Against Arrival: Binary Deviance in Translation

The deviant translation that I offer here is derived from the song “Raat Ke Sapna,” originally recorded by the Sarnami Hindustani–speaking Ramdew Chaitoe in 1980 and performed and reperformed across the world. I am interested in what contexts of the song can be enlivened through this process of translating the song from the original into English, into Guyanese Creole, and into Guyanese Bhojpuri (mutually intelligible and very close to Sarnami Hindustani) using different angles of transposing music and meaning until the poem yields its butter from this churning. Each of these languages has its own particularities of sound and sense that reveal their own poetry. The process of deviant translation resists the notion of static arrival into a “target” language and lets the song-poem retain its lexical fluidity and its context shifting without relying on false binaries. The focus then shifts to the multiple crossings from language to language instead of a permanent migration from the “peripheral” language to the language of empire. In this way, also blurred is the relationship by translation, intelligibility, queer methodology, and deviance-as-infidelity.

Mostly, the idea of migration of meaning is a challenging one to me. Typically, slippage and individuated phenomenological realizations, semantic and affective, are not easily described or quantified in the discursive space of public culture. Public cultural productions trade in shortcuts and clichés hoping to resonate with the participators and in my experience as a reader and a poet the resonance is at best partial. It may be a matter of genre. I use Creolese and Guyanese Bhojpuri because most people in my family say that I shouldn’t—what it conveys feels deeply personal and not necessarily for people outside of the understanding, not because it’s secret knowledge but because of the historical devaluing and denigration of these non-standard languages. When explained to me by elders, the song meanings were not communicated in written poetic Creolese, but rather through the poetry as it was spoken, defying genre altogether. My attempts here are to write in Creolese poetry because I shouldn’t. I hear my Aji saying, Who go hundastan’ dis madness dis?