On “Moonlight on Pine Trees”
BY Viplav Saini
The sentence, “I was sitting on the scooter,” translates in Hindi to: “main scooter pe baitha tha” (I, the scooter, on, sitting, was). The syntax of Hindi favors such constructions, where verb and tense are not revealed till the very end, creating a kind of suspense that is different from the Subject—Verb (+tense)—Object sequence that readers of English are used to. That prepositions follow nouns complicates things further. A translation that hews too close to the original, then, might jar readers. How far should one go to accommodate them?
Consider an almost literal translation of the first sentence from the poem, where the qualifying clauses add further delay to the unveiling of verb and tense:
The morning (in), the room’s window, through, peeking out, instantly, a moment, for, the heartbeat, stop, would.
Rearranging to make it more readable:
In the morning, through the window of the room, peeking out, instantly, for a moment, the heartbeat would stop.
(Who/what is doing the peeking, by the way?) Another option:
Peeking out the window of the room in the morning, instantly for a moment the heartbeat would stop.
This is not bad at all, but for the published version I chose, among other things, and for reasons I can no longer recall, to place the verb and subject much earlier on.
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Moonlight on Pine Trees (Cheeron par Chandani) is a collection of prose essays, although Vineet Gill, in his excellent book on Verma, Here and Hereafter, calls the eponymous chapter from which these lines are drawn a prose poem.
I don’t remember how I made the choice to enjamb the lines, but I suspect that as I was playing around with Verma’s words, one early morning last summer in Bangalore, jetlagged, in between countries, time zones, languages, I must have recklessly hit return in the middle of some sentence and then gone from there. Once the line breaks appeared, it was impossible to not hear them.
Maybe the suspense created by the line breaks mimics the delay of the unfolding sentence in the original Hindi. Maybe the way the poem travels down, differently than the prose, mimics snow.
Read the Hindi-language original, and the English-language translation, from “Moonlight on Pine Trees,” that this note is about.
Viplav Saini is from Delhi, India, and has previously published in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and Southern Review. He teaches economics at New York University.