By Anil Raturi
The aspect of human cognition and expression is a complex issue. The jury is still out regarding which of the great thinkers is right. The one who propounded “I think, therefore I am,” or the one who said “I am, therefore I think!”
Emotions are instinctive. However, language is not.
Language is an aspect of social evolution. It is connected to culture and civilisation.
An Indian child, born in China will probably speak chaste Mandarin rather than any Indian language. This is possible because of the circumstances of his socialisation. Languages of the world are at different levels of evolution. Some have vast vocabularies and written literature, while others may still be beginning their written journey. A large number of colloquial languages are still dialects without even a script.
Words as well as languages are tools for communication.
Human thoughts and emotions are conveyed through language, both verbal and non-verbal. The jury is still out regarding whether, beyond a point, the human mind is capable of thinking in the absence of words or language.
Whether the thought creates the words of our articulation or whether the words and their felicity confine, restrict, facilitate or even distort what we want to emotionally express.
The language of literature – both universal or of any particular language among other things is effected by geography.
The collective experience of different people in different locales for instance, in a desert, mountain, river valley or seashore, etc., tends to vary because societies try to negotiate life according to the local topographical challenges.
From this experience, different cultures and languages are born. The words and language of a people are organically rooted in its soil. And soils can be varied.
The spoken word carries culture specific idiom which can never be really adequately translated into any other tongue.
In any language, the simplest communication is through signs. As a society evolves, words and languages emerge.
Complex communication can be made through words spoken and later through a script based writing. The more evolved a language, the more conducive it becomes to complex forms of expression.
Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian, English literatures are such examples.
In literature, the simplest form of expression is possible through an essay or a short story.
More complex ones, through a play or a novel in prose.
As the thought and emotion required to be conveyed becomes more complex, the genres mentioned above become inadequate.
Then a writer resorts to poetry!
Poetry uses words for expression. But it also amplifies the meaning through diction, arrangement, rhyme, alliteration, onomatopoeia, meter, simile, metaphor, pathetic fallacy, etc.
Often the poets are not able to fully comprehend their own emotions and feelings.
The process of writing poetry itself becomes a tool for their own catharsis!
The effect of the sound produced by reading the arrangement of the words– (as in a declamation)–is crucial for the reader to fully comprehend the meaning of the work.
Hence poetry, unlike a work of prose or novel, needs to be read out aloud. The totality of the meaning is lost if it is quietly read only in the mind because the sound produced by reciting the word arrangement is equally intrinsic to the overall meaning as are the words of the poem!
As the literary allusions, musical effect, literary devices of a poem are all ultimately grounded in the culture and idiom of a particular society, despite the commonality of universal human emotions that imbue a great work, culture specific idiom cannot really be translated adequately!
An effort to translate it will no wonder have a curious result, such as Alexander Pope’s translation of the Greek poet Homer into English. Rather than copying Greek idioms or constraints word-for-word, Pope translated the spirit and transformed the ancient epic.
Classical critics like Richard Bentley famously remarked of the work: “It is a pretty poem, Mr Pope, but you must not call it Homer,” pointing to the 18th-century English heroic couplets, instead of Greek dactylic hexameter!
(Anil Raturi is a retired IPS officer and former DGP of Uttarakhand.)
