Gold and Bracelet, Water and Wave': Signature and Translation in the Indian Poetry of Adela Cory Nicolson - (Part 1)
Anindyo RoyRapid #: -10960377 CROSS REF ID: 92819 LENDER: BBH :: EJournals BORROWER: CBY :: Main Libraryn nTYPE: Article CC:CCL JOURNAL TITLE: Women USER JOURNAL TITLE: Women (Oxford, England)
ARTICLE TITLE: 'Gold and Bracelet, Water and Wave': Signature and Translation in the Indian Poetry of Adela Cory Nicolson
ARTICLE AUTHOR: Roy, Anindyo
VOLUME: 13 ISSUE: 2 MONTH: 6 YEAR: 2002 PAGES: 140-160 ISSN: 0957-4042
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Women: A Cultural Review ISSN: 0957-4042 (Print) 1470-1367 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rwcr20
To cite this article: Anindyo Roy (2002) 'Gold and Bracelet, Water and Wave': Signature and Translation in the Indian Poetry of Adela Cory Nicolson, Women: A Cultural Review, 13:2, 140-160, DOI: 10.1080/09574040210122995 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09574040210122995
(First) Published online: 23 Jun 2008.
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'Gold and Bracelet, Water and Wave': Signature and Translation in the Indian Poetry of Adela Cory Nicolson
Written By: Anindyo Roy
Sweet! On the daisies of your English grave
I lay this wreath of Indian flowers,
Fragrant for me, because the scent they have
Breathes of the memory of our wedded bows. -Edwin Arnold, 1866
See in my songs how women love. -Adela Cory Nicolson, 'The Masters'
There is no knowledge of the Other which is not also a temporal, historical, a political act -Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object
THE poetry of Adela Cory Nicolson, who wrote under the male pseudonym T 'Laurence Hope', is considered to be little more than a late Victorian curiosity. Long ignored on grounds that it was merely part of the enormous left-over corpus of colonial exotica produced and consumed with unprecedented eagerness in the age of empire, Nicolson's poetry invites a reappraisal on the grounds that it constituted a significant act of translation: a practice aimed at reconceptualizing notions of national poetic legacy under colonialism and at reworking gender and identity in relation to poetic voice. In this context, the term 'translation' signifies a radical cultural practice, one that simultaneously emerges from a long discursive colonial terrain and transforms its dominant relations of power by animating the power of language to work through and open spaces beyond that terrain. By deploying forms of poetic signature derived from non-western traditions, Nicolson pushes many of the established boundaries of nineteenth-century colonial practices of translation to new limits. To this extent, Nicolson's efforts can be rightly called revisionist; such an endeavour also encompasses a feminist production of voice, making her poetry part of a significant historical moment in the cultural production of India in the colonial imagination.
Originating a century ago in the work of the eighteenth-century orientalists and continuing through the nineteenth century in the works of major translators such as Edward FitzGerald, Richard Burton, Edwin Arnold and less well-known figures such as Ella Haggar, Ebenezer Pocock, G. S. Davie and J. Atkinson (the translator of the eleventh-century Persian poet Firdausi's Shah Namuh), the work of translating 'India' had circumscribed and made possible a entire range of textual and discursive practices that helped constitute British national identity. Nicolson's translations depart from traditional colonial practices of representing the Other that Tejaswini Niranjana claims always 'reinforce[d] hegemonic versions of the colonized' (Niranjana 1992:3). Drawing from feminist and postcolonial cultural theory, I will elaborate on the specific textual modes by which Nicolson adopted the language of local poetic traditions to sign herself into poetic verse, working simultaneously to disrupt and reorganize the dominant specular relations authorized by late Victorian conventions of gender. At the heart of the present analysis is a consideration of the larger discursive context of her poetry as a means to an exploration of the intersection between the textual and intertextual nodes in Nicolson's poetic oeuvre.
Adela Cory Nicolson is perhaps best known today as the poet who penned the famous opening lines to the poem 'Kashmiri Song': 'Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar'. In the absence of an authorized biography, one is necessarily compelled to rely on a few sketchy details about her life culled primarily from secondary sources.' (1- Notes) The daughter of Colonel Cory, a colonial man who was once the co-editor of the Civil and Military Gazette and later took up the editorship of the Sind Gazette in Karachi, India. Adela Cory Nicolson was born in 1865 in England. In 1889 she married Colonel Malcolm Hassels Nicolson, a commander of a native regiment in the Bombay Army, veteran of the Second Afghan War and also an expert linguist. Colonel Nicolson served as CO of Mhow, the headquarters of the Western Command in India, whence he led a series of military campaigns in Afghanistan (MacMillan 1988:206-7). According to Margaret MacMillan, Nicolson routinely followed her husband to the military camps situated along the north-west frontiers dressed as a young Afghan groom; this experience of gender and cultural cross-dressing finds a special place in many of Nicolson's love poems, particularly those that are set against the background of war and military campaigns. As far as Nicolson's knowledge of, and familiarity with, indigenous Indian poetic traditions is concerned, it is worthwhile to point out that, in the nineteenth century, the work of translating Hindu 'bhakti' and Islamic Sufi poetry had not only been completed but these translations had been fairly widely disseminated in Anglo-Indian circles. Published simultaneously in the metropolis and the colony, some of these translations had also been introduced as texts into the regular curriculum for the colonial civil service examinations. (2 Notes) Nicolson's familiarity with some of the North Indian languages has been affirmed by those who knew her personally; for example, in her diary written in India, Violet Jacob notes that Nicolson spoke the North Indian language Urdu fluently (Jacob 199098). Furthermore, the linguist Colonel Nicolson could have been a key source of her knowledge of Indian languages; travelling extensively throughout India, she would have also encountered Indian poetry during public performances of Indian devotional 'bhakti' poetry-in the form of 'Krishna lilas' or dramatic performances based on the life of the Hind god Krishna-or heard it in the songs of itinerant Islamic Sufi singers and storytellers common in nineteenth-century India.
Perhaps the most marked aspect of Nicolson's poetry is that it is set
exclusively against the background of the nineteenth-century British Empire
in India, with some poems set in the Far East and North Africa. The
presence of the empire is marked indirectly through oblique references to
military campaigns and battles in many of the poems that are otherwise
located in ideal or imaginary settings. Originally written in the mid- to late
1890s, her poems were published in three consecutive volumes only at the
beginning of the twentieth century: The Garden of Kam (1901), Stars of the
Desert (1903) and Indian Love (1905), the last appearing a year after her death
in 1904. The first collection of poems, Garden of Kama, published by
Heinemann, sold well in England and was immediately picked up by John
Lane for publication in the United States. Later Amy Woodforde-Finden
used Nicolson's verses as the basis for her musical arrangements entitled
'Four Indian Love Lyrics', which was followed by two cinematic adaptations:
Less Than Dust (1916, starring Mary Pickford and David Powell) and The
Indian Love Lyrics (1923). Nicolson's popularity among the reading public in
the first two decades of the twentieth century has been attributed to the fact
that she had successfully created for herself what James Elroy Flecker writing in 1907-called 'a world of admirers, a multitude of initiants-a
Public' (quoted in Marx 1998:476). Flecker's use of the term 'initiants' to
characterize her readers and admirers is significant because it evokes a
particular history of the relationship, in the metropolis, between the
reading public and the 'Orient'. Since the publication of Edward FitzGerald's
Rubaiyat Of Omar Khayyam and Richard Burton's Kama Shastra in the
late 1870s, the Orient had been constructed as the source of new knowledge about sexual practices and norms previously unknown in the metropolis.
The construction of this Orient as the object of erotic discourse also
made the colonial experience the source of new desire and delight for the
metropolitan subject, which explains the initial popularity of Nicolson's
poetry. For a Victorian orientalist like Edwin Arnold, who translated the
poetry of the sixteenth-century divine and erotic poet Jayadeva, this delight
had its source in what he called 'a real reverence of the antique wisdom to
which the West owes so much' (Arnold 1860:28).(3 Notes) The necessity to hold on
to this binary Eastmest paradigm as a way to explain the charm of India was,
of course, a characteristic feature of nineteenth-century colonial discourse,
and can be discerned in many colonial writers. Henry Sumner Maine, who
like Arnold was closely associated with educational administration, observed
that it was not hard to understand 'why India is on the whole so differently
regarded among ourselves.. . It is at once too far and too near' (Maine 1875:6).
This awareness of India's simultaneous proximity and remoteness was crucial
to maintaining the sovereignty of the metropolitan will to knowledge, a
knowledge exercised over the colony that often authorized certain forms of
colonial desire to be articulated through the act of translation. Furthermore,
although the practical consequences of colonial rule were never far from
colonial considerations, a man like Edwin Arnold was clearly cognizant of
the temporary nature of British rule: 'we [the English] are clearly a transitory
race in India, though we may make our influence permanent' (Arnold
1860:lO). Translation was one of the means adopted to make this influence
palpable, as evident in the entire debate between the 'orientalists' and the
'anglicists' conducted during the reign of Lord Bentinck. (4- Notes) Th e history of
translation therefore represents one of the most significant markers of the
changing profile of Britain's political power in India. While earlier in the
century British utilitarians had sought to justify colonial authority by
concentrating solely on the power of the metropolitan government to
shape and change what had been perceived as an 'unchanging' India, a late
nineteenth-century orientalist like Edwin Arnold, while supporting the
agenda of the 1854 Charter of Indian Education and advocating the spread
of 'European knowledge throughout all classes of people', continued to
translate important Indian works and promote the cause of Indian literature.
His works span a wide gamut of Indian materials, from the study of Sanskrit
and Pali to translations of Buddhist religious dogma. Clearly, by the end of
the nineteenth century, the absolute polarization of 'orientalists' and
'anglicists', which had marked the 1830s and 1840s (in the wake of
Macaulay's Minutes on Education), had been replaced by a more synthetic,
yet hegemonic, approach to literary language and translation.
Like the work of translators, Nicolson's Indian poetry was clearly aimed
at a metropolitan audience, its popularity evident from the many editions it
went through in the early years of the century. Its appeal lay in the fact that
its early twentieth-century audience was beginning to see itself in new ways:
as metropolitan imperial subjects who were also key consumers and affective
shapers of the market. Domestic desire for the Orient was therefore
consolidated by the proliferation of this market, leading to the increasing
consumption of this constructed Orient in the form of translations, poetry,
romances and, later, film. (5- Notes) At a time when the British Empire, despite its
claims to unchallenged supremacy, seemed beleaguered by internal inconsistencies
and the rise of nationalist movements in the colony, as well as by the
constant peril of real or imagined external threats from other imperial
powers, Nicolson's poetry presents a world that is simultaneously idyllic
and troubled, often demonstrating an acute awareness of an imperial
subjectivity caught between the desire to reclaim an idyllic past and the
consciousness of present reality marked by conflict and dissent. In its
rendition of loss and the search for the missing object-often represented
by the figure of the elusive beloved-that had been adopted from Indian
poetical traditions, her poetry gave voice to the inner contradictions and
dualities of the imperial historical experience. Often re-imagining that loss
by reconstructing its sites, Nicolson's poetry engages in recursive enactments
of desire directed at, received or displaced by its object. It is possible to argue
that her initial appeal may have resulted from this ability simultaneously to
present the Orient as an ideal object and also to express those contradictions
within imperial subjectivity that were linked to that idealizing impulse,
contradictions that were rehearsed time and again in the ambiguous
positioning of voice and in the poems' sadomasochistic undercurrents
suggesting exhaustion, death, loss, violence and even dismemberment.
In his A History of Modern Poetry: From the 1890s to the High Modernist
Mode, David Perkins characterized Nicolson's poems as 'lyrics of erotic
passion' that were read, he alleges, 'with an almost pornographic interest'
(Perkins 1976:194). As indicated earlier, throughout the late Victorian age,
the production and reception of the 'erotic Orient' depended on the
simultaneous processes of incitement and interdiction, seen, for example,
in the popularity of a work like the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and in the
proscription of a work such as Oscar Wilde's Salomk. Writing in 1907, James
Elroy Flecker's imaginative rendering of the public as an 'initiant' (See MacKenzie 1984) had suggested that in many ways the public who read Nicolson's poetry had been familiarized with the sexual codes of the Orient through the erotically
tantalizing power of poetic verse. This certainly had been the dominant
perception in nineteenth-century colonial works of pornography such as
Venus in India, works that often dealt with the sexual initiation of young
Englishmen in the colonies. These works, often restricted to strict underground
circulation, achieved a level of notoriety in reading circles that
matched the popularity of other forms of mainstream fiction (6- Note missing in original) On the other hand, the eroticism of some works translated from Indian languages (primarily Sanskrit) were often seen to 'teach lechery in its most seductive forms' (Clive 1987:355). Perkins follows Flecker in seeing Nicolson's appeal in
purely orientalist terms-he observes that in Nicolson's poetry one 'hears
much of peacocks, temples, monkeys, sword fights, palms trees' (Perkins
1976:193) - but, departing from Flecker, ascribes to it a kind of prurience that
the latter had avoided in describing Nicolson's work. Furthermore, dismissing
her as a 'decadent, female Kipling', Perkins seeks to invent a masculine
genealogy, one that other modern critics have drawn on in order to locate
her within a more resolutely defined masculine European poetic heritage
drawn from Swinburne and the Symbolists, both associated with an European
fin-de-siecle decadent eroticism. For example, Harold Williams contends
that her antecedents are the writers of the Yellow Book and Savoy,
observing that 'in psychological subtlety and frankness she was nearer to Mr
Arthur Symonds than any other modern poet' (Williams 1918:142).
The question remains: why was she forgotten? The reasons for Nicolson's
fall into literary obscurity can be attributed to her growing mass appeal that
made these modern critics suspicious of her poetry's literary merit. By the
beginning of the twentieth century-at that precise historical juncture when
the market came to play a regulative role in establishing authorial credibility
and when the institutionalization of modern 'criticism' led to the formation
of literary value through canonicity (itself a patriarchal construct)-notions
of aesthetic value came to be gradually dissociated from market appeal.
Nicolson is one of the many women writers and poets of this period to have
fallen prey to the politics of canon formation. Calling her poetry 'raw and
savage', the Times Litevavy Supplement of 25 August 1905 also acknowledged
that it had 'character and force', but stated there was 'of beauty nothing, of
suggestion, or (shall we say) of the suggestive too much' ('Some Recent
Verses' 1905). David Perkins, whose main purpose was to establish a literary
genealogy for modern poetry, relegated Nicolson to the margins, seeing her
exoticism as being unredeemed by originality or genius. Needless to say,
Perkins failed to acknowledge the powerful effects of translation in Nicolson,
effects achieved through the use of non-western poetic traditions, as opposed
to the canonized modern poets he assesses, male poets who worked almost
exclusively within European traditions. If her exoticism continued to provide
inspiration for a host of other artistic productions in the early decades of the
century-in music and film, for instance-that exoticism was inextricably
linked to the very experimental forces that were shaping literature and
cultural production as a whole during the era of the fin de sikle. Perkins,
however, fails to note this fact.
Attempts to identify the source of Nicolson's verses have not yet been
successful and, as Lesley Blanch admitted in 1964 in her bookeUnder a Lilac
Bleeding Star, 'the mainspring of Laurence Hope's verses itill elude us'
(Blanch 1964:200). Despite the male pseudonym she assumed in signing
her poetry, Adela Cory Nicolson's gender, along with her official gender
identity, was made public as early as 1902 by the periodical Critic; so there
was hardly any doubt that the male writer of these erotic verses was a
'woman'. Nonetheless, the name 'Laurence Hope' continued to be resolutely
subjected to a form of gendered hyphenation by critics such as Perkins who
produced a genealogy of origins by cathecting her signature 'Laurence Hope'
in the name of a European masculinist literary order. Like Harold Williams,
who placed her in the 'tradition of Swinburne and the younger English poets
influenced by the French Romantics and Symbolists' (Williams 1918:143),
Perkins named her as a belated female Kipling, thereby casting her as a
hybrid figure who was not quite 'Kipling'. The comparison with Kipling is
indeed noteworthy. Nicolson, like Kipling, often adopted the form of the
ballad, and a poem like 'On the City Wall', a name deliberately taken from
Kipling, directly evokes his theme of the 'East/West' divide, if only to
question and interrupt Kipling's masculinist world-view. While Williams had
noted, with a perspicacity missing from the later generation of scholars, that
'the fragments of Sappho recur to mind as we read her verse' (Williams
1918:143)-a view that had been endorsed by Thomas Hardy in the obituary
he wrote for her in the Athenaeum ('Sapphic fervour7)-Perkins ignored the
Sapphic resonances in her poetry by appropriating her name under the
master sign of 'Kipling'. Assigning her a derivative status as a 'decadent'
Kipling, one who is both out of place in and inappropriate to the order
consolidated by Kipling's brand of brawny imperialism, Perkins ignores the
influence of other traditions in her poetry. As I have indicated, it is hard to
miss the significance of this strategic placing of names in modern criticismof
Swinburne, Kipling and Nicolson-since it simultaneously conceals and
reveals crucial aspects of the way in which her poetry has been received in
the West by literary historians seeking to establish the rule of the canon,
particularly the way in which her specific mode of signing herself into poetic
verse has been comprehended by them. It is clear, however, that when critics
called her poetry 'loose translations', they missed the way in which she
reworked the colonial discourse about translation through her use of
signature. Embodied in a series of proper (gendered) names from the
'East'-Mahomed Akram, Valgobind, Morsellin Khan, Khan Zada, Faiz
Ulla, Lilavanti, to name a few, proper names often marked by the titles of
specific poems-these names are ascribed by the poet to specific verses
through which they are made to 'speak'. For example, poems with titles such
as 'To Aziz: Song of Mahomed Akram', 'Thoughts: Mahomed Akram', 'To
the Unattainable: Lament of Mahomed Akram', 'Mahomed Akram's Appeal
to the Stars', 'Reminiscence of Mahomed Akram' and 'The Island of
Desolation: Song of Mahomed Akram' suggest an indefinable ground
between the purely lyrical, the elocutionary and the performative: in some
of these poems, the 'of' signals the hiatus between the primary lyrical 'I' and
its repetition through performance: in other words, is Mahomed Akram
merely the singer or is the poem an expression of his voice? Therefore, the
transitive move into assuming or ascribing a name, whether signalled by the
word 'of' or, as in some poems, 'by', involves the coming into play of specific
forms of a personal elocutionary 'I' in relation to the performative, and it is
through this dynamic that the 'I' or 'you', or 'we', is inscribed in the poems.
Sometimes the 'I/we' writes itself as an anonymous improvisatrice, one who
recites the song as part of her poem, sometimes in the form of a named
persona (usually Indian), with the 'you' as its Other or its interlocutor/
addressee. The relational mode established between them marks the larger
performative dynamic at one moment, which in turn defines the elocutionary
at the next. This progressive unfolding of relations between the
elocutionary and the performative is therefore linked to the ways in which
poetic 'signature' is assigned to specific verses, becoming part of an
expanding texture of gendered names arranged within specific poetic
sequences. The issue of poetic signature is further complicated if we consider
what Foucault has called the 'specific link' between the 'two poles of
description and designation'. Foucault notes that 'it is here that the particular
difficulties of the author's name arise-the links between the proper name
and the individual named and between the author's name and what it names
are not isomorphic and do not function in the same way' (Foucault
1998392-3). Carrying the hyphenated form of 'Adela Cory Nicolson/
Laurence Hope' into the body of the poetry marked by these other
'proper names' opens up the very body of the poetic oeuvre, signalling what is at its very heart: the multiplicity of voices that change in relation to the sites marked out for each of them within a translated/hyphenated continuum.
Along with this multiplicity of voices, what is also visible are the traces
of poetry drawn from non-western poetic sources, some based on the erotic
and mystical traditions of 'bhakti' and some from Islamic Sufi traditions.
Accruing around this elocutionary/performative dynamic, these traces serve
literally as verbal echoes that transform and are in turn transformed by the
movement of each poem. To this extent, Nicolson's hybrid style can be seen
to be more complex than what Williams calls a style that 'mirrors the soul of
the East' (Williams 1918:193). This is evident in her use of 'names' or
'signatures' in many of her poems: while each name clearly indicates the
religious and gender identity of the speaker/addressee, the voice is composed
of an ensemble of varying poetic languages drawn from both Islamic and
Hindu traditions (as is evident in poems like 'Farewell', 'Valgobind's Song'
and others). The poetic body is thus constructed discursively, and a specific
form of poetic economy is consolidated through this process of linking
names to specific languages. Also visible is the way in which &sire is voiced
and then mapped out in the poems. This economy is unique to Nicolson's
Indian poetry, and achieves specific effects of reconstructing traditional
Victorian notions of gendered desire and eroticism by often playing up to
and then reversing their conventional modes, especially their ocular
directionality. This pattern appears to be consistent with the experience of
many British women in colonial India, who as Indira Ghose suggests were
'multiply organized across positionalities along several axes and across
mutually contradictory discourses' (Ghose 1998:5). Translating and familiarizing
traditions that lay outside the reach of European canonicity, this
economy puts into relief the entire discourse of Victorian erotics, power and
colonialism that has been elaborated by Anne McClintock in Imperial
Leather. Leslie Blanch has noted that Nicolson's 'setting was India-Kipling's
India, part of that pattern of Empire-building in which England still believed:
the India of might and right: of Viceregal splendours imposed on Moghal
memories' (Blanch 1964:186). Yet, in many of her verses devoted to desire
and yearning, echoes of Indian poetry transform the specific location-which
is often a scene of war and military campaigns that had been led by the
British on the frontiers with Afghanistan-into a reverie wherein a form of
arrested temporality replaces the purely spatial, allowing the speaker/
interlocutor to experience a form of desire that lay outside the boundaries
of Victorian eroticism.
During the course of the century-long colonial era, the textual and
practical modes that had helped produce 'India' gave shape to a multifaceted
discursive tradition, performing a wide range of disciplinary functions: from
the formation of legal and administrative codes and educational policies to
ethnological studies and comparative linguistics, and to the laws on censorship.
Even a cursory look at nineteenth-century colonial writings shows that
translation as cultural practice was widely discussed, and debates about
translation appeared routinely in nineteenth-century periodicals (as in the
prominent Anglo-Indian periodical Calcutta Review). The question of 'translation'
is significant because, although her reviewers described Nicolson's
poetry as 'loose translations' from the original Indian languages (Hindi or
Urdu), they were not quite certain about their 'authenticity' as translated
poetry. Although this view-that she had merely translated Indian poetryprevented
her poetry from being proscribed for its eroticism, it is not clear
how this issue of authenticity versus what Edward Marx has called the
'pretense of translation' (Marx 1998:477) played out in the considerations of
her literary genealogy. For example, commenting on 'the spell and mysterious
fascination of the blue skies and bronze shadows of the Orient, its vast
inchoate life, its silences, the age-old habits of its life and thought, its
perfumes, its passions, hates, loves and the transient swiftness of its youth',
Harold Williams ascribes the 'pervasion of her lyrics' to a 'neurosis of sex'
that he says 'is a mode of the Paris boulevard and the ballet stage of London'
(Williams 1918:143). If she was a symptom of a particular 'European'
condition-as Williams seems to suggest-the 'pretence of translation' also
brings up a new set of questions about the precise scope of her engagement
with the process of translating poetic traditions indigenous to India,
especially at a time when Richard Burton's anthropological eye had already
established a powerful mediating paradigm for constructing and comprehending
colonial alterity and when, as Yopie Prins has demonstrated, women
poets like Laetitia Elizabeth Landon and Michael Fields had introduced the
Sapphic fragment as a newly revived mode of translation.
In his famous essay, 'The Task of the Translator', Walter Benjamin
defined the cultural dynamic that he calls translatability in the following
manner:
Rejecting a simple mechanical view of translation based on the notion of
'alikeness', Benjamin seeks to place translation at the heart of a cultural
process that is defined by change, by 'the perpetual renewal of language'
(Benjamin 1968:74). Questioning the 'identity of origin' through what
Derrida calls 'the ex-appropriation of any relation of any proper or of any
last instance to itself' (Derrida 1993:205) leads Benjamin to posit the idea of
'remoteness' (Benjamin 1968:75), a conditioning factor that is potentially
present in the use and exchange of language. In other words, translation is
the very condition under which language assumes its lived and ever-changing
discursive reality, what Benjamin calls its 'afterlife'.
As indicated earlier, the traces that mark Nicolson's poetry are drawn
from Indian poetic traditions, which by the end of the nineteenth century
formed part of a significant discursive terrain. For examples, the speaker's
call in 'Khristna and His Flute' to
. . . arise and follow,
To seek, in vain pursuit,
The blueness and the distance,
The sweetness of that flute (Hope 1940:371)
clearly echo the words of the sixteenth-century woman 'bhakti' poet,
Mirabai. (7- Notes) Although the phrase 'translation by Moolchand' indicated under
the title of the poem places it in a differential textual relation with the
'original' ('Moolchand/Mirabai'), Nicolson's translation is not based on a
linear relationship between it and the derivative, but is a practice involving
the use of signature to create a specific relation between the elocutionary 'I'
and the performative persona, a dynamic sustained through this use of
Mirabai's poetry. Furthermore, this dynamic also evokes a relation between
the written and the spoken that is part of the burden of translation (which in
turn brings up related questions about literacy and orality). Poetic voice,
therefore, finds its very being in this complex intertextual mode, and is not
simply exterior to it. To track this terrain is therefore to assemble a particular
genealogy for Nicolson's work, one that lies outside the purview of western
metropolitan poetics and canonicity. It should be borne in mind that this
genealogy is not simply about the appropriation of local knowledges and
languages, but also about the historical consolidation of the 'local' under the
sign of 'translation', a practice with a wide-ranging cultural significance.
Because of space considerations, this article had to be broken into two parts. This is Part 1, click here for Part 2 which includes Notes and Bibliography.
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