[In the following essay, Jha analyzes the influence of Rabindranath Tagore's own poetry on his translations of Kabīr's verse.]

As if conscious of the limitation of translating a text, Evelyn Underhill, in her introduction to One Hundred Poems of Kabir, points out that Kabir is able to dramatize his symbols, and that he uses all the senses in communicating his experience. To state in advance to the reader what a text appears to lose in taking to the medium of another person, Underhill takes pains to mention Kabir's use of popular Hindi to his purposes, the closeness of the language of his songs to common life and a poetic use of material from popular Hinduism of his time as he draws upon symbols and images from contemporary life. Tagore's attempt with Underhill at introducing Kabir to the western world could be taken to be largely successful.

And yet, in spite of the success a translation may have, there are certain questions that inevitably follow. For example, there is the important question of the relation of a secondary creation to the original. Sometimes the gap between the original and its translation may be a little too wide as is the stand of T. S. Eliot in respect of Gilbert Murray's translation of the Greek plays. That in the case of a translator so gifted as Rabindranath, the limitation proceeds from a difference of what his own verse is and what it can be in relation to Kabir has been stated by Edward Thompson. What concerns us here is what Kabir may lose in being translated. As if conscious of a possible loss in such an effort, Underhill says:

The constant insistence on simplicity and directness, the hatred of all abstractions and philosophizings … are amongst his most marked characteristics.

This is mainly a statement about the nature of experience, what Richards calls the ‘critical’ part in a work of art. It is because of the directness of an approach to reality with the kind of monism which is implicit in his attitude of protest and rejection that Kabir is acceptable to people:

God is that Root where all manifestations, ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’, alike proceed; God is the only need of man—‘happiness shall be yours when you come to the Root’.

On the philosophical side, such ‘eclecticism’ implies ‘vedantist and vaisnavite, pantheist and Transcedentalist, Brahman and Sufi’ ideas and beliefs. That Tagore himself was under the influence of some of these ideas and beliefs and his almost constant preoccupation with the poet's craft make him an ardent translator of Kabir.

But there are differences between Kabir, the humble weaver, who passes into a sect because of his life and songs, and Rabindranath, the versatile experimenter of many forms and genres, for whom the translation could not have been more than an important side-affair. This is not to lessen the value of the translation, but to set limits within which it can be judged, in spite of its success, against the original. Thompson is close to to what Tagore and Kabir can be together. But he seems to undermine the value of the derived in the making of a poet, when he attributes the liveliness of Kabir's verse to a mere relation to its time.

For a person so keen of mind and sharp of speech as Kabir, the ignorance of the written word became a regulating compulsion that made his speech the sharper in verse. In Rabindranath, the area of experience on which his poetry draws as well as awareness of the past behind such a practice is wider. By constant exercise of himself, he has disciplined his wide awareness of literature in several traditions to serve his particular needs as a poet. While his training in the poet's craft or his discipline as a poet does not affect the ease of his utterance as a poet, he does bring into effect part of his beliefs and training in translating Kabir.

What has he, then, in common with Kabir that impels him to present Kabir to the western world? Writing much later, Rabindranath is appreciative of the Bauls of Bengal for what they offer. He thinks they have, as religion, a framework of beliefs without the formal framework of a religion.

Like Kabir, there is a protestant element in Tagore's stand in respect of sanctioned values of the traditional religion. His admiration for Buddhism cannot be concealed. A protestant belief close enough to the traditional fold to be a worthwhile offshoot, and yet distant enough to reject much of what is orthodox, can be seen at work in what Tagore inherits from his father. Also what comes from the Upanishads, Kabir and Raja Rammohun Roy may have blended into one as an influence behind Tagore's protestant zeal to bypass the demands of a stratified society and the external authority of religion.

It is a falsehood often practised in our discussion of ‘uneducated’ men like Kabir or Ramakrishna that the extent of their reliable knowledge could not be of much value for consistent academic investigation. What Shakespeare could absorb out of one page of Plutarch, Kabir could glean from his associations with Ramananda and the ethos around him in Benares. Like Ramakrishna's use of the Vedantic ideas, Kabir's use of such ideas is considerable, leading one from their popular sources to Ramananda and Ramanuja and the Upanishads themselves.

In the more educated personality of Rabindranath, the Upanishads become more of a derived influence. Under such influences as those of Kabir and Buddhism, it may appear for a time that the preparation of life—as far as it consists of the common experience of living—is limited in view of that awareness of an ineffable source of Reality. But more than Kabir, perhaps under Chaitanya's latest influence in Bengali tradition, he is led to an affirmation on the side of joy in faith even through the senses which may be close to the explicit intention of his prose works.

And yet like the Bauls, Kabir attracts him as the example of a use of religion outside its authoritative fold. Kabir's language must have been an impediment to him. Even Vidyapati, whom he used as a model in Bhanusingher Padavali, offered him some difficulty:

Vidyapati's quaint and corrupt Maithili language attracted me all the more because of its unintelligibility.

That the verse which could have been archaic for him could be adapted and absorbed into his needs was possible because of an existing influence of this kind in the Bengali language and literature earlier to him. The mastery of a technique in modern Bengali coming of the practice of the poets from the west was, properly speaking, a use of the Brajabuli influence to a new purpose in the verse of a modern poet. This brought with it also a cultural awareness:

Those who have studied the lives and writings of our medieval saints, and all the great religious movements that sprang up in the time of the Muhammadan rule, know how deep is our debt to this foreign current that has so intimately mingled with our life.

There is a difference between a correct translation of verse into equivalent prose by a scholar and the translation by an amateur scholar and craftsman of verse. An able translator will, as often as not, eschew the merely literal. But he may in the process lose something of the freshness and appeal of the original. If the translator is not a poet himself, which means that the translated work must be dependent on his use of language and diction elsewhere, and if he wants to keep to verse patterns that he wants to translate, it is most likely that he will draw on the available rhetoric and diction of verse in his time. In doing so, although handicapped by what is the creation and convention of other men, he is yet useful to them in extending the apparatus of communication they had created in respect of new things.

But, if like Rabindranath, he is a master of his own craft, what he puts into English is not only a correct translation, but it becomes some sort of a valuable translation of the original into a new form available to a foreigner now in his own language. For the language into which it has been translated, it brings something new into existence. As Kabir goes by a dependence on the high and intense rhythms of a song, which are essentially untranslatable in any other tongue, it is safer to try get to Kabir in trying to put his songs into a form devoid of that ingredient poetic form and its necessary accompaniments that constitute a song of Kabir. Tagore himself is capable of high and intenese rhythms in poetry in Bengali, but trying to translate into English the Hindi songs of Kabir, he takes to the more sober medium of prose. Thus the translation of:

Pīle pyālā ho matwālā pyālā nām amīrasa kā re
bālpanā sab khel ganvāyā tarun bhayā nārī bas kā re
Biradh gayā kaph vāyu ne gherā, khāt parā na jāya khasakā re
nābhi kamal bich dai kastūrī, jaise mirag phirē ban kā re
Bin satgur itnā dukh pāyā, vaid milā nahi is tan kā re
mātu-pitā-bandhu-sut-tiriyā, sang nahīn koi jāv sakā re
Jab lag jīve guru gun legā, dhan jīvan hai din das kā re
chourasī jo ubarā chāhe chōri kāmini kā chasakā re
Kahai kabīr sunāu bhai sādhau, nakh sikh pūrā rahā bisakā re

shows how he takes recourse to simple English to express what is unique in a literature. The expression, ‘Empty the cup! O be drunken.’ for ‘pīle pyālā ho matwālā’ is hardly just to the export of feeling in the spoken idiom of native speech in Kabir, which is hard to get to even for a poet like Rabindranath. The other half of the verse line, pyālā nām amīrasa kā re, is translated easily into a sort of prose, “Drink the divine nectar of his Name!” that tries its best to reach up to the intensity of the original in terms of a foreign idiom.

Sometimes, in Kabir, the verve and vigour of a localized idiom—within the diction available to him—becomes so adequate in terms of the communicated effect that a translation appears to be begging the issue. It is perhaps because of such a difficulty that the lines that follow have been left out. The translation is completed by merely expressing in English “Kabir says: Listen to me, dear Sadhu! / From the sole of the feet to the crown of the head this mind is filled with poison”, what the last line in the poem itself says so deftly, at the head of all that precedes ‘Kahai kabīr sunāu bhāi sādhau nakh sikh pūrā rahā bisakā re!’

Tagore is happiest at translating verse lines that are less localized to their idiomatic vigour and sharpness, or in any case verse lines or poems that are closer to his own sympathies as they express the infinite. Thus, for:

Sunatā nahīn dhun kī khabar anhad kā bājā bājathā
rasa mandir bājatā bāhar sune to kya huā

we have:

Have you not heard the tune which the unstruck Music is playing? In the midst of the chamber the harp of joy is gently and sweetly played; and where is the need of going without to hear it?

The more literary as well as sophisticated approach to the original in translation is the gift of an educated sensibility. At his best, the translator makes his English come beyond the stereotyped syntax and idiom of his contemporaries to the largely self-educated needs of a man of letters to communicate what could be of a foreign culture and language. In this, he had his forerunners who had popularized vedantic ideas in the west but the inherence of these ideas in terms of the manifest personality of a poet and his songs could very well be the preoccupation of a gifted translator. A perception of a lack of reality beneath the appearance, thus, is the main preoccupation in the original in these lines:

Jogī digambar sevarā kapar ā range lāl men!
wākif nahin us range se kaparā range se kyā huā!!

A translation of these lines has to be more even against the uneven and irregular tone of the original:

The Yogi dyes his garments with red: but if he knows naught of that colour of love, what does it avail though his garments be tinted?

What Tagore contributes in spite of his handicaps is a clear communication of the experience and intention of the original. What he lacks by way of tone and rhythm, he tries to compensate by supplying us with what he has himself created. Even in his prose, particularly in his short stories, he uses a broad and persuasive tone to carry his reader along to the end of the piece. His prose acquires a more durable value by an evasion of the sordid, the commonplace, the merely factual and the statement-like by a subtle interplay of tone he has learnt to use as a professional writer. If it is such a language that is the staple basis of his dependence in translating verse he can even give his sentence an implicit rhythm, which he is capable of, even as he uses it to a different purpose in the prose that is created.

To understand his translation better, perhaps it will be more just to bring in a partial consideration of his verse. In Sanskrit, it is a suggestive sentence that has been called to be a unit of verse and, in a sense, the idea bears on his practice as a craftsman of prose and verse. When he chooses to write beyond the limitation of traditional forms, Rabindranath flattens the rhetoric of his verse:

Where words come out from the depth of truth:
.....Where the clear stream of reason has not lost
its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee
into ever-widening thought and action—
Into that heaven of freedom,
my Father,
let my country awake.

Here he uses the sheer value of a generalized poetic experience to poetic purposes. To reach the impersonal effect of a poem through the self-created rhetoric is an exercise of a poetic power at the other extreme of a self-involvement in experience typical of the subjectively romantic. It is through this that Rabindranath came to influence the technique of some of his contemporaries and even younger men in Europe and America. It is a technique close to that of Whitman and is at the same time neater and more controlled than Whitman could ever be.

It is such a technique in expression together with a rhetoric that seems to be in keeping with this kind of expression which seems to account for his translation of Kabir from Hindi.

As for the content of Kabir's poetry, although Rabindranath understood Shaktism in its essentials as such a tendency had become part of the tradition in Bengal, he was not a Shakta himself. Participation in life and activities that he stood for were not of that sort.

As it was, Kabir and his followers were averse to Shaktism as it meant allowing the senses to participate while trying to control and sublimate them, using partly the Yoga discipline to its end. Hindered by Buddhism in a full participation of the senses, the Shakta took to a fulfilment of such cravings by taking resort to more primitive archetypes of a compelling elemental sort in his effort to reassert vital participation. In this, he mixed the value of the ‘mother’ image toward a sublimation even from Buddhistic sources.

Coming from a fresh approach to the Upanishads in the wake of the new consciousness of the Brahmos, Rabindranath is able to understand together the Shakta on the one hand and the Buddhist on the other.

It is in such a light that one should view his translation of such poems of Kabir in which there is a blend of an apprehensive of the real in one of the ways as the Brihadaranyaka understands it. Left to himself, Tagore can communicate such simple and naked states of the soul at their keenest in poetry. But trying to imitate a past mode in expression in such an apprehension of the real, he appears at times to be grappling with a derived influence and a somewhat outdated convention.

In Kabir, this urgency is often and unmistakably expressed in the figure of a beloved yearning for her lord:

Hai kōi āisa par upagahi Hari saun kahai sunāi re
ab tāu behal Kabīr bhaye hāin dekhen jiu jāi re

Tagore's familiarity with such yearning for God as the infinite coming to him from several sources makes him naturally sympathetic to such an experience, and thus he is able to transmute the former adequately into English:

My body and my mind are grieved for the want of Thee;
O my Beloved! Come to my house.
When people say I am thy Bride, I am ashamed; for I have not tou-
ched thy heart with my heart.
Then what is this love of mine? I have no taste for food, I have no
sleep; my heart is ever restless, within doors and without.
As water is to the thirsty, so is the lover to the bride. Who is there
that will carry my news to my Beloved?
Kabir is restless: he is dying for sight of him.

A transmutation of the physical to the process of faith, which comes of a view of the Real is characteristic of the devotional literature of mediaeval India, and in Kabir such an experience finds a poet capable of expressing the same. A complete subservience of the self in faith to God is born of a feeling of humility of the loved one for the lover. This submission of the subject to God is the result of a high sense of priority in value which is attested by the evidence of the humming, pulsating states of feeling of the sense in what they apprehend as truth in conceiving of such a likeness. The bare commonsense of the weaver, as he registers a view of human relation in the society around him, is used as a point of likeness for expressing a very different experience.

The complex wholeness of two separate experiences is grappled at some remove from the original, as it is couched in expression by a partly romantic poet, in the language of the cultivated, as in “O my Beloved! Come to my house …” etc. above.

That even the given relation between a lover and his bride is more than mere love of such a relation, jyōn kāmin ko kāmini pyāri is expressed with the help of what is basic to the relation itself. The nature of a desire for which a different kind of a feeling for physical love is the point of correlation between the subject and the object communicates the urgent and necessary character of the referent, jyōn pyāse ko nīr re. Tagore, however, simplifies such suggestions as he expresses the full line together in English, “As water to the thirsty, so is the lover to the bride.”

Kabir finds it convenient to express his urgent cravings through the beloved symbol. His humility is unusual if one takes into account the manly vigour of his speech as well as its sharpness. That his humility comes in spite of his keen intellect and his full grasp of a vital speech in all its liveliness becomes possible because of a dramatization of the sensibility with that peculiar vantage that is his as a mystic. Whereas Tagore is happier at translating such a poem:

Is there any wise man who will listen to that solemn music which arises in the sky?
For He, the Source of all music, makes all vessels fraught and rests in fullness Himself.
He who is in the body is ever athirst, for he pursues that which is in part.
But ever there wells forth deeper and deeper the sound
“He is this—this is He”, fusing love and renunciation into one,
Kabir says: “O Brother! that is the Primal word”.

His translation of a more complex verse as:

Nāihar te jiyarā phāt re
Nāihar-nagarī jisakī bigarī, uskā kyā ghar bār re
tanik jiyarabā mōr na lāge, tan man bahut uchāt re
Yā nagāri men lakh darwājā, bīch samandar ghāt re
kaise ke pār utari hain sajanī, agam panth kā pāt re
Ajab tarah ka bana tambūra, tār lage man māt re
kḥūntī tūtī tār bilgāno, kōun pūchat bāt re
Hansi-hansi pūchāi māt pitā sāun, bhōre sasur jawa re
jo chāhen so vāhī karihen, patvāhī ke hāth re
Nhāya-dhōya dulhin hoya bāithī, johe piyā kī bāt re
tanik gūnghatwā dikhaw sakhī ri, āj sōhhāg kī rāt re

becomes possible because of an undue simplification of some of the actual verse lines. Thus, “My heart cries aloud for the house of my love” is hardly the proper translation of, Nāihar te jiyarā phāt re. In his failure to translate the more localized element in Kabir's use of a native tongue, “Nāihar-nagarī jisakī bigarī uskā kyā ghar bār re”, the translator uses a language that communicates a more consistent sense in relation to the intention of the poem at the close. But, in fact, it leads one away from the effect of the original. That Nāihar-nagari is not all right to the beloved figure in the poem means a deeper disturbance than Rabindranth's translation evokes:

My heart cries aloud for the house of my lover; the open road and the shelter of a roof are all one to her who has lost the city of her husband.

The ultimate sense of the poem is brought a little too soon in translation at the cost of the verse lines in the original. The confounding nature of an ecstasy that results of an experience of the variety and grandeur implicit in the infinite is expressed in terms of a place with a large number of gates. But it is still the feeling of most humane kind as it is made real in terms of how a beloved craves for entry into her lover's house.

Sometimes the poet achieves his objective correlative in terms of the familiar and the homely, Hansi-Hansi pūchāi māt pitā sāun which dramatizes what is essentially the indefinable nature of his ecstasy. In translating it in explicit terms, Tagore being a poet himself is perhaps conscious of the fact that such verse can only be translated in the manner he does it. The indefinable nature of the feeling involved in communicating ecstasy comes naturally to expression after such a dramatization of the basic content in the original text:

Hansi hansi pūchāi māt pitā sāun bhore sāsur jawa re
jo chāhen so vāhī karihēn, patvāhi ke hāth re
Nhāya-dhoya dulhin hoya bāithī, johe piyā kī bāt re

(which the translator thinks best to achieve in terms of direct speech) becomes possible through simple and direct presentation in another language:

I tell my parents with laughter that I must go to my Lord in the morning;

They are angry, for they do not want me to go, and they say: “She thinks that she has gained such dominion over her husband that she can have whatever she wishes; and therefore she is impatient to go to him.”

The rhetorical power that Tagore can build up for a sustenance of the personal and the general in experience in verse comes to help him in expressing that community sense basic to Kabir and his followers in a poem like:

Abadhū begam desa hamārā
rājā rang phakīr bādsā, sabse kahāun pukārā
Jo tum chahō param pad kō, basihō desa hamara
jo tum āye jhīne hoke, taj do man kī dhārā
Aise rahan rahōre pyāre, sahajāi utār jāwō pārā
dharan akās gagan kachu nāhin, nahīn chandra nahīn tārā
Sant dharma kī hai mahatābe, sāheb ke darbārā
kahāi Kabīr sunō ho pyāre, sant-dharm hāi sārā

That Kabir also passes into a sect is possible because of the way in which he masters a common participation of the kind possible for others as well. In Rabindranath, with all his reformer's zeal, it becomes difficult to translate that sense of a live human participation together achieved in a poem that bases itself wholly on the power of a song to go by way of mouth. A literary craftsman like Rabindranath is up against an unusual mode in spite of his close familiarity with such ways of expression in the religious literature of Bengal. Thus, in spite of his unusual deftness in the use of the verse-craft, he can hardly recapture the full tone and effect of “Abadhū begam desa hamara”, translating it as “Sadhu! My land is a sorrowless land.”