 Hello and welcome. I'm Allison Mark and Powell Japanese literary translator and former co-chair of the Penn Translation Committee. My co-host today is Larissa Kaiser, who many of you will recognize from our week five program on the 2020 manifesto on translation. Larissa is an award-winning translator from the Icelandic and the current co-chair of the Penn Translation Committee, as well as a co-organizer of Translating the Future, the conference you're now attending. Thank you Allison and thank you all for joining us for the 17th installment of our weekly program on translating the classics. Today's conversation will feature Lori Patton, who has translated the Bhagavad Gita and is also president of Middlebury College, the sponsor of today's program. Lori will be joined by Gopal Sukhu, a translator of classical Chinese poetry and professor at Queens College and Vivek Narayanian, a poet, writer, editor and translator who is a former fellow at the Coleman Center, one of our conference partners. You can read their full and illustrious bios on the Center for the Humanities website. We've just finished celebrating the seventh year of August as Women in Translation Month, which aims to highlight women and non-binary writers and translators to address gender disparity in the field of literary translation. The past year saw the publication of more classics appearing in their first translations by women, including Michael Nyland's The Art of War by Swinsa and Maria Devanna Hedley's Beowulf. In her translator's note to her edition of the Odyssey, Emily Wilson rejects the quote gendered metaphor of the faithful translation, whose worth is always secondary to that of a male authored original. Instead, she points to a translator's quote responsibility to acknowledge her own agency and wrestle in explicit and conscious ways, not only with the multiple meanings of the original in its own culture, but with her own text, but what her own text may mean and the effects it may have on its readers. Because the Odyssey, and I might add the text that we're discussing today, are such foundational text. Wilson asserts that quote, it is particularly important for the translator to think through and tease out their values and to allow the reader to see the cracks and fissures in these constructed fantasies. It is in this spirit of reflection considered critique and acknowledgement of a translator's agency that we welcome out these re or untranslations. They are daring interpretations and creative works in their own right, pushing both reader and translator to look at familiar canonical works with new eyes. And we hope to see more such projects taken on by translators and encouraged by publishers in the future. As usual, a Q&A session will follow today's conversation. Please email your questions for Gopal, Laurie and Vivek to translating the future 2020 at gmail.com. We'll keep questions anonymous, unless you note in your email that you would like us to read your name. Translating the future will continue in its current form through the rest of this month. During the conference's originally planned dates in late September, several marvelous larger scale events will happen. We'll be here every Tuesday through the rest of this month for the rest with the week's hour long conversation. Please join us next Tuesday, September 8 for translating trauma with Ellen Elias Bursach, Aaron Robertson and Julia Sanchez, moderated by Queenie Sukadia, and keep checking the Center for the Humanity site for future events. The future is convened by Penn America's translation committee, which advocates on behalf of literary translators, working to foster a wider understanding of their art, and offering professional resources for translators, publishers, critics, bloggers and others with an interest in international literature. The committee is currently co-chaired by Lynn Miller-Lachman and myself. For more information, look for translation resources at penn.org. If you know anyone who was unable to join us for the live stream today, a recording will be available afterward on the HowlRound and Center for the Humanities sites. Before we turn it over to Gopal, Laurie and Vivek, we'd like to offer our utmost gratitude to today's sponsor, Middlebury College, and to our partners at the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center CUNY, the Martin E. Siegel Theater Center, the Coleman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and Penn America, and to the masters of dark zoom magic at HowlRound who make this live stream possible. And now, hand it over to our speaker. We're still just waiting for Gopal to become visible. Oh, sorry about that. You are definitely with us, but we can't see you. Oh, that's strange. My video is on. I don't know what the problem is. I seem, oh, let's stop again. I don't know what's going on. You know, Gopal, I think what we might want to do is just start and maybe you could work with Travis to see how you can become visible to us. But you can hear us. Okay. Yes. Yes, I can hear you. Great. All right. Well, first of all, I just want to say thank you so much to Allison and Marissa. Just wonderful to be part of this. I think we're all so excited to be talking to each other. And I also just want to say on behalf of Middlebury, how honored we are to be able to co-sponsor this or co-host this session with these really wonderful, my fellow co-panelists today. This would have been right after the ending of our Breadlove Writers Conference had we hosted it in person. And as you know, Breadlove also sponsors a translator's conference earlier on. And so we feel like we are amongst kindred spirits and we've left at the opportunity to be able to really support this incredible work that everyone's doing. So I'm going to switch hats now from my admin role to the translator and poet reflection role. And I just wanted to start with three or four reflections. Allison and Marissa asked us to think about our language and the relationship to our language. So my work as you may have read from the bios in Sanskrit and early Indian religions, although I'm now doing a contemporary ethnography of the lives of women Sanskritists in post-colonial India. So I have some contemporary understanding and engagement with the language. So one thing that I would say is I've always had a focus on trying to open up Sanskrit. It's understood from the very early period, even in the earliest satires we have about Sanskrit that it's an elite language. It is one that is muttered should not be fully clearly heard in all situations because it is a sacred language. There's a lot more to say about that. But that understanding of Sanskrit is a very interesting and important part of someone who is from an Anglo-American heritage learning in a post-colonial environment where concerns about neocolonialism emerge in some very interesting ways. Is Sanskrit even a language that we should engage in a post-colonial environment? That's one of the big questions that certainly arose for me in graduate school and beyond. And so after having published a couple of books in this area on poetics and ancient Vedic material, the earliest material that we have, I was asked to translate the Bhagavad Gita. It would have been the 251st translation it is. And the question is, why do that? And my first response is always, well there is no intellectual reason to do the 251st translation of this Sanskrit classic. However, there are generational reasons. And the last Penguin classic was in the mid 20th century and was done by someone who wanted to really see Christian residences. And it was of its time and it was time for something new for Penguin. And so I really narrowed my scope into saying, there's no intellectual reason. We have many wonderful translations. I astute right away the definitive, the idea of any definitive translation. I disagree with that idea deeply. And I think there are many translations that are as good if not better than mine. But I did feel that it was important to take a new view of gender in my translation. So I do not use the gender pronoun him. I use one except in one place in the text. Second, I wanted to focus on the poetic simplicity that I think had been not as present in many of the Victorian English translations. Finally, I wanted it to be concrete language. There's a lot in the Gita that is uses a lot of early Indian language Vedic language that is deeply concrete and I think even more poetic. So for those three reasons I thought it was worth giving the world a very small alternative to the many other wonderful translations that were out there. Okay, but I'll begin with that in a brief way and then maybe turn to Gopal who is now newly visible. Next, and then we can go to the bank. Oh, you're muted. I think you're still, we can't hear you. So Gopal I think now if you're working on the sound we've got the vision together but since we're working on the sound I'm going to turn to make next as you work on the sound. So hello everyone and excited to be on this panel. I think of myself in some ways a bit of an interloper in the world of translators, because I'm not a language expert of any sort and probably don't have the discipline to learn new languages by the traditional means. I'm grateful to the community of translators that I have been among in recent years because they've been so welcoming. In my case, I found myself in my engagement with different texts, driven by kind of necessity as a writer, and more specifically as a writer and the tradition of Indian poetry in English. And you can see this more or less from the very beginnings of Indian poetry English in English in the 19th century, with a writer like to do that, which is, you know, driven by a necessity to investigate reconcile challenge one's own past. The forces and the discourses that have shaped me and to be in a kind of critical dialogue with all of that. And as we go on I want to talk about two texts. One, Valmiki is Ramayana, which I've been working on for the past decade, and recently completed a book of poems on, which is not a translation, but what I've called a writing through kind of critical conversation through poems between Valmiki and contemporary poetry in English. But one that incorporates translation and also plays with and tries to open up the translation idea of translation in various ways. And then also maybe like to say a bit about project I've just started the return to, which is the current okay and ancient Tamil anthology of short poems four to eight lines and length, which I've just started working on an earnest. And, well, I'll talk, you know, as we go on, I'll talk more and more detail about my method and my inspiration and how I came to Valmiki and the current okay and so on. But, but I just wanted to maybe, you know, propose a few things. One is that, and these are these are personal things. I really want to echo Laurie's idea against the idea of definitive translation. And maybe propose something more personal, which I found for me which is the first point would be that every translation, you know, is a unique encounter, as I see it, between the concerns, personality, etc. of the translator and that of the text, and various things follow from there including the ethics of translation. And what I found myself doing is not the kind of objective translation that seeks to produce a single authoritative version that replaces all the others. And, you know, there's this kind of I think, you know, a false idea that we have of translations becoming obsolete. You know, and being kind of replaced in every generation I think that's pernicious. But I want to propose something more personal. Let's say, both the strength and limitation of what I do. And one of the things I've thought about as translation as a kind of soul fusion technology, a translation is a place where souls start with the soul of the translator and the soul of the text are fused. This is especially true, I think with so called ancient text because they're distant from us not only in terms of language, but also in sort of tons of time. And the other thing I want to propose is that translation is a fundamentally collaborative process. And again, not only between the translator and the text, but also that you can't but be indebted to all the translators that came to this text, or the specific area of a language before you. So what I find is that even if one rejects the work of a previous translator, one is still indebted, because they've given you something to reject. So for instance, with the current okay the most famous previous translators a caram engine, who really introduced the poems to the world. And although I would say would disagree with and reject a lot of his choices in my work. He's given me something to reject, which he didn't have when he went at it so again, the idea of multiplicity and final thing I want to say to start off as a proposal. It's that, for me, the biggest revelation through the process of working with these texts as a writer and not a scholar. And the past 10 years of so of getting into the weeds by various means is just how much is still not known about them how little, for instance of the reading of specific lines has actually been settled. And I would say this is true for Valmiki and the cook, okay, definitely. And I was also thinking recently of you know, a poem like Wolf and a worker and the Anglo Saxon tradition where, you know, virtually every word in a way is not settled. And I think this is not the general public's understanding. They usually tend to assume that the meaning and interpretation of these canonical texts is already well settled. And has to merely be conveyed in an updated contemporary language. So although there have been all these different layers of critical interpretation and silting, there is still I think this matrix of raw mystery. And this applies to poetry especially because poetry is mystery. And so that can be opened up again and again. And I think for the text I've been talking about, it's not too much to say that these texts can keep telling us new things that earlier generations perhaps could not even hear in them. So that those are, those are some kind of proposals for for things I've been thinking about. Vivek, I love those I'm hoping that Gopal's volume is now ready you're unmuted for us. So can you say, can you hear Gopal Vivek. I can't hear him but I do I see the the unmuting, I see the unmuting sign went on now. Yeah, so what I would suggest that you do. The process is mute your unmute yourself, but mute your stop your video and see if that makes a difference. Can you now say something. No, looks like we still can't hear, I'm hoping that Travis can still work with you. So what I'm going to do Gopal is I'm going to respond to Vivek but turn back to you in a second and Travis some assuming that you can continue to work with Gopal to make sure that we can hear him at some point and it's not just my computer. So hopefully the two of you can continue to work on this. So I'm going to try Gopal you want to just try and say something and see if we can hear you, trying to say something still doesn't work. Okay, okay, so I'll come back to Gopal but Vivek I love many of the things you said. I will tell you that Ramanujan was one of my teachers, one of my major teachers at Chicago and one of the things that really struck me. I was trying to decide and I, I'm sure you have some thoughts about this about whether to be a scholar or writer, which I was obsessed with in graduate school. He looked at me at one point with, you know, only a stare that someone like him could give and said, just right. But Gopal, you know, it sort of didn't matter what genre was, I just done some work in publishing poems and, you know, was filled with all the identity crises that only someone in their mid 20s trying to figure out a professional identity can have and there he was and he just said it's very simple, you know just right. So I'm really excited to hear from you, given that the introducer of an ancient language classical text that is not known to the world can have certain liberties and also certain limitations I think as you rightly said, in a way that the person who is saying I actually want to do it this way, that you're taking up is, you know, you have a whole different perspective on it in a way that is has its own limitations and advantages. The other thing that I think was a wonderful thought was how collaborative. We are with other translators I know for the Gita there were two or three particular ones that I felt that one of my other mentors, that says frequently that the Gitas that that on frequently our understanding of Sanskrit in the contemporary world is not Sanskrit it's actually Victorian English. Yeah, it's sort of true at a certain level and so the simplicity of my verses I tried in the shloka move. I didn't do short long short long I didn't want to imitate I didn't think it would work in English but what I tried to do was no more than eight syllables per line and always eight lines so I gave it a loose preform understanding. Very much like the poems that that I have written in my three books of poems, very similar kind of deep simplicity. And I was reacting all the time to the ornate, you know flowery thing. But what's been very interesting is some folk don't like the turn to contemporary idiom for the Gita because in their view, the only English that the Gita can be poured into literally must be something more ornate because that's what would the English reflection of the high Sanskrit language right so. So there's this very interesting conversation happening all the time as I wrestle with that. I'd love your thoughts on that as well. How you wrestle with a K Ramanujan would be a deep personal interest as I hope for for others as well who are translating and wrestling with their predecessors. Yeah, I mean, I mean, you know, with with with Ramanujan. The thing that's fascinating to me is the sort of traffic or the sort of portal between his translations and his own poetry that we can see kind of moving back and forth, you know, and and so so it seems, you know, as with me it seems that that that his approach to the current okay poems is also a matter of him working out his own poetics. And in some ways, channeling pound, obviously, and you know, and and and and, you know, sort of working out his obsessions, you know, like all sexually Brahmins growing up with this kind of sexually repressed as with me sex obsessed. And so so that and you know and so so there are various questions that he's asking himself and various things that he's trying to work out in his own poetics. And, and as I said that that is very much the sort of tradition of Indian English poetry. I mentioned told that earlier, who is writing the 19th century and you know, dies very young died stage of, I think, 25, but but towards the end of her life is working with Sanskrit. And she's translating a story from the Vishnu Purana. And in the middle of the translation she stops and disagrees with everything disagrees with some character that's and comes in so so it's a it's a it's a very, you know, a personal process. And, but for many years. Ramachand's translations had more or less replaced the sanghan poems in my mind. So, so I in fact I felt no need to, to, to, to, you know, see what what look at other translations even and and even show up in original and and and so and then I think that that happened for a lot of people that in some way they were so compelling and so original and so fresh that they had kind of replaced the original. And, and the break for me came for when I started to look at some other translations and comparing them with translations done by others. And I started to wonder, and then eventually, you know, I found myself back to going back towards the original. It was a long process and in my case, you know, a crucial thing was actually this this this text here by Eva Wilden, which came out just a couple of years ago. It's a critical edition of the current okay, the short poems. And just to show you a little bit about how I've been working with this text, similar to how I've been working with Balmiki. See if I can do this. Yeah. So, so you'll see that that there in this corner is the original, and then the transliteration. And then, you know, here you have variations between the text. And here you have a word for word translation. And at bottom here you have a kind of summary of various previous critical readings of this particular form. And then you have here a translation done by Eva Wilden but what I found was so moving is that she says, you know, she has also furnished a complete English translation. The purpose of which is not to offer a polished version that brushes over the awkwardnesses, but rather a tool that opens up lays open the difficulties of interpretation. So I moved by, you know, her kind of effort as a scholar first to go back to the original manuscripts and compare, but also to be able to offer someone like me. You know, I speak the Tamil language and I had a early encounter with it through the script. You know, I read very hauntingly so it offers someone like me a way to kind of have these words and how to kind of put them together. But in one way that doesn't close them up that that shows all the different ways and the kind of arguments that critics are being having about how to read the lines and you know, that shows that shows the kind of the mystery of these texts and in many cases, we don't even they don't even seem to have figured out what these lines are said or how to put them together in certain ways. And so that was kind of an opening for me. And so one of the things was that, you know, Ramajan and many of the translations kind of reconstruct the poem from within. And, and, yeah, sorry. I just was going to say, there's so much to say and I think that question of allowing the both the mystery of the language as well as the fact that in India. And in other Asian materials, it's different than the Greek, it's different than the Latin it's there's there's a mystery because there hasn't been the same amount of translation happening. There's I think a double mystery. I think up house and I want to. I think I heard Gopal. Yeah, I hope I didn't disturb you. Yay, we hear you. We've been jumping all around but we can't wait for you to join us. I'm very sorry. I'm a tech dunce. And, among other things, but anyway, it's one half that I wear, not very proudly anymore. But anyway, here I am. Let's see where am I. Okay, a short introduction. I got into Chinese originally through the study of Buddhism. But I did the full hearty thing of trying to learn all the Buddhist languages at the same time, Sanskrit, Pali and Chinese. And it was a TC. And so I went off of the Chinese direction. Of course, I never quite gave up the others. All right, I'm the text that I'm working on, or the text that I've published on is known as the songs of true in English. And the main problem with that is, well, if I can go back to the beginning. I, of course, cut my teeth in Asian studies on translations like most people in the Western world. One peculiar thing that I noticed about a foundational poem in Chinese, and that poem is known as the Li Sao, sometimes translated as encountering sorrow. There are at least two translations of it out. And what I, but what I noticed with all of the translators is that they admitted that they had no idea what the poem means or very little idea of what the poem means. And much was written on this. And I found this a very curious problem. How could it be that a poem is considered great, but no one knows what it means. And when I when I looked at the Chinese commentators, I found that there also was a great deal of disagreement and bafflement about what the poem means. So I looked at the poem and realized that there's something very odd about it. As you all, all of the participants here know that when you read an ancient text, you are dependent on commentaries on ancient commentaries. And when you read an ancient commentary, especially when you are a beginner, as I was in those days, you trust it. You try, you try it, you try to follow it because you have nothing else. And in doing that, I found that they were what I decided I wanted to get into this commentary literature to find out what is going on. And the disagreements were appalling. And the disagreements not only went across space in terms of different people that different, you know, at the same time, disagreeing, disagreeing, but also across time. And I found that I had to find out what was behind the commentary and behind the disagreements. Long story short, the problem was ideology and politics, which is to say that as is the case in a number of many ancient cultures, the commentator had an ideological acts to grind. And following the tradition, he basically used the hermeneutical tools that were available to him. And commented on the poem, glossed the poem in a way that would be convenient for him during the period that he was writing. And to put this a little bit more succinctly, because I think we want to get on with the discussion, the poet was something of a patron saint of loyal dissent during the Han dynasty. And the people who were commenting on his poetry were opposing those who were attempting to create a new ideology, wherein the emperor would be considered above criticism. So they were using the poet and the poetry as a kind of, as their hero, as a kind of effigy of their movement. And so they commented on the poem that way. And it was through basically uncovering all of this that I was able to get back to a coherent reading of the poem. And I'll leave it there. And we can perhaps go on in the discussion. But that's essentially what was going on. And so by doing that, I finally managed to come up with at least one coherent explanation of the poem, perhaps not the coherent one. And which is perhaps a little step forward, you know, in, at least Western scholarship. Okay, so I'll leave it there. Well, we were just talking about the fact that we have an allergy to the idea of the definitive and I love the way you framed that one step. But what strikes me about all three of us and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this is the role of commentary in poetry, particularly in ancient classical work right so we all laugh with there's so many commentaries on the Gita and it's sort of assumed to be ideological, and precisely the way you're talking about. It's laughter, because it's, there's, there's so many that you are sort of overwhelmed, but you know that each one is going to give you the key, you know, and claim that key in a particular way. And that that question of commentary is, is commentary can can do two things in a poem one is and live in it in a way that you've never thought, you know, or help you with, hey pats will come and I you know words that only occur once where meaning is, you know, there are two or three levels of obscurity right. And then there's also commentary that dead ends. And this is something I think about a lot commentary that gives you alternative words. There's simply sort of it's almost like a thesaurus almost and so I've noticed in my own writing of poetry, as well as in translating ancient poems that my relationship to commentary is highly dichotomous right I go back and forth. I mean my relationship to it every time I try and do translation. I don't know if either of you have the vague mentioned commentary earlier too so I'm really delighted that that has come up for all three of us. Yes, yes, and I. Yes, in fact, will perhaps be vacant can speak to that because it is well let me put it this way. We have to use the commentary. We have to use them. And there is. And as you say, they're, there's often, they're often very, very valuable things in it. But you have, you know, as they put it, what, what kind of what's silting, do you get rid of and what's silting key. And the silting is, you know, in case of ancient languages, such as Chinese and Sanskrit. It's thousands of years old, in many cases. Well, you know, I mean, one thing I should explain about the Valmiki how I got into the Valmiki was. Who is the translator of the penguin abridged Valmiki. And, but also, I think, really a groundbreaking scholar of Valmiki in that I would say her her readings of it are more like closer to less logical, if that makes sense and more closer to kind of literary criticism and and my project is dedicated to her and she bought a decade ago she called the workshop to for Indian English poets to engage with Valmiki. So that was a kind of that that was its way to an entry point into it which kind of opened that out that there was something more immediate about that reading. Whereas much of what is written on the Ramayana is kind of relies very heavily just on the kind of commentaries and in the way, trying to kind of convey what supposedly what the tradition from within transmits. That's one thing the other thing is of course the Ramayana is an incredibly layered in terms of the various commentaries that have appeared of it and really the various Ramayanas and and and that's one thing that's kind of interesting about it which is that I think what you could call translations, when the Ramayana Valmiki moves from Sanskrit into Tamil of Kamban or Tulsi. I think that these can legitimately be called translations because they've clearly studied the Valmiki very closely. And when they want to the Hindi Ramayana Tulsi Hindi Ramayana they follow it very closely when they want to. And then at other times, the translation diverges it draws from elsewhere it cut scenes shots that it rewrite scenes. So, so the, the history of the, the versions of the Ramayana or the sort of translations of the Ramayana has also been a process of kind of rewriting and reinventing. So, so the, so, which is to say that that that every translation in a way is also a commentary, the translation, I think, encodes a certain reading of the text, and sometimes a willful reading of the text, even though it may not be explicit about that. And so, and so, and so you have so so so essentially what it does what these commentaries and these different from it produces multiple Ramayanas, many Ramayanas, as Ramajan said, and, and, and, and, and I would argue, what I think is fascinating is that Valmiki itself as a singular text also contains many Ramayanas in it. Like it is already multiple. And so, so while in a sense if, if, if, if we're going to kind of rest on a particular commentary or rest on the most recent commentary, it can be suffocating. There's another way to look at it, which is that essentially produces multiple texts of personal producers are kind of multiplicity of texts and that's what. So, so I think that that that's perhaps for me that became a very empowering thing that when I could see these different commentaries and different versions were actually creating this kind of multiplicity that were in dialogue with each other. That then created a space for me to create my own Ramayana, which has faced it is just another reading of the Ramayana with its own limitations and something I'm kind of throw on to that massive pile of Ramayanas that already exist. You make a really interesting point, which is, and our ship, by the way, is a friend from graduate school and so we work together she's amazing and we use, I use her translations for my early India classes, and I agree with you completely around the compelling interpretations of Vomiki and Ramayana. The thing I would say that's so interesting about this, though, is that that call for poets to engage, you know, with the reminder that you're mentioning. It also suggests that poetry itself is a form of commentary and I actually, you know, the three works that I've done on all of them are the first is poems to a Hindu year, which are calm. They are really commentaries on Hindu holidays. The second is based in the Jewish tradition, and very much commentaries on biblical passages, you know, various kinds. The third is based on home and commentaries on architectural elements like roof window hallway, etc. But I realized a long time ago that my that the poetic voice I am most happy with, including in the Gita translation is one where there's a structure upon which I am commenting. And so I think you know the Sanskrit is fine move is sort of self originating understanding of poetry. I've always been somewhat suspicious of, even though the earliest Vedic poets in India understood themselves to be in some ways fine move but they were apprehending something, a deity usually a vision of a deity to which they were responding so even there. There's a dialogical but also commentarial element to poetry which I think is, you know, so interesting and fascinating in its own right. I can't wait to hear what Gopal says about this and see brought up the commentary and got us going on this. Gopal are you still there. Yes, perfect. Yeah, we can hear you we can't see you but hearing you is is lovely. I don't know what's going on, but we can hear you. It's very interesting. Of course, both of you are talking about commentary and I, and of course, you, you are the was at the Sanskritist and so I, what I'd like to ask you is from your point of view, would you would you ever. Was there ever a time in India when commentary was controlled by a central authority. You mean culturally or in terms of religiously or Well, yeah, let me let me give you an example. China, the, it was the imperial government. Yes, that was what was Orthodox commentary and what wasn't right and this system broke down only after a few thousand years. Yeah. So it's an interesting question. I would say a couple of things about that the first is, I think I did a paper comparing not being in any way focused on Chinese or educated as you are but comparing for Shenz's view of language and an early edema logician and Sanskrit Yaska view of language and the scariest thing for Shenz is to that it's that that there could be several meanings to a word and I'm sure you know much more about this than I did that I do and the last thing for Yaska is that there are in the more alternative etymologies that you can give for a word this is the first etymological dictionary in the fifth century CE roughly the more powerful the word is and of course I'm, you know, very much attracted to the and fascinated by the first but so I'm somewhat familiar from having read Shenz and at what you're talking about. I think you certainly within particular monasteries particular schools of thought particular they don't as an early Indian there would be orthodoxies. Yes. And there are certainly kingdoms where patrons would want a particular kind of translation. Yes. But the kind of thing that you see, or that I am only a student of and learning just a little bit about in China you wouldn't see at all you see instead something like a proliferation. When I was part of a comparative China India panel we all decided we would read the others texts so I was reading Chinese texts and sinologists are reading Indian texts. And we laughed because we all came to this very interesting thing which was exactly the stereotypes we were trying to get away from where the sinologists would say you know, the Indian text seem a little too loose and free and the sinologists would say yes and the Chinese text seem a little uptight about language you know and there we were again back in our stereotypes, but that's a long answer to question but it's a question that delights me and so I'm grateful for it. And this is this is very interesting because what Vivek was talking about you know the proliferation of Romanis. And, and also what what you said, we, what I'm talking about what I had to break through in China is at least at least in one instance, and maybe the a commentary tradition that precluded certain readings. In other words, instead of allowing a proliferation, it controlled the readings and controlled controlled if you want different versions of the story. And this, this was so intensely applied to the particular poem that I was concerned with that it turned it into an incoherent poem. Now when I say incoherent, of course, you know, one could argue about exactly what that means. But I do believe in a thing called world literature. And before, before the, the, what my project was, was, was to take this poem out of the context of the pure, a purely Chinese culture with all the controversies, and to make it available for various readers. But in other words, to break the hold that the commentators had on it in China itself. And if I if, well, perhaps I can give you an example. And I should I should say that this what what the, the Chinese commentarial tradition did was a bit what the rabbinical and the early church fathers did to, for example, the song of Solomon, I mean, which is an example that's used over and over again. In the early church fathers, you had this idea that the song of Solomon is not an erotic poem. It is about Christ's love of the church. And of course what's part of that, of course, is a whole hermeneutical culture, which, because of course, if Solomon wrote it, which everyone believed, how could he be talking about Christianity. But of course, there is, there is the hermeneutical theory that what is in the Old Testament, pre figures what's in the New Testament, and this was all part of that hermeneutical maneuver to turn the song of Solomon into a Christian poem. A similar thing goes on in China in traditional Confucianism. I could give you an example of it, but perhaps, you know, perhaps you want to talk about. I have to salute the speakers today for their intrepid response to our technical difficulties and all of you have have performed so well and I were grateful to you for powering through because it has been a fascinating conversation already and we're sorry to break in. We tried to give you a few extra minutes to continue the conversation but we do have a couple of very interesting questions that have come in. So actually I'm going to have one from Peter Cole, who is watching and I think Larissa is going to read his question. Yes, he says this is Peter Cole, and I'd like to thank everyone for the excellent conversation so far. My question is initially for Vivek, but really for Laurie and Gopal too. I would love to hear more from you on what you're calling the soul or soul dimension of the work of translation. You spoke of it in relation to the mystery of the poem. People are so wary of bringing the language of mysticism and even psyche into translation, and yet it has been so central to the history of translation throughout the world and certainly in my own experience. Could you say a bit more and Laurie Gopal, how does this sit with you. Who also Gopal. I think Vivek should answer and then I can jump. Well, yeah, I mean, yeah, I think of it as soul fusion technology because there are technical aspects to it somehow, the process of translation. But I mean, if I would say, I mean, like sometimes I think that what the place where we can actually see our souls is somewhere kind of trapped in a poem. And so that raised the question of what a translation is, as some kind of thing and in one hand it draws on all this sort of apparatus and there are specific things that go together. But, but on one hand, another hand, you know, each translation produces a kind of unique object. And I've often, at least in my experience, sometimes I feel like I can, I find myself using translation to bury my secrets in plain sight. So. I love the question, Peter and it's so lovely to hear from you. I would say it's really interesting and it's, I think with the Gita translation in particular, I wanted it to be really simple and direct and poetic, you know, at the same time because it's frequently translated in prose or as philosophy and so on. And I think that move. I was worried always about mysticizing the text, because of the influence of the images, right so I was going to go off with Vivek before Gopal jumped in on this question of images. You know, poetry, and the tradition that, you know, some of us still labor with it and for and under. But there was only one person who wrote and said, your, your translation is too contemplative for a war like poem, you know, the Gita. And of course there are back to our commentaries right we had so many commentarial traditions that make it contemplative and others make it more like. So I didn't mind that I was too contemplative you're going to be to something it would be fine for me to be that, but I worried about it all the time because I think in moving to the concrete simplicity. There is a, there's a sort of over evoking that I worried about doing, especially with philosophical terms making them too poetic or too concrete. But in the end, I was happy to take the risk. Gopal do you do you would you like to. Yeah, so I'll add to that. I suppose. I don't know if I'd use the word soul I'm a Buddhist there so you don't believe in it but but at the same time. There is something that happens between the reader and the text of that is a truly wonderful thing I guess we call poetry. And it is it's important to to to see what that is and not everyone can. And, you know, and some people will try, let's put it this way, there has to be some poetic skill, if you want to make a poem accessible to a reader, but accessibility means not only making making bringing a poem that is has a certain amount of cultural viability in terms of in terms of the culture from which it came. But at the same time, it has to connect with some sort of world. That's a very, very important thing. And that's a very, very complex thing to achieve. It's something that is achieved not only in imagery but also in sound. I'll leave it there. I do want to add we did just this is really just a comment but I would like to say we've had a response from Emil Alcalei who would like to add that to like to say that soul fusion technology is a superb term that should be generally adapted so there's an endorsement for you. Um, I think we had one other question that came in early on, perhaps a little bit more technical. How do you preserve in the translations in your poems the ancient social and cultural class bound language levels so that today's American or I should say English language readers can understand them. This is just jump in and then be brief but it's a wonderful question and the issue of footnotes is something you struggle with in translation how many notes do you put in to do that sort of cultural work. So what I decided to do was to put as I did not translate many terms that others decided to translate others that not so. Yoga is not translated. Guna, the qualities are not it's not translated but I explained them in the beginning I don't, I also provide a glossary, but for the really key terms that have so many of the social and cultural connotations that you're talking about and class based connotations Barna based connotations. It's very important for the reader to know that first and so that's what I decided to do. But I think secondly I just appreciate the spirit of the question to because I wrote this Gita for my Hindu students in America, who wanted something that they could connect to, and I kept providing better trends are not better. Translations that were better for them. In my classroom and I said well, it's better to think of them as an audience to get at some of the issues that really provide plain spoken in the best sense accessible ways of thinking. But they're going to have to do the work up front to understand some of those connotations in order to be better readers. So that's the way I designed the translation and the terminology to get at some of the issues that you're talking about. Well. All right. This is go Bob. Certainly, certainly these these texts, if they are read within the cultures that produce them are very often read, especially if they're old tags right they're very, very often read with commentaries and the, the, the problem, of course, is that even the within a culture. Something from another time can appear very far. And so I, I, I think that the idea of footnotes which which many people find an anathema is, unfortunately, and inevitable thing, right, you're going to, you're going to have to set the thing in some sort of frame. And the other the other problem, of course, is that even within a culture. There is very often a kind of stereotypical depiction of its own ancient time. And we have to often deal with that as well. I would say, even will take, you know, take, for the, for example, the way Shakespeare used to be presented, it would be presented in simply contemporary clothing. And although we've, we've reverted we've come back to that but there was a time when they tried to recreate. And of course, you have, you have now in early music, right, the recreation of the sound of that ancient, ancient western time. And so we have to do work a little bit like that but the problem is always the accessibility for the reader. In other words, when terms get in the way. You, you have to let them go, especially if you want there to be a kind of lyrical impact of the poem of the text. In other instances, it doesn't matter so much. So I mean, I feel like, basically, this is a question about the impossibility of translation. With your skeptic approach, you can say all translation is impossible, especially poetry translation. But I would counter with that is that translation is always possible. And the reason why it's always possible is that we forget that a translation is actually the bringing of something new into the world, something that has not existed before. And to the extent that it, you know, a real translation lyrical translation is something new. It represents a kind of a new conversation, it represents the exploration of what is possible. And so, so in that sense, you know, every translation has finds no translation can find any absolute strategy, but every fine translation finds new things to add to the conversation. And so, so, so in my case, in some ways that, you know, the answer about classes would be to think about, for instance, the kind of class divisions that exist in our society. And how can you, how can you produce resonances and create an object that in a way looks backwards to that that earlier text but also reflects on the world we live in today. Thank you. Thank you all so much. Again, thank you for your efforts to get through these technical difficulties but Larry go Paul and Vivec it was a wonderful conversation and we're sorry to have to cut you off here now. Thank everybody for watching. Once again, we'd like to thank our partners how round pen America, the Center for the humanities at the Graduate Center CUNY, the Coleman Center for scholars and writers at the New York Public Library, the Martin E. Segal Theater Center, and of course, Larry and Middlebury College for their support of today's event. Thank you again, and we hope to see you next.