Bengal's Modern Epic

The Slaying of Meghanada: A Ramayana from Colonial Bengal by Michael Madhusudan Datta. Translated by Clinton B. Seely. New York: Oxford University Press.

The Ramayana, as everyone knows, depicts and celebrates the divine Rama's victory over the villainous rakshasas led by their king, Ravana. But Michael, it is equally well known, turns the tale upside down. Disdainful of 'Ram and his rabble,' he considers Ravana 'a splendid fellow,' and constructs an epic poem (kabya) around the slaying (badh) of Meghanada, the rakshasa crown prince. With characteristic aplomb he furnishes it with intertextual connections to the great epics of Europe--Homer's Iliad, Virgil's Aeneid, Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, Dante's Divine Comedy, Milton's Paradise Los--though in its substance it owes more to homely Bengali folk classics, Krittibas's Ramayana, Kashiram Das's Mahabharata, and the popular Ramlila folk dramas performed every year at the time of the Durga Puja.

Arguably, the Meghnadabadhkabya created more of a stir among its early readers because of its innovative prosody rather than its content. Modelling himself on Milton, Michael fashioned a splendidly sonorous Bengali blank verse (which he named the amitrakshara chhanda) that remains unrivalled in our literature. He did this by shaking up the traditional payar form, which is tight as an English heroic couplet, keeping its line length but doing away with rhyme and bringing in enjambment.

This seems pretty straightforward, but we should remember that there is an essential difference in the music of English and Bengali. English is a stressed language and English prosody is based on the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. Bengali is unstressed and Bengali prosody is consequently purely quantitative, but in a way very different from classical Greek or Latin prosody, where the pattern of short and long syllables determines metre. Bengali prosody is based on counting sound units called matras, which usually coincide with syllables, but quite often are consonantial phonemes. As a result a line of Bengali verse that scans neatly into the fourteen matras required of the standard payar (with a caesura after the eighth matra), may not have as many syllables.

Consequently Clinton Seely's decision to translate the Meghnadabadhkabya into English syllabic free verse, with fourteen syllables to a line, in the belief that it is an approximation of Michael's amitrakshara chhanda, is--putting it mildly--rather quixotic. In an apologia embedded in Seely's comprehensive introduction he even scans four of the following lines from Michael to show the fourteen matras in each:

Trouble is, he uses the word "syllable" instead of matra. The reader need only read and count the syllables to see the error. Conversely, if one were to adapt the payar method of counting matras to Seely's lines, they would amount to quite a few more than fourteen in each; witness his translation of the Bengali lines quoted above:

This news of yours, messenger, is like a nightmare! Beggar
Raghava in face-to-face battle slew the archer who,
by his strength of arms, has harassed even the immortals?
Did Providence, with flower petals, chop down so stately
a salmali tree?

Each line has exactly fourteen syllables, but in counting matras payar-style, in the first line, the first four and the sixth and seventh words would each have two, "messenger" five, the last three words a total of eight--and that makes twenty-five matras in all!

Seely also tries to approximate the unstressed character of Bengali by deliberately avoiding "an iambic pattern, or any other pattern, of stress." This too leads to problems. As he admits, he cannot "avoid stress within words, for that is natural to the English language." Second, though stress is not phonemic in Bengali, it is used for emphasis. And Michael's verse acquires dramatic gusto through its conspicuous emphases. Seely's prosodic strategy renders him incapable of echoing this quality in the original Bengali.

I wonder what drove Seely into these confusions of prosodic theory--could it be the pressure one might feel in Western academia from the promoters of so-called "Translation Theory"? Be that as it may, the ultimate test of a text lies in the reading, and here even the most niggardly examiner will have to concede that Seely's version is at the very least an excellent crib. Thanks to its curious prosody, it reads like prose--admirably limpid prose--while the occasional inversion and the epic similes and other figures of speech remind the reader that it is an intricately woven poetic text. Seely's Michael deserves to be on the reading list every course in South Asian literature in Anglophone academia. His 65-page introduction, which covers the background, both historical and biographical, as well as the critical context and textual commentary, should go down well with students. It is insightful, well-written and informative, though even on a hurried reading I did spot a slight inaccuracy: Kaliprasanna Sinha's Bengali Mahabharata is not, as Seely claims, a complete translation; even at 2000 plus quarto pages, it is a condensation.

Seely's is not the first English translation of Meghnadabadha, nor will it be the last. A translation into English blank verse by Rajendranath Sen appeared in Benares in 1926, and Britain's leading Bengali scholar-translator, William Radice, is waiting to publish his translation, which is based on a 'verse principle' of his own devising--very different from Seely's, strongly cadenced and more self-consciously poetic*. The two versions should nicely complement each other.

*See 'Reflections on Clinton B. Seely's Translation of Meghnadbadhkabya' by William Radice at www.parabaas.com.

Kaiser Huq teaches English at Dhaka University.

Extract from The Slaying of Meghanada: A Ramayana from Colonial Bengal
In the form of lightning streaks, Agni ran to earth. Then at
once the pyre burst ablaze. All, startled, looked upon that
fiery chariot. There on a seat of gold within the
chariot sat the warrior, vanquisher of Vasava,
in celestial form. On his left, pretty Pramila whose
splendor of unending youth shone from her graceful figure
and on whose honeyed lips, a smile of everlasting joy.
With great speed that best of chariots climbed its skyward path
as the god clan in concert rained down flowers, and the
universe filled with blissful sounds. The Raksasas put out
those brilliant flames in streams of pure milk. With utmost care
they gathered up the ashes and immersed them in the ocean.
Having washed that cremation site using water from the
Jahnavi, Raksasa craftsmen by the thousands built with
golden bricks a temple on the spot where stood the pyre...
that temple's lofty spire, cleaving clouds, rose to the sky.
After bathing in waters of the sea, those Raksasas
now headed back toward Lanka, wet still with water of their
grief--it was as if they had immersed the image of the
goddess on the lunar tenth day of the Durga Puja.
Then Lanka wept in sorrow seven days and nights.