Apollo Constantine

on translating Kunwar Narain

I chose शान्ति की दुकान because I liked the concept of selling peace. The poem is also somewhat contemporary, and though I don’t live in India, I could relate to it. The poem is more positive than the poet's other poems I considered, and I didn't want to work with a depressing poem. I also wanted to pick something I thought my grandmother would like.

This poem was published in 2002, so the environment it describes for the most part still applies, today. In India (as well as many other places), many shopkeepers will play very loud music through loudspeakers in an attempt to gain attention and attract customers. It can become quite a problem in large cities, where buildings are so close together that many shops can be heard all at once, creating accumulative noise. Often, as expressed in Narain’s poem, the shops start playing music very early in the morning, which is extremely annoying to the people who live in apartments right next to or above them. शान्ति की दुकान describes the speaker’s interaction with a shopkeeper, and an agreement they have that if the speaker pays the shopkeeper 100 rupees per month, he will delay starting the music for two hours in the morning. I don’t speak Hindi, so the first thing that I observed about the poem when I saw it was that it has six stanzas, some with indentation choices that seem deliberate, and might be used to connect ideas between lines. The number of lines vary from stanza to stanza, but the poem has an obvious pattern, with one exception at the end. The line numbers are as follows: 4, 3, 4, 3, 4, 5.

When I met with my translation mentor, Achla B. Madan, my grandmother, she told me quite a lot about the poem. She often didn’t have very many answers for any of the specific analytical questions, but when she simply told me her thoughts on the poem, I frantically took notes. Those notes are most of what guided me through my translating process. She also gave me her literal translation (I say that it’s hers because I don’t speak Hindi, so she did the translating part), and that gave me a better idea of the content of the poem. Another interesting thing about my grandmother’s translation is that she speaks and writes in proper English, but she included a few more informal phrases, such as “it sure is a bargain.”

My grandmother told me that the wording used in the poem was fairly casual; in her words, the diction of the poem is “what you would use in your common talk.” In my first translation, I chose to embrace this aspect of the poem. In her literal translation, my grandmother wrote “to fulfill his daily needs” --which is, in fact, not entirely literal. A literal translation of this phrase, in Hindi, would be “to fill his stomach,” but it is an idiom that means “to fulfill his daily needs.” Logically, the daily need that selling peace fulfills is earning money. Keeping my informal writing theme, I translated this as “to bring the bread home.”

For my second translation, my focus was to do the opposite, and use flowery language to paint a picture, in part of the scene of the shop, but mostly create the imagery of the chaotic life of the speaker and the reasons behind why peace is necessary. I think that the original poem does both these things, and I wanted to continue and even give the poem more of this. I used many of the words and phrases that my grandmother gave me initially, such as “it abuts my house” and “the need for peace will supersede.” Some of the lines that I added include “he must undertake” and “inflation rates have grown immensely.”