Democracy and the humanities

With that title, a certain grandiloquence cannot easily be avoided. And there has been plenty of it in the press lately; but I say - "Friends, Cantabrigians, Faculty-Men, lend me your ears; I come to bury the humanities, not to praise them..." Even that would be unnecessary: they will anyway be buried inexhumably under a forthcoming landslide of bureaucratic antipathy and enormous tuition fees. All I want to ask is: are they being buried alive? Or are they actually dead already?

For though we hear much, including from leading professorial lights such as Martha Nussbaum, about the role of the humanities in public life, in fostering democratic values and a sense of meaning beyond the utilitarian, not much progress has been made in establishing whether they do that as well as they might in their current form. And my intention here is to argue that they fall well short. In fact, they are not even living up to their name, for there is little that is humanist, or even humane, about the unhealthy combination of louse-combing textual and artefactual obsessiveness on the one hand with Grand, but increasingly bizarre Theory on the other that currently predominates in humanities faculties. I would not want to make sweeping denunciations without offering examples of how things could be done better. So such examples will be offered: in each case showing how things were done better, approximately 100 years ago. (Often they were done even better than that 200 years ago; but a single century is quite enough time to cover in a blog post.)

The problems that could be identified with the bulk of present-day academic writing on the arts and humanities are many, but I want to pick out two interrelated points that bear on the question of democracy or the public sphere - one of style, the other of intellectual content. The first is that the favoured writing style in the academy is not one that courts a wider audience than the academy itself. With some exceptions, of course; but not enough. I used to buy the TLS quite often, thinking it represented a desirable intellectual generalism, until I realised I could get a more interesting and personalized selection of the same sort of academic book review by spending an hour in the library Periodicals room. Part of the problem here is the metaphors in currency, which are often quite dazzlingly abstract and depersonalized: structuralist, in other words, even where the author claims to be poststructuralist, New Historicist, postcolonialist or whatever it might be. And this merges (in a way that will become clearer when we look at some quotes) into my second point of intellectual content - the presently professed lack of faith in individual personality and autonomy, the dissolution of subjectivity or the "death of the author". Both esoteric style and fatalist philosophical content are, it is hardly difficult to see, quite precisely unsuited to fostering democratic ideals or practical discussions in the public sphere.

I mentioned a sort of covert structuralism. Here is an example, presented in the context of an academically celebrated postcolonial critique of culture by the Indian theorist Homi K. Bhabha -

"The linguistic difference that informs any cultural performance is dramatized in the common semiotic account of the disjuncture between the subject of a proposition (enoncé) and the subject of enunciation, which is not represented in the statement but which is the acknowledgement of its discursive embeddedness and address, its cultural positionality, its reference to a present time and a specific space. The pact of interpretation is never simply an act of communication between the I and the You designated in the statement. The production of meaning requires that these two places be mobilized in the passage through a Third Space, which represents both the general conditions of language and the specific implication of the utterance in a performative and institutional strategy of which it cannot 'in itself' be conscious. What this unconscious relation introduces is an ambivalence in the act of interpretation. The pronominal I of the proposition cannot be made to address - in its own words - the subject of enunciation, for this is not personable, but remains a spatial relation within the schemata and strategies of discourse. The meaning of the utterance is quite literally neither the one nor the other" (The Location of Culture, p. 36)

This can I think fairly be taken to represent Bhabha's theory of literary interpretation and communication, and it is "spatial" rather than "personable", to use Bhabha's own terms. The talk is of "places" (in place of I and You), "mobilizing", "positionality", "passages": these are metaphors, let us remind ourselves, but grandly strategic ones. They enforce a sense of personal powerlessness that goes far beyond what might be understood (it isn't easy!) as the substantial point of Bhabha's argument - that even literary statements depend on their audiences and contexts in ways that are hard to calculate. If that is what he means, then here is Tagore making the same point, in a much easier and more personable fashion, in the 1907 address "Literary Creation":

"Man's thoughts are gratified if they get these three opportunities: to blossom, to fruit, and to drop onto fertile soil. Thoughts, like living things, constantly urge us towards this fulfilment; hence the unabated exchange of embraces and whispers among human beings. A mind looks for another mind to relieve it of the burden of its thoughts, to have its own ideas contemplated by another. That is why women gather at the waterside steps, friend runs to friend, letters go to and fro...
"Thus throughout human society, the thoughts of one mind strive to find fulfilment in another, thereby so shaping our ideas that they are no longer exclusive to the original thinker. This often goes unnoticed. A little reflection would make us agree that when we say something to a friend, the statement moulds itself to some extent in accordance with our friend's mind. We cannot write to one friend exactly as we write to another. My idea adjusts itself somewhat to the particular mind of the particular friend in whom it secretly seeks fulfilment. In fact, what we say is shaped by the conjunction of speaker and listener.
"In literature, for the same reason, the author tries to fit the work, even if unwittingly, to the nature of the person to whom it is offered. The folk epic of Dashurathi is not Dashurathi's sole possession; it is written in collaboration with the society that listens to it. It does not contain the thoughts of Dashurathi alone; the love, hate, piety, belief, and taste of a given circle at a give time find spontaneous expression within it... Therefore, that which survives does not speak only of itself; it speaks of the world around it, because it survives more by the force of its surroundings than by its own strength."

Comment on the difference in prose quality is superfluous: even though this is a modern translation, it always comes through with Tagore, who also wrote exquisitely in English. Bhabha has won a Bad Writing Competition for another sentence in the same book I have quoted. My point however is more substantial. You cannot accuse Tagore here of any Romantic hero-worship of the figure of the author. His point is indeed that "negotiations" are taking place, to use a current term, in literary creation, and some of them are even "unwitting" (- which could equally be translated "unconscious"). But they are also rhetorical, emotional, and founded in human relationships, where Bhabha's are "strategic", institutional, and decidedly inhuman. Tagore prefers to phrase them in that way; and who can blame him. Bhabha, on the other hand, tries to present what is in truth a metaphorical (and rhetorical) effect of his text as the inescapable reality of communication. He does not succeed in explaning how this inhumanly "spatial" reality serves human needs; Tagore's clustering thought-fruits and his women at the waterside steps do that far better.

Is this comparison unfair? Bhabha is an academic theorist; Tagore was a poet. But he was also a critic, literary professional and a man of the university (albeit his own, rather eccentric university, Visva-Bharati). And on his side, when questioned in a newspaper interview Bhabha will say things such as the following, which in intention at least sounds almost Tagorean: "In a world that is increasingly instrumentalist and consumerist, I think it is very important to set up against such a world the great aspirations of literature and poetry, of painting and music, because art and aesthetic experience adds ardour and passion to our principles and our beliefs. It should be seen as an essential part of our freedom and not an optional part of our lives." If he really believes this, then why does his own criticism add so little "ardour and passion"? Why does it celebrate not "freedom" and "great aspirations", but obscure and uncanny spatial strategies?

Let us move on to another example. Here is a modern critic who makes much capital out of resisting Bhabha's sort of language: Harold Bloom, celebrating timeless literary and humanistic values in his book How to Read and Why. This is how he begins to instruct the reader on how to read poetry:

"A first principle for how to read poems: closely, because a true criterion for any good poem is that it will sustain a very close reading indeed. Here is William Blake, giving us a lyric that again seems simple and direct, 'The Sick Rose'... The ironies of 'The Sick Rose' are fierce, perhaps cruel in their relentlessness. What Blake depicts is altogether natural, and yet the poem's perspective renders the natural itself into a social ritual in which phallic menace is set against female self-gratification (the rose's bed is one of 'crimson joy' before the worm finds it out)" (pp.71-2)

Since I. A. Richards and William Empson between the wars, the technique of "close reading" has become a literary-academic sine qua non: unless you can appreciate and produce interpretations such as the above, you are not invited to the party. What did literary criticism look like before close reading, then? Like this: George Saintsbury on Thomas Browne -

"The finale of Hydriotaphia has rung in the ears of some eight generations as the very and unsurpassable Dead March of English Prose. Every word of this chapter is memorable, and almost every word abides in the memory by dint of Browne's marmoreal phrase, his great and grave meaning, and the wonderful clangour and echo of his word-music. 'Time, which antiquates antiquities' will have some difficulty in destroying this. And through all the chapter his style, like his theme, rises, till after a wonderful burst of mysticism, we are left with such a dying close as never had been heard in English before, 'ready to be anything in the ecstasy of being ever, and as content with six foot as with the moles of Adrianus'...
"Christian Morals is entirely of a piece with the other books - the same gorgeously Latinised terminology, which somehow never becomes stiff or awkward; the same sententious weight, which is never heavy or dull; the same cunning construction of sentences and paragraphs; and above all, the same extraordinary power of transforming a commonplace into the eternal idea corresponding to it by some far-reaching image, some illustration quaintly erudite, or even by sheer and mere beauty of phrase and expression.
"For this is the great merit of Browne, that, quaint or gorgeous, or even, as he sometimes may seem to be, merely tricksy - bringing out of the treasures of his wisdom and his wit and his learning things new and old, for the mere pleasure of showing them - thought and expression are always at one in him, just as they are in the great poets. The one is never below the other, and both are always worthy of the placid, partly sad, wholly conscious and intelligent, sense of the riddles of life which serves them as background" (George Saintsbury, A Short History of English Literature (1913), pp. 451-2)

Again, there is simply no competition when it comes to the writing. Nor is there on the question of erudition: Bloom may be considered the best-read man alive by modern standards, but his acquaintance with literature is paltry compared to Saintsbury's, who could jump from Shakespeare to Corneille to Crabbe to Martial in a few lines and never needed to read anything in translation. Yet the real question is not of expertise, but of approach: were Bloom to continue expounding on Blakean sexual politics it would not increase your desire to read more of the poetry, whereas if you do not know Browne, you will most certainly want to now. (I hope you might want to read more Saintsbury too: he has been unjustly forgotten, and most English majors have simply never heard of him.)

When referred to at all, Saintsbury is usually categorized as an "aesthetic" critic, and it might be hard to see at first how aestheticism has anything to do with democracy or the public sphere. But it does, because what a critic such as Saintsbury gives you is a sense of the humane and "personable" value of a given author, something with a far more natural and widespread appeal than an analysis of fierce ironic mechanisms, or the necessity of understanding a rosebud as a vulva. Yes, his metaphors sometimes become uncomfortably culinary, "as if he were proposing a picnic" to quote John Gross; but his philosophy is refreshingly straightforward: "read, and as far as possible, read everything", without prejudice, and cultivating a "constant habit of looking at everything and every writer in conjunction with their analogues and opposites" - in other words, utilizing comparison rather than analysis. You need to read a lot to do this at the level Saintsbury does, but you do not need to read in any specially "close" way, for which you have been expensively trained. You simply need to be part of what Saintsbury called the "general congregation of intelligent people". In spirit, that is democratic criticism: its ideals are essentially Arnoldian, even if Saintsbury was a High Tory himself.

It is the same with art history. Criticize Kenneth Clark's patrician tones all you like: he was the last representative, in the age of television, of a humanist critical tradition that goes back through Bernard Berenson to the great Germans of centuries previous. His picture of the canon is insensitive to the place and perspective of a great many alternative identities: in that sense his rhetoric is exclusive. But is it more inclusive to write sentences such as the following?

"Once we insist that sexual difference is produced through an interconnecting series of social practices and institutions of which families, education, art studies, galleries and magazines are part, then the hierarchies which sustain masculine dominance come under scrutiny and stress, then what we are studying in analysing the visual arts is one instance of this production of difference which must of necessity be considered in a double frame: (a) the specificity of its effects as a particular practice with its own materials, resources, conditions, constituencies, modes of training, competence, expertise, forms of consumption and related discourses, as well as its own codes and rhetorics; (b) the interdependence for its intelligibility and meaning with a range of other discourses and social practices" (Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Feminity, Feminism, and Histories of Art, p. 9)

The relentless pluralization alone becomes rhetorically wearisome. That is an interesting point to dwell on, actually: I might agree with Pollock that many of these abstract entities ("discourse", "history of art", "hierarchy") can and ultimately should be construed in more than one way; but does this need to be insisted on at every moment? The effect is not of liberation but of bewilderment: I cannot imagine all the points in these multiply interconnecting series, and as with Bhabha, my own sense of human agency and autonomy is thereby diminished.

I could carry on with other disciplines, including music, and philosophy (whom would you rather read, Nietzsche or Foucault? Or psychoanalysis: Freud's Introductory Lectures, or Lacan's Ecrits?). Just about the one discipline of which all this does not hold true is history: and it is there that scholars are making up the deficit of readable books on the arts aimed at a general audience - Tim Blanning's The Triumph of Music, Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory and Rembrandt's Eyes. Popular philosophical writers and broadcasters such as Alain de Botton or Bryan Magee have also done a commendable job with everything from Proust to architectural criticism to the great philosophers. Perhaps this will be dismissed as a lamentable return of what Hermann Hesse called the Age of the Feuilleton, in which journalistic values took precedence over academic integrity. But if one takes a closer look at that late-Victorian/Edwardian period when intellectual celebrities such as Tagore, Mark Twain, Georg Simmel, Henri Bergson et al travelled the world giving public lectures to large audiences, there is much we ought really to be envious of. If poetry, philosophy, classical music, and painting do not enjoy the vital popularity they once did, the attitudes of the academy are largely to blame.

The Romantic art of translation

For Florian Scheding and Rama Pekua - friends and literary Liebhaber

Wanderer's Night Song

Across the hilltops,
Restfulness;
Over the treetops
Stillness hangs in the air.
The birds have silenced their song.
Wait: before long
You too will rest there.

Hopefully some of you reading this will recognize it as an Anglicization of the most famous lyric poem in German literature: Goethe's "Wanderers Nachtlied (II)". Having composed it yesterday afternoon lying on my bed I make no particular claims on its behalf. Instead the idea for the following arose when I decided to test my version against those I could find on the internet. The results were interesting; some, in fact, could only be described as alarming. First of all, here is the original:

Über allen Gipfeln
ist Ruh.
Über allen Wipfeln
spürest du
kaum einen Hauch.
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
ruhest du auch.

Milan Kundera finds a beautiful way to introduce the poem into his novel Immortality (1988). Read by an expatriate German to his daughter, it becomes first a lullaby, a bond between their childhoods in different countries, different languages; then, at the very end of his life "she realized that the poem speaks of death... She whispered with him 'Warte nur, bald ruhest du auch', soon you too will rest. And she recognized the voice of Father's approaching death: it was the calm of birds in the treetops". Here is the literal prose translation in the English text of Kundera's novel:

On all hilltops
There is peace,
In all treetops
You will hear
Hardly a breath.
Birds in the wood are silent.
Just wait, soon
You too will rest.

As Kundera himself admits, "in a literal translation the poem loses everything". Well, perhaps not quite everything. But on a technical level this little lyric is cut like a jewel: "every line has a different number of syllables, there is an alternation of trochees, iambs, dactyls, the sixth line is oddly longer than the others, and even though the poem consists of two couplets, the first grammatical sentence ends asymmetrically in the fifth line, which creates a melody that had never existed before, in any poem, as magnificent as it is ordinary".

One might, then, think that a translator's task would be to try and match that technical achievement, creating an equivalent of equal structural brilliance. And expectations were raised when I found the following translator's gloss, which seemed to be fully aware of the versifying subtleties that would be required:

"So naïve-sounding a rhythm, diction, and feeling can only be the product of the most sophisticated craftsmanship... Translators have either betrayed Goethe’s simplicity by cleverness or cloyed it by banality. To substitute for the resonance of feminine rhyme in German (uninflected English having more masculine rhymes), I’ve increased the number of rhymes with the key word 'rest'. And to prevent this increase from becoming monotonous, I’ve used one rhyme with accent not on 'rest' but on the penultimate syllable: 'forest' in line four. To enhance the hushed mood by echo, Goethe on line six alliterates the 'w' of 'schweigen' with the 'w' of 'Wald'. Analogously in line six of the English, 'hushed' and 'heath' alliterate. This is achieved at the cost of using an eye rhyme (heath, breath) instead of a 'perfect' ear rhyme. In denotation, 'heath' is not a proper translation of 'Wald'. The former has mere thickets; the latter is arboreal. But the emotional connotations are partly similar: rustic, unpruned, unmapped, a wilderness for wanderers at night. I don’t want to repeat the earlier used concept of forest and woods. The reader’s ear needs the couplet ending in 'eath' to escape for just a moment the restless 'rest' rhymes."

The analysis sounds sensitive, convincing: the author is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, and according to one of his colleagues “no one has ever translated Goethe as well into English”. One's expectations rise still higher. Here is the poem that resulted:

To every hill crest
Comes rest.
In every tree crest
the forest
scarcely draws breath.
Each bird-nest is hushed on the heath.
Wait a bit; soon you
will find rest too.

And...nascetur ridiculus mus! Since the perpetrator can easily be discovered by clicking the above links, there is no point in preserving his anonymity any longer. In fact there is an added incentive. His surname sums up the defining quality of his translation: Peter Viereck (Peter Square). Everything else that he apparently wanted to avoid - "cleverness", "banality", "monotonousness" - is nonetheless, unfortunately, present. The last two lines are more catastrophically clunking than a fatal accident in a lumber yard.

So translation is evidently an art, and not a science. One cannot create a good poetic rendition by analysis, though one can certainly use analysis in demonstrating why a rendition is good or bad. To make a start with Herr Square's version: "comes rest" in line 2 introduces a disruptive movement of arrival that does not appear in the original, and is entirely out of place; Goethe's forest does not "draw breath", and still less does it do so "in its tree crests" ( - though Goethe had a high opinion of his own scientific work, this poem is not known for contributing to the discovery of photosynthesis); and "Warte nur" is not successfully rendered by "Wait a bit", any more than it would be by "Hang on", "Hold up", or "Can we stop for a breather, I've got a stitch". All these are faults of Viereck's poem as a poem, as well as qua translation: they all disrupt the Stimmung, the mood that the poem tries (and already has precious little space) to create.

And that ultimately subjective, non-technical factor, "mood", leads me onto a defence of the other part of my title - translation as Romantic art. For one thing that the Romantics believed in firmly was that the "holistic" aspect of the arts, the ability to imbue creative expression with the unity and self-evidence of a simple, intuited truth, was imaginative and emotional, not rational. As August Wilhelm Schlegel put it, "concepts outline each thing for itself, whereas in reality, nothing ever exists for itself; only feeling perceives the all-in-all". In Romantic poetry, as in music, there is always a subjective essence - be it an emotion, an Idea, or a vision - which casts its light across the poem's accidents of sound and sense. And if sceptics would identify those accidents literally and not philosophically, I can only respond that I find considerably fewer of them in the following nineteenth-century rendition of "Wanderers Nachtlied" by the much-despised Longfellow than in the twentieth-century version by Viereck:

Over all the hilltops
Is quiet now
In all the treetops
Hearest thou

Hardly a breath.
The birds are asleep in the trees:
Wait; soon like these
Thou too shall rest.

In a context like this one sees how the Romantic habit of simple rhyming (now/thou, trees/these) can be unobtrusive and well-judged: it does not have to be "trite", as it is so often accused of - even in a translation by a second-rate poet. (A better target for charges of "triteness" would be bad twentieth-century rhymes, which plumb unsounded depths of banality - viz. "you/too"). But to see what a great Romantic poet can really do with rhyme and rhythm, just look at a passage from Shelley's incomplete (sadly, scarcely begun) 1822 translation of Goethe's Faust. The second stanza of the "Prologue in Heaven" is spoken by Gabriel:

Und schnell und unbegreiflich schnelle
Dreht sich umher der Erde Pracht;
Es wechselt Paradieseshelle
Mit tiefer, schauervoller Nacht;
Es schäumt das Meer in breiten Flüssen
Am tiefen Grund der Felsen auf,
Und Fels und Meer wird fortgerissen
In ewig schnellem Sphärenlauf.

Here is John R. Williams' translation (available in Wordworth Classics):

The earth in majesty rotating
Spins on itself as swift as light,
Celestial radiance alternating
With dread impenetrable night.
In rocky depths the foaming ocean
Surges with elemental force,
Swept on by the eternal motion
That speeds the worlds upon their course.

The metre, rhyme-scheme and meaning are all preserved: deviations are extremely minor, and indeed quite felicitous ("unimaginably fast" in the original is pictured "as swift as light", and the sea's "broad streams" become elemental surges). All things considered, philologically, this is a model translation. But now read Shelley's version:

And swift and swift, with rapid lightness,
The adornèd Earth spins silently,
Alternating Elysian brightness
With deep and dreadful night; the sea
Foams in broad billows from the deep
Up to the rocks, and rocks and Ocean,
Onward, with spheres which never sleep,
Are hurried in eternal motion.

The sheer force of movement here is unmatched in Goethe's original. Goethe could have had it, of course - there is no suggesting he was not a master of verse effects. The reason why he did not is that the variety of verse-forms in Faust is motivated by the speaker and the tone and context of the scene as much as by the poetic imagery. Theatrically speaking, there should be a certain stiffness and ceremony to these lines, so that when Mephistopheles enters he can the more effectively puncture the mood - "apologies, I'm not capable of such high-flown phrases!".

Shelley, obviously, is more interested in the poetry for itself, commenting in awed tones in his translator's note, "it is impossible to represent in another language the melody of the versification; even the volatile strength and delicacy of the ideas escape in the crucible of translation". For all that he succeeeds extraordinarily well. It is the energy which most convinces, felt in the enjambment of the fourth line, and even more in the repetitions, which Goethe separates (schnell and Fels) but Shelley thrusts together: "And swift and swift", "Up to the rocks, and rocks and Ocean..."

For another example, one which I hope will better illustrate the specific importance of "mood" or "tone", let us make a linguistic passage in the other direction. (Apologies to those who do not read German: I will try and back-translate where it seems worth it). Here is the first half of the soliloquy from Hamlet as our starting-point:

To be, or not to be - that is the question;
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die, to sleep -
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th'unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?

German readers will already have the well-known translation of this echoing in their heads - it is probably one of the most successful Shakespeare translations ever made. But before we come to it, let us look at two rather less well-known (and less successful) renderings. Both are by famous German poets of the eighteenth century. Here is Wieland's prose version from the 1760s, before German literature had entirely rejected the French code of bon goût:

Sein oder nicht sein - - das ist die Frage - - Ob es einem edlen Geist anständiger ist, sich den Beleidigungen des Glücks geduldig zu unterwerfen oder seinen Anfällen geduldig entgegenzustehen und durch einen herzhaften Streich sie auf einmal zu erledigen? Was ist Sterben? Schlafen – das ist alles - - und durch einen guten Schlaf sich auf immer vom Kopfweh und allen andern Plagen, wovon unser Fleisch Erbe ist, zu entledigen, ist ja eine Glückseligkeit, die man einem andächtiglich zubeten sollte – Sterben, schlafen - - Doch vielleicht ist es was mehr - - - wie, wenn es träumen wäre?

- - Da steckt der Haken - - was nach dem irdischen Getümmel in diesem langen Schlaf des Todes für Träume folgen können, das ist es, was uns stutzen machen muss. Wenn das nicht wäre, wer würde die Miβhandlungen und Staupenschläge der Zeit, die Gewalttätigkeiten des Unterdrückers, die verächtlichen Kränkungen der Stolzen, die Qual verschmähter Liebe, die Schikanen der Justiz, den Übermut der Groβen ertragen, oder welcher Mann von Verdienst würde sich von einem Elenden, dessen Geburt oder Glück seinen ganzen Wert ausmacht, mit Füβen stoβen lassen, wenn ihm freistünde, mit einem armen, kleinen Federmesser sich Ruhe zu verschaffen?

The contrast with Shakespeare's own style could hardly be greater! Wieland's urge to tone the violent impulses down and introduce a more elegant turn of phrase must have once been an anticipation of his audience's social sensibilities; today it reads like a strange exercise in moralistic featherbedding, delivered with all the rhetorical force of a professorial retirement lecture. The slings and arrows are thrown out and replaced by "fortune's insults", which, however they are to be treated, must always be met "patiently", and the "heartache" and "thousand natural shocks" become an inconvenient "headache" and a lot of other "vexations" which can be "got rid of by a good sleep"(!)

Going almost (but not quite) as far in the other direction, here are Herder's verses, full of Sturm und Drang excitability:

Sein oder nicht sein? – das ist nun die Frage!
Ob’s edler, im Gemüte fortzudulden
Des Schicksals Tückepfeil und Hohngeschoβ?
wie oder aufzustehn den Trübsalsstürmen
und widerstehnd sie enden! – Sterben! – Schlafen!
Nicht mehr? Und schlafend sagen können: aus ist
das Herzach, aus die tausend Erdenstöβe,
die Fleisch wir erbeten! – So ist’s Vollendung,
andächtig recht zu wünschen – Sterben! – schlafen! –
Nur schlafen? – wohl auch träumen! Ah! da liegt’s!
Denn in dem Schlaf des Todes was für Träume
da kommen, wenn nun aus ist Lebenslärm,
das macht uns Halt! – Und die, die Rücksicht ist’s,
die Jammer macht so langen, langen Lebens.
Denn wer ertrüg’s, die Hieb’ und Streich’ des Unfalls,
Gewalt des Drückers! stolzer Narren Schmach,
den Stich verschmähter Liebe! der Gesetze
Betrugverzögerung – Staatsmanns Hoffart! Spott
den’s leidende Verdienst vom Bub empfängt –
kann man sich selbst je los und ledig machen
mit bloβem Dolchstich –

Where Herder succeeds is in using the peculiarly German resource of compound nouns to express the metaphor-packed pithiness of the original. "Tückepfeil" und "Hohngeschoβ" are fine strokes, quite legitimately transferring the force of fortune's "outrageousness" (explicated as "cunning spite" and "mockery") to the "arrows" and "missiles". Where he goes too far is in reducing other parts of the text to a barely filled-out procession of exclamation-marks. While one must grant that the German Ausrufezeichen is more common, and does not by itself convey such an excitable atmosphere as it does in English, moderation would surely have been urged had Herder noticed that Shakespeare's text uses not a single exclamation-mark. Any vor sich hin, soliloquizing tone is abandoned: Herder's text berates heaven and earth.

Finally, here is August Wilhelm Schlegel's canonized version:

Sein oder Nichtsein; das ist hier die Frage:
Ob's edler im Gemüt, die Pfeil' und Schleudern
Des wütenden Geschicks erdulden, oder,
Sich waffnend gegen eine See von Plagen,
Durch Widerstand sie enden? Sterben – schlafen –
Nichts weiter! Und zu wissen, daß ein Schlaf
Das Herzweh und die tausend Stöße endet,
Die unsers Fleisches Erbteil, ’s ist ein Ziel,
Aufs innigste zu wünschen. Sterben – schlafen –
Schlafen! Vielleicht auch träumen! Ja, da liegts:
Was in dem Schlaf für Träume kommen mögen,
Wenn wir die irdische Verstrickung lösten,
Das zwingt uns stillzustehn. Das ist die Rücksicht,
Die Elend läßt zu hohen Jahren kommen.
Denn wer ertrüg der Zeiten Spott und Geißel,
Des Mächtigen Druck, des Stolzen Mißhandlungen,
Verschmähter Liebe Pein, des Rechtes Aufschub,
Den Übermut der Ämter und die Schmach,
Die Unwert schweigendem Verdienst erweist,
Wenn er sich selbst in Ruhstand setzen könnte
Mit einer Nadel bloß?

The precision is striking enough, especially when one considers that Schlegel, unlike Herder, produced 17 plays' worth of this perfectly-turned blank verse. As the great Swiss Germanist Emil Staiger remarks, in the introduction to Schlegel's critical writings from which I have taken the above extracts, "Schlegel preserved the original wording to a quite remarkable extent...and yet there is a faint Romantic tinge to his Shakespeare". And there is nothing wrong with that; indeed for Staiger it may have guaranteed that "Shakespeare...worked his way into the German soul". It takes, perhaps, a great cultural movement in the present to do justice to one of the past.

If that last sentence has any truth to it, it will be worth our while expanding the frame of cultural reference. For on this model, it is not so much the fine threads of intellectual and cultural history linking the German Romantics and the English Renaissance that matter (many of them, such as the self-evident command of classical rhetoric, or the adherence to what E. M. W. Tillyard called the "Elizabethan world picture", had indeed been irremediably broken). Rather, it is the imaginative connection, the fact that the Romantics felt that Shakespeare was a "Romantic" poet, and were determined to use all the resources they could find to emulate and extend his achievement. And that imaginative connection to Shakespeare was felt well beyond Europe. The Bengali cult of Shakespeare began only slightly later than the German, in the nineteenth century. As a teenager, Rabindranath Tagore was already trying his hand at rendering Shakespeare into Bengali. He did all the witches' dialogues from Macbeth (quite a linguistic challenge when one thinks about it!); here is the opening of the play -

( ডাকিনী । ম্যাক‍্‌বেথ্ )
দৃশ্য : বিজন প্রান্তর । বজ্র বিদ্যু ৎ । তিনজন ডাকিনী ।

১ম ডা — ঝড় বাদলে আবার কখন
মিল্‌ব মোরা তিনটি জনে ।
২য় ডা — ঝগড়া ঝাঁটি থামবে যখন ,
হার জিত সব মিট্‌বে রণে ।
৩য় ডা — সাঁঝের আগেই হবে সে ত ;
১ম ডা — মিল্‌ব কোথায় বোলে দে ত ।
২য় ডা — কাঁটা খোঁচা মাঠের মাঝ ।
৩য় ডা — যাক্কেথ সেথা আস্‌চে আজ ।
১ম ডা — কটা বেড়াল ! যাচ্ছি ওরে !
২য় ডা — ঐ বুঝি ব্যাং ডাক্‌চে মোরে !
৩য় ডা — চল্‌ তবে চল্‌ ত্বরা কোরে !
সকলে — মোদের কাছে ভালই মন্দ ,
মন্দ যাহা ভাল যে তাই ,
অন্ধকারে কোয়াশাতে
ঘুরে ঘুরে ঘুরে বেড়াই !

Without bothering with stage directions, parts etc., but just to give you an idea of the harsh music of Tagore's rendering, here is a rough transliteration:

Jhor badole abar kokhon
Milbo mora tinti jone?
Jhogra jhanti thambe jokhon
Har[o] jit sab mitbe rone.
Sanjer age hobe shey to -
Milbo kothay bole dey to.
Kantha koncha mather majh.
Macbeth shetha asche aaj.
Kota beral! Jacchi o re!
Ei bujhi byang dakche more!

Moder kache bhalo-i mondo
Mondo jaha bhalo je tai,
Ondhokare kuyashate,
Ghure ghure ghure berai!

The last four lines correspond to the chorus couplet, "Fair is foul and foul is fair/ Hover through the fog and filthy air", giving Rabindranath twice as many syllables to play with. And he knows how to use them: "ghure ghure ghure berai" is a poundingly energetic line to close the scene on (a typically Bengali compound verb, with berano meaning "to travel" and ghora feeling very much like a cognate of the Italian [fare un] giro, to "go around" in both the loose and the literal senses; the witches don't hover, they whirl off into the stormy air!). The other famous chorus is treated in the same way: "Double, double toil and trouble/ Fire burn and cauldron bubble" becomes -

দ্বিগুণ দ্বিগুণ দ্বিগুণ খেটে
কাজ সাধি আয় সবাই জুটে ।
দ্বিগুণ দ্বিগুণ জ্বলরে আগুন
ওঠ্‌রে কড়া দ্বিগুণ ফুটে ।

Digun digun digun khete
Kaj sadhi aay sobai jute.
Digun digun jwalre aagun
Othre kora digun phute.

- with six "doubles", and an added instruction to work harder at collecting their ingredients! The interesting points are those where Rabindranath has to decide how to translate the untranslatable: he leaves the "harpier" (in the third line of Act IV/i) as a "harpy", which presumably would mean little to a Bengali; however, the witches themselves become dakinis. In Hindu mythology these are female spirits. But far from being generally imagined as potion-stirring hags, they are more usually young and beautiful, using their charms to seduce and trick men who cross their path. Quite how this might have affected (or might still affect) a Bengali reading of the witches' (or dakinis') encounters with Macbeth, I will not try to guess: it would certainly have made the text's reference to the witches' "beards" (Act I/iii, line 46) doubly puzzling!

Tagore's other translations include poems by Byron, Shelley, Matthew Arnold, and some short lyrics from Heine. In his reminiscences he reports learning to read German from a missionary, so the Heine translations were direct and not via English. Here is one:

নীল বায়লেট নয়ন দুটি করিতেছে ঢলঢল

রাঙা গোলাপ গাল দুখানি , সুধায় মাখা সুকোমল ।

শুভ্র বিমল করকমল ফুটে আছে চিরদিন!

হৃদয়টুকু শুষ্ক শুধু পাষাণস্ম সুকঠিন!

Nil baylet noyon duti koriteche toltol
Ranga golap gal dukhani, sudhay makha sukomol.
Shubhro bimol korokomol phute aache chirodin!
Hridoytuku susko shudhu pashanoso sukothin!

Die blauen Veilchen der Äugelein,
Die roten Rosen der Wängelein,
Die weißen Lilien der Händchen klein,
Die blühen und blühen noch immerfort,
Und nur das Herzchen ist verdorrt.

I can't find an acceptable English version, but the point of the poem is Heine's comparison of the various parts of the beloved's body with flowers - eyes blue violets, cheeks red roses, hands white lilies; these are forever in bloom, he says, but the part that matters most, the heart, is withered. Tagore's version again virtually doubles the poem's length, with eight-foot lines instead of the quadrameter of the original, and he adds in extra imagery. In this context one naturally tends to assume the additions are part of the same general, rather cliched Romantic vocabulary: the "liquid clearness" of her eyes in line 1, her "nectar-filled" cheeks in line 2 - but in line 3 we suddenly hit something unmistakeably Indian: korokomol literally means "hand-lotus"! And suddenly Heine's chance colour association (lily-white skin) is linked up to a whole Sanskritic system of lotus-based symbology, in which "lotus hands", "lotus feet" and gods seated on lotuses (think the Indian equivalent of Botticelli's Venus in her shell) are all already culturally established as familiar poetic and artistic icons of formal perfection.

This is, finally, to raise (hopefully from a somewhat shifted perspective) the familiar questions - how "cultural" should a translation be? How "faithful"? If we translate Tagore, should we be as radical as he was in approaching Heine? Should his lotuses become our lilies? That is certainly not the current solution; most Western readers of an author such as Tagore want an "Indian flavour", and there is nothing necessarily wrong with that. Many of his poems and songs are so bound to the landscape that inspired them that a re-imagining in Western terms would be impossible anyway ( - as impossible as trying to imagine the frozen landscape of Schubert's Winterreise while lying sweat-soaked under a mosquito net). All I want to raise here is the point that "faithfulness" takes many forms, and we need to be much more aware than we perhaps are (given the existence of Viereck-style travesties) of the complex relationships between letter and spirit.

The twentieth century wanted to simplify those relationships, and in literature just as in music, visions of getting closer to the Urtext, the authentic, original, stripped-down version came to dominate. As Andre Aciman observes in relation to the Scott Moncrieff (1922) and Lydia Davis (2004) translations of Proust, even for that most digressive, shadowy, and ramifyingly suggestive of all literary texts, a certain Puritanism has taken hold. Aciman objects to this, and on principle at least, I think rightly so. To capture the beauty of some passages, he suggests, "you may need to do something no translator will admit needs doing: you may have to depart from the text in order to capture not just its meaning, but its cadence, its luster, its magic. In other words—and I should bite my tongue—you may need to pad, to adorn, to interpolate" (all the things of which Scott Moncrieff stands accused). Of course one may not have to make such a departure: Schlegel's Hamlet does not, nor Longfellow's Goethe. But what they and Tagore have in common is that the judgement of poetic necessity and licence remains poetic. It never becomes Puritan or professorial.

Proust and the webcam

With grateful acknowledgements to Anna Goodman...

The real title of what follows ought to be "Proust and metaphor", since this is what has recently recaptured my interest in the writer whom I all too regularly cite as my favourite of all time. But since one can easily imagine (without needing to seek them out) a hundred academic essays bearing such a heading, all substantially more comprehensive than what I am about to offer, I decided on something a little more piquant. Proust and the webcam genuinely do have something to do with one another, and something surprising, namely the former uses the latter as a metaphor even though it does not exist yet. (All quotes with page numbers that follow are from the first volume of the Scott Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation, Remembrance of Things Past.)

"'I gather that Mme de Villeparisis', [Albertine] remarked to Octave, 'has been complaining to your father'. I could hear, underlying the 'I gather', one of those notes that were peculiar to Albertine; every time I realised that I had forgotten them, I would remember having already caught a glimpse behind them of Albertine's determined and typically Gallic mien. I could have been blind and yet have detected certain of her qualities, alert and slightly provincial, in those notes just as plainly as in the tip of her nose. They were equivalent and might have been substituted for one another, and her voice was like what we are promised in the photo-telephone of the future: the visual image was clearly outlined in the sound" (p.992)

Et voila, la webcam! Quite how a visual image could be "clearly outlined in sound" is clearer in the case of the Proustian imagination (the tenor of his metaphor) than in any conceivable "photo-telephonic" apparatus (the vehicle). The corresponding visual image here is surely not an accident: the narrator is picturing Albertine wrinkling the tip of her nose slightly just as she lets her voice take on the characteristic note of social disapproval. Perhaps the details of digital communication, the translation of both the tip of the nose and the tone of voice into identical binary strings, could form some sort of analogy - to us - for the way they blend in Proust's mind; needless to add, they were not accessible to him!

And with that example we get a sense of how unusual Proust's use of metaphor was. His images are very often as rechérché as the "lost time" of his title. Commentators have in fact suggested a connection: for Wallace Fowlie the juxtapositions of separated moments of time created by the workings of involuntary memory parallel the "function of a metaphor which brings together objects which have no relationship in ordinary life...explain[ing] the unknown by the known". This last is a very common observation about metaphor, particularly if we are allowed to equate knowledge and vision, and thus assume its equivalence to the other common observation that metaphor explains the invisible through the visible. It surely has some truth to it: why else do music and religion both so persistently invite metaphorical language? But Proust loves to disrupt this neat reasoning: even the very Proustian metaphor that Fowlie inserts just before his (proto-Rumsfeldian) identification of metaphorically known unknowns - the "waiters in the restaurant of Rivebelle, compared, in their agility and flight, to angels" - actually contradicts it. After all, we have much more definite knowledge of waiters than we do of angels.

In fact on turning to the passage that Fowlie appears to quote, one finds a metaphor even more extended and unusual. Proust only implies the angelic status of the waiters: the direct comparison is of the restaurant's round tables with heavenly bodies, which soon expands into an entire pre-prandial cosmological vision -

"I looked at the round tables whose infinite assemblage filled the restaurant like so many planets, as the latter are represented in old allegorical pictures. Moreover, there seemed to be some irresistible force of attraction at work among these divers stars, and at each table the diners had eyes only for the tables at which they were not sitting, with the possible exception of some wealthy Amphitryon who, having managed to secure a famous author, was endeavouring to extract from him...a few insignificant remarks, at which the ladies marvelled. The harmony of these astral tables did not prevent the incessant revolution of the countless waiters who, because they were on their feet instead of being seated like the diners, performed their gyrations in a more exalted sphere... Seated behind a bank of flowers, two horrible cashiers, busy with endless calculations, seemed two witches occupied in forecasting by astrological signs the disasters that might from time to time occur in this celestial vault fashioned according to the scientific conceptions of the Middle Ages" (p.868)

The incessant revolutions of the scene are elsewhere acknowledged to have been artifically enhanced, namely by the narrator's consumption of a "dose of beer, and a fortiori of champagne...adding...a few drops of port which I was too bemused to be able to taste"! In this case, then, the narrator's perceptions are not purely the result of perceptiveness: but that does not stop him "pitying all the diners, because I felt that for them the round tables were not planets and that they had not cut through the scheme of things in such a way as to be delivered from the bondage of habitual appearances and enabled to perceive analogies" (p. 869). The situation makes light of a serious point, one which Alain de Botton (whose How Proust Can Change Your Life should not be disdained by the Proustophile: de Botton's style and succinctness are truly enviable) regards as a principle of Proustian philosophy - the need to destroy our habitual lack of sensitivity to the world. In this, the use of metaphors or analogies that begin with the usual and transfigure it by reference to the unusual is enormously helpful. They do not have to select a mundane subject and find a transcendent image for it, as with the astral tables. The relationship can go the other way too, as with an example cited by de Botton:

"Sometimes in the afternoon sky a white moon would creep up like a little cloud, furtive, without display, suggesting an actress who does not have to 'come on' for a while, and so goes 'in front' in her ordinary clothes to watch the rest of the company for a moment, but keeps in the background, not wishing to attract attention to herself."

An example like this is, as well as being exquisite, important in emphasizing that Proust's technique is not mere poetic hyperbole. The moon is a conventional "poetic" image, an actress waiting to come on stage is not, but this is irrelevant: the second is a more unusual and interesting sight, and thus a fit vehicle for refreshing our perceptions of the first.

On returning after many years to the most famous passage of Proust, which itself I expected to find no longer capable of making me hold my breath in the way it did at first reading - the tasting of the madeleine - I was after all captivated, and moved, by two extremely peculiar images that Proust employs, neither of which I have ever found reference to in their original context:

"I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and thus effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have reognised their voice the spell is broken. Delivered by us, they have overcome death and return to share our life.

And so it is with our past" (p.47)

"And as in the game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, solid and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea" (p.51)

For all that the Japanese have been long known for their ingenuity with paper, one almost wonders whether this game really exists... But of course by this point in a first reading (this is the last paragraph of the passage), one has also ceased to pay attention to the literary means by which the epiphany is being communicated. The Proustian metaphor functions, as one blogger puts it in a suitably extravagant metaphor of his own, "like one of those massively complex atoms created in cyclotrons that disintegrates radioactively in milliseconds"; it catalyzes the reaction going on in the reader's own experience. New Critical readings of metaphor that analyze it as a "structural element" would surely find Proust wanting: frequently metaphors vanish mid-sentence, as happens even in an oft-quoted passage such as the following, in which the vase persists for no more than four or five words:

"An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates, and what we call reality is a certain connexion between these immediate sensations and the memories which envelop us simultaneously with them–a connexion that is suppressed in a simple cinematographic vision, which just because it professes to confine itself to the truth in fact departs widely from it–a unique connexion which the writer has to rediscover in order to link for ever in his phrase the two sets of phenomena which reality joins together."

But the pleasure created by the metaphor lasts much longer; for (to end with another technological Proustian metaphor) -

"Pleasure in this respect is like photography. What we take, in the presence of the beloved object, is merely a negative, which we develop later, when we are back at home, and have once again found at our disposal that inner darkroom the entrance to which is barred to us so long as we are with other people" (p. 932)

vita contemplativa

In Bengal, landscape and mind seem to meet naturally in a state of contemplation. This is not an epic country. South of Darjeeling, there are no dramatic peaks and falls, no mist-swathed hills, not even the romance of the desert. But the flat plain has an expansiveness and an imaginative tinge to it that one might miss in the north German plateau or the East Anglian fens. The land is still occupied, in a full sense, and the occupants are waiting always, for the transformations brought by the weather that sweeps across the plain, the grand and yet subtle sequence of the Bengali calendar's six seasons.

In consequence the country's literature seems also to have a lyric, contemplative quality. Pather Panchali (1929) is celebrated as the greatest Bengali novel of the past century not for plot, complex psychology or social critique, but for its rootedness in a child's vivid experience of his place in the world, defined by personal relationships of course, but also by space and the power of imagination. For Opu, the horizon of his knowledge and vision is tinged with a vague wonder, a sense of imagined distance that appears at dusk in the illumined beauty of the tops of the palm trees standing furthest away from his house, in the bewitched, nervous sense of strangeness as he passes the buildings of an old, deserted British indigo plantation on a walk with his father at the outskirts of the village, or in the inconceivable excitement of the railway line which his sister takes him to see (one of the most memorable scenes in Ray's celebrated film adaptation). Naturally Opu is "imaginative" in the conventionally childlike way too - he loves swashbuckling stories from the old epics, and the jatra, the travelling village theatre - but that Bibhutibashan gives him this more numinous, more immanent vision of the wonder of his surroundings seems to me not just poetizing wishfulness, but an understanding of the freshness of a child's perceptions, of how exactly scenes in one's life become meaningful, memorable.

And despite his majestic adult appearance, Tagore too could see with the eyes of a child. Among the prose works of his that I have read, the ones that appeal the strongest to me (and to many other commentators also) are not the big social-issue novels, but the slim memoirs of his early life - My Reminiscences and Boyhood Days. His early childhood was more confined than Opu's: from the dark family house in Jorasanko in north Calcutta, only his gaze and his fancy could go out roaming. They did not immediately scramble in search of stories. Young Rabi was a patient observer, willing to dwell, like a Dutch old master, on homely details of life on the streets, courtyards and rooftops of the town. As he wrote in a letter of 1930:

"A greater part of my early years was spent in observing the world of nature. It gave me intense joy to watch things. I would sit quietly by the window, or climb on a packing-box to peep over the wall of our balcony to feast my eyes upon a host of things - the early morning sun touching the top of a row of coconut palms, the drove of ducks diving in and out of the water of the tank, the deep blue grandeur of the rain-laden clouds rising suddenly from behind the balcony, the walls of varied sizes of a neighbouring house, across the lane looking mysterious in moonlight, the low sheds where lived the milkmen with their cattle beyond the walls of the inner apartments, the sun glistening on a shallow pool of water where the buffaloes bathed, the deep green of an avenue of trees that stood atop a long line of roofs of assorted heights to the east - all of them seemed to fascinate me. The first idea that came the instant I left my bed was that there was no end of things to see..."

In the last years of life - when Tagore began to paint - his visions became more symbolically charged. He wanted to find a meaning or even a moral in what he saw; as in the description of a train ride (from Calcutta to Madras) from the same letter –

"My mind is content with the thought that I had taken in all there was to see. The train moves on fast and I cannot go over the once reconnoitred ground. Those who counsel giving up the world because nothing in it lasts, should take a lesson from the man in the moving train... As I look out of the compartment and observe a thing of indescribable beauty on this sunbathed noon of early spring - I realise at this very instant that this will not last, that this will vanish out of my line of vision. And yet...is my present experience an illusion? I am not prepared to accept this to be so. This picture that I see this instant is not merely a source of joy to me personally, as to an unrelated individual. My response does not depend on my flitting fancy...it is an experience I share with my fellow man, as part of humanity... The joy that Kalidasa poured into his verses, on seeing the beauty of the earth bathed in the deep shadows of the early monsoon clouds, will live... It is a cumulative joy to which all of us contribute our share."

Kalidasa, the great Sanskrit poet whose work "The Cloud Messenger" (Meghadutam) Tagore had in mind in writing this, also described, in that greatest of his poems, a journey across the Indian landscape – not by a train but by a drifting monsoon cloud. It is an extended and yet entirely contemplative poem, the likes of which one will scarcely find in ancient European literature ( – just as, conversely, ancient Indian literature contains no tragedies). For the Sanskrit aestheticians, literature and the arts were vehicles of the rasas, aesthetic emotions which should be "tasted" and dwelt upon rather than cathartically discharged in shocks. The connection when one's eyes and mind are held by an image, the essential timelessness of that moment of appreciation, are what the artist aims to engender. Hence why a single north Indian raga can be "developed" for an hour or more (and here one should best understand that word in something like the sense of the "development" of a photographic image, a gradual emergence into clarity); or why south Indian forms of dance-drama such as Kathakali will dwell on a single tableau or gesture for lengths of time that in the Western theatre would seem absurd. As teachers will sometimes express it, a raga is like the remembered image of a beautiful face; what you play must outline and manifest this inner vision, not distort it.

Tagore's opening "preamble" to My Reminiscences suggests a similarity to the writer's task in dealing with his memories. Chronology is merely external: the rasa is in the images laid down under the flow of time.

"I do not know who has painted the pictures of my life imprinted on my memory. But whoever he is, he is an artist. He does not take up his brush simply to copy everything that happens; he retains or omits things just as he fancies; he makes many a big thing small and small thing big; he does not hesitate to exchange things in the foreground with things in the background. In short, his task is to paint pictures, not to write history. The flow of events forms our external life, while within us a series of pictures is painted. The two correspond, but are not identical."

To "make many a big thing small and small thing big" - a procedure that might work for more than just reminiscence. Other writers of the period in Europe believed in it - Joseph Roth was one, as I've written on this blog, Proust (appearances to the contrary notwithstanding) another. It carries on in Bengali literature, for me most convincingly in the work of Amit Chaudhuri. The first of his novels, A Strange and Sublime Address, was autobiographical. Here is an especially beautiful passage, in the course of which Chaudhuri describes his own view of fiction and its “stories”:

“...why did these houses seem to suggest that an infinitely interesting story might be woven around them? And yet the story would never be a satisfying one, because the writer, like Sandeep, would be too caught up in jotting down the irrelevances and digressions that make up lives, and the life of a city, rather than a good story — till the reader would shout ‘Come to the point!’—and there would be no point, except the girl memorising the rules of grammar, the old man in the easy-chair fanning himself, and the house with the small, empty porch that was crowded, paradoxically, with many memories and possibilities. The ‘real’ story, with its beginning, middle, and conclusion, would never be told, because it did not exist.”

Many scenes in Chaudhuri’s books dwell on "memory pictures", episodes, impulses, or routines, quite insignificant from a narrative point of view – the rituals and inconveniences of Indian household life, the homesickness of the young Indian student in England, the middle-class housewife's modest determination to take music lessons. They are not there to give “body” or a sense of location to a story, a story in terms of which people’s lives take on meaning. It is rather as if the characters are waiting for a story to shape itself (for the housewife to realize her dreams as a successful singer, perhaps). And when time flows on and that still does not happen, it is these “images” from their life which, redeeming their quiet disappointment, absorb the meaning instead, gently soaking up the rasa of passed time.

Whose "development"?

Readers well-versed in development issues may have to forgive (if they can) some economic naiveties in the following, where this blog goes determinedly "off-topic"...

Kathmandu's Thamel district, a rooftop restaurant in the tourist ghetto. The third lassi of the afternoon, staving off the waiters circling questioningly with the bill. As dusk draws on, the crazy medley of sounds that crowd in from outside sums up the distracted confusion of the place, and my situation, trapped in visa limbo now for two weeks, and still too preoccupied to plunge into the "real" Nepal. Rickshaw drivers emit bird-like peeps, quack their home-made shampoo-bottle hooters; the tourist-protecting policewomen give intermittent blasts on their whistles; the sarangi (Nepali fiddle) sellers wander up and down all playing the same desultory scale, competing perhaps with a flute salesman or one of the melancholy, note-perfect imitations of American rock that begin to echo down from the bar across the narrow, rainy street. Everything meant to alert or attract the foreign traveller, everything instead merging together into a repetitive, overlayered backdrop, like the jungle of signs and banners that jut and unfurl across the claustrophobic gully separating one pizza parlour from its rival opposite - they read: Laundry, Internet, ATM, Massage, Treks and Tours, Continental/Indian/Tibetan/Chinese Food...

I become lulled into a familiar urban-American doze - a mall-terrace, airport-lounge, TV ad-break state of mind. It even seems to have penetrated the book I have just abandoned, bought out of a vague sense of duty to read at least something Nepali, Samrat Upadhyay's Arresting God in Kathmandu - nothing very arresting or divine about it to my mind, a succession of adultery- and alcoholism-filled tales in jaded, detached American short-story prose; Nepal through the eyes of a cosmopolitan Raymond Carver-wannabe. I read other books here too, mostly for "timepass" as Indian English quaintly expresses it. One genuinely attracts my full interest, and begins to connect with what I am learning here and there about the situation of Nepal, and of India. It is Helena Norberg-Hodge's book Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh, a brilliant and deeply questioning text, part anthropology, part political-environmental manifesto. (There is also a film of the same title.) Her thesis is as radical as her perspective is unique: as the first Westerner to master Ladakhi, the dialect of Tibetan spoken in the highest region of Himalayan India, she was also the first outsider to penetrate fully one of the most stable, ancient and secluded societies still to be found on the globe in the second half of the twentieth century. And at the same time, arriving just as Ladakh began to be "opened up", she saw the region both prior to and during its ongoing "modernization", its exposure to Western commerce, development and tourism.

Her conclusion was, quite simply, that this process was an unmitigated catastrophe for the Ladakhi people. And that conclusion was the more convincing for being reached gradually, over 16 years, and from an originally non-political vantage point; for Norberg-Hodge had entered Ladakh as a professional linguist, merely with the intention of compiling a dictionary of the Ladakhi language. But the political passion that finally speaks from the book's pages is white-hot, quite as fierce as the more recent investigative journalism of Naomi Klein or Arundhati Roy. It is a brave and fascinatingly argued challenge to our commonplace image of development - that it is something like growing up, an inevitable "mixed blessing", dispelling one's innocence but giving one new capacities to engage with the big wide world.

That makes it sound as if "globalization" is what is at stake here; but in 1991 Helena Norberg-Hodge made little use of the term, and in a way one is rather grateful for it. To talk instead of "progress" and "development", while questioning the values those words have acquired, puts things in a different perspective. One sees Ladakh's changes temporally, rather than spatially; as part of a historical transformation that has happened, is happening, or (in a few far-flung cases) is still about to happen in each individual human culture, rather than a seductively fatal, all-embracing process of interconnection between them. As the author writes, this latter picture falsely implies a "concept of unity [that] has tremendous symbolic appeal... 'One market' implies community and co-operation and the 'Global Village' sounds like a place of tolerance and mutual exchange" (p.155). Not only does this leave on one side the imbalances and injustices that affect individual communities; it also implies that the interconnection and exchange taking place now is something absolutely new, rescuing the "native" societies of the world from their age-old isolation. One of the most telling points this book makes - there is almost one a paragraph - is that such isolation is wrongly imagined. Even such remote societies as Ladakh's reach out and accept foreign goods and influences. Leh, the capital, was an Asian trade hub, and Ladakhis themselves travelled as merchants and pilgrims. The point was that cultural contact with foreigners did not disturb the structures underpinning Ladakhi society - it was sought only as and when the Ladakhis needed it.

And it must be said, that was relatively seldom: for the Ladakhi way of life seems to have been so internally well-adjusted as to rely little on outside resources. The society was small and tightly-knit, using a few natural assets - a short barley-growing season, carefully channeled mountain streams, sturdy yaks providing labour, milk and fuel - to maximum effect. By harvesting and storing food and fodder when it was available in summer, the Ladakhis could spend the winter months celebrating, drinking and telling stories. "Economic" relations were centred on the household (the meaning, it pays to remember, of the Greek root of our word "economics": oikos); and particularly on the sustaining knowledge and industry of the women at its core. Work thus solidified familial relationships, diffusing a spirit of co-operation throughout the community which is neatly summed up in a traditional proverb: "Even a man with a hundred horses may need to ask another for a whip". Such co-operation largely replaced any need for a money economy, as well as ensuring a crime rate of virtually nil and an absence even of the concept of "unemployment". As the expressive English phrase goes about the "good old days" (sometimes even taken to include the Second World War) - back then people "pulled together". And having done so in traditional fashion for hundreds of years, the Ladakhis continued still in 1975 to live their lives with grace, consideration, humour and an extraordinary level of contentment.

The picture seems exaggerated, too rosy perhaps - some reviewers of the book and film suggest as much. But it may equally be, as Norberg Hodge reports of her own initial distrust at the Ladakhis' joie de vivre, that we would rather not believe a society so different from our own could take such good care of its members. We would prefer to think of it as "poor" and "backward", in urgent need of development on the Western pattern. And the tragedy, which in this book stands revealed as one of the main motors of such development, is the success we have had in convincing the Ladakhis and others like them of our way of seeing things. A sadly revealing chapter epigraph sets two quotes from the same Ladakhi source alongside each other, one from 1975 when Norberg-Hodge arrived, the other from 1983. The first time of asking, Tsewang Paljor opined, "We don't have any poverty here [in Ladakh]"; eight years later, he was complaining, "If only you could help us Ladakhis, we're so poor".

What is poverty, according to these two definitions? On the first, it seems to indicate a poorer quality of life, the lack of an enjoyable modicum of the things one needs - "enough to drink, enough to eat" as a Ladakhi phrase went. On the second, it has been reduced to lack of money, and the things - of Western origin - that money can buy. The innumerable economic paradoxes this sets up in practice, some of them familiar from the free trade and globalization debate, are well explained here, in more detail than I have space to reproduce: how villagers begin selling traditional brass and wooden jars for a pittance and replacing them with tins or plastic buckets; how construction work with imported concrete becomes "cheaper" than building traditional houses from local mud bricks; how the Ladakhis' environment becomes urbanised and aesthetically degraded at the same time that individuals count themselves richer. But of equally great importance, for the psychological or rhetorical reason just mentioned, is the paradox in theory. In Ladakh and the similarly placed independent kingdom of Bhutan, the standard of living is "actually quite high... People provide their own basic needs, and still have beautiful art and music, and significantly more time for leisure activities than people in the West" (p. 143). Yet going by GNP, Bhutan's subsistence economy ranks it as one of the poorest countries in the world. In effect no distinction is made "between the homeless on the streets of New York and Bhutanese or Ladakhi farmers". Equally absurdly, because work performed in one's own home or on one's own land is not "productive", only 10% of Ladakhis were, at the time of writing, officially classified as being "in work" at all.

I'm not competent to start a debate about statistics here, but this really made me stop and think. What does a slogan like "Make Poverty History" - which is the kind of sentiment that no-one would normally dream of questioning - actually mean in practice? Perhaps the agitatory tactics and short-term objectives selected by the 2005 campaign were in fact less problematic than its long-term aim - removing "absolute poverty". For when one looks with Norberg-Hodge's caveats in mind at the ways in which this state, or its upper limit, the "poverty threshold", are defined, one starts to wonder whether it really always equates to the classic cliche of destitution - as real as that undoubtedly is for those living in a Mumbai bustee. The World Bank sets the poverty line at $1 a day. First of all, that figure must be adjusted according to national economic conditions. Many students here at Santiniketan, for instance, spend less than that in a day, and are by no means absolutely poor: it is simply that, going by current exchange rates, a vegetarian lunch in a restaurant here will cost only 30 cents (and home cooking is of course cheaper). Secondly, even when adjusted, this measurement will always rest on the assumption that purchasing power or the lack of it must be the defining factor in quality of life - something that may not hold true in traditional economies. And some of the conventional lifestyle-based alternatives, such as the UN paper quoted on the above Wikipedia link, are so loaded with cultural bias they would astonish anyone who had spent any length of time in a Third World country: if you live in a house with a mud floor and do not get your information from the media then you are already defined as living in absolute poverty. (That would have categorized Tagore in his later years as poverty-stricken, living isolated in his mud house "Syamali" here in Santiniketan!)

Although that was not a happy example, alternatives to financial measures of poverty are needed - as Bengal's most famous Nobel laureate since Tagore, Amartya Sen (also a denizen of Santiniketan) has pointed out. The now-deposed King of Bhutan famously stated the objective of his deliberately isolationist policies as the maintenance of "Gross National Happiness". Maybe that sounds whimsical, but in fact economists have recently been taking happiness seriously as a factor in their theories. And as the Bhutanese meditations on this concept reveal, this is surely one way in which such wider topics as morality and religion must enter economics, upsetting the modern dogma that "development" and progress should be defined in purely material terms.

Tagore was of a similar mind. In a few paragraphs on the idea of "civilization" in his book The Religion of Man, he tells a story about travelling down by car with friends to Calcutta. Since there was a problem with the engine, the party had to stop numerous times in order to ask for water to help service it. In village after village people were happy to help, without thinking of charging any money for their often considerable trouble in finding water for the visitors. "The only place where a price was expected for the water given to us", he reports, "was a suburb of Calcutta, where life was richer, the water supply easier and more abundant and where progress flowed in numerous channels in all directions." It is a rather ambiguous anecdote, one must admit: as indeed much in Tagore's effort to engage with rural society was. The party of motoring urbanites already embody to the full the transformation in lifestyle that Tagore regretfully witnesses occurring in the countryside; and it is easier for the aristocrat to operate with assumptions of mutual generosity than it perhaps was for those whose lives were being swallowed by the growing metropolis. But for all that, he has a point when he contrasts the moral culture needed to offer a simple gift of water with the material civilization which has lost such an instinct: "In a few years time it might be possible for me to learn how to make holes in thousands of needles simultaneously by turning a wheel, but to be absolutely simple in one's hospitality...requires generations of training."

It is easy to forget the role that human virtues have had to play even in establishing what "material" civilization we do enjoy. We are too prone to forget that money itself is not a material but an ideal entity, its power resting entirely on trust and confidence. Businesses too need to choose morally reliable associates and employees, hence the provision of job references; where corruption rules and everyone has their hand in the till, even the maximization of profit will prove difficult. And once we are prepared to acknowledge how important the virtues of human character are within our present economic system, perhaps then we may see what virtues also lie outside it. When money does not change hands, then other concepts than trust come to the fore. Doing things for oneself builds independence and self-reliance, as Thoreau discovered in his cabin in Walden; conversely, the gift can stand at the centre of a whole network of social bonds and associated values, as sociologists from Marcel Mauss to Pierre Bourdieu have observed. To give a local example: for one of the prominent Brahmin families in rural Bengal, feeding the other villagers at festival time is a way to maintain one's social position; not to do so would be considered both mean and dishonourable. Analysing similar practices in Algeria, Bourdieu terms this "social capital": by distributing one's wealth one cultivates good social relations, which are always considered more basic and valuable. All across the Middle East and India, such attitudes permeate even what might appear to be normal market economies. When market traders assiduously cultivate your friendship, they are, perhaps, not just being "slimy" (as Western travellers are prone to think); they are attempting to convert a brief and empty monetary transaction into a more continuous social relationship. We may not think it worth the time; but is that not in the end our loss? For if we persistently refuse such overtures - and I admit, out of my lack of social adeptness I tend to do so, most of the time - then we ourselves will gradually transform a large part of our public world into what must be a worse alternative: into Thamel, a pure consumer zone, where the isolated, rootless individual wanders through a mall of luxury goods and impersonally administered services, gazing constantly, but from ever-varying angles, at the mirror of his own impatient desires.

I am, then, still persuaded by the argument of Ancient Futures: Ladakh may be an exaggerated case of postponed development, but its situation is far from unique. The tragedies of the Native American and Australian aborigine populations were not the result of "colonial" attitudes: they are another, more radical outcome of much the same process - the insistence that only Western definitions of land ownership, money, education, wealth and leisure are binding. Is it worse to have to travel miles on foot to fetch water, when this is an expected part of one's way of life - or to have that way of life and its skills laid waste, and to sit alone and unemployed at home with plentiful clean water on tap? I put that not just as a rhetorical question: it is genuinely difficult to answer, because we in the West have in fact got used to the latter kind of alternative and the values it creates. And when others want access to that sort of living, it seems like condescension, or jealousy, to suddenly begin questioning it.

In the end, I think the best thing one can do is to acquaint oneself as well as one can with the alternatives to our "developed" state, and with the dilemmas of those still "developing". Those dilemmas are real, but in their complexities they can also be very local. A subsistence economy, after all, means farming: and what one can farm and how easy it is (with or without some use of machinery) vary massively from place to place. It thus seems right to me that the most popular practical approach to "development issues" is currently not through central government, but small-scale charitable enterprise, better known as the NGO. In this part of the world one comes across NGOs everywhere. A Swiss woman I met at the Indian embassy in Kathmandu, acquainted for some 25 years with Nepal and its affairs, explained to me how - with the government still in transition and the constitution suspended - the country was virtually being run by NGOs. In the mountainous area of Jharkhand, roughly between West Bengal and the Nepalese border, numerous local initiatives were being run for the adivasis (tribal people) and poor local peasants. Here NGOs are the peaceful alternative to a more revolutionary approach: Maoist guerilla fighters, establishing enclaves independent of central government, and in the last few months constantly in the news for their attacks on local police stations. I met one NGO worker from there on the train between Santiniketan and Kolkata; in Nepal I made friends with an American girl volunteering on a project in Hazaribagh, the Nav Bharat Jagriti Kendra. And in Kathmandu itself I was given a tour of the Kumbeshwar Technical School, a completely self-sustaining, 25-year old project integrating traditional handicraft production, an orphanage and a primary school, all for the local low-caste population. In Hindu India and Nepal, these organisations are not only battling economic imbalances but also the ingrained social prejudice of the caste system. Not everything in traditional societies is organised for the "greatest happiness of the greatest number", and not everything there deserves to be endorsed just because it has perpetuated itself for generations. (I want to put on record that I do not agree with social conservatism a la Edmund Burke!) But in some cases, and Ladakh may have been one, stability corresponds to slowly-evolved contentment, not oppressive conservatism; and here we must have something to learn in building a sustainable future for our own society.