"Street Dog" by Amritha Pritam (English translation by Arlene Zide and the poet)
Street Dog
The Poem
When you and I went our separate ways
With no regrets
Only-there’s just one thing I never
understood.
You and I, when we said farewell
Our house on sale,
The empty pots and pans
Scattered in the courtyard
Maybe
watching us
The others upside down
Maybe
hiding their faces.
A withered vine above the door
Maybe trying to say something to us, me and
you
Or
complaining to the water tap.
None of this, or things like this
Ever come to mind these days
Only – one thing keeps coming back.
How a street dog –
Strayed into our empty room
Sniffing each and every corner
And the door closed on him from outside.
Then three days later –
When the deal is closed
And we traded keys for cash
Handed over the locks, and one by one
Showed the new owner all the rooms
In one of them was that dog’s corpse
I never heard his bark
Just
smelled his stench
And suddenly, from several things
It’s that very stench I smell now too.
Translated from the
Punjabi by Arlene Zide and the poet
The Poet
Amrita Pritam
(31 August 1919 – 31 October 2005) was an Indian writer and poet, who wrote in
Punjabi and Hindi. She is considered the first prominent woman Punjabi poet,
novelist, and essayist, and the leading 20th-century poet of the Punjabi
language, who is equally loved on both sides of the India-Pakistan border. With
a career spanning over six decades, she produced over 100 books of poetry,
fiction, biographies, essays, a collection of Punjabi folk songs and an
autobiography that were translated into several Indian and foreign languages.
She is most remembered for her poignant poem, Ajj
aakhaan Waris Shah nu (Today I invoke Waris Shah – "Ode to Waris
Shah"), an elegy to the 18th-century Punjabi poet, an expression of her
anguish over massacres during the partition of India. As a novelist, her most
noted work was Pinjar (The Cage) (1950), in which she created her memorable
character, Puro, an epitome of violence against women, loss of humanity and
ultimate surrender to existential fate; the novel was made into an
award-winning film, Pinjar in 2003.
When the former British India was partitioned into the
independent states of India and Pakistan in 1947, she migrated from Lahore, to
India, though she remained equally popular in Pakistan throughout her life, as
compared to her contemporaries like Mohan Singh and Shiv Kumar Batalvi.
Known as the most important voice for the women in
Punjabi literature, in 1956, she became the first woman to win the Sahitya
Akademi Award for her magnum opus, a long poem, Sunehade (Messages), later she
received the Bharatiya Jnanpith, one of India's highest literary awards, in
1982 for Kagaz Te Canvas (The Paper and the Canvas). The Padma Shri came her
way in 1969 and finally, Padma Vibhushan, India's second highest civilian
award, in 2004, and in the same year she was honoured with India's highest
literary award, given by the Sahitya Akademi (India's Academy of Letters), the
Sahitya Akademi Fellowship given to the "immortals of literature" for
lifetime achievement.
As A Writer
Amrita Pritam was born as Amrit Kaur in 1919 in
Gujranwala, Punjab, in present-day Pakistan, the only child of a school
teacher, a poet and a scholar of Braj Bhasha, Kartar Singh Hitkari, who also
edited a literary journal. Besides this, he was a pracharak – a preacher of the
Sikh faith. Amrita's mother died when she was eleven. Soon after, she and her
father moved to Lahore, where she lived till her migration to India in 1947.
Confronting adult responsibilities, and besieged by loneliness following her
mother's death, she began to write at an early age. Her first anthology of
poems, Amrit Lehran (Immortal Waves) was published in 1936, at age sixteen, the
year she married Pritam Singh, an editor to whom she was engaged in early
childhood, and changed her name from Amrita Kaur to Amrita Pritam. Half a dozen
collections of poems were to follow between 1936 and 1943.
Though she began her journey as romantic poet, soon
she shifted gears, and became part of the Progressive Writers' Movement and its
effect was seen in her collection, Lok Peed (People's Anguish) (1944), which
openly criticized the war-torn economy, after the Bengal famine of 1943. She
was also involved in social work to certain extent and participated in such
activities wholeheartedly, after Independence when social activist Guru Radha Kishan
took the initiative to bring the first Janta Library in Delhi, which was
inaugurated by Balraj Sahni and Aruna Asaf Ali, she contributed to the occasion
accordingly. This study centre cum library is still running at Clock Tower,
Delhi. She also worked at Lahore Radio Station for a while, before the
partition of India.
Renowned theatre person and the director of the
immortal partition movie 'Garam Hava', MS Sathyu paid a theatrical tribute to
her through the rare theatrical performance 'Ek Thee Amrita'. Culled from her
many writings this rare biographical docu-drama is produced by K K Kohli of
Impresario Asia. Written by Danish Iqbal, who had earlier penned 'Sahir', this
Play has memorable performances by well-known actors like Lovleen Thadani,
Mangat Ram, Vijay Nagyal, Kedar Sharma, and others.
Personal life
In 1935, Amrita married Pritam Singh, son of a leading
hosiery merchant of Lahore's Anarkali bazaar. In 1960, Amrita Pritam left her
husband. She is also said to have an unrequited affection for poet Sahir
Ludhianvi. The story of this love is depicted in her autobiography, Rasidi
Ticket (Revenue Stamp). When another woman, singer Sudha Malhotra came into
Sahir's life, Amrita found solace in the companionship of the renowned artist
and writer Imroz. She spent the last forty years of her life with Imroz, who
also designed most of her book covers and made her the subject of his several
paintings. Their life together is also the subject of a book, Amrita Imroz: A
Love Story.
She died in her sleep on 31 October 2005 at the age of
86 in New Delhi, after a long illness. She was survived by her partner Imroz,
daughter Kandala, son Navraj Kwatra, daughter-in-law Alka, and her
grandchildren, Taurus, Noor, Aman and Shilpi. Navraj Kwatra was killed in 2012.
Amrita Pritam worked until 1961 in the Punjabi service
of All India Radio, Delhi. After her divorce in 1960, her work became more
clearly feminist. Many of her stories and poems drew on the unhappy experience
of her marriage. A number of her works have been translated into English,
French, Danish, Japanese, Mandarin and other languages from Punjabi and Urdu,
including her autobiographical works Black Rose and Rasidi Ticket (Revenue
Stamp).
The first of Amrita Pritam's books to be filmed was
Dharti Sagar te Sippiyan, as ‘Kadambari’ (1965), followed by ‘Unah Di Kahani’,
as Daaku (Dacoit, 1976), directed by Basu Bhattacharya. Her novel Pinjar (The
Skeleton, 1970) narrates the story of partition riots along with the crisis of
women who suffered during the times. It was made into an award winning Hindi
movie by Chandra Prakash Dwivedi, because of its humanism: "Amritaji has
portrayed the suffering of people of both the countries." Pinjar was shot
in a border region of Rajasthan and in Punjab.
She edited "Nagmani", a monthly literary
magazine in Punjabi for several years, which she ran together with Imroz, for
33 years; though after Partition she wrote prolifically in Hindi as well. Later
in life, she turned to Osho and wrote introductions for several books of Osho,
including Ek Onkar Satnam, and also started writing on spiritual themes and
dreams, producing works like Kaal Chetna (Time Consciousness) and Agyat Ka
Nimantran (Call of the Unknown). She had also published autobiographies,
titled, Kala Gulab (Black Rose) (1968), Rasidi Ticket (The Revenue Stamp)
(1976), and Aksharon kay Saayee (Shadows of Words).
The poem is autobiographical: reflects on the separation the
poet had with her husband. It can also reflect upon the Indo-Pakistan
partition, which was a vivid living personal experience for her.
As a poem of recollection, the poet tries to give an
objective colour to the situation. She recollects that both the partners had ‘no
regrets’. It gives no room for emotions; perhaps, the narrator tries to hide
her emotions within the veil of objective recollection.
She picturises the scene when they left the house: empty
vessels gazing at them, or turning the face from them; the withered vine trying
to advise them or ‘complaining to the tap’ – these are situations when people
around may look at the parting couple, gossip about them, or just avoid facing
them. There can be ‘withered’ people – parents or other elders, who will want to
advise them.
An element of personification is brought up here.
Use of Sensory Imagery [Olfactory Imagery]: The narrator
brings out just one thing that comes back to her memory: more than a sight or a
sound, it was a stench: of a street dog which has entered the house, got locked
in and died inside. When three days later, the poet came to show the house to the
new owner, she comes across the corpse of the dog. But what stood out was the
stench: which she can sense even now.
The poem is in the form of a monologue where the lady
addresses her ex-husband. But more than a direct conversation, it appears to be
a letter, or even a diary entry addressed to him.
The Poem as a Work of Translation
The attempt to translate this is a collective one, where the
poet (for whom the source language is the mother tongue) and Arlene Zide, (who
has the target language as her mother tongue), work together. This helps to
check if all ideas in the original are communicated in the best way possible,
and also if the target language is exploited well to bring out a natural feel
and flow. A comparison with R Parthasarathy’s translation will help us to
recognize the effectiveness of this twin effort of translation.
Ideas of pots and pans lying outside, or the image of others
gossiping about, or avoiding, a divorced couple are typically of the source
language’s social culture; this may not be familiar to those who live in the
target language culture. Street dogs wandering into a house also may not be a
familiar experience to the native English reader.
The translation has managed to capture the feelings and
emotions of the poem, as we can judge from the impressions we ourselves get
when we read it.
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