NER intern Murtaza Bugti talks with poet and translator Viplav Saini about the linguistic structure of Hindi, translation as memorialization, and the aesthetic considerations in his translation of Nirmal Verma’s “Pines under Moonlight” (45.3).
Murtaza Bugti: What initially drew you to Nirmal Verma’s works? What led you to translate “Pines under Moonlight” into English?
Viplav Saini: My mother was a Reader (Associate Professor) in Hindi at Jesus and Mary College at the University of Delhi, a position she retired from only a few months before her death in 2014 at the age of sixty-four. She loved languages and had master’s degrees in Hindi and English, and wrote a PhD dissertation on Hindi and Gujarati poetry.
I remember from my childhood her copy of Shakespeare’s Richard III next to the mysteriously named Mill on the Floss next to Verma’s essay collection Cheedon Par Chandani (Pines Under Moonlight). I would go to her bookcase, open these books and run my hands over the pages, the way one examines one’s parents’ belongings, trying to figure them out. When she died, I looked for her copy of Cheedon Par Chandani and couldn’t find it, but the music of the title (the ch sounds, the different da sounds, mixing with the na sounds) stayed, tucked somewhere in my ear.
Eight years after her death, visiting Bangalore on a trip to India from New York City where I now live, I saw copies of the book in Rang Shankara Theatre’s bookshop. I bought one out of idle curiosity—there wasn’t a particular plan to read it; I just wanted to thumb through it, like I used to.
The next morning, waking up at 5 AM, jetlagged—still in between countries, time zones, languages—I started reading bits from the essay aloud to myself. Letting Hindi animate the machinery of my mouth and throat loosened something and brought it into view. What was it? A desire to connect to it—to Hindi, and to my mother, through Hindi. But how? While I can speak Hindi fluently, and read it easily, I hadn’t read more than a few pages of Hindi in the previous decade, and certainly had gaps in my vocabulary that would make reading slow and clumsy.
Translation was the only way to read Verma. So, I opened up two Hindi-English dictionaries on my browser, and a thesaurus and translated a couple of the sentences. Something strange happened next. I had been writing prose and poetry for almost eight years at the time, but suddenly felt closer to the translated sentences than to any piece of original writing I had done. So, I thought let’s try and translate the whole thing—and it has been a singularly rewarding and enriching experience.
MB: Nirmal Verma is considered by many to be a pioneer of the “New Story” (Nai Kahani) literary movement in Hindi literature. How, in your view, does “Pines under Moonlight” engage with this literary movement? How might this work, and the movement as a whole, enrich English literature through translation?
VS: What struck me about the essay right away was how contemporary the solitary and melancholic narrator of Verma’s essay feels. We start with him as a child looking at the mountains from his parents’ home in Shimla. That home is soon left behind—the first of several dislocations—for Delhi and then Czechoslovakia, and the world. Over the course of the essay, we find the narrator looking, intensely, back at the landscape of his childhood from hotel rooms in various towns around Himachal Pradesh and Kashmir.
Verma is sensitive to light, alert to subtle differences in shades of dark, of shadows, attuned to the liminality of color, as day turns to night, but also to how the bright flits over the course of an afternoon. Mist enchants him; so do the pinpricks of light on pine trees. His fascination with the play of light and shadows in the mountains is also a metaphor for his shifting moods and melancholic disposition.
I think essayists will be inspired by the novel formal structure of this essay, its juxtapositions, its sudden leaps across time and place. I hope this translation will be yet another window for new readers into Verma’s work.
MB: Verma alludes to Thomas Mann and his Magic Mountain in “Pines under Moonlight.” Mann’s novel is rich in aesthetic choices that reflect his themes, characters, and philosophical musings, but one—in the context of your translation—stands out to me most: Mann’s narrative style. Mann’s long, winding sentences create a dreamlike quality which, in my opinion, is also present in your translation. How much of this quality is reflected in Verma’s work? As a translator, how do you negotiate the stylistic decisions made by an author, their literary influences, and the aesthetic expectations of a western, English-speaking audience?
VS: Certainly the entrancing, dreamlike quality of the sentences was present in the original, and drew me to the work; it was also important to me that I carry it over in the translation. Consider this sentence from the third paragraph:
The mountain peaks of Switzerland are different from Shimla’s—I never went there, never saw them, but that magic mountain where Hans Castrop, lost in snowy caverns, encountered a colossal truth, can I even say today how often as a child I experienced a momentary, fleeting sensation of it?
I appreciated the lilting cadence of this sentence in the original, which I tried to transport into English, but I was also aware of its capaciousness: juxtaposing Shimla and Switzerland, Verma as a child and Hans Castrop, the colossal truth and the momentary and fleeting sensation of it. Also the juxtaposition of the writer as a child and the writer at 33, ruefully admitting that perhaps it is not possible to fully re-enter his consciousness as a child.
The reference to the epic 700-page novel in this sentence is perhaps Verma telling us how the essay itself is a momentary fleeting sensation of a more epic account of his childhood, maybe the only account possible, the way poetry sometimes reaches for the unsayable by glancing off prose.
In this sentence Verma is also hinting at his influences, which included canonical Western writers like Woolf, Proust, and Kafka. I chose to remain very faithful to the text so there are no drastic departures in tone or aesthetics—I would like to think—in the translation. But certainly one would suspect that the translation is an amalgam of the author’s and the translator’s aesthetic preferences and literary influences, the most prominent of which for me, to the extent I can identify any, would be V. S. Naipaul’s Enigma of Arrival. When I read Verma’s descriptions of snow, I immediately thought of Naipaul describing snow beginning to fall at his cottage in Wiltshire.
Certainly this essay blurs the line between poetry and prose. My own training as a poet is therefore another influence on the tone of the translation, sensitive as I was to the soundscape of the original, which I tried to reproduce an analog of in the translation.
MB: On a similar note, how do you choose to highlight the cultural and linguistic values present in Hindi literature when translating into English?
VS: What I have found perhaps most bewitching about this essay is the disappearing act that Verma pulls over the course of it. We begin with a line of dialogue, but for the remainder of the piece no one speaks (in fact only one other person, the dak bungalow’s caretaker, is even mentioned); the essay concludes with the sound of figs falling, which the narrator hears, or imagines hearing, in his sleep.
Verma is very interested in disappearance, and death. Consider him on the porch of a house he has just arrived at in the mountains:
My whole being feels buried in the endless folds of some impalpable haze. As if I am no longer sitting in the chair on the porch, and only my overcoat is left, hanging on the blue wall of mist.
There is an ego-lessness to this essay, and an interest in contraction, that perhaps goes along with the linguistic structure of Hindi sentences, where verb follows object. In a Hindi sentence, verb and tense are not revealed till the very end (I/the car/driving/was), something readers of English—where the verb seems stronger, more active, appearing earlier (I was driving the car)—are not used to. Of course, this nuance was lost in translation.
MB: What was the most challenging aspect of translating Verma’s work? Did your translation hinge on a specific passage or idea found in “Pines under Moonlight”?
As my eyes swept across the essay, one particular sentence seemed to glow brighter than the others. “कमरे में हल्की, फीकी-सी चाँदनी बिखर आई थी” I translated as: “A faint, dim moonlight had spread into the room.”
Spread? Or, scattered? Spilled. And so, it began. Over the next few days, the following paragraph (translation mine) came into view:
A faint, dim moonlight had spilled into the room. Outside the window, across the intervening liquid dark, the snow-topped peaks of Khilanmarg. Atoms of moonlight slid down the length of the ice, sparkling like touch-me-nots. Everything was quietly collapsing into everything else. White specks of crushed marble seemed to rain down gently. A yellow luminescence, spreading over the grass of the polo ground outside the hotel, quivered again and again in the wind. Clouds, snow, moonlight—each had a different color, a different cadence. The glittering notes of an illusive music seemed to have gathered, quietly, the entire woodland within their dreamlike wings, and the icy hills of Khilanmarg seemed to have slid down, dragged by the silken cords of moonlight, to right outside my hotel room, and I just had to reach through the window to touch them.
The chiaroscuro of this passage compelled me: the faint dim moon light against the liquid dark, the trembling yellow luminescence, the snow raining down like crushed marble. Verma uses the motif of light versus dark, childhood versus death, sound versus silence, over and over in the essay.
To your other question: maybe not challenges necessarily, but I could talk about a couple of choices I made while translating. One way in which Verma produces a sense of “an eternal present” is by switching between present and past tenses while describing the same scene from memory. For the translation, knowing American readers might be jarred by this, I chose to maintain a consistent past tense for the first half of the essay and a consistent present tense for the second half.
Verma likes to use double adjectives: “a faint, dim moonlight,” “some solitary, desolate trail,” “the unpassable, unreachable peaks of the mountains.” I think it would have been fine to omit one adjective in each case, but I also found that keeping the second adjective, letting it ring against the first, delaying the appearance of the object being described, created a satisfying tension and poetry.
MB: Could you share something about your relationship with Hindi? Did you grow up speaking it? Or was it something you encountered in a school-setting? Does your relationship with the language influence how you choose to translate?
VS: I was born into a Hindi-speaking household. As I mentioned, my mother taught Hindi at the university. Hindi was also the first language of my father, who was born to illiterate farmers in a village on the outskirts of Delhi; he learned English in school but his slow progress hindered his early academic career in law and management, until through painstaking effort he mastered English. At my own school (like many, even most, schools across Delhi), Hindi was considered a hurdle to mastering English, and to be taking up space that should be ceded to English, the language in which upward socioeconomic mobility was possible. Parents were instructed to talk to their children at home only in English.
It is safe to say that, like almost everyone around me, I stopped reading in Hindi after ninth grade, when it was no longer a compulsory subject on the curriculum. Even to this day I have never read novels in Hindi. But I am fluent in spoken Hindi. I am funnier in Hindi, able to summon a wider variety of voices and references than are possible in English, able to leap farther across time and geographies. Like most Hindi speakers, when I am talking to another Hindi speaker, I speak in sentences that mix in English.
But I should also mention my bodily response to Hindi: it is my mother tongue two times over. It was the language that I was drenched in growing up, and the language that my mother taught for a living. When I look at Hindi text on the page, I become uncomfortably aware of an agitation in my arms—I can feel the blood gush—I sometimes have to look away. Maybe I should take Hindi more seriously.
The trigger for this essay was an impulse to memorialize my mother through an act of reading and writing fused in translation. I am becoming increasingly aware however, that it might have opened a door to my own growth as a writer. As an emerging writer, I used to look to Indians writing in English for inspiration—Kiran Desai, Vikram Seth, V. S. Naipaul—but now I think, why not also Bhisham Sahni, why not Nirmal Verma?
Viplav Saini has previously published poems, a translation, and an essay in journals such as POETRY, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Massachusetts Review. A native of Delhi, India, he is a clinical professor of economics at NYU. He is a Kundiman fellow and received a Katharine Bakeless award from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
Murtaza Bugti is a student intern at NER and a senior at Middlebury College (Class of 2025). He double-majors in comparative literature and German.
Photo courtesy of Debi Singh Saini