Rajiv Mohabir: FROM “SWAGGERMAN, FLYMOUTH” A DEVIANT TRANSLATION
Introduction by Rajiv Mohabir:
The poems that follow are from a forthcoming manuscript. These poems are a type of translation of a Caribbean chutney song called “Na Manu” by the Surnamese singer Bidjwanti Chaitoe Rekhan in the early 1960s.
The song “Na Manoo Na Manoo Re” from the 1961 Bollywood film Gunga Jamuna in which Lata Mangeshkar sings a song of similar lyrics may have been an inspiration to the Sarnami Hindustani song of Bidjwanti Chaitoe Rekhan.
Still, adding more layers and complications, is this song, remade by Babla and Kanchan– a duo from India who took Caribbean songs and remade them for worldwide distribution in the 1980s– that was very popular in my family and the community of Guyanese and Caribbean Indians that we interreacted with in Orlando, New York City, and Toronto, so my move to translate them is one that is intimate given my own linguistic history of erasure and reclamation. This is the version that I grew up dancing to, knowing it intimately in the twisting of my body in feral dance.
What is remarkable about each remake and each rebranding is the change in lyrics and instrumentation, translated each time to fit the contexts of the viewers/singers/dancers/audience. To start with the Surinamese version, the regularization in Rekhan’s lyrics allows for a predictable structure that is easily replicable, though it maintains the play and irony of the original. I keep the play and irony of the original in mind as I work through the various pieces in this section of the translation process I am presenting here.
The process that I use to translate this song I’m calling “deviant:” these are deviant translations. I want to destabilize language and the ideas around final realization and “arrival”, in order to resist stasis and provide space for all of the queer slippages of language and their worldviews in their very particular speech communities. When I was younger these songs in Hindustani would be translated into a Creole iteration with a different poetic orientation. The English interpretations were up to me. All of the poems are retranslations of retranslations of retranslations in and out of Guyanese Hindustani, Guyanese Creole, and English. In this way I envision each incarnation as a possible emanation from the text as even the idea of primacy and the original are dubious. I approach each iteration with a different idea of what I want to communicate: what affective dimension is available in the language that has similar resonances throughout while not always being literal. What are the affective hauntings of these lyrics, languages, and musics? This is the central question driving my experiment.
I’m also obsessed with Creole and Bhojpuri indeterminacies in English and the ways these languages use grief, humor, and joy in differing ways. Using Guyanese Bhojpuri, English, and Guyanese Creole, the deviant translation is nonbinary and ever migrating. (In live performances of these songs, performers sing as the spirit moves them with lexical fluidity an incarnation of their own creative magic). What results are translations that are not translations as such in that there is no resting place but rather motion with the deviant driving the multiple crossings.
From “Swaggerman, Fly-mouth” A Deviant Translation
Swaggerman, fly-mouth
what is true?
I take in the raven moon’s glow
so when you deny me
I’m still opalescent.
Why veil this shine
for a liar’s night, a mind
wipe serum?
My churas are not shackles—
It’s morning and I’m gilded.
*
Things Not to Forget in the Morning (Liar Though You Be)
moonlight moonlit night full moon light
my veil with kinaras of gold
golddupattagold
golddupattagold
golddupattagold
golddupattagold
golddupattagold
golddupattagold
golddupattagold
golddupattagold
golddupattagold
golddupattagold
golddupattagold
golddupattagold
golddupattagold
golddupattagold
golddupattagold
my silver bera
*
a song from laborer to recruiter is that why it is so sonorous and resonantly all these years later summoning the ghosts of tide and bond how even as the language receded from us like a tide coolies couldn’t release still can’t let fly this story or rather it possessed us in the dance halls as soca chutney a music salve for the pain of forgetting for getting into the boats and we are haunted by the memory of a promise of return but it wasn’t about the physical return but a return to wholeness-as-India that our masters and owners reneged on denying generations any passage not rum-doused and sun-scorched is this why we dance so fiercely in the moonlight is this
*
What part of me is memory?
The skin and muscle,
neuron and fat—?
Don’t believe in god.
It’s a mean lie to lay you down
to strip you of cloth and gem.
You are not headed any place
but into the ocean as cremains
and pearls of bones
not quite machine smashed.
Did you forget? Is it beautiful
this morning where you think you are?
*
चूड़ा बीढा काढ़ा
काँगन बाँगल जिंगल
चान्दी की चान्दनी जइसन
दुपट्टा चुनरी ओढ़नी
निक़ाब परदा रूमाल
बदन की बदनिया जइसन
*
Look. Wha’ me know me go tell yuh
De man come
an’ tief all me ting dem
‘E come cana me
an’ talk suh lie-lie talk
an’ me been haunted
fe lie dung
whe’ ‘e put de ordhni
But wha’ matti hable see a night?
Come daylight
dopahariya
‘e na remembah
me na me bangle,
how de moon a shine,
O gas—
how de moon been a shine
*
Sugar floss melts in dew
forgets its thread’s any spun yarn
So what thing is moonlight
who deposits amnesia
for even a woven veil
to dissolve from your memory
despite my ornaments
exquisite and golden forged
all lost in the ephemeral jewels
globes of hundreds of tiny suns
bending grass leaves
into pranam which is both
greeting and leave taking
- Published in home, Monthly, Translation
THE CITY by Helwig Brunner, translated by Monika Zobel
Die Stadt zu Linien vereinfacht,
abgeschminkt das eigene Gesicht.
Häuser, Schritte und Gedanken
sind aus demselben Material,
Grafitstaub und Diamanten.
Die Zeit steht, senkt deine Lider,
um einmal jetzt zu sein, inmitten
der schlafenden Welt, hellsichtig
zugewandt den tappenden Fragen
der Somnambulen.
Helwig Brunner‘s work has been published in numerous literary magazines and anthologies in Europe and elsewhere, including New European Poets (Graywolf Press, 2008). Brunner has published eight books of poetry, most recently Vorläufige Tage (Leykam Verlag, 2011) and Die Sicht der Dinge: Rätselgedichte (edition keiper, 2012), as well as some novels, short stories, and essays. He has been the recipient of several literary prizes in Austria and Germany.
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The city simplified to lines,
makeup removed from your face.
Houses, footsteps, and thoughts
are made of the same material,
graphite dust and diamonds.
Time stalls, lowers your lids,
to be now for once in the midst of
a sleeping world, clear-sighted
turned toward the groping questions
of the somnambulists.
Monika Zobel‘s poems and translations have been published in Redivider, The Cincinnati Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cream City Review, Mid-American Review, The Adirondack Review, Guernica Magazine, West Branch, Best New Poets 2010, and elsewhere. A senior editor at The California Journal of Poetics and recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, she currently lives in Vienna, Austria.
- Published in Issue 3, Poetry, Translation
ECHOLOCATION: AERIAL SCRIPT by Helwig Brunner, translated by Monika Zobel
Echolot. Luftlinienschrift
Die Fledermäuse, an ihre Laute gedacht,
unhörbar, das Horchen also hinein in eine
Stille, die keine ist; sie ziehn den Blick
in den Dämmerhimmel, das Zickzack ihres
Flatterfluges, samtpelzige Beinahvögel,
die mit den Ohren schaun: Bilder hören.
Wenig später sind sie entzogen, entflogen
hinter die schwarze Jalousie der Nacht,
gesättigt an den Blindstellen des Echos
und ich denke sehr banal, wie wenig ich
auslote mit Worten.
Helwig Brunner‘s work has been published in numerous literary magazines and anthologies in Europe and elsewhere, including New European Poets (Graywolf Press, 2008). Brunner has published eight books of poetry, most recently Vorläufige Tage (Leykam Verlag, 2011) and Die Sicht der Dinge: Rätselgedichte (edition keiper, 2012), as well as some novels, short stories, and essays. He has been the recipient of several literary prizes in Austria and Germany.
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Echolocation: Aerial Script
The bats, reflecting on their sounds,
inaudible, thus eavesdropping on a
silence, which is none; they drag the gaze
through the twilight sky, the zigzag of their
flutter flight, satin-fur nearly birds
that see with their ears: listen to images.
A little later they diminish, vanish
behind the black blinds of night,
satiated by the blind spots of the echo
and I think how little I sound out
with trite words.
Monika Zobel‘s poems and translations have been published in Redivider, The Cincinnati Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cream City Review, Mid-American Review, The Adirondack Review, Guernica Magazine, West Branch, Best New Poets 2010, and elsewhere. A senior editor at The California Journal of Poetics and recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, she currently lives in Vienna, Austria.
- Published in Issue 3, Poetry, Translation
JANUARY by Sara Uribe, translated by Toshiya Kamei
ENERO
en las calles hay testigos que juran haberme visto caminar por ciertos sitios dicen que vivo ahí del otro lado de la palabra que tengo un jardín donde en lugar de flores todas las noches siembro olvido pero no los conozco y no sé si mienten o si la memoria es un rostro un ojo de murmullos que nos sigue y nos acecha cuando los días son más oscuros y la vida apenas comienza
On the above left, listen to the original version of “January”…
Sara Uribe was born in 1978 in Querétaro, Mexico. She is the author of Lo que no imaginas (2004), Palabras más palabras menos (2006), and Nunca quise detener el tiempo (2007). English translations of her poems have appeared in The Bitter Oleander, Harpur Palate, and So to Speak, among others.
JANUARY
on the streets there are witnesses who swear they have seen me walk around certain places they say I live beyond the other side of the word that I have a garden where instead of flowers every night I sow oblivion but I don’t know them and don’t know if they lie or if memory is a face an eye of murmurs that follows us and lies in wait when days are darker and life barely begins
- Published in Issue 2, Poetry, Translation
EDGE by Sara Uribe, translated by Toshiya Kamei
FILO
en el filo del tiempo pronuncio tu nombre una y otra vez como una suerte de conjuro pero todos saben que una palabra pierde sentido si la repites muchas veces que una palabra es demasiado frágil como para no romperse como para no rasgarse con el filo inverso del silencio así que mi voz se desvanece entre los hilos invisibles del sentido y sólo queda en el acero solitario del lenguaje una sombra una traza que se dispersa
On the above left, listen to the original version of “Edge”
Sara Uribe was born in 1978 in Querétaro, Mexico. She is the author of Lo que no imaginas (2004), Palabras más palabras menos (2006), and Nunca quise detener el tiempo (2007). English translations of her poems have appeared in The Bitter Oleander, Harpur Palate, and So to Speak, among others.
EDGE
on the edge of time I chant your name over and over again like a spell but everyone knows a word loses meaning if you repeat it many times a word is too fragile not without breaking not without tearing with the opposite blade of silence so my voice disappears among invisible edges of meaning and what only remains on the solitary steel of language is a shadow a trace that scatters
- Published in Issue 2, Poetry, Translation