[Editor’s Note: Suvir Kaul is the A.M. Rosenthal Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania as well as the author of four books, including most recently Of Garden and Graves[1], a collection of his essays on the conflict in Kashmir as well as poems that Kaul has translated into English.
First published in local journals, the book’s poems were all written by authors — Hindu and Muslim alike — who at some point lived in Kashmir. They detail the conflict’s effects in the most intimate of ways, as their words are those of people who have directly suffered the consequences. Kashmir refers to the northernmost territories of India, the Himalayan regions that make up the border between India and Pakistan, and some parts of the Indo-Chinese border. India and Pakistan have been engaging in brutal, though sporadic, warfare since 1947, the year of Indian independence, over this land. Pakistan argues for control since Kashmir is an area of Muslim majority, while India claims that Pakistan has supported separatist groups fighting against government control.
The issue extends beyond politics, as Hindus and Muslims alike live in fear, not of each other but of military forces from both governments that crack down on their respective territories. They once lived in harmony and they now distrust each other. The only bridge between these two communities, these two countries, is their shared pain and the common language. Of Gardens and Graves includes classical forms, such as the ghazal and the nazm[2], as well as poems following the more spontaneous forms of the poet’s desire. These translations explore the chaos and anxieties that Kashmiri citizens face via the structure and artistry of poetry.
DoubleSpeak was lucky enough to talk with Professor Kaul about his work, as well as the larger global scope of translation. Below is a transcript of our conversation followed by two excerpts from Of Gardens and Graves.]
Shailly Pandey: Why did you specifically choose poems written in Kashmiri? Is it because the poems you were looking for just happened to be written in it, or because Kashmiri is starting to die out?
Suvir Kaul: Kashmiri is not dying at all, but it does not receive the kind of attention reserved for other major languages in India. But there is a reason why I only wanted Kashmiri poems in this book. There is lots of Urdu poetry in Kashmir. Urdu is the state language; it is the language taught in schools. Kashmiri [wasn’t] taught in school until very recently. It used to be the language of the home, of domesticity, of colloquialism on the street, not the official language.
Kashmiri is [also] a very idiomatic language. The idiom of spoken Kashmiri, even if you follow a casual street conversation, is particularly clever and inventive. Some of that is available in the poetry. It’s also a more intimate language. When someone in Kashmir wants to make a formal or important point, they will switch to Urdu. But if they’re just talking about the way they feel, within the family, between parents and children, they’ll be speaking Kashmiri. And it’s that intimacy that I find very attractive. Many of my friends said to me, “Here, these are wonderful poems, and they’re all in Urdu,” and I said no, this is a collection of Kashmiri poems.
Pandey: Originally, was this meant to be a book of translation or a book of essays?
Kaul: This didn’t begin as a project in translation of poetry at all. I kept writing longer, quasi-journalistic think-pieces about what I was seeing there in visits to my ancestral home in Srinagar. This wasn’t the Kashmir of my childhood. This wasn’t the Kashmir that most people around me, Hindu or Muslim, understood. They suffered it, but they didn’t understand it. So I started to write articles in my own effort to educate myself: What allowed us to get to this point? But I was still not tapping into something I might be able to do that other journalists or political observers would not be able to do. And that really is to try and generate an archive of poetry, and to use my skills as a literary critic, which is what I am by training, to say to people who pay attention only to political developments that if you really want to understand political feelings, it’s not only through formal politics alone that you understand them, but it’s also by turning to poetry, to cultural production. That’s what lies behind the addition of these poems to this project.
In my introduction, I speak about the poem “Corpse” by Shabir “Azar.” It’s an English translation of an Urdu poem, published in Uzma Weekly, a local Kashmiri newspaper. In 2014, there were these floods in Kashmir. I lost the Urdu original I had photocopied, and I have not been able to find it since, because the newspaper is no longer published and all other places I thought I would find it don’t have a copy either, either because of the flood or because of bad housekeeping. So the original Urdu from which I have translated, I no longer have. This is just one of the ironies of translating poems from Kashmir.
The other irony is that, when I began this project, I kept telling my friends that I was the wrong person to do it because my Kashmiri really isn’t good enough. But then I realized that more important than language facility was a desire peculiar to translation, and here I’ll use the phrase that is often bandied about in literary criticism: inhabiting the space of the other — the space of the other language, the other poet, etc., and doing so empathetically. As a matter of fact, you will not get any two Kashmiris to agree on what they think a single line of poetry means. It’s not literal meaning, so there will be a lot of discussion. But the discussion is the point. That’s when you begin to understand the manifold resources of poetic language, the way it allows people to find elements of themselves, their own experiences, their own differences in that space. That, for me, is what it means to think of translation not just simply as an individual encounter with language, but as a cultural engagement with language.
Pandey: How did the fact that these originals were so susceptible to being lost forever change your process of first finding and then translating them, knowing that you’re preserving something that would have otherwise vanished?
Kaul: I should note that not all of the journals or newspapers that these poems were published in will disappear like issues of low-circulation newspapers do, but it is true that publishing these poems is a way of preserving them and giving them new life in a second language. That’s the responsibility I learned to believe in. I knew I couldn’t include more than twenty-five or thirty poems in a book like this. So I was always looking for poems that I would think of as representative in some ways. I read and did drafts of a great many more poems than these, perhaps around one hundred and twenty, till I got to these poems. And so I suppose the choices are comparatively opportunistic; there’s not anything that represents a rock-solid archive. It’s a combing through elements.
One of the poems I discuss here, available only in my English translation, was actually brought to me on a scrap of paper. And that was because the person who wrote it is in jail. He’s never going to be publishing the poem, but he wrote it. For me, that is weightier than the kind of ephemeral quality suggested by a person in jail writing on scraps of paper and then passing it on to his brother who passed it on to a friend who passed it on to me because he knew I was interested in collecting these poems. My friends there kept telling me, “Look, what you’re doing is not inconsequential because at the very least, we’ll have a book that will preserve some of these poems and make them available.” It sounded a little grandiose and hyperbolic, but it’s not. It makes these twenty-five poems available. The fact is that English is an Indian language and indeed the global lingua franca by now. So any entry point into English is useful for local poets.
Pandey: Out of those one hundred and twenty drafts, how did you pick — and order — those that you felt most engaged with the contemporary situation?
Kaul: I was looking for poems that I thought were representative of what I believed to be certain emotions, states of feeling, forms, that are characteristic of the larger volume of poems. Yes, there are a great many ghazals here, but then there are ghazals that use the form of the ghazal, precisely the repetition that you are asking about, to emphasize the disorderly conditions that obtain in Kashmir. It’s a very odd phenomenon: you are using a very regular form, a form that is structured around repetitions, but the events you’re describing, the feelings you’re describing, are those of endless rupture, frustration, fear, anxiety, misery. To an extent, these are personal choices, so once I felt I had found a poem that worked with a conventional form, but did it interestingly, innovatively, those were the kinds of poems I chose.
And then it came to deciding how to order the book. I went back and forth with the order for a long time… and it’s not as if I can offer you a precise template that governed my decisions, but there was a sense in which I wanted, in the beginning, to open with poems that spent time describing what Kashmir felt like to people on the way to its becoming alienating or disturbed. And then I wanted poems that were innovative in form, that aren’t necessarily nazms or ghazals. I’ll give you an instance of what I mean. A poem like Naji Munawar’s “Then and Today,” is staged as a little dialogue. We don’t know who these people are, but you can guess the situation. Slightly older people, a man and a woman, sitting inside their home, the light is off, there’s fear in the air. “Now what are you getting enraged about?” asks one of them (I imagine it is the man), and the question is the little turn in the poem. Or rather, the answer is the unexpected irony: “Alas then it used to be said the darkness might swallow — / and now the light truly comes to devour.” The context of this poem, and why it’s particularly evocative, is the so-called crack-downs that became a feature of Kashmiri villages and small town life. Everyone turns off the lights. The police and the military are outside. You’re really scared. Light, when you see it, is not something that brings hope; it brings the chances of unwarranted attention. So this was a poem I found really startling precisely because of its form.
Pandey: You could very clearly see that some poems followed a conventional form, and some didn’t; they were just written in a moment, in the way they were meant to be written.
Kaul: Exactly. Those poems are much more urgent in their sense of things. The last couple of poems will tell you what my own hopes are. Som Nath Bhat Veer’s poem, “A New Day will Dawn,” is a song of hope in the middle of this misery, as is Zahid Mukhtar’s poem, “Who will change our destiny?” These are not poets I know, but I made it my business, once I had chosen their poems, to try and find them. Kashmir is still a small enough world that if I made phone calls to my friends, they would make phone calls to their friends, and somebody or other would be in touch with these poets, and many of them were on email.
When I wrote to Zahid Mukhtar and I sent him this translation, he wrote back very kindly. He said “You know, I’m very touched that you have chosen to do this,” because I am a Hindu, and he is not, and that is part of the unfortunate, polarizing of life in Kashmir. And he said, and this was his phrase that I mention in my book, “It must be that our common pain which I have attempted to describe in my mother tongue,” which I found a very hopeful sentiment. It’s an almost lost sentiment, but that’s the only sentiment that allows for hope. So that’s why I close the book with these two poems, both of which look forward.
Pandey: I’m assuming Som Nath Bhat was Hindu?
Kaul: He is Hindu, and Zahid Mukhtar is Muslim. Arjun Dev Majboor, whose poem is at the beginning of the book, is Hindu, and the next poet in the book is Muslim.
Pandey: You translate a line in Maqbool Sajid’s ghazal as, “Eyes upon eyes weep, now what is left,” and in a note below the poem you explain, “It could also be translated as ‘Word upon word weeps, now what is left.’” You made notes like this in a few other poems too, I think. I remember specifically the translation of jigar[3]: I thought about it long and hard, and I couldn’t think of a word for it in English. It’s not quite “heart.” How did you translate these lines that didn’t have an exact meaning in English, or that could be interpreted one of two ways?
Kaul: In the second edition, the version I’ve decided to use is, “Word upon word weeps here, now what is left.” Why? A literary friend pointed out that the duality of meaning might well be the result of poor copyediting of the original. Here is the problem: when Urdu is written in Nastaliq[4], vowel markers are often dropped. So you literally have to recognize the word to be able to tell what kind of vowel to use. Now, Kashmiri has a great many more vowel markers, but when the poetry is printed in these journals, very often the calligrapher or the typesetter doesn’t use these vowel markers. In the original that I saw of this poem, the phrase ashar, ashar could have been read as akshar, akshar. It’s a question of uncertain or missing vowel markers, so I maintained both meanings. But then in conversation after the book was published, my friend said, “Look, it’s unlikely to have been that, I bet it was a typo.” I was persuaded by her to drop the original translation I had used, and now in the new edition that note has disappeared.
Pandey: Is all of Kashmiri written in Nastaliq?
Kaul: Not quite, but increasingly so. This is part of what happens to language in a polarized situation. The original script of Kashmiri was a script called Sharda, which looks like Devnagari[5] but with additional consonants and vowel sounds. That script has disappeared. Sadly, what happened is that if you are a Muslim who writes in Kashmiri, you will prefer to write it in Nastaliq, plus Kashmiri vowel sounds with these new vowel markers. The state literary academy, the Sahitya Academy, is actually formulating ways in which this language can be orthographically more precise than it is when written in Nastaliq as Urdu is written. But a great many Hindus who write in Kashmiri choose to write it in Devanagri.
Pandey: So the language itself is becoming cut in half.
Kaul: The language itself is being represented in two different scripts. The future is likely to remain based in Nastaliq, because the largest numbers of users are those who write in Urdu, and know Nastaliq, and are likely to write Kashmiri in it. The language politics are interesting. Ever since this was a Dogra kingdom[6], that is, before independence and partition, the official language of the court was Urdu. Never Kashmiri. English was used, and Urdu was used: these were the languages of classical, literary, and philosophical education. Kashmiri was the people’s tongue; it was literally the vernacular.
Pandey: When you started, did you think you were going to preserve the very apparent musicality of the ghazals and nazms, or did you know it wouldn’t be possible?
Kaul: As I said, Kashmiri is very idiomatic. The hardest terms to translate from one language to another are idioms. There were times when I abandoned the effort. It would make no sense in English. It’s always a series of compromises. But when I read them in English, if I didn’t know the Kashmiri, I would sometimes think that there’s not a very particularly melodic progression in each of the lines. There are moments in the original with alliterative sounds and certain kinds of repetition, but it is just not possible to replicate all of them in English and retain meaning.
Thus, and these are difficulties you discover, you always hope to find an idiom, a certain phrasing or a tone that will replicate the original. Then you recognize that is only aspiration, that it is not how it works in practice. Translation is as much compromise as anything else. The best I can claim for these translations is that [they] are compromises that [hopefully] work as poetry in English. I know some translators think of their writing as transcreation. They will take what they understand to be the sentiment, the approximate meaning, sometimes the arresting images of the original, and rewrite them into the new language, generating essentially a poem in response to that [original] poem, a poem that is much more overtly poetical in the new language. And that’s not what I was prepared to do. I wasn’t prepared to overwrite what I took to be some of the characteristic features of the original. And there the real challenge began, because you can’t overwrite, yet you can’t remain entirely faithful to the original.
Pandey: How did you get from your very literal, word-for-word first drafts to this finished product? That’s kind of a big step.
Kaul: Of course it is. But it isn’t a single step; it’s many steps. And many steps that you redo and go over and fix again. I wish I could say to you that here is a single principle I used, and this is what enabled me to keep redrafting. There was no single principle. You see something really arresting idiomatically and you think, “Okay, I’m going to find a way to replicate that idiom,” but what do you do with the rest of the line? You have to produce syntax that will allow it to make sense in English. You feel your way through this. And you recognize that you risk someone else [saying], “This particular image ought to have resulted in this kind of translation.”
Once you recognize it in the original, trying to find a way of recreating it in the new language doesn’t always work, but it becomes one more thing you are alerted to. You have to find these little elements of the original and somehow find a way to bring as many of them over with you. That’s what compromise means. I think working compromises are precisely getting translation right.
Pandey: You talked about these poems engaging with contemporary circumstance, and of course what’s happening in Kashmir right now is very near to your heart. When you were compiling these essays and poems, did you mean them as political statement or did you mean them to just say, “This is what Kashmir is,” or something else entirely?
Kaul: You know, when you’ve been doing what I’ve been doing for as long as I have, you no longer believe that anything can stand on its own. My very choice of this project, my decision to take it from individual essays to these translations is political too… but part of the work of these translations is a sign of my own desperation. When you go there and you visit… my parents would be there, and my mother and my sister… I would look around and say, “What I see here is not India, this is not democracy, this is not anything I love and value about India.” And then you think “Okay, so then what?”
And the answer is that I’m not going to become a politician, or a political theorist, or an advisor to the governor, but I have certain skills that can, I hope, generate the picture of a world under siege, both in terms of its cultural productivity in these poems, but also in terms of my own understanding and my own commentary. To that extent, it is meant to be an intervention. If people read this, I hope the book will change their mind, so that the “Kashmir problem” doesn’t remain a binary between India and Pakistan, as if Kashmiris do not matter. It’s a very mottled, ugly history that has been put into place there. I think of myself as an Indian. I think of myself as a democrat. I think of myself as a Kashmiri. Those three terms right now are not in easy alignment. So that’s what this book is meant to be. It’s almost a cry, in its own minor key, that says, “Pay attention.”
Pandey: I also saw it as a small reconciliation of some of the differences, because you’ve published Hindus and Muslims side by side, because you chose to stick to Kashmiri, which is written in both Nastaliq and Devnagari. You know, Kashmiri is literally a bridge between those two communities, which is special and rare.
Kaul: That’s what I argue: that it’s in Kashmiri that you find commonality. In the language, the common pain, the common history, and I hope the common future. I wrote this book fully cognizant that I am a Hindu writing about what is commonly perceived to be a Muslim problem. But it’s not a Muslim problem alone. It’s a Kashmiri problem, and it’s a problem for Indians who are democrats. I’m hoping that if this book enacts the necessity of empathizing with those who have suffered, it will work as a model for those who live and work in Kashmir too. I hope that young Muslims will start thinking of the kinds of resources of culture and community that have been lost in the last so many years, as the bulk of Hindus have left. I hope Pandits (which is what Kashmiri Hindus are called) will work to extend their own feelings of loss and alienation into empathy for all that their Muslim neighbors have suffered. And, projects like this one and other parallel ones are an attempt to say there is a commonality of language, expression, feeling, belief, not religious belief in its particularity, but belief in something larger, that needs to be rebuilt.
[1] Of Gardens and Graves was published by Duke University Press in the United States, 2017.
[2] A ghazal is a lyrical poem typical of Middle Eastern and Indian literature and music, with a couplet structure and a repeating refrain. A nazm is simply a song characterized by rhymed verses but not governed by any specific structural laws.
[3] Jigar is a common term in Hindi and Urdu. It is akin to “life force,” but is often translated as “heart” or “liver.”
[4] Nastaliq is the traditional script of Urdu, Arabic, and other languages that use a Persian script. It is also often used for writing in Kashmiri.
[5] The traditional script of Hindi and other Sanskrit-derived languages.
[6] A Hindu Rajput dynasty which traced its roots to the dynasties of northern India. The rulers of the dynasty were Dogra Rajput. The ruling family is also known as the “royal house of Jammu and Kashmir.”
photo by Shailly Pandey