Translating the divine girl

karuviLai oNmalarkAL ! kAyA malarkAL !
thirumAl uruvoLi kAttukinRIr,
enakku uyvazhakku onRuraiIr
thiruviLaiyAtu thiNtOL thirumAliruchOlai nambi
varivaLai ilpukunthu vanthipaRRum vazhakkuLathE !
(nAchchiyAr thirumozhi 9.3)

Lovely blossoms of karuviLai !
Flowers of kAyA !
You are showing me the complexion
Of ThirumAl's shining form.
Tell me a way to survive.
The great Lord, full and complete, of ThirumAlirunchOlai
Whose shoulders strong are the playful prop
Of the goddess of wealth, Thiru.
Is it just for him to enter our house
And snatch my lovely lined bangles by force?

When I read this to a friend, his ready comment was, 'it's too literal, do something about it !'. What is too literal and what is in proper idiom changes with the language.
Here, 'showing me the complexion of thirumAl's shining form' tries to translate the original, 'thirumAl uruvoLi kAttukinRIr'. The flowers kAyA and karuviLai, left untranslated with cognate names in English are addressed by the implied speaker as resembling thirumAl in complexion by means of their color and shine.

'ThirumAlirunchOlai nambi' of the original indicates the deity in the temple of the place, ThirumAlirunchOlai. The word 'nambi' means 'one who is full of good qualities,
accomplishments and exceedingly noble'. This word 'nambi' plays a vital role in suggesting a subtle humour to the poem. But the translation is yet to catch that humour.

'whose shoulders strong are the playful prop of the goddess of wealth, thiru' by being overly literal goes too awry from the passing of the proper mood and sense of the original, 'thiruviLaiyAdu thiNdOL'.

What is 'snatching one's bangles by force' as per the target idiom of English?

So the target language changes the poem and the translation, if successful, is but a deception. But this deception has to be made efficient in communicating the original, however. Shall we attempt at a deception now?

karuviLai ! kAyA !
Oh! you flowers and blossoms
of shine and color !
Form of ThirumAl you resemble,
Can you suggest me a way to survive?
The God of ThirumAlirunchOlai,
so noble is He and so strong-shouldered,
Thiru, the goddess of riches, ever rejoices in Him.
Is it right on His part to force His way into our home
And snatch everything, including the bangles on my wrist?

Victor Hugo

It is just amazing what an appeal the French giant is able to make even now. Of course many criticisms have been levelled against Hugo to the effect that the writer is sometimes inordinately eloquent and the interludes become books by themselves so that the reader is left at largesses to manoeuver his way back to the link in the story. But, for myself, I found these interludes very interesting. And moreover as a man of India, southern Tamilnad, in Srirangam I had already been exposed to the epical styles in Ramayana and Mahabharatha and as a result Hugo found his peers in my reception of reading. More so, I think he was writing about the universal men in his characters, which justified perhaps the wide strokes he tended to make quite often. But how can he remain so gripping in his story telling, all the while so abstract in his philosophical observations. A good story telling means being attentive to the particulars and to match this with intense abstractions running to pages and more than that, altering between these two quite often. No wonder I call him a giant.

After I joined my job, the first thing I did was to buy a copy of Penguin Les Miserables and take that to Neyveli where my father was staying at that time and to read out to him pages after pages of cherished text-places. A transport of interests between father and son! Especially I remember the first scene where the priest goes into the woods to meet the renegade, dying of old age but still a terror in the quarters. One thing I found in Victor Hugo was in his novels the arguments and dialogues do act and do act right before your very eyes. I have found this talent in rare instances, may be a couple of them, right now the one other novelist coming to mind is Ayn Rand.
Another feature of Hugovian novels is the choice and the volitional thrust of decisions, which the characters make. The articulations of the deciding process are phenomenal.

Poetry

The world has become too strange to poetry.
Poetry has to blossom in the person and become contagious.
Poetry can never become prose or its substitute
Infirmity in poetical perception covertly touts prose in its place
Poetry always happens
taking inputs from unforeseeable quarters
Poetry is creative irregularity
madness of connotation
A conflagration of words and meanings
Never a guided tour
Being a venture into unchartered regions

VENU AND THIRULOKA SITHARAM

It was a day of Naachiyaar Thiruk kolam* in Srirangam. It was the later part of 1970s. The Tamil poet, Thiruloka Seethaaram and other friends visited my father, nearing dusk. When refreshments were over, talks wandered here and there; topics were changing and discussions cropped up to dissolve in further musings. My father was ever a terrible conversationalist and table talks were always lively whenever he was around. Slowly the drift was towards Shakespeare. My father commented that without the help of commentators like Bradley and others, it was always difficult to understand the Bard and hence the perennial value of annotations on Shakespeare. 

 Thiruloka Seethaaram, a man of original thinking and independent development, sprang on the moment and countered my father saying, " how can you say that ? has the poet written directly for you or for any mediator to expound to others ? what are these commentators? throw them ! go to the poet directly ! labour pains and poetic strains can never be had by proxy." 

My father was a man never yielding to a point in arguments. Nothing was sacrosanct and nobody towered high when he began to charge with his battery of arguments. He immediately countered back the Poet saying, " all such arguments are ok with regard to geniuses like yourself. But what of the common run and less endowed like us who need some prompting at least". 

Immediately the piece of soliloquy in Hamlet, ‘to be or not to be’, was taken as a test piece and analyzed . After some time other friends who were there were already feeling a little sleepy and assumed all sorts of resting postures. But the two concerned were not aware of the passing time, it was already 11 pm, and with recurrent renewal of energy they were going on and on. Thiruloka Seethaaram was arguing that all commentaries were a waste standing in between the text and the reader. The text can and should speak for and by itself, that Prof. C S Kamalapathi, who was my father’s friend and guide in dramas had exploited the emotional involvement of my father and injected such slavish dependency on the commentators. ( I was wondering how my father would retort to that) But my father took it in his strides and replied , “ not so ..the said Professor out of sympathy for the students that they need not unnecessarily waste time on already clarified aspects has brought to the knowledge of us such foregone efforts, and thereby we can start from others’ endpoints. It is the natural way of growth, to learn, to accumulate lessons learnt and pass it on to the coming generations. Where the forerunners stumbled that is the light for the later to better. The ways of the exceptional cases like the poet do but stress the natural process and never disprove it. 

At last it was half an hour past midnight and the two came to a halt of mutual appreciation , accepting to disagree . I remember it vividly even now as a battle of giants. 

Srirangam Mohanarangan

  *Nachiyar Thirukkolam --In Srirangam temple during the month of November-December a festival of recitation of the whole corpous of 4000 divine hymns of Alwars is conducted for the past 1500 years. In the middle of the 21 days long festival comes Vaikunta Ekadasi, on which day the Deity himself act out the role of a religious aspirant towards salvation. The day previous to that , the Deity adorns himself as the goddess consort, Nachiyaar( the Lady of the divine household). It is called Nachiyar Thirukkolam- in the Guise of the Lady. 

*my father-R.Venugopal