your linguistic accomplishments, this would mean you might never have the opportunity to read Homer or Sophocles or Sappho, Catullus or Virgil, Dante or Petrarch or Leopardi, Cervantes or Lope or Quevedo, Ronsard or Rabelais or Verlaine, Tolstoy or Chekhov, Goethe or Heine: even a cursory list of awe-inspiring writers is practically endless, though I have not even left western Europe or gone past the nineteenth century to compile it.  [A similar list of languages: Polish, Bulgarian, etc.]  The mere idea creates a prospect that is intolerably, inconceivably bleak. (Grossman, 26)

I must admit that much of my resistance to the Why Translation Matters part of Why Translation Matters is that I can’t stand this rhetoric.*  The “we” in the first sentence makes me nervous, while “indescribable,” “inconceivably” and so on seem absurd.  Everyone who stops by Wuthering Expectations for any purpose besides trolling for term paper ideas is well-read, in something, often in many things.  Now, please, tell me if the absence of Pierre de Ronsard,** Lope de Vega, or Heinrich Heine from your life makes it intolerably bleak.  I ask this as someone who has read in some depth into every writer on that list, my recent encounter with Paul Verlaine taking care of the last one (she got me with Bulgarian, though).

Maybe the list meant to be purely metaphorical?  It can’t be, though – imagine someone whose list of the writers he can’t imagine living without went:  Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, H. James, Cather, T. Eliot, E. Bishop, and so on.  Is there some argument against that list?  That's a good list!  Some good readers do just fine without the help of translation.

Is all of the weight on the word “opportunity”?  The argument has to be based on opportunity, not on actual reading.  The social value of translation is different that the individual value.  Are you reading enough books in translation?  Yes, you likely are, even if the number is zero.  If that does not sound sufficiently absurd:  Are you reading enough Sanskrit literature?  Are you reading enough poetry?  Are you listening to enough jazz?  More of any of these virtuous cultural activities means less of whatever virtuous cultural (or non-cultural!) activity you are engaged in now.  Reading more translations is not free - it means less of something else that is valuable.

The social arguments for more, more, more translation, with which I agree, completely, do not actually depend on any particular reader.  The social value of translation is very high; the individual value – well, that varies enormously.  Someone has to read these books, but how many, or who, is another question.  Chad Post, out on the frontlines, suspects that shaming people into enjoying literary translation (or poetry, jazz, Sanskrit plays, etc.) is not a long-run solution, which seems right.

I put a high value on the remarkable Clay Sanskrit Library, and I am shocked and dismayed that no one is reading these books for a blog project.  But does that mean that I did something remarkable when I recently read a couple of Kālidāsa plays?  Should you feel bad if you haven’t read them, or that a great deal of Sanskrit literature has never been translated?  The prospect is tolerable, and conceivable. 

The literary translator expands the possibilities of our culture.  Good ones, like Edith Grossman, are invaluable, or at least greatly underpaid and underappreciated.  Did I recommend her fine The Golden Age: Poems of the Spanish Renaissance yet? And Love in the Time of Cholera, what a book, right? And the second half of Why Translation Matters, I think many people will get a lot out of that.

No more Why Translation Matters, but tomorrow, one more reason that translation matters.

* And I’m leaving aside high-pitched oddities like “the crisis in translation” and declining literary translation as “a hovering and constant threat to civil liberties.”

** Several years ago, I combed through Ronsard translations. They ranged from serviceable to disgraceful. I wish Grossman had clued me into the good one.

Even Rama gradually permitted his mind to become enthralled - a return visit to the Clay Sanskrit Library

The John Galt reading proceeds. The final pieces of the Anti-Sympathy project are falling into place. obooki extracts yet another fascinating, baffling 100 Best Novels list. But this week will be entirely miscellaneous.

The Clay Sanskrit Library has reached the end of its funding, with fifty-six voulmes in print, many never before in English. I celebrated or commiserated or whatever it was by reading another of their titles, the first volume (of eight) of The Ramayana (4th century BC, maybe). I've read the R. K. Narayan version twice, once when I was twelve or so, once as an adult. It's a thrilling little book that is maybe a tenth of the length of the real thing. So one might expect substantially less thrill in the long poem.

Yes and no. In the first book, King Dasharatha has everything but a son. Heroic sacrifices give him the son he wants, the future hero Rama, who goes around bending unbendable bows and killing unkillable demons. But, frankly, the main story doesn't get moving until Book 2. No Hanuman the monkey-hero, for example.

The greatest pleasures of reading the beginning of the actual Ramayana are the incidental passages, digressions, mythical tales, and inset stories that do not advance the plot at all. The sage Vasishtha orders his "heavenly, wish-fulfilling cow" to make "a huge amount of food" "using all the six flavors" (canto 51):

"She made sugarcane and sweets, parched grains and wines, excellent liquors, costly beverages and all sorts of food. She produced mountainous heaps of steaming rice, savory food, soups and rivers of curds. There were thousands of silver platters, filled with various delicious confections." (canto 52)

Then the king and the sage argue about selling the magic cow. The sage refuses, obviously. It's a heavenly, wish-fulfilling cow!

The very best thing in the first book of The Ramayana, actually, is the very beginning. The sage Valimiki sees a hunter kill a bird, is filled with pity, and spontaneously utters the first poem. The god Brahma suggests that Valmiki use this new technique to tell the story of the hero Rama in a vast poetic epic. The poet composes the poem, which is so wonderful that even Rama himself, still alive, wants to hear it. "And right there in the assembly, even Rama, in his desire to experience it fully, gradually permitted his mind to become enthralled."

Poems as arrows and axes - It fell to earth, I knew not where - (plus, one arrow, found)

A Longfellow poem contemporary with Evangeline:

I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For, so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.

I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For who has sight so keen and strong
That it can follow the flight of song?

Long, long afterward, in an oak
I found the arrow, still unbroke;
And the song, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend.

This poem-and-arrow business reminded me of the 10th/ 11th century Indian poem by Nannecoda I put up back here:

An arrow shot by an archer
or a poem made by a poet
should cut through your heart,
jolting the head.
If it doesn’t, it’s no arrow,
it’s no poem.

If Longfellow's poems are like arrows, they must have suction cup tips. I like Longfellow well enough, but I have yet to find one that jolted my head. The Nannecoda cut a little bit.

Meine Frau, upon reading the Nannecoda poem, was reminded of this statement of Franz Kafka's, from Max Brod's biography:

"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? ... A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. "

A blow on the head? An arrow through the heart? And isn't Longfellow's bow safety appalling? He should take a class. Where was I? I was just sitting there reading Kafka, and the next thing I knew I was in the emergency room. Ow, my head!

I can see that one might miss the violence inherent in Longfellow's poem. The other examples sort of bring it to the front. Even setting that aside, these are incredibly strong demands to make of a book or poem. How many poems or stories have this effect on even one person? How many have this effect on me? Very few. A select, treasured few.

My first Clay Sanskrit Library post, linked above, turns out to have been an arrow that landed I knew not where. On Wednesday I received the CSL Autumn newsletter email and was delighted, and shocked, to see "Wuthering Expectations" right up there on top. Look, here I am on their press page, along with Library Journal and the Asian edition of Time.* The email also included a link to my Life of the Buddha post, which was only two days old - fast work.

* And a couple of interesting blogs. languagehat is a Professional Reader, a linguist, who writes about novels and poems as well as linguistics. The Proust posts are excellent. rpollack is a grad student in the East Asian program at St. Johns's. This post on how to pick a fight with a book is full of first-rate advice.

Ashvaghosha's Life of the Buddha - a shower of flowers fell fragrant and water-filled

I have followed my own advice and read a volume of the Clay Sanskrit Library. Ashvaghosha's Life of the Buddha (1st or 2nd century) was by no means my first choice, but the university library I relied on, a serious place, mostly, owned exactly two volumes, which is pathetic.

No regrets, though, since Life of the Buddha was a poetic work of high quality. It's a genuine epic poem on the subject, written several hundred years after the fact. A rough analogy would be a late Roman or Byzantine epic on the life of Christ, with non-scriptural sections borrowing from not just the Old Testament, but the Aeneid or the Odyssey. Or imagine that Milton had extended Paradise Regained to cover all of the Gospels. Oh boy, says any English major reading this, Paradise Regained at ten or twenty times the length. What a shame we don't have that.

There are some cantos of Life of the Buddha that include some theological heavy lifting, but there were also a lot of delightful things. Here are some women racing up to the roof to see the young Siddhartha pass by:

they gathered curious and unabashed,
hampered by the slipping of girdle strings,
eyes dazed by the sudden rousing from sleep,
ornaments slipped on at hearing the news;

frigtening away the bevies of house-birds
with the clatter of steps on the stairways,
with girdles jinging and anklets tinkling,
and rebuking each other for their haste; (Canto 3, p. 65)

That's vivid writing. There are a lot of great bits with women, actually. The king, Siddhartha's father, wants to keep the prince from becoming a holy man, so he swamps his son with women, each of whom has a different seduction strategy:

One of the girls feigned to stumble,
and with tendril-like arms,
hanging loosely from her drooping
shoulders, embraced him by force. (p. 95)

Another, pretending she was drunk,
repeatedly let her blue dress slip down.
Flashing her girdle, she gleamed,
like the night with lightning streaks. (p. 97)

Another parodied his bearing
by stretching the bow of her brows
upon her beautiful countenance,
mimicking his resolute mien. (p. 99)

I can hardly believe that last one did not work, but the prince has discovered sickness, old age, and death, so it's the ascetic life for him.

One odd aspect of the book is that the complete epic survives in Chinese and Tibetan translations, but only the first half is extant in Sanskrit. So the translation konks out halfway through; brief prose summaries of the last fourteen cantos finish the book. I would have been happy to read a second volume of the epic, but I was also content to move on to another book. With Life of the Buddha, I had reached inner peace.

As the flower-bannered one fled defeated
  along with his cohorts,
passion-free, the great seer stood victorious
  and dispelling darkness,
the sky sparkled with the moon,
  like a girl with a smile,
and a shower of flowers fell
  fragrant and water-filled. (Canto 13, p. 399)

If it doesn't, it's no arrow, it's no poem.

An arrow shot by an archer
or a poem made by a poet
should cut through your heart,
jolting the head.
If it doesn’t, it’s no arrow,
it’s no poem.

The poet is Nannecoda, the time is the late 10th or early 11th century, the language is Telugu, I think, but Sanskrit scholar David Shulman uses this poem to describe classical Sanskrit literature. The poem can be found in this review of the Clay Sanskrit Library in The New Republic.

The Clay Sanskrit Library is an ongoing series of translations of classical Sanskrit literature, with 41 volumes published since they started three years ago. The two centers of the series are the great early epics, the Ramayana (which will fill 8 volumes) and the Mahabharata which requires 32. 32! There has never been a complete Mahabharata in English, and Shulman says that “the Indian tradition tells us that the text is so powerful, and potentially so destructive, that is positively dangerous to attempt to translate it, or even to read it, from beginning to end.” They’ve got 13 volumes done now, so wish them luck.

Shulman could hardly be more enthusiastic about having these works available in English. He admits that most past English translations of classical Sanskrit books are terrible, sometimes close to unreadable (like “Shall I set in motion moist breezes by (means of ) cool lotus-leaf-fans which removed languor?”). He has some criticisms of the CSL series, but for the most part he thinks that English readers now have a way in to a difficult but rewarding literature.

The updated versions of the playwright Kalidasa seem like must-reads to me, especially Goethe’s favorite The Recognition of Shakuntala. But there is also a long list of works that are new to me, and although Shulman does not literally recommend them all, his advice is to just dig in. He even recommends reading chronolgically, using Sheldon Pollock’s The Language of the Gods in the World of Men as an overview. This is my kind of review - useful.

The Clay Sanskrit Library would make a great blog project, hint hint. Who wants to blog the Mahabharata? You will have at least one reader, I promise. This will not be my project, no no no, since I have publicly declared that I will read Asian literature non-neurotically. I’ll just check the library, dip in, and see what’s what.

I’ve read the William Buck adaptation of the Mahabharata and the R. K. Narayan Ramayana, both of which reduce the huge mass of poetic material to fast-moving stories in 300 pages or so of prose. These are both wonderful books. The Mahabharata is akin to, roughly, a Homeric epic, while the Ramayana, with its beloved monkey god Hanuman, is more of a mythological story. I can hardly imagine, though, what the originals must be like. The Clay Sanskrit Library Mahabharata, for example, will be somewhere around 10,000 pages in English.

A friend who grew up in India has told me that although everyone knows the stories of the two great epics, it is typically through comic books or movies. The comic books often emphasize specific ethical lessons. The sacred Bhagavad-Gita is actually an episode of the Mahabharata, although I don’t think the entire epics are thought of as sacred books. Or are they?

My real question is, how do people actually read them? I know the stories already, so should I just pick a volume at random?

I described Shulman’s article as essential. If you are at all curious about classical Sanskrit literature, it really is.

I was actually planning to make a point linked to what I have been discussing all week, the use of a literaty education. But I find myself more curious about these books than in the ideas they suggest to me. Maybe that's my point.