I have previously written of one Bengali lady academic's failure to understand the story of Echo and Narcissus in Ovid. Today I want to look at a much younger Bengali lady's misprision in this connection.
Jhumpa Lahiri claims 'in Praise of Echo'
the myth of Echo and Narcissus is particularly resonant when considered from a translator’s point of view, and it speaks to me personally, acutely, about what it means to shift from writer to translator and back again.
What Ovid has to say is so full of pathos and pietas and yet so pithy and elegantly elegiac that the difficulty we face, as readers, is rendering its delicate web of allusions into something as concrete in our own memoriously emotional vocabulary.
Due to I iz a shitty little Tambram shithead my adolescent response was drenched in Vatsalya bhava- the maternal matrix of emotion.
Let’s begin by refreshing our memory of the myth, found in book 3 of the Metamorphoses. A doomed love story, it is one of a series of tales in Ovid in which both the lover and the beloved are transformed. Echo, a mountain nymph known for her sonorous voice, is enlisted by the philandering Zeus to distract Juno by chatting with her.
So, Echo's offence is against Hymen- the God of Marriage. Hoes before bros, Yo! especially if the bro dun put a ring on it- innit?
When Juno learns that she has been deceived by Echo’s talkative nature, she condemns her to say only a portion of what other people have already said. Her capacity to speak is altered, reduced to a partial repetition of words previously generated by others: “Nevertheless, when chatting, her powers of speech / were no different then than now; that is to say, / she could only repeat, from several words, the very last of them” (“et tamen usum / garrula non alium quam nunc habit oris habebat, / reddere de multis ut uerba nouissima posset,” 359–61).
This is barbaric. Ovid is pointing out that Echo still had a body when she fell in love with Narcissus- who previously was importuned by hairy men and had thus come to equate protestations of love with anal rape which is why he wanted nothing to do with the loathsome thing. Thus Echo was not merely a voice- albeit a voice chained to but parrot like repetition- but a corporeal presence. Then, after Narcissus died, Echo pined for Narcissus till she wasted away into nothingness and became a voice without a body.
Notice that Narcissus's love for his image was pure. He too, after all, wasted away. But this was Cupid's fault or else the fault of Mummyji who had procured sonny boy the boon of not knowing himself because if the fellow gains the goal of Greek philosophy, he dies. Of course, philosophy is only a practicing of death- still, its not something you want to happen to your own bonny bairn. You hope he'll study a STEM subject or get into Business School.
A Marriage is consecrated not when it is physically consummated but when the voice of assent is freely given. At precisely this time, the Roman elite were switching to this 'lower' 'sine manu' form of marriage rite. Narcissus wanted to be free. He didn't want to be anybody's catamite. What Echo was offering him was something different. But the lad had been scarred by his previous experiences of being stalked by sodomites. His sin was not to spurn Love but to yearn for autonomy and so Love is granted to him but it is Love for something virtual, not real. A yet embodied Echo, ultimately moved by pity, offers his image that voice so that- at least, for Tambrams who term marriage 'kalyanam' or welfare- both bimba, pratibimba, image & pre-image & even the maternal darpan, or mirror, may fare well now their Marriage-as-farewell has been consecrated by mutual assent and Love- even a blind, flower-like, Love- can yet propagate itself through Time and Space in the gay and valiant manner of thoughtless tots not tot-less thoughts while Yamuna yet flows.
Ovid says 'Corpus adhuc Echo, non vox erat et tamen usum / garrula non alium, quam nunc habet, oris habebat, / reddere de multis ut verba novissima posset'
Translation has always been a controversial literary form, and those who are resistant to it or dismiss it complain that the resulting transformation is a “mere echo” of the original— that too much has been lost in the process of traveling from one language into another.
No. Nobody is prejudiced against echoes. They can be more beautiful and sonorous than the original. What people object to is the barbarism, the programmatic witlessness, of the translator. They have not understood what they read and what they write is ugly and stupid.
Ovid’s story draws attention to the nature of this loss, or impoverishment, as personified by Echo, a figure who inspires the word, also Greek in origin, to explain an acoustic phenomenon: a sound that, as a result of moving in a certain way and encountering a barrier, “returns,” replicating a portion of the original sound.
No. The elegiac poem may be greatly inferior in ekhprastic brilliance and soul stirring sonorousness to the epic genre. Indeed, the thing may be quiet, conversational, wholly unremarkable, till we come to the last line and move on but no, we can't, it returns as an echo- a dhvani- and suddenly the world has vanished, even grief has vanished, there is nothing but loss, a loss so improvident as to have provided, in advance, for its own reflective liquidation. Everything has already been arranged. But that arrangement is already its own ceremonious fulmination. No 'chishtam', crumb from the sacrifice, is left over. Echo is the prothalamion to Hymen's mise en abyme of wedding torch and funeral pyre.
'Dhvani' could be considered a kind of echo. Riti-granth poetry, like Romance or Latin neoritic literature, packs its punch in its final phrase.
We must be careful, however, not to equate the word echo with simple repetition. The verb Ovid attributed to Echo, once condemned, is not repetere but reddere, which means, among other things, to restore, to render, to reproduce. It can also mean to translate from one language to another.2
Just as repetere can mean to reclaim or recall to mind. Echo has free will in choosing which chunk of a final sentence or phrase she reproduces. There is no question of translation because everybody is speaking the same language.
At first glance, it seems that Echo, who starts out as a talented storyteller, is converted, thanks to Juno’s curse, into a translator.
How? Does Jhumpa really think Greek dudes needed a translator when talking to other Greek dudes? Perhaps. She is very well educated but only in stupid shite.
For, like Echo, part of the translator’s task is to “listen” to a text by carefully reading it, absorbing its meaning, and repeating it back.
Echo has no such task. She is free to express herself or not do so but she is constrained in her choice of what she can repeat.
The translator reproduces words already written by duplicating them.
No. The translator performs a mapping between words in different languages. Mapping is not duplication. This woman is as stupid as shit.
Like Echo, the translator’s art presupposes the existence of an original text,
Echo is not a translator. She can repeat the final words of speech she hears. She may be illiterate for all we know. Texts don't matter here.
and also presupposes that much of what makes that text beautiful and unique in the original will be impossible to maintain in another linguistic context.
Unless the translator is a gifted writer.
In Ovid’s myth, Echo’s condition is clearly a punishment,
No shit, Sherlock!
a deprivation of her own voice and words. But she who translates, ideally, converts this “punishment” into a stimulating challenge, and often a joy.
What the fuck is wrong with this silly woman? Why does she assume that translators are being punished? Most do the thing for love or to better master their craft.
The translator “repeats” and thus “doubles” a text, but this repetition must not be taken literally.
How should it be taken? Up the ass? Please don't say 'up the ass.'
Far from a restrictive act of copying, a translator restores the meaning of a text by means of an elaborate, alchemical process that requires imagination, ingenuity, and freedom.
No. The text don't need no fuckin' meaning restoration. Nobody who ever translated the Bible thought any such thing. Inspiration is needful. Fidelity is needful. Alchemy can go fuck itself.
And so, while the act of repeating, or echoing, is certainly pertinent to the subject of translation, it is only the starting point of the translator’s art.
Translation can indeed be mechanical or stupid and self-regarding. Fuck would Lahiri know of the 'translator's art'?
Let’s proceed with our myth. Echo, one day, falls in love with Narcissus, and as a result her condition, already compromised,
compromised?! That's Lahiri's mot juste? I've watched plenty of Netflix series where the icy blonde wearing dark glasses says 'The asset has been compromised. Terminate on sight.'
turns tragic. Lacking her own words, she is unable to call out to Narcissus, whom she desires.
Let's face it. A girl can call out to a dude all she likes but if what he sees doesn't get his motor running then nothing she can say will change that unless it involves an offer of money or, in my case, the promise of a bacon sandwich and a nice mug of tea.
When she eventually approaches him, he repudiates her, and in a cruel comedy of errors, Narcissus, in the course of resisting her advances, falls in love with himself. Echo, in her shame, wastes away, her body vanishing, to the point where she is nothing but a heap of bones and a voice. Ovid’s language is emphatic and haunting: “Only voice and bones survive. / The voice endures; the bones, they say, assumed the look of stones” (“uox tantum atque ossa supersunt: / uox manet; ossa ferunt lapidis traxisse figuram,” 398–99).Which is the 'load bearing' word in 'Vox manet, ossa ferunt lapidis traxisse figuram' ? It is ferunt (they say) , from fero, which literally means to bear up (bharati). This is Latin's iron in the soul of what might otherwise might be but limp wristed Hellenistic belletrism. Language is sarcophagal- Latin bone, Roman stone and the cursus honorum echo between them by which, in but elegy, we aught enthrone.
The repetition of the Latin vox, voice, celebrates Echo’s very curse, acknowledging her original talent.
Why the fuck would anybody want to celebrate a curse placed on some poor creature? Ovid was a dude. He wasn't some tenured Feminist hack 'celebrating' incestuous pedophiles on the grounds that rape of this disgusting sort must be reclaimed for Feminism. Not till every MFA aspirant has gotten her long suffering Dad to sodomize her can a truly emancipatory praxis of deconstructive discourse translate Ovid into putrid offal.
Vox tantum, vox manet- what is said once is said for all time though stone and bone and throne pass away. If, that is, it is 'votum'- a vow. When Echo echoed Narcissus's 'farewell', she made a votive offering to Hymen and lost that body which had repulsed Narcissus by reason of its importunity to bind him. Now we see the nargis flower by the banks of streams where the bodiless wind can affectionately ruffle its petals and broadcast its seed.
Lahiri's people have the 'mala badal' where bride and groom, seeing each other for the first time, exchange garlands thrice. The Muslim custom of encountering each other first in the 'mirror of the Virgin Mary' has a similar esoteric effectuality. The mirror is a flower but- Om mani padme hum- its jewel is self-reflection.
The word, literally echoed,
but, it literally is not echoed. When I say I am fat, I am not echoing the word I. I am merely attaching two different predicates to a particular subject. That's how language works. It has nothing to with echoing.
elevates the insubstantial, invisible, but enduring part of her, drawing it paradoxically into sharp relief.
Lahiri must know that 'relief drawing'- relievo in Italian- elevates what it wants to emphasize above a supporting background. Why the fuck does she think some 'paradox' is involved? Does she really not get that invisible things, in Language, are just as real as visible things? Ovid was a poet. He wasn't a sculptor.
These plot points are charged with meaning from the translator’s point of view.
The reader's point of view- sure. But, from the translator's point of view, what is charged with meaning is that one particular word or phrase in the target language to which the source can be canonically mapped.
Two details are fundamental, and both refer to Echo. First, the act of desiring, of falling in love, which, under ideal circumstances, is what instigates the impulse to translate.
This silly woman doesn't get that Echo fucked up big time.
Passion, as I said, was what moved me to translate Lacci, and everything I have translated since.
Is Lahiri saying "I'm as shit as Echo? I love such and such text but it turns out that it is totes Gay and finds me utterly repulsive. So, as a translator, I'm a pathetic fag hag unable to conceive shit.'
The rest of Lahiri's essay is self-regarding shite about how men say mean things about how shitty she is as a translator. Obviously, this is a very serious issue for Feminism. Screw Roe v Wade, why are women not supporting their suffering sister? Is it coz she be bleck?
No. She be shit.
In Open Magazine, I read Lahiri explain that her Mum was dying while she was translating Ovid.
Many of us think we know Lahiri's Mum- not from Jhumpa's writing which just depicts her as a maniacal devourer of fish- but from Tabu's luminous performance in 'Namesake'. The fact is, almost everybody in India loves a Bengali lady of that age because they have helped us greatly or even just smiled upon us or given friendship to our own Mum or Gran when that was what they needed. From the religious p.o.v, I am fond of quoting a talk given by our Shankaracharya over a hundred and twenty years ago. He explained why the Gauda, or Bengali, Brahmins should be revered- not viewed with suspicion. No doubt, the context was the first stirrings of the Freedom Struggle in Madras Presidency. What was not mentioned was that the Bengali Brahmin woman was as much the superior of the Bengali man as the Ramakrishnas and Vivekanandas of the time were superior to our complacent patriarchs who considered the Brits a gift from God to defend the Agraharam from Islam.
Mamta Bannerjee is thirteen years older than Jhumpa. She and she alone destroyed the Left Front citadel in Bengal which had endured for 30 years. She made mincemeat of Modi in the recent election. The Bengali Brahmin woman incarnates Shakti. Why? Because being a woman grants you superior sapience. So did being Bengali- or, even now, inhabiting that topos, larger, for more noble, more compassionate, than the world of names and forms.
Pico Iyer has written about the death of his father and reading him my contempt for both increased. Lahiri shits on her Mum. But even a stupid, hateful, cretin like me can see that there is something here, some 'crumb let fall from the table', some clay flung off from what is being shaped on the potter's wheel, which would suffice for my salvation.
Not, alas, for Jhumpa because she won't acknowledge that Bengali is coeval with Italian but more closely connected to the Greek myths and their related soteriology through the endurance of Hinduism. Why speak of 'Echo' when chubby men- some great scholars- keep alive that mythos in your own mother tongue? Everything in ancient Greece is 'ready at hand' in India more particularly if you are, or can read, Bengali. Echo's Sanskrit dhvani is the Viyogini who exceeds the Yogi because separation exceeds union.
Lahiri says that learning Italian gave her 'a new linguistic point of entry that positioned me closer to Latin than ever before. The itinerary of my translation was no longer point-to-point but triangulated, given that I was now reading him, instinctively, with an Italian brain. The process felt richer, more intimate, more revelatory, and even more satisfying.'
The problem here is that Italian is no more or less a 'Romance' language than Spanish or Romanian or French or Portuguese or, indeed, the Augustan Latinate diction of Samuel Johnson or Edward Gibbon. True, if you learn a dialect from Magna Grecia and enter into the older way of life there, you might be on to something. But Lahiri isn't.
The necessary 'point of triangulation' she lacks is a living culture, a living civilizational tradition, where much older forms of religion are alive and remain intimately connected with advances in the philosophical and literary arts.
The sad thing is, her Mum was always available to her. Jhumpa chose to write stupid shit. Still, that was a career, under aesthetic affirmative action, and careers are important because work is worship.
Lahiri was beavering away in the some tony Ivy League library or study room while her Mum was dying. Pico got a call from his father. That famously garrulous man had no words only tears. Lahiri writes-
One day as I was translating in that room, my mother called me. It was a FaceTime call; for several weeks, she could only communicate if she could see my face, perhaps because she was aided by my image and expressions.
That communication failed. No feminine equivalent of Brahminical 'Sampratti' or transmission of 'Sampradaya', or 'life-breath', occurred. Or so it would appear.
As my mother’s penmanship became inscrutable, as her already compromised speech dwindled from brief sentences to words to near silence, I thought of the many characters in the poem—more often than not women—who are deprived of language.
Bengali is a language. Most people speak a little of their mother tongue and definitely speak that tongue to their mother when she is dying- if they have the chance to do so. At the least the repeat a line or two from Mum's favorite hymn.
I wanted to pray for her but knew no prayers. The first line of the Metamorphoses, which I’d write on the blackboard the first day of my translation workshops, which I’ve cited in writing about Domenico Starnone, became one. I memorized it and kept saying it in my head, hoping it would accompany her: “In nova fert animus muatas dicere formas / corpora (My soul stirs to speak of forms changed into new bodies).”
Her soul wasn't stirred to speak such words in Bengali as daughters and mothers use so as sever the bonds of 'Moh- Maya'- elemental 'love attachment'- so that transmigration is eased. Jhumpa repeated some jargon from work. But that's cool. Work too is worship.
On the day we brought my mother home from the hospital, four days before she died, I followed her in the ambulance by car, stopping off to buy two potted plants—a hydrangea and a daffodil—to keep her company. My mother loved plants, and they always thrived under her care. After arranging them on her dressing table, I asked her if she liked them. She immediately replied, pointing, that she would continue to dwell inside them. She said this with a calm conviction. It was as if she had intuited the force of Ovid’s poetry that was flowing like an antidote through my veins. Her words to me that day turned her, too, into a version of Daphne, reinforcing our bond, and they enable me to translate her unalterable absence into everything that is green and rooted under the sun.
Mother will dwell in flowers. That's an inducement to do Puja if nothing else is. But the daughter thinks Mum has turned into a tree.
This was my comment on Lahiri's self-regarding tosh.
The author says 'the Metamorphoses, governed by ambiguity, instability, and acts of becoming, was a trenchant metaphor for the process of converting literary texts from one language to another.' This is foolish. Ovid subscribed to the Callimachean notion of the doctus poeta, or skilled poet, who is allusive, not ambiguous, and who, by mimetic, not maieutic, methods, establishes an enduring personal hypostasis rather than anything subject to hermeneutic instability or availability for deconstruction. Ovid tells us that he is concerned with the debate as to the superiority of the epic or elegiac style (all of his previous work was in the latter style). He is offering a 'ritigranth'- i.e. a book containing rules and examples- such that, he grandiloquently claims, Orphic song is itself recreated and reclaimed. Poetry is not philosophy. Sign and signifier are univocal. There is no hierarchy to be deconstructed. The song of Orpheus is Nadabrahma.
Jhumpa has imposed a barbaric Spivak type stupidity on a master poet. (Vide https://socioproctology.blo....) I suppose that is the 'work' she is paid to do by the Academy, but it is an alienated labor which impoverishes her psyche and, it seems, this article represents her as being incapable of properly responding to her mother's mortality. In particular, Jhumpa does not understand the Hindu concept of family members cutting the umbilical cord of 'Moh-Maya' (primitive Love-attachment) so that, though grief remain, it causes no fracture to the soul of the departing or the psyche of those who remain.
Jhumpa thinks Ovid faced a problem similar to her own. This was not the case. Educated Romans read Greek as easily as Jhumpa's parents read English. Ovid had studied in Athens. He was writing for a select class who knew Greek and wanted a Latin poetry with the same aesthetic qualities but with an avant garde, self-aggrandizing, 'neoteric' twist. Indeed, this is why Ovid suffered exile. He had made too much of himself. His book was a Galleotto. Public morality required his banishment.
Ovid's translators in English or other European languages were fluent in Latin. They too were trying to create a 'Romantic' literature on the Latin model. This was transcreation not translation. These authors was trying to find new forms for their own language. They were seeking to ennoble, elevate, and make it more elegant. Jhumpa, sadly, is not interested in any such thing. Her mother was quitting one form but, as we Hindus believe, taking another- surely nobler, more elevated form. In the process, there were forms of beauty and poignancy- Ashoka trees blossoming as her soul was becoming fugitive from her body and its affectional ties- thrown off by the departing jiva, which Jhumpa could indeed have linked to the forms of beauty thrown off by fleeing nymphs in Greek mythology. In Hinduism, of course, we would identify this with Shatharupa. Knowledge flees its own Creating Intelligence in all forms of lovely things and lapidary intricacies of speech.
The daughter wanted to pray for her mother. But she knew no prayers. There was a Moh Maya here but none to cut the cord. Still, the daughter repeated some jargon from her work. Work too is worship. So the mother says she will remain as certain flowers. Jhumpa can do Puja or, writing of flowery metamorphoses, her work can be a Puja.. There could be something beautiful, something full of pathos here. No doubt, Jhumpa intuited it. But she can't express it. Why? The Academy has crushed that possibility within her.
Daphne flees Apollo to preserve her virginity. In Ovid, this is Cupid's fault. Not even the God of Healers can cure himself of love. He clings to the laurel tree into which Daphne has been transformed. The bonds of Moh Maya have not been snapped. Instead there is fetishism. The Apollo of the Academy rewards but its own frauds.
Meanwhile रू॒पंरू॑पं॒ प्रति॑रूपो बभूव॒ तद॑स्य रू॒पं प्र॑ति॒चक्ष॑णाय the one thing we have known of as truly divine- Mother's love- returns to us in an infinity of forms.
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