A litany on translating cultures
ShAk is that delicious little clump of vegetable, spiced with jIre and kAnchA lankA, which you are served next to the bhAt on a kAnshAr thAlA - dark green beside white on beaten gold. As you break the rice with your fingers and mix it gently with the shAk you get the fragrance of the rice and wisps of hot vapour rise delicately. If the mood is right, you may even take some kAsundi and mix in its mustard pungency. The shAk darkens the rice with its black leaves, short trimmed stems, and occasional lankA. You lift it to your lips. Your teeth shred the occasional hot lankA and your tongue savours the mixed flavours - the pungent mustard, the delicate taste of the shAk itself, while bhAt provides an absorbent backdrop. Meanwhile your fingers are preparing the next dalA. You are, of course, sitting crosslegged on a piRi or Asan, together with your brother, father, and uncles, while your mother and kAkimA serve you and thAkumA oversees the operation from a perch on the other side of the balcony door - "ei nAntu-ke Arektu shAk de to buRi". The radio is playing Bournvita quiz contest, for it is Sunday. Your water is in a kAnshAr glass to the right of the main plate, next to the stainless steel bAti of steaming musur dAl. Since this is not a festive occasion, the same bAti will serve later for fish.
And how does the shAk come to you?
To buy shAk, you go to the bAjAr, carrying the bAjArer thali. There he sits on the ground under a tin roof, his vegetables spread out on the chater bastA (jute sack). He is wearing an off-colour vest and the mAduli on his neck shakes as he moves to adjust his wares across his domain. " ki Panchu - Ajker pAlang kemon?" You bend down and inspect the shAk. You may even chew on a stalk. "It's the best," he assures you, "nothing to beat it in the entire market." How much? Three sike's. (That's for one poA of course). What? Look at these grubholes on this leaf - and half what I am paying for is this dirt ... here, weigh this bunch. " du poA'r ektu kam Achhe - Apni pAnch shike-i din " - " ei neo ek tAkA. " and he puts the rich green pile into your bag straight from the pan of his balance. Whatever the socialists may say of "exploitation" etc in this process, there is a delight in this bargaining that goes to both sides, and this is as true in the pARAr bAjAr as it is in the Souks of Marrakesh:
"It is desirable that the toing and froing of negotiations should last a miniature, incident-packed eternity. The merchant is delighted at the time you take over your purchase. Arguments aimed at making the other give ground should be far-fetched, involved, emphatic, and stimulating." - Elias Canetti
The exchange is much more than the shAk you are buying from him. The one-on-one human contact has its own secrets: the sparring holds subtle fulfillment for both parties, and you often exchange pleasantries -- "How is chhotobAbu?" he will ask; or "So -- did you find a husband for laxmI?" you might query. He might smile, pleased at your interest, and his reply would pause suspended in ether for another day, another morning, before progressing seamlessly into a continuous discourse. Over the years, this has grown into a part of a larger relationship fringing the human part of your life; you used to see his daughter who sometimes played with beads sitting beside him; as she grew up, she occasionally sat in for her father. Now that she is about to get married, pAnchu has asked you for some help, and he knows you will not disappoint. He is counting on many such small relationships; much more than the little matter of the shAk itself. On the other hand, were you to come to the bAjAr tomorrow and never see pAnchu again, a small part of you would be gone forever.
So this is shAk.
Spinach is a "n: a dark green herb grown for its edible leaves"; a wet wilting thing that you take out of the microwave and fork into your mouth from a corning bowl, while walking around the house or ensconced in front of the evening news. The healthiness of this insipid listless stuff is such that it has to be imbued with magic by Popeye before little children can be convinced of its virtue. As in medicine, you expect no gastronomic delights. You buy it in a cellophane pack, and wash it carefully to remove the chemicals, and remove the spots where it has wilted from staying too long in the store or your fridge. Sometimes (heaven forbid) you may even buy it frozen, finely cut, in neat little rectangular boxes, packaged in a factory for efficient transportation and display. You feel like an automaton passing through the grocery chain getting your spinach, along with a dozen other things, trying to minimize your time while the store is maximizing your purchases. You are just another statistic, yet another point on a multi-dimensional cost-benefit pareto-optimization curve.
That is spinach. A green herb with edible leaves. The dictionary explains it pretty much as what it means to me in the west. What worries me is that were I to live here long enough, that might become what shAk means to me as well.
This difference may appear subtle, but it makes all the difference. Octavio Paz the exile feels the same way:
"When I commented to a Mexican friend on the loveliness of Berkeley, she said: "Yes, it's very lovely, but I don't belong here. Even the birds speak English. How can I enjoy a flower if I don't know its right name, its English name, the name that has fused with its colors and petals, the name that's the same thing as the flower? If I say bugambilia to you, you think of the bougainvillaea vines you've seen in your own village, climbing around an ash tree or hanging from a wall in the afternoon sunlight. They're part of your being, your culture." - "Labyrinths of Solitude"
Words fade in translation. It is futle trying to convey the richness of bugumbilia or shAk to the foreigner. Transcending words, one needs the direct experience, but even then it is a poor approximation to the totality of shared experience that shAk represents.
Going the other way, the same word is merged jostled in the crowd and merges with a host of other meanings. Its colour has bleached, its associations are frayed, and when you meet him in a distant land, part of you also seems lost with it. When you eat bhAt in America, you are eating rice. When you buy chAl, or the farmer grows dhAn, it is also rice. But rice comes in many more shades to the Bengali in me, each intertwined into delicate strands of memory. The feel of bhAt as I mix it with my fingers - the chAl as I sieve it through my hand directly from the jute sack - how can I relate this with the neatly pre-packaged grain that I eat directly from the rice-cooker? And the word itself - it means everything and therefore it means nothing to me. What of the process of serving and eating rice - bhAt bARA and bhAt bhAngA - which will never have an analog in English? What then of polAo, the festive mood of which is irrepairably lost in the colourless "fried rice" that degrades it to mere food, and worse, lumps it with a myriad dishes from far east and elsewhere. Then there is pAyes - rich, sweet, lush and creamy - off with your banal "rice pudding". There is "muri", and khai", and "chiRe" - what a letdown it is to eat "puffed rice mixture" when what we are eating is muri-chAnAchuR. The eskimo has twenty words for "hole in the ice", and I am sure he also feels the same sense of loss and devastation in a pagan land that knows only ice in the fridge. What of lankA and marich - both "chile": or when you say hot - is it jhhAl or is it garam? And then there is the untranslatable: what of the sondA gandha - how can "smell of the earth after the rain" tickle the nostrils the same way?
This difference in translation is, of course, also a difference in culture, and ultimately, a difference in identity. This is the gap that is so palpable between a second generation Indian and one who grew up in India. Communities in exile, like the Tamils of Singapore, or the Jewish diaspora with Hebrew, hold on to a purer form of the language, which mutates and may even be lost in the motherland. This is their fragile attempt to hold on to something that is uniquely theirs. Words define us; shared meanings define our identity. When we lose a word, we also lose little bits of ourselves. When we are in the same place, each loss is replaced with more new ones; but in a foreign land one can merely cling ever harder to what was there in the past. However, like Tagore says:
amit mukerjee
texas, 1991