I handed in my final assignment for my research course yesterday. Yes, it’s silly to have to write a research proposal for a thesis that’s due in a few weeks, but that should actually make it easier to write. I took it as a good sign that I got it done without bursting into tears – that means I actually do have some idea what I’m doing. Yaay.

The creative component was fun though, specially since I’ve opted to not include a creative component in my thesis and I wanted to see what I might have come up with if I had.  I thought of doing an ‘imitiation’ of Faiz in English, but discarded that idea pretty fast since I’d need my examiner to be able to read the original for it to make sense. What I did take from Faiz was the images and sentiment he uses in “Aaj Bazaar Mein Pabajaulan Chalo” which translates roughly as “Come to the marketplace in shackles today”.

[Digression] 

I’ve tried translating that one line over and over and simply cannot come up with any kind of phrasing in English that manages to convey the right combination of grief or determination or resignation or any of the other emotions that one line carries. ‘Aaj’ means today. ‘Bazaar’ is not just a marketplace, it’s the town centre or square where the business of living, not just trade, is carried out. ‘Mein’ is ‘in’. ‘Pabajaulan’ means ‘with shackled feet. ‘Chalo’ means ‘walk’ but it can also mean come or go. But that doesn’t really help because we don’t know who the line is addressed to. It could mean: 

• come with me to the marketplace in shackels
• let us go to the marketplace in shackles today
• I must walk in shackles through the marketplace today
• walk in shackles in the marketplace today
• We have come to a time when we must walk in shackles in the marketplace

So which is it? The problem is, it’s all of them. The poet himself actually did have to pass through the marketplace in chains one day because he needed to see a doctor and one couldn’t come to him in prison that day(Faiz was jailed because the government didn’t like his political opinions). The idea of having to walk chained in his own country for the crime of actually caring about its people stayed with him. It is also a comment on subjugation and the idea that, visible or not, everyone living under an oppressive regime is in shackles in public. It is also not only touches on (and the poem later discusses it explicitly) the humiliation faced by those with the will to fight but suggests that the brave come out in shackles willingly and take whatever other punishment the ‘oppressors’ wish to heap on them. Yes this is still the one line.

[/Digression]

 Since I’ve been reading Ilhan’s book at the same time and given my own interest in the ancient history of the land, I also picked up the image of the Dancing Girl of Mohenjodaro and again used Faiz’s idea of her ‘birth’ as the moment when time began (until we figure out what the real myths of the time were, I suppose we’ll just have to make up our own). Combine that with the Indus River (because I can) and you have a narrator all set to tell the story of a land in political turmoil. It was also easier to use the dancing girl as the speaker than myself because I feel my own emotional connection to the land is quite tenuous, despite my anger at the current situation there. (But that division is a whole other post.)

Overall, I’m not unhappy with the stuff I turned in. I’m avoiding reading it because I know I’ll find something I could have put better or should have left out or something. Plus I have my Writing the Unconscious assignment due next and have to go look up stuff on Jung. A jungian short story. What the hell was I thinking?!

The Urdu Poetry Archive is probably the most comprehensive Urdu poetry site I’ve come across so far. It contains over 1,800 poems by about 343 poets and has an alphabetical listing of both, which makes it easy to locate whatever you’re looking for. It hasn’t been updated for a few years though and I hope it hasn’t been abandoned – it’s a fantastic resource and, since the poems are transliterated (according to a painstakingly uniform system that it’s worth your while to get to know), people who speak urdu but have trouble with the script can still access the poetry. There aren’t any translations up though, but I suppose that would be a whole other project.

If you’ve ever wondered why our voices go up a few octaves and become distinctly sing-song-y when we talk to children (and yes, even a misanthrope like me does on occasion talk to children), Professor Steve Jones may have an answer.

And thereby hangs a tale; for rhythm is essential to language. Children pick up the pulse of speech well after they have learned its vocabulary and grammar. That explains in part why they sound childish and why adults talk to them in such an embarrassing way. The young pick up trochees first (which is why “Twinkle, twinkle, little star” – a perfect example of the form – is so popular and may even lie behind Shakespeare’s use of the same rhythm for the child-like figure of Puck). An ability to respond to the ponderous iamb takes much longer to emerge. When faced with a complicated word like “banana”, infants often turn it into a tasty trochee, or “nana”.

So I now have a huge stack of books threatening to topple onto my poor little laptop and crush it under their weight. All about translation, of course. As if I’m going to be able (through osmosis, maybe?) to absorb all their relevant content and produce an elegantly argued thesis clearly well-grounded in the current literature of my field. In a word, gah.

What’s fun though is coming across information that I have absolutely no use for but that is fascinating anyway. I love the physicality of language, or, put more boringly, the way we use the identical vocal apparatus to produce such a wide variety of language sounds. The most vivid example I remember is watching my mother on the phone once (before New York, so I would have been about 12) when she was conducting two simultaneous conversations, one with my father on the official line and the other with two friends on the other phone. It was fascinating to see her face literally rearrange itself while she switched from Turkish (dad) to French to Urdu/English. She speaks each with its ‘proper’ accent so I expect the realignment was even more exaggerated than it would have been if she’d kept the same accent. (But how do you learn a language without learning the accent or at least something like it? Isn’t it integral to understanding and picking up speech?) The way her cheeks and mouth were placed almost seemed to shift and her entire expression, tone, and volume would change. I keep thinking of the term ‘acrobatics’ and I suppose, in a sense, it’s an apt description.

The other thing, which is related in a way to the first, is the way one’s attitude changes in different languages. I speak French with a lower tone, with many more ‘throat-clearers’ (non, fin, tu vois, et bien, quoi, etc.) than I do English. I also speak it slightly slower than English or Urdu, probably because I go so long between conversations, but also because I tend to trip myself up when I speak too fast in any language and French is harder to disentangle. Technical difficulties aside, my attitude is also more relaxed in French–even my gestures which, in Urdu, can get almost frantic, are larger and smoother. The emotional connection with French actually made itself felt when my mother-in-law died and I found that while functioning in Urdu and even English was a massive effort–I couldn’t remember the simplest of words at times and spent much of my time gesturing and nodding–my French revived and supplanted both as if it were the most natural thing in the world to be babbling away in French during funeral preparations in Pakistan. I think it may be that because I spoke to my mother in French as a child–she was particularly pleased by how quickly I picked it up and it’s been ‘our’ language ever since I can remember–I associate a cetain amount of emotional stability with the language. It’s what I speak when I want to talk to just her, even though my father is familiar with it and my brother has a fair command of it too. In fact, when we’re in an ‘us vs. them’ type of situation, Ilhan and I will usually fall into it too.

My Urdu has always been somewhat careful, but became far more fluent when I moved to Lahore for college and then to Islamabad. It’s already slipping away again though, to the point where Ameel gets a good laugh out my failed attempts to speak it exclusively–we’re more diglossic than bilingual in that sense. He ups the ante by responding in Punjabi, which is grossly unfair because it’s not a language I claim to speak, regardless of how well I understand it. I speak Urdu very fast though–faster than English–and gesticulate quite a lot (things have been known to fly off the table). I guess I’m never really sure when it’s going to run out. I was quite happy to learn to cuss well in it though, since the ability to lose your temper in a language is one good way to measure your grasp of it. But I’ll still revert to English when I’m paticularly angry. It’s very clearly North American for just being rude or loud or both and my trusty RP for sarcasm and being generally poisonous. So far, luckily, I have not had to do both simultaneously.

Time seems to fly and crawl simultaneously sometimes. I don’t quite get it, but there you go. I’ll be slogging away at something utterly boringly unending and suddenly the week’s gone. Again. It’s like being stuck in a vacuum while time rushes past around me.

The new semester starts on the Feb 26. I’m quite ready to go back to school again, although what with it being the last six (five, really) months of my thesis and tutoring thrown in as well, it should be nice and stressful, but in a good I’m-doing-what-I-want-to-be-doing kind of way. At least that’s the idea.

I’ve been reading buckets on translation and the upshot seems to be that, at present, everyone’s got a different take on it and everyone thinks that their take works for them well enough but that obviously others have their own way of doing it, although they couldn’t possibly do it that way themselves. Isn’t that nice?

What many do agree on is that the choice of what to translate is usually personal, particularly when it comes to poetry. Even when translators work with ‘informants’ who know the language of the original text, they seem to want to connect with the ideas expressed and explored before they feel able to actually render the same poem in the target language (English in almost all the cases I’ve read so far). At the same time, most acknowledge that a perfectly literal translation is impossible simply because no two languages are alike enough for a text to travel intact between them. But that’s why they do it. Because even though the exact sense cannot be conveyed, something of the essence of the poem can, and that, they feel, is the point. Better to have an imperfect rendering of , say, Homer than none at all.

What any of this means for my thesis remains to be seen, unfortunately. The only thing I have been able to conclude so far is that there has been extremely little contact between Urdu and French. What contact there has been says to me that the two languages should cross-pollinate–the lyrical quality of each seems to me to travel well despite the distance between the languages and I think something in each manages to capture something very basic in the other in a way that English translations of Urdu and French poetry do not. But then for me there already exists a basic connection between Urdu and Frenchbecause I’ve heard them used in tandem my whole life. There’s no such relationship between them and English for me though, even though I’ve used that my whole life as well–more so than the other two. That’s odd.