Parvati as a Maker, Baby Aeroplanes and this Mad Water

I end up in Amogh's world so frequently- the world of Harry Potter films, dinosaurs, Hanuman and more recently Ganapati-that they invariably end up being part of my poetry.What is poetry after all but quest for the child within yourself, the naughty boy ( or girl) who is undomesticated, wild,  incredibly curious and so essentially anti-social and anti-civilizational. 

That's the reason why the poetry of the Romantic age was preoccupied the world of children. I remember Amogh has also given me the first line for my next poem- हे पाणी वेडंच आहे की नाही?! which means Isnt this water mad? Well, water is always mad Amogh. I also remember the grandson of my PhD supervisor telling me after drawing a big aeroplane on the board followed by a very small aeroplane that the smaller plane is the bigger one's baby. Only a small child can think of a baby aeroplane. A child's imagination, her way of looking at the world is what people call surreal. Anyway.

Parvati, coy of finding her nosy husband peeping into her bathroom while she is taking her bath, thinks of a plan to keep the nosy parker off. She takes the dirty soot from her body ( yucks! but remember she is the daughter of mountains!) and makes a door keeper ( not to be confused with Kafka's door keeper in the Trial, but equally firm and nasty) boy out of it. ( Well goddesses have their own ways, fine women as Yeats told us, eat crazy salad with their meat) and the boy resists Shiva ( that ascetic-lover) his legal father from going into his own house. The legal father gets angry with this defiant kid and in a fit of wrath cuts off his head with his trident. 

Dr.Sudhir Kakar would see Oedipal conflict here,he would also see the filth from Parvati's body as suggesting anal phase of psychosexual development, but the father has to repent. His missus is Durga and Chandika and Kali and etc, so the poor chap has to find a replacement for his soot-son's head. He kills an elephant asura (whats that?) and fits the elephant head on the decapitated doorkeeper. This is how the God of Intelligence, the bigamous beloved deity of Maharashtra comes into existence. Well thats what Amogh's recent CD on Ganapati says.

What fascinated me was the idea of taking soot and dirt from your body and making a living human being out of it. Well is this not a metaphor for creative process? You use the dirt from your body and make something living and intelligent out of it. So it will find place in my future poems!

Translation: As an Art and a `Service'

For a change from the boring routine,I attended a seminar on Translation, Quality and Technology yesterday.It was largely meant for translators of non-literary texts. It was chiefly out of curiosity and interest in translation as an activity.It provided a refreshing change from academic seminars and literary translation. Sandhya Murthy gave a good talk on how to become a professional translator in an international and national context. She expressed her astonishment at how amatuers can barge into the area of literary translation where the angels of professional translations fear to tread. A Dutch professional translator and IT expert and an open source activist Patrick someone gave a very interesting, albeit technical lecture on open source software and translation. He also talked about his own experiences as a professional translator. Mrugesh Shah talked about unicode and multilingual softwares and Manish Soni talked about multilingual softwares and translation. He also gave a short demonstration of his own software Sulekh. Jagruti Trivedi talked about her experiences of translating Harry Potter into Gujarati. I liked the seminar and found the information about professional translation and information technology very interesting. I think literary translators, especially in India, should be more professional and serious about their craft and passion. Literary translation can only be a passion, because it is an art, and like all arts, it is also a service, and hence should be done in more professional manner. Translators should also be open to the advances in information technology, multilingual softwares, online glossaries, and TMs ( translation memories, the memories of earlier translation of lexicons, stored in translation software like Trados, Wordfast and OmegaT) and so on.
Jagruti Trivedi did a good job of organizing a seminar on such an area. There were more participants than I expected, which goes to show that in the age of globalization, the need for translation ( which implies knowledge of languages, and the knowledge of interpretation as well as the knowledge of writing well) combined with the knowledge of information technology and commerce is going to increase exponentially.

Thinking out loud about Art

I have recently renovated my msn blog. Da Vinci theme and all that. Every blog that I make seems to be about me as a writer. Is being a writer any different from being someone else? A doctor or a lawer or a mechanic or a farmer? Dont they all produce something? Arent they all creative in some sense? The writer makes art out of the activity of writing. Art, I think is not a separate category of activity but a dimention of any human activity. Art, in earlier days implied skill. Yoga is defined as the excellence in the skill in our day to day deeds. Poetry, then, becomes a certain skill in using words in a particular way. What kind of skill? What kind of way?

Entry for November 02, 2005

To be creative is to think in an off beat way and look at things in the ways that are non conventional and non-conformist. This is why art is so appealing, enigmatic and important.