There1 is something precious about a translator’s refusal to translate: “A milkless cow? A wingless bird?/A waterless plant?/All worthless.”2 Finding valid and felicitous expressive solutions across seemingly hopeless chasms of time and tongue is indeed so essentially and incontestably the translator’s vocation that its dereliction merits unflinching critical attention. The translator’s responsibility is all the weightier and more rewarding in engaging with the revelatory utterances of that rarest and most resplendent kind of human—the genuine mystic—in whom language strains at its limit in rapturous celebration of the extraordinary potentiality suffusing our common humanity. I was accordingly excited upon first learning that Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh—Crawford Family Professor of Religion and Department of Religious Studies Chair at Colby College, Maine—would be translating selected verses of the wondrous Gurū Nanak for Harvard University Press.
On the whole, I had considerably enjoyed Christopher Shackle’s 2015 translations3 from the eighteenth-century Sufi poet Bullhe Shah (d. 1758) for Harvard’s Murty Classical Library of India. Given Professor N.G.K. Singh’s decades of mature reflection on “[t]ranslating Sikh scripture into English4” (as in an eponymous 2007 article for Sikh Formations) as well as the unmistakable and infectious passion for Sikhī she unfailingly conveys at public appearances, I was guardedly hopeful about HUP’s welcome—if tardy—publication of Gurū Nanak (1469-1539) as part of the same series. The Murty library after all boldly touts “…original texts and modern English translations of the masterpieces of literature and thought from across the whole spectrum of Indic languages over the past two millennia in the most authoritative and accessible formats on offer anywhere.”5
Yet in sacrificing authority on the alter of accessibility, Professor Singh’s February 2022 Poems from the Guru Granth Sahib (MCLI 33) dispiritingly loses out twice over: it is unclear to what exactly the reader gains access in her presentist translations from Gurū Nanak’s rich corpus, which routinely violate a number of the generally intelligible—if not wholly adequate—principles she previously propounded. This review begins with a critical overview of N.G.K.’s professed approach to Sikh scriptural translation, proceeds to examine her translation section by section, next considers her performance against the legacy of the ambitious series’s elder cousins, and ultimately concludes that we cannot translate Gurū Nanak without first being translated, being transmuted, by him.
I. N.G.K. and the “Gurus’ multiple jouissance”6
“…[A]s a Sikh feminist scholar, who grew up on the poetry of Guru Granth, I am left disappointed.”7 So Professor Singh identifies herself and characterizes her reaction to all the existing English translations of Srī Gurū Graṅth Sāhib, beginning with that of Ernest Trumpp (1828-1885) of 1877, in “Translating Sikh Scripture into English.” N.G.K. goes on to ascribe her “dissatisfaction” with their “androcentric hermeneutics” to her “undergraduate years at Wellesley College.”8 Having taken up Sikh scriptural translation herself, she promisingly finds “Punjabi actually lends itself quite well to the English language,” only to “wholeheartedly adopt” Walter Benjamin9 (1892-1942) as her preceptor in translation. She approvingly quotes as a “popular perspective” of Benjamin’s an anodyne dictum on the “intrinsic kinship” of languages: “‘…a priori and apart from all historical relations, [languages are] interrelated in what they want to express.’”10 Regrettably, Professor Singh’s linguistic sanguinity does not extend to words denoting “[k]ey theological concepts from western philosophical tradition,” summarily othering these as “alien to Sikh worldview11,” though the Gurū unequivocally teaches us that different people celebrate and worship the same One creator through different names and traditions.
Later in the same introduction to a translation of Baudelaire that N.G.K. cites, Benjamin evocatively asserts that “sacred writings” understood as “identical with truth or dogma” are “unconditionally translatable” through the “form of the interlinear version, in which [syntactical] literalness and freedom are united.”12 Crucially, this must be understood in light of Benjamin’s devotion to “pure language formed in the linguistic flux” that “no longer means or expresses anything but is, as expressionless and creative Word, that which is meant in all languages,” deriving its justification “not from the sense of what is to be conveyed, for the emancipation from this sense is the task of fidelity.”13 Heady stuff—no doubt—but pace Benjamin, GurSikh scripture in particular is unconditionally untranslatable qua Sabad Gurū.14 As Gurbāṇī already takes the form of ‘pure language’—and as we shall see—‘pure song’ discovered in the eternally renewing knowing and lauding of the incomparable One, ‘translation’ at its best enriches our understanding of how exactly the Gurū expresses the ineffable, always reorienting us towards the revelatory original.
Professor Singh takes particular umbrage at the translation of verses like “‘between you and me and me and you what difference can there be’”15 as being allegedly “misunderstood as submission to an omnipotent lordly ‘God’ out there who can only be related through supreme ‘thous’ and thees’.” While I emphatically lay no claim to deep philological study, I do recall from reading Shakespeare that “thou” is in fact an intimate mode of address. And indeed, the entry from the characteristically insightful Webster’s of 1913 includes an instructive note from Skeat, distinguishing between ‘thou’ and ‘ye’ reproduced in full below. Not only is ‘thou’ the “language of a lord to a servant, of an equal to an equal,” but it further denotes a rich variety of relational affects including “companionship, love, permission, defiance, scorn, [and] threatening….”16
Should the philologically curious reader follow the dictionary entry back to Walter William Skeat’s 1888 An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, she will be rewarded by still more detailed etymological information reinforcing the perhaps surprising felicity of ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ in GurSikh scriptural translation. In particular, it is noteworthy that ‘thou’ is the English analogue of the Sanskrit tvam and Persian tù, both rooted in the “Aryan base TU….”17 Of course, tū is evocatively also the informal second person pronoun in Punjabi, intimately employed by Gurū Nanak in addressing the One. While I do not thus intend to commit myself to necessarily exploiting the semantic distinctions available in Old English pronouns for GurSikh scriptural translation, I cannot join Professor Singh in her raillery of some early predecessors on account of their usage: (“Perhaps ‘God’ is wondering why people are talking to him in this funny language that he has not heard for five hundred years!”).18 In my own experience, uncommon or “foreign”19 locutions are not “alienating” intrusions so much as welcome invitations to cultivate my own knowledge of the linguistic tools humans in some ways like and in others unlike me have employed—and how I might myself employ—such language to precisely convey matters of recurring human concern. Perhaps ironically, it is this reaching for startling words that seems to meet Benjamin’s admirable call for the translator to “deepen […] language by means of the foreign language.”20
N.G.K. more specifically blacklists three words as “particularly detrimental to Sikh scriptural translations[:] […] God, Lord, and Soul.”21 At the level of translation, Professor Singh declares they “cover up the original, obscure its light, and prevent it from reaching out to us22,” thereby inverting Benjamin’s notion of a “real translation.”23 She then proceeds to declaim this unholy triumvirate of “tiny short little word[s]” constitute “patriarchal gender paradigms” that “buttress male dominance and superiority,” continuing, these “misogynistic tools” voice “sexist language which discriminates against women” and thereby “harm one half of Sikh society,” ultimately concluding that they exert “a terrible effect on Sikh thought and behavior overall.”24 N.G.K. dispatches the word ‘God’ with the curious objection it “distorts the Gurus’ vision of the transcendent One into a male God.”25 Next, she banishes the word ‘Lord,’ as it supposedly “reduces their multiple concepts of the Divine to merely a single concept of a Lord.”26 Professor Singh lastly declares the word “soul” anathema on the charge it “dichotomizes the fullness of their experience into body and Soul.”27
In the next section, we shall have occasion to revisit her rejection of ‘Lord,’ but for the present I should register my unqualified endorsement of Professor Singh’s sense that it “is truly outrageous […] that even when there is no mention of such a person in the original, translators most enthusiastically usher in a supreme male Lord in their English versions!”28 On grounds of translatorial fidelity, I wholeheartedly reject the gratuitous addition of words not present in the original. For closely related reasons, I cannot, however, assent to her suggestion that “wherever a term like sahib turns up […] we translate it as ‘sovereign,’” for the sake of gender inclusivity29, which is to say, on ideological grounds. She quixotically argues that ‘sovereign’ better reflects “the intention of the Gurus” as it “emphasizes the supremacy of a completely independent ruler, whether male of female….”30 Yet as I shall argue below, suppressing an existing concept is as blameworthy as concocting a non-existent one; since Gurū Nanak utters both the masculine ‘sāhib’ and feminine ‘sāhibā,’ it is most consistent with his intention to reflect each of his gendered locutions with distinct, precisely corresponding translations. Without further ado, let us turn to the work under review, generally considering its sections by turn, while doggedly pursuing issues that recur throughout the book.
II. Examination by Section
Beginning with its title, Poems from the Guru Granth Sahib reflects Professor Singh’s intention to treat Gurū Nanak’s Bāṇī as poetry. By way of justification, she notes in the introduction that “Guru Nanak identifies himself as a ‘poet,’ (sāiru, from the Arabic shā‘ir).”31 While this is not incorrect, it is further true that Gurū Nanak also describes himself in numerous other ways—as the same paragraph adduces—that do not so tidily lend themselves to characterizing his revelatory utterances in a book title. Given the word’s rootedness in the Greek ποιέω (‘I make,’) and Gurū Nanak’s acknowledgement that “this is the husband’s sacred verse/as it comes to me,”32 the term ‘poems’ strikes me as highly unsuitable (despite his verse’s indisputably sublime literary qualities). Further evidence of its unsuitability is to be found in N.G.K.’s enthusiastic—if clumsy—formulation, “While Bhai Mardana strummed on his rabab, a divinely inspired Nanak would burst into song.”33 Professor Singh inverts the causal relationship, since Gurū Nanak’s revelatory song first arrived in rāga, which Bhāī Mardana then faithfully accompanied; however, she here correctly identifies his revelatory utterances as song.
As such, either ‘songs’ or ‘hymns’ would better convey the arrival of revelatory vocalizations to Gurū Nanak in addition to their subsequent liturgical performance. Yet as serious mistranslations suggest and conspicuous bibliographical lacunae confirm, Professor Singh is evidently not versed in the exacting oral-aural tradition34 of Gurbāṇī Saṅgīta that has astonishingly sustained and substantiated its musical continuity35 with the historically determinate—but hereby perennially singable—revelatory hymns of the Gurū-s themselves, as well as of Bhakti and Sufī giants included in Srī Gurū Graṅth Sāhib. Historically at the core of emic GurSikh pedagogy, enculturation in this marvelous paideia is requisite for the responsible handling of Sabad Gurū. Most modestly, it stands to reason that study of a song’s lyrics absent its melody can provide only a partial understanding. Because the Gurū-s themselves sang and ubiquitously enjoin their disciples to sing the praises of the One across36 Srī Gurū Graṅth Sāhib—not to mention N.G.K.’s own translation of Gurū Nanak’s hymns—I consider oral literacy in the historically-continuous mode of their musical revelatory expression indispensable for the responsible interpretation and translation of GurSikh scripture.
Even absent experiential knowledge of this superlatively choiceworthy activity, Professor Singh ought not to perpetrate such glaring mistranslations as occur with such dismaying frequency. Particularly egregious is “Wisdom our harmonium, love our tambourine.” While the contemporary ‘harmonium,’ is admittedly sometimes called ‘vājā,’ (a generic name for instrument, literally something ‘played,’) the contemporary ‘harmonium’ plaguing far too much kīrtana today is a nineteenth century colonial import that supplanted marvelous stringed instruments of the Gurū-s’ use and endowment, including the rabāb, saraṅdā, and tāus. ‘Tambourine,’ is still less comprehensible. Gurū Nanak’s original is ‘pakhāvaj,’ a double-headed classical drum associated with Śiva. As I have previously written in these pages—in an essay considering the rich synergy between GurSikh percussion and mysticism—“Pakhāvaj is the drum of choice for accompanying the medieval dhurpad genre of sacred art music, and the odes of Bhāī Gurdas (1551-1636) record an era when the households of Gurū Nanak’s Sikhs were identifiable by kīrtan[a] sung along with the mridaṅg[a] [another name for pakhāvaj, derived from its material rather than playing style] and dhurpadī rabāb.”37
Were I to channel for a moment the modish—if shrill—post-colonial vein, I might declaim, ‘such flagrant inaccuracies render Professor Singh and her editors complicit in opprobrious acts of colonial erasure.’ While I am myself decidedly not of the academic cabal that astonishingly characterizes meaning-laden pressure waves emitted from the lips and sometimes jotted down as “violence,”38 N.G.K.’s “beat” for ‘tāla’ in the same translation39 comes as close as I have seen. Again, I refer the reader to “The Paran as Pointer,”40 for a sustained exposition of the autonomous discipline of tāla, which along with its melodic counterpart in rāga vidiā, enables participation in the sovereign discipline of kīrtana. In turn, kīrtana—I submit—is best understood as a distinctive, axiological mode of investigating reality (including self-reference) as it presents itself to consciousness, thereby enabling citta’s transformation.41 Beyond Professor Singh’s impressionistic and Rumi-esque portrayal of Gurū Nanak as a tambourine-wielding troubadour, she does not even mistranslate ‘tāla’ consistently, later reading “off-key” for ‘bētālā’42 in the main text.
Before turning squarely to Professor Singh’s introduction, I would be remiss not to flag yet another musicological error that pervasively mars Poems from the Guru Granth Sahib. N.G.K. banks on HUP’s authority to bluster the possession of knowledge where there, in fact, exists vexatious perplexity. In the glossary, she defines “gharu ‘house,’ a musical style in which a hymn of a particular raga is performed.” However, the elusive term is a matter of considerable speculation, debate, and controversy as no operative practice has come down for this designation (specified 1-17) in the heading of many hymns.43 It would be futile to catalog the variety of extant theories, but it is sufficient to note that Professor Singh’s fails to distinguish between the variants that even maintain gharu provides musical instruction in the first place. Inexplicably, she furnishes no argument or authority for her tendentious claim. As a student of Gurbāṇī Saṅgīta—and as a Sikh more generally—I would have been overjoyed had Professor Singh definitively resolved this puzzle. Yet as Bhāī Baldeep Singh, the thirteenth-generation exponent and preeminent living pedagogue of the Gurbāṇī Saṅgīta Paramparā has forcefully and publicly argued, a solution to the problem of gharu would be valid if and only if it both provides unambiguous interpretation of each of the seventeen gharu-s and these answers positively correlate with the surviving heritage repertory.
N.G.K.’s engaging—if at times erroneous—introduction begins by identifying Gurū Nanak as the “founder of the religion of the Sikhs….” One may find Professor Singh’s use of the r-word curious given her ostracism of the terms “God, Lord, and Soul,” but conspicuously absent from her bibliography is Professor Arvind-Pal Singh Mandair’s audacious Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation. N.G.K. intrepidly side-steps A.P.S.M.’s ‘aporetic’ understanding of ‘religion’ in an Indian context—which in turn attempts to side-step Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction—as an “experience that is simultaneously possible and impossible.”44 Professor Singh refreshingly cites Aristotle on the universality of poetry, arguing “Guru Nanak’s lyrical oeuvre […] calls for resonance within and among traditions.”45 Oliver Freiberger’s recent Considering Comparison: A Method for Religious Studies from Oxford University Press offers a lucid apology for and account of how such indispensable comparative analysis may be accomplished.46 Whatever her methodological endorsements, N.G.K.’s actual performance—as we continue to see below—reveals the inexorable conceptual seduction of ‘Post(x) and the Specter of the Continent’ for certain academics. I must, however, credit N.G.K. for acknowledging and citing the moral justifications for what it is arguably not too much of a stretch to term something to the effect of ‘Gurū Nanak’s ethical proto-capitalism.’47
We may deal briefly with Professor Singh’s “Note on the Text and Translation” as the latter, especially, largely rehearses her translatorial commitments discussed at some length in the previous section. Reiterating her opposition to the words “God, Lord, and Soul,” she explains her decision not to translate “a variety of names [of the One] that were commonly used by his [Gurū Nanak’s] contemporaries” when they appear in his Bāṇī: “I retain them because they give us intimations of his frontierless imagination….”48 To be fair, she does note that the glossary contains a translation of these names for the One49, and the glossary sensibly enough provides “‘lord,’ name for the non-incarnate divine” for the not infrequent ‘sāhiba.’50 (‘Master’ could also be appropriate here.)
The refusal to translate may take two basic forms. N.G.K. is guilty of both. First, one may omit particular concepts from translation, leaving the words untranslated in their original language or expurgating/otherwise passing over them them altogether while translating other parts of a given text. In the main text of the ‘poems,’ for instance, such words as “Purakhu”and51 “Sahib” appear untranslated. Second, one may interpolate words that fail to correspond to explicit concepts in the source text, either in place of concepts thus omitted from translation as in the first case (“enticed” for ‘pāiae,’52 “wriggles” for ‘kāṭae’),53 or more distinctively, as gratuitous additions lacking any explicit textual warrant (“all [my italics to the denote additions present throughout the second pauṛī] are made great” for ‘hukami milae vaḍiāī’).54 This does not preclude footnoted glosses/suggestions for ambiguous or otherwise opaque words, but instead resists the artificial precluding of the reader’s puzzlement where semantic uncertainty exists for the translator. Likewise in translation, succumbing to presentist sensibilities/traumata/fixations as well as indulging in idiosyncratic flights of the imagination are to be rejected. Briefly, a good translator provides the most faithful possible retelling of a text in another language—neither leaving out what exists in the original nor adding what does not—always reorienting the reader towards the original.
I reiterate my agreement with N.G.K. from the previous section: a translator ought not to insert the word ‘Lord’ where “sāhiba” or an equivalent does not exist in Bāṇī. Insofar as N.G.K. is translating the other words, I equally object to her refusal to translate ‘sāhiba.’ As it appears capitalized and devoid any preceding article, (“If anybody spoke about Sahib,/what would I not offer them? asks Nanak.)55 it may come across as a proper noun devoid of semantic content whose relation to the One is not transparent. Appearing capitalized and with the definite article amidst an otherwise all-English sentence, (“No order makes it through to the Sahib,/make intimate requests.”),56 it may recall the colonial overlord more readily than the beloved One. In any case, neither a commitment to ‘gender equality’ nor a desire to highlight Gurū Nanak’s “frontierless imagination” demands such expurgation; more feminine modes of address/identification for the One exist in other hymns, and literally translating ‘Lord’ where it does appear adds to rather than subtracts from our knowledge of the many ways Gurū Nanak conceives of the One. The untranslated “guru”57 can sadly prove maximally misleading given the etymologically and historically venerable word’s appalling debasement in present currency.
Professor Singh’s note 52 to the hymn on pages 380-1 exhibits a more general misconception regarding the variety of names Gurū Nanak employs for the One, terming ‘rāma-’s’ placement at the end of the lines a “pious acclamation” and a non-invocatory “interjection.”58 Naturally, I grant this is no invocation to the Hindu deity Rāmacandra, further recognizing its conventionality as an ending in some Indic verse. Yet N.G.K.’s note goes too far in altogether depriving it of particular semantic content. According to Bhāī Baldeep Singh, ‘rāma’ is the apabhraṃśa of ‘ramaīā,’ and as such is best understood as a ‘karama nāma’ or ‘attributive name’ of the One. ‘Rāma,’ in particular, denotes the One’s pervading quality. As such, its deployment by Gurū Nanak is not some “pious interjection” devoid of semantic content, perhaps necessitated by metrical tribulations, but a revelation into the quality of the One most germane to the Gurū-’s present sense.
Thus does N.G.K. translate some ‘poems’ of Gurū Nanak, beginning with Japujī Sāhib (reduced to the ‘Morning Hymn’ in her main translation) and continuing through the ‘Daily Worship.’ Next comes Asa dī Vār or ‘Ballad in the Melody of Hope,’ the ‘Discourses with the Siddhas,’ and ‘Thematic Compositions’ including the Bāraha Māhā and Bābarvāṇī. The main body concludes with ‘Selections Across Musical Modes.’ While the volume’s title and the legacy of other “Facing-Page Libraries” from HUP leaves open the possibility of Poems from the Gurū Graṅth Sāhib by Gurū Nanak’s successors and other Bāṇī recipients amounting to an eventual complete works of each of Srī Gurū Granṅth Sāhib-’s voices, that Gurū Nanak appears only in selection at the outset diminishes the probability of the maximalist option. As far as it goes, the selection is pretty straightforward; it includes Gurū Nanak’s larger and better known works. I appreciate Professor Singh’s decision to maintain the “poetic sanctity”59 of translated compositions, which at times entails translating succeeding Jōt-s of Gurū Nanak. I cannot fault N.G.K. for omitting some of my personal favorites, nor will I subject the patient reader to my line-by-line rebuttal of individual translations, which would entail something approaching a re-translation.
Before wrapping up this section, a few words on Professor Singh’s translation of Gurū Nanak’s seminal Japujī Sāhib are in order, especially given their broader applicability. I object vociferously to N.G.K.’s transmogrification of “ੴ” into the ontological postulation, “There is only One.”60 Appearing fully-formed across perfect silence, Gurū Nanak’s originary revelation is not a metaphysical assertion so much as remembrance of the originary One who grants us consciousness and likewise grants existence to all we can be conscious of. The “mūla mantru”61 is likewise not so much “the foundational belief of the Sikh faith” so much as it is itself ‘gurprasādi.’ If these radical shifts in modality arise from the misprision of interpolation, many of N.G.K.’s translatorial infelicities are perhaps born of the misprision of poetasting, for her glossary entries are considerably more sober on the whole than her poetic renderings appearing in the main body.
Puzzlingly, some of the terms defined in the glossary are fully capitalized, though often—but not always—lacking consistent diacritical markings. The glossary’s assimilation of ‘Sabad’ to ‘śabadu’ is dismaying, as the latter—to my knowledge—never appears in Srī Gurū Graṅth Sāhib. The volume’s striking Gurmukhī typography was specially commissioned by HUP and “recalls forms found in the Prayer Book of Rani Jindan.”62 While the book’s end materials excitingly state that all of the fonts commissioned for the Murty library “will be made available, free of charge, for non-commercial use,” on the basis of some exploration of HUP’s website, this regrettably does not yet appear to be the case as of this review’s publication.63 Like its siblings’s, the book’s matte dust jacket is unfortunately prone to smudging.
Finally, I should note that I deploy the perhaps charged phrase “refusal to translate” advisedly: if one chooses to translate at some times and not to translate at others, one cannot rightfully be said to follow the translator’s dharma, but rather, one’s own will.64
III. Loeb’s Legacy and N.G.K.
The youngest cousin of the Loeb Classical Library (1911)65 and more recently the I Tatti Renaissance Library (2001) as well as the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (2010), the Murty Classical Library of India (2015) may be considered the successor to the Clay Sanskrit Library (2005). Published by Harvard University Press under the general editorship of noted Sanskritist, Professor Sheldon Pollock, the ambitious series aims to share “the greatest literary works of India from the past two millennia to the largest readership in the world.”66 The verso folio features the untranslated text in its original script, while the recto folio carries an English translation by a “world-class” scholar.67 According to HUP’s website, the ambitious project enjoys the patronage of computer scientist Rohan Narayana Murty, a “true friend of the Indian classics.”68
The notion of publishing “Facing-Page Libraries” is presently so uncontroversial and so patently a bid for currying intellectual prestige that it may surprise some readers to learn that in the early twentieth century, ‘cribs’ for works in the learned tongues were viewed with an admixture of skepticism and derision by a number of the leading classicists. Over time, the visually striking Loeb editions (green for Greek and red for Latin) overcame much of this stigma, and sweeping changes in the general society prompted editorial changes on the part of the series’s translators. In particular, “any passages that ‘might give offense’” (generally mentions of “sex and homosexuality”) were formerly subjected to editorial “euphemizing” and “bowdlerizing.”69 The modus operandi of the late censors was to employ footnoted Latin glosses or ‘hints’ for more “risqué” Greek passages and Italian glosses where the offending parts were originally in Latin.70 Evidently, an equalitarian intention to impart the ‘naughty’ bits to even those students and general readers whose Greek, Latin, or Italian is not up to snuff has led HUP to issue fresh translations more recently, ostensibly in the name of greater ‘up-to-dateness’ and ‘accuracy.’71
In all seriousness, I make note of this history in part because it strikes me that Loeb’s legacy of bowdlerization arguably lives on in Professor Singh’s refusal to translate words such as ‘purakhu’ and ‘sāhiba’ save in the Siberia of the book’s glossary. I certainly hope it will not be a century before the Murty library’s editors believe students, scholars, and general readers can handle such verboten locutions as ‘lord’ or ‘master.’ As Professor Singh herself humorously admits, “Modern scholars have their prejudices too. We believe that everybody in the 19th century was a Victorian bigot,” before charitably concluding, “analysis of Macauliffe’s concerns proves that our stereotypes are wrong too.”72 In the spirit of N.G.K.’s wonderful candor, let us turn to the final and briefest section, where I shall tip my own hand on translation.
IV. No Translation without Transmutation
As I have previously suggested, I am of the admittedly old-fashioned view that we cannot translate Gurū Nanak—or indeed, any genuine mystic—without first being transmuted by him. Anything short of this is to transmogrify the Gurū, thereby shortchanging both ourselves and our readers of the transformative opportunity to experience the world through the ‘moral imagination,’ which—in Russel Kirk’s (1918-1994) kathā of Edmund Burke’s (1729-1797) fine phrase—“aspires to the apprehending of right order in the soul and right order in the commonwealth.”73 Such translation, born of loving engagement with Sabad Gurū—participating, wherever possible, in singing and hearing its Sabadrīta as it was first revealed and has been orally transmitted down the centuries—is undertaken not to problematize, but to renew and reorient oneself toward the Gurū.
There is something decidedly unfashionable about the sacred process whereby Gurū Nanak’s Sikh as much as T.S. Eliot’s (1888-1965) ‘poet’ must continually “surrender himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable.”74 For initiate and master alike, the distinction between “meaning” and “significance” proves decisive. Whereas the former is fixed by what the author “represented […] by his use of a particular sign sequence,” the latter denotes “a relationship between that meaning and […] anything imaginable.”75 Indeed, it is not in Walter Benjamin, but in Eliot’s Harvard professor—the positively antediluvian Irving Babbitt (1865-1933)—that I find such wisdom as “a man should look for true liberty neither in society nor in nature, but in himself — his ethical self; and the ethical self is experienced, not as an expansive emotion, but as an inner control.”76
Of course, such teachings lead us far from Professor Singh’s vision of Gurū Nanak as “a modern instructor,” who “prescribes no rules, gives no doctrinal or epistemic system to follow….”77 Surely, in the final analysis, the Gurū is not semantically null. Taking inspiration from N.G.K.’s admirably literal translation of ‘haumai’ as “I-me,”78 let us all take refuge in Gurū Nanak’s favorite pronouns, ‘tū’ and ‘terā,’ that “Ambrosia pours out in the vat of love,/the sacred word is cast in the true mint….”79
__________
1Because I largely wrote this book review on the road, it is my joyful duty to acknowledge the thoughtfulness of my Airbnb host in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, Jean and Daniel Colson for their gracious Zephyr Cove hospitality and enduring friendship, as well as the baristas of Sue’s Gallery Cafe in Saratoga, California for keeping me well-provisioned with exquisitely presented beverages and delectable comestibles.
2Guru Nanak, Poems from the Guru Granth Sahib, trans. Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh, Bilingual edition, Murty Classical Library of India 33 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2022), 664 pages, $35.
3Bullhe Shah, Sufi Lyrics, trans. Christopher Shackle, Bilingual edition, Murty Classical Library of India (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2015).
4Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh, “Translating Sikh Scripture into English,” Sikh Formations, June 18, 2007.
5Guru Nanak, Poems from the Guru Granth Sahib, backflap.
6Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh, “Translating Sikh Scripture into English,” Sikh Formations, June 18, 2007, 41. [N.G.K. furnishes no translation from the French here or in her 2005 The Birth of the Khalsa.]
Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh, The Birth of the Khalsa: A Feminist Re-Memory of Sikh Identity, Unabridged edition (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). [Enjoying vogue in Lacanian psychoanalysis, post-structuralist feminism, and literary theory derivative of these, the French term variously refers to pleasure, orgasm, or the enjoyment of property rights. Formulations such as “multiple and endless jouissance” (Birth of the Khalsa, p. 158) do not leave much to interpretation. No entry for or references to “jouissance” exist in The Encyclopaedia [sic] of Sikhism, whose editor-in-chief—the distinguished Sikh scholar and Punjabi University founding father, Professor Harbans Singh (1921-1998)—is N.G.K.’s late father.
Harbans Singh, Encyclopaedia [sic] of Sikhism, 4 vols. (Punjabi University, Patiala, 1998).
7Singh, “Translating Sikh Scripture into English,” 34.
8Ibid.
9Richard Vine, “The Beatification of Walter Benjamin,” The New Criterion, June 1990, https://newcriterion.com/issues/1990/6/the-beatification-of-walter-benjamin. [Vine offers a striking account integrating biographical intimations of Benjamin’s character, their salience to his intellectual projects, his standing during life among leaders of the Frankfurt School, and his ultimate “critical apotheosis” following his suicide.]
10Ibid.
11Singh, “Translating Sikh Scripture into English,” 37.
12Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator – An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens,” in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti, trans. Harry Zohn, 2nd edition (New York: Routledge, 2004), 23.
13Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator – An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens,” 22.
14Cf. Verne A. Dusenbery, “The Word as Guru: Sikh Scripture and the Translation Controversy,” History of Religions 31, no. 4 (1992): 385–402, pp. 388-9. [Dusenbery perceptively argues that the Sikh understanding of language is “nondualistic,” in that it “recognizes the material as well as cognitive properties of language (especially articulated speech) and refuses to privilege semantico-referential meaning at the expense of other properties [….]” While Benjamin’s ideology is not especially “dualistic” in Dusenbery’s sense, any translation on this understanding is perforce a “violation of the integrity of the text” that in its entirety is itself “taken to be the embodiment of the Guru.”]
15Bhagat Ravidas: Aṅg 93, Srī Gurū Graṅth Sāhib.
16“Thou,” in Webster’s New International Dictionary, 1913, https://www.websters1913.com/words/Thou.
17Walter William Skeat, An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1888), 634 and 638 respectively.
18Singh, “Translating Sikh Scripture into English,” 36.
19Ibid.
20Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator – An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens,” 22.
21Singh, “Translating Sikh Scripture into English,” 37.
22Ibid.
23Ibid.
24Ibid.
25Ibid.
26Ibid.
27Ibid, 37-38.
28Ibid, 40.
29Ibid.
30Ibid.
31Guru Nanak, Poems from the Guru Granth Sahib, xi.
32Ibid., 268-9.
33Ibid., viii.
34Cf. Marcel Jousse and Werner H. Kelber, Memory, Memorization, and Memorizers, ed. Edgard Sienaert (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 2018), 22.
35Cf. Bhai Baldeep Singh, “Memory and Pedagogy of Gurbāṇī Saṅgīta: An Autoethnographic Udāsī,” Sikh Formations 15, no. 1–2 (2019).
36Ibid., 6-7, 66-7, 234-5, 408-9, 440-1, 486-7, among others.
37Nihal Singh, “The Paran as Pointer,” The Vital Anjan, no. March 2021, www.vitalanjan.com/journal/the-paran-as-pointer/.
38But cf. Arvind Mandair, “The Politics of Nonduality: Reassessing the Work of Transcendence in Modern Sikh Theology,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74, no. 3 (2006): 646–73, 649-50.
39Guru Nanak, Poems from the Guru Granth Sahib, 366-7.
40Singh, “The Paran as Pointer.”
41Cf. Bhai Baldeep Singh, “What Is Kīrtan?,” Sikh Formations 7, no. 3 (2011): 245–95, 49.
42Guru Nanak, Poems from the Guru Granth Sahib, 454-55.
43Singh, “What Is Kīrtan?,” 279-80.
44Arvind-Pal Mandair, Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation, First Edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 7.
45Guru Nanak, Poems from the Guru Granth Sahib, xxiii.
46Oliver Freiberger, Considering Comparison: A Method for Religious Studies (Oxford University Press, 2019).
47Guru Nanak, Poems from the Guru Granth Sahib, xxvii.
48Ibid., xxix.
49Ibid.
50Ibid., 561.
51Ibid., 3.
52Ibid., 428-9.
53Ibid., 466-7.
54Ibid., 4-5.
55Ibid., 396-7.
56Ibid., 148-9
57Ibid., 3.
58Ibid., 544-5.
59Ibid.
60Ibid., 2-3.
61Ibid., 560.
62Ibid., “About the Book.”
63“Design and Typography – Murty Classical Library of India,” accessed April 30, 2022, https://www.murtylibrary.com/about/design-and-typography.
64Cf. Guru Nanak, Poems from the Guru Granth Sahib, 146-147.
65[The bracketed dates indicate the year of the series’s respective first publications.]
66“Our Mission – Murty Classical Library of India,” accessed April 30, 2022, https://www.murtylibrary.com/about/our-mission.
67Ibid.
68Ibid.
69“The New Translations | Loeb Classical Library | Harvard University Press,” accessed April 30, 2022, https://www.hup.harvard.edu/features/loeb/translations.html.
70Ibid.
71Ibid.
72Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh, “M. A. Macauliffe and the Angst of the Translator,” Journal of the Irish Society for the Academic Study of Religions 4, no. 1 (2017): 33–57.
73Russell Kirk, Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot’s Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century, 2nd edition (Wilmington, Del: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2008), 4-5.
74T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Perspecta 19 (1982): 36–42, 39.
75E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 8.
76Irving Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Riverside Press, 1924), 222.
77Guru Nanak, Poems from the Guru Granth Sahib, xvii.
78Guru Nanak, Poems from the Guru Granth Sahib, Ibid., 560.
79Guru Nanak, Poems from the Guru Granth Sahib, Ibid., 42-43.
_____
Nihal Singh