Vikram Seth's Translation of The Hanuman Chalisa

Review by Kala Krishnan

If you know Seth’s poetry—his own and those he Englishes—then, like me, you’d have waited eagerly for his The Hanuman Chalisa, an English translation from Tulsidas’s Awadhi. Seth’s poetry has a rare quality: it is at once spell-binding and also intellectually stimulating. You are dazed by the allure and dexterity of the poems, but something in the writing ensures that you don’t bypass the crafting, the process of the artificing. Look at this poem—and if you enjoy poetry, or want to read, enjoy, understand poetry, you should go read the whole book, All You Who Sleep Tonight.

Across these miles I wish you well.

May nothing haunt your heart but sleep.

May you not sense what I don’t tell.

May you not dream, or doubt, or weep.

May what my pen this peaceless day

Writes on this page not reach your view

Till its deferred print lets you say

It speaks to someone else than you. (‘Across’)

The poem takes you by the lungs, it makes you stagger just a little, with breathlessness, then you see the poem’s scaffolding, it’s craft and holding on to the solidity of that, you breathe, balance.

To come back to The Hanuman Chalisa, in pre-launch interviews, Seth was repeatedly asked to speak of the book’s political gestures, and which he does, with simple, sharp, frank, no-nonsense sensitivity. He also describes in detail the process and chronology of translating. These interviews are all on YouTube and really worth a watch; they add a little edginess to the reading of the translation.

Seth dedicates the book to Bhaskar from A Suitable Boy, and reminds readers that ‘Nothing could be further from the humanity and inclusivity of the best of Hinduism than the self-aggrandizement and wilful cruelty of those who use the religion in which—in the lottery of life—they happen to be born, in order to attack or demean others.’ Seth’s own excitement about the Chalisa, his delight in its sonic, incantatory quality, in its significance as a source of both pleasure and support to many, as well as his gentle refusal to answer questions of what Hanuman ji means to him, all add delicate layers. So too, the little snippets of personal trivia.

My immediate reaction on reading The Hanuman Chalisa, was a double jolt of shock: the shock of the contrast of this translation to his translation of three Chinese poets—which I absolutely adore—and the shock of the word ‘mechanical’ plopping into my head. The feeling stayed as I read on and re-read and then it dawned: of course, the aesthetic of Seth’s translation, like that of Tulsidas’s Awadhi, is mechanical—exactly in the same way that it is, in the exquisite patterns carved into our most beautiful temples, or hand-printed printed on our traditional fabrics, or painted into our breath-taking miniatures, or fitted into the most-loved of our hymns. The feeling in body and mind-heart that a reading of the Chalisa, Awadhi and English, is mechanical: you sway to it, you are entranced, caught up and mechanically overwhelmed, subsumed into its projects of sound and sense. A satisfactory aside to reading and thinking about Seth’s translation was the joy of re-instating the word ‘mechanical’ to the fulness of its meanings.

You must read aloud when you read Seth’s The Hanuman Chalisa, for in the sound of the lines, you’ll see the logic of the translation—what prompted certain word choices, lineation preferences. If you’re an admirer of his Three Chinese Poets, or of The Rivered Earth, you must remember that the Hanuman Chalisa has layers that are more—and sometimes less—than literary, demanding that at times the translator needs to weigh in favour of literalness rather than literariness.

Here are a couple of line sets to show you how the incantatory quality of the original, its falling, feminine rhythms, which Seth explains was one of the challenges of the translation process, are very effectively achieved in the English.

Hail Hanuman, great wisdom’s ocean—

The three worlds glow with your light

and devotion.

…

You brought the herb

that was Lakshman’s salvation;

Ram pressed you close

to his heart in elation.

…

All the world’s tasks, so confused and contorted,

Thanks to your grace, are untangled and sorted.