<p>‘Everything was withdrawn as far as possible,/in drawn.’ I’ve always tripped over these lines from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem The End of March. I know many of the things that most readers do – that it’s a coastal poem, that its rhythm comes from the movement of the sea in the first stanzas and the behaviour of light in the concluding ones; I can experience the syntax of the words when I’m in the poem. But as soon as I take them out of the poem, I don’t know what to do with them. It’s a problem that’s different from, say, taking an eye or both out of a mammalian face. The eyes outside a face are pretty useless in a way that lines culled from a poem are not. Quotes appeal to us, outside of their donor bodies, in a way that scooped-out eyes don’t. All this we know. I notice the tussle happening in the pair of expressions: ‘withdrawn’ and ‘in drawn’. I see it – the land, the shore, is like the pot-bellied person pulling in their stomach for a photo. But I’m stubborn, I want to explore its life outside the poem.</p>.<p>A few things happen as these lines swim inside me. I read an interview with Vivek Shanbhag about his writing and the act of translation: ‘I write in Kannada, which is not my mother tongue. My mother tongue is Konkani. Konkanis are people who migrated South from Goa, and the stories of this migration are kept alive in every Konkani home... The Konkanis left Goa after the Portuguese arrived – they feared conversion. As migrants, two things are striking. At home, they protected their language and culture, but outside, they were remarkably resilient, adapting to their surroundings. In Karnataka, they began writing Konkani in Kannada script; in Kerala, they adopted Malayalam. Today, Konkani is written in five scripts... Speech is mutually intelligible, but writing is not. That in itself is a powerful metaphor for the community’s worldview. So, there were multiple worlds. At home, we spoke Konkani, but outside, Kannada. Every outside experience, when brought back home, had to be translated. This act of translation was constant, sometimes involving the direct borrowing of Kannada words and phrases. The borders between languages were porous. It sounds romantic now, but at the time, it felt completely natural.’</p>.The stars, while we wonder.<p>Every outside experience, when brought back home, had to be translated. Seemingly simple, it is a remarkable observation. We are all aware of being different people to different people and different people to the outside and inside. But are we conscious of being translators as a condition of our existence? What kind of training equips us with the guile and gumption to be natural translators? Everything was withdrawn as far as possible,/in drawn. Is this act of translating—not just for the benefit of the family or other residents of the house, but primarily for oneself—enabled by ‘withdrawing’ and ‘in drawn’? What might have happened to us – as people, as artists – if there was no difference between the language of the outside and that of the inside?</p>.<p>Colm Toibin, writing about Bishop’s poem, says: ‘The picture she draws of the beach and the seascape has an oddly intense melancholy despite the casual diction. Rather than Vermeer now, it seems that the presiding spirit is more that of Cezanne, or a northern version of Cezanne, with part of the surface left blank... much that is filled with bareness, absence. Phrase after phrase in the poem adds up to something mysteriously beyond the phrases, or within them, pulling the eye, or perhaps the mind, in toward a desolate, almost alien scenery.’</p>.<p>Toibin notices Bishop translating the outside for the inside in the way Shanbhag characterises the lifelong project of translation: the beach and the sea are translated into ‘melancholy’; empty stretches of the beach into ‘bareness, absence’; ‘phrase after phrase’ creates ‘a desolate... alien scenery’.</p>.<p>How does this translation happen? Why must it happen? Is it a question of scale alone, this miniaturising of the outside so that it can fit into the inside? ‘The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat,’ Bishop writes in an early poem. It’s not just the precision of imagery I notice. What is being condensed is man and the syntax of the outside – a three-letter word can hold another three-letter word: ‘man’ in a ‘hat’.</p>.<p>I suppose this is how we survive – by creating this language of condensation, of translation, of restoration.</p>.<p><strong>The writer is an author and poet. Her books include How I Became a Tree and Provincials.</strong></p>.<p><em>Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.</em></p>
<p>‘Everything was withdrawn as far as possible,/in drawn.’ I’ve always tripped over these lines from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem The End of March. I know many of the things that most readers do – that it’s a coastal poem, that its rhythm comes from the movement of the sea in the first stanzas and the behaviour of light in the concluding ones; I can experience the syntax of the words when I’m in the poem. But as soon as I take them out of the poem, I don’t know what to do with them. It’s a problem that’s different from, say, taking an eye or both out of a mammalian face. The eyes outside a face are pretty useless in a way that lines culled from a poem are not. Quotes appeal to us, outside of their donor bodies, in a way that scooped-out eyes don’t. All this we know. I notice the tussle happening in the pair of expressions: ‘withdrawn’ and ‘in drawn’. I see it – the land, the shore, is like the pot-bellied person pulling in their stomach for a photo. But I’m stubborn, I want to explore its life outside the poem.</p>.<p>A few things happen as these lines swim inside me. I read an interview with Vivek Shanbhag about his writing and the act of translation: ‘I write in Kannada, which is not my mother tongue. My mother tongue is Konkani. Konkanis are people who migrated South from Goa, and the stories of this migration are kept alive in every Konkani home... The Konkanis left Goa after the Portuguese arrived – they feared conversion. As migrants, two things are striking. At home, they protected their language and culture, but outside, they were remarkably resilient, adapting to their surroundings. In Karnataka, they began writing Konkani in Kannada script; in Kerala, they adopted Malayalam. Today, Konkani is written in five scripts... Speech is mutually intelligible, but writing is not. That in itself is a powerful metaphor for the community’s worldview. So, there were multiple worlds. At home, we spoke Konkani, but outside, Kannada. Every outside experience, when brought back home, had to be translated. This act of translation was constant, sometimes involving the direct borrowing of Kannada words and phrases. The borders between languages were porous. It sounds romantic now, but at the time, it felt completely natural.’</p>.The stars, while we wonder.<p>Every outside experience, when brought back home, had to be translated. Seemingly simple, it is a remarkable observation. We are all aware of being different people to different people and different people to the outside and inside. But are we conscious of being translators as a condition of our existence? What kind of training equips us with the guile and gumption to be natural translators? Everything was withdrawn as far as possible,/in drawn. Is this act of translating—not just for the benefit of the family or other residents of the house, but primarily for oneself—enabled by ‘withdrawing’ and ‘in drawn’? What might have happened to us – as people, as artists – if there was no difference between the language of the outside and that of the inside?</p>.<p>Colm Toibin, writing about Bishop’s poem, says: ‘The picture she draws of the beach and the seascape has an oddly intense melancholy despite the casual diction. Rather than Vermeer now, it seems that the presiding spirit is more that of Cezanne, or a northern version of Cezanne, with part of the surface left blank... much that is filled with bareness, absence. Phrase after phrase in the poem adds up to something mysteriously beyond the phrases, or within them, pulling the eye, or perhaps the mind, in toward a desolate, almost alien scenery.’</p>.<p>Toibin notices Bishop translating the outside for the inside in the way Shanbhag characterises the lifelong project of translation: the beach and the sea are translated into ‘melancholy’; empty stretches of the beach into ‘bareness, absence’; ‘phrase after phrase’ creates ‘a desolate... alien scenery’.</p>.<p>How does this translation happen? Why must it happen? Is it a question of scale alone, this miniaturising of the outside so that it can fit into the inside? ‘The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat,’ Bishop writes in an early poem. It’s not just the precision of imagery I notice. What is being condensed is man and the syntax of the outside – a three-letter word can hold another three-letter word: ‘man’ in a ‘hat’.</p>.<p>I suppose this is how we survive – by creating this language of condensation, of translation, of restoration.</p>.<p><strong>The writer is an author and poet. Her books include How I Became a Tree and Provincials.</strong></p>.<p><em>Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.</em></p>
