Hello All,
First, my thanks to everyone who looked in on the thread here, and especially to those who took the time to post a reply. And of course, a special big thanks to Geoff for choosing "Chantdog" for comment in the first place, and for leading the way with such a generous and insightful reading. I'm glad you enjoyed the piece Geoff, and I'm positively tickled pink that you thought it worthy of a vote amid such a strong field of contenders.
So the question, I guess, is
Is this really a translation?
And the answer is, umm . . .
I dunno.
Can you take a passage of prose and turn it into verse (or perhaps I should say here,
free verse) and still call it a translation? Certainly people go the opposite way all the time, translating verse into prose, or formal verse into free verse that (in some cases at least) isn't very far from prose. But then, assuming that you
can do so, how much can you alter your prose original in reworking it as a poem? Can you
add to the text--to fill it out, or give it some rhythmic bounce?
I don't have ready answers to those questions; I was just curious to try the experiment. And so, "Chantdog Upanishad."
Of course, beyond the fidelity-to-form question, there's a larger question of fidelity-to-spirit as well. And that's a lot trickier here perhaps . . . though I must say, I would indeed be sorry if readers were
only to think, as Maryann puts it above, "Somebody's having a laugh at our expense." I believe that the (gentle) laugh really is there, in the original, and I wanted to find a way to bring it out in English.
No one's mentioned them above, so I'm not sure whether people actually saw them or not, but the crucial clue for me here is in those numbers that you'll see in the last section of the Sanskrit text:
o3madā3m' |
oṃ3 pibā3m' |
oṃ3 devo varuṇaḥ prajāpatiḥ savitā2'nnam ihā2'harat |
annapate3'nnamihā2''harā2''haro3miti || ChUp_1,12.5 ||
As Swami Swahananda puts it in
his edition of the Chandogya, "The numbers in the text are used to indicate the prolation of the vowels in the song." The word "
prolation" is a little obscure, of course, but the basic intent, I think, is clear enough: an extension, or repetition, of the vowel sounds in the words. (Presumably Swami S. is not thinking of the specifically western,
medieval musical term here. You actually get a much clearer, simpler definition looking the word up
in French: "Action de proférer . . . Prolongation de son par la voix, soit dans les roulements, soit dans les cadences.")
Anyway, I honestly don't know enough about Sanskrit to say how those numbers would be realized in a traditional, chanted performance of the text, but then . . . ignorance is bliss, right? Fools rush in, and all that?
One thing at least seems clear: we have a chorus of dogs singing for their food, and the "score" says, in effect,
stretch the vowels out . . . o3m fo3od o3m dri3nk, and so on. It's true, of course, that similar examples of "prolation notation" (to give it a name) can be found in other contexts in the Upanishads, where dogs are nowhere to be seen. (Indeed they appear, for example, in the passage of the
Taittiriya Upanishad which Nemo quotes above [3.10.6], though again, they are used there to mark specific
vowels, rather than the repetition of whole phrases--i.e., "I am the food, I am the food, I am the food" is written "ahamannam ahamannam ahamannam," rather than "ahamannam3" or the like.) But whatever the intended effect of the practice elsewhere, here we have dogs "singing" o3m for their fo3od and o3m for their drrr3ink and so on, eleven vowels in all, in not much more than two lines of prose. Could it be that they're howling, perhaps? Could it be that there's a 2500 year-old joke here, waiting to be revived?
Anyway, that, in a nutshell, is the idea behind "Chantdog Upanishad." Of course, I could have done a "serious" translation and, in due fidelity to the text, reproduced it with the numbers in place ("o3m fo3od o3m dri3nk, e3tc.") and added a footnote, à la Swami Swahananda. And a perceptive reader might indeed conclude then,
Ah, there's an amusing little joke there. But as we all know, to explain a joke is usually to kill it. So how to make it live instead?
Basically, everything in the translation--all its little liberties and tricks--follows from that impulse. I wanted a text that would stand on its own, without the aid of footnotes, and with enough "surface" interest to attract the reader (a bit of rhythm, a bit of rhyme). Also, I wanted it to have enough "bulk" to produce a sense of narrative development before the punchline arrived--so that the O-whoo-whoo-whoo-M's would have some impact, and not just seem like a throwaway. And so, I basically filled in the blanks of the prose original, "unpacking" certain phrases (canine Udgitha >> hymning of hounds, chorus of curs, etc.) and adding in "footnote material" (idiomatically, saṃrabdhāḥ "holding together" means "hand-in-hand" . . . but dogs, surely, would be "tail-in-teeth"--let's throw 'em both in!), and using the extra volume of text thus produced to shape a rhythmical free-verse poem out of it. It helped, of course, that the original is pretty quirky and eccentric to start with.
Of course, to say that there's a joke here is still to assume a great deal, and potentially to get a great deal wrong. So it's a form of cultural appropriation, and a risky one at that. But then, I'm not sure that the pious keepers of tradition are always the best guides to the complexities of the texts they cherish anyway. If, in the middle of the New Testament somewhere, we were to find a story about, say, Jessie the Retriever, rising up to give a Sermon on the Mound and teaching the other farm animals to say "Our Fodder," you can bet your bottom dollar that theologians would eventually find a way to discover some deep spiritual lesson in the episode. In a footnote to the text here, on the first appearance of the White Dog, Swami Swahananda says,
Quote:
|
Pleased with his [i.e., Baka Dalbhya's] studies, some deity or sage along with other deities or sages appeared before him as dogs with a view to helping him. Or, speech and the rest, partaking of food in the wake of vital breath, came along with the vital breath in the mouth.
|
Well,
maybe, I say. But the full text of Swami Swahananda's translation of the "canine Udgitha" is reproduced as the prose crib above. What do
you think, gentle reader?
*
So that's that for "Chantdog Upanishad." No, not a "translation," perhaps--more an experiment in cross-linguistic repurposing. As the Chandogya itself says, however, in a later and more famous passage, "
tat tvam asi"--thou art that. I can't see why the lesson shouldn't apply here also. Thou art the dog, thou art the food, thou art the howling . . . laughter.
OwhooooooooM!
(Adam, Geoff, thanks again for the great bake-off.)
Linear Mode
