Lo! He lifts up His Hand,
And the tigers fly howling through deserts of sand,
And the sea – serpents crowl
Obedient and meek! He breathes on idols of gold
In their temples of marble, gigantic and old
And like Dagon they fall! 25
Toru shows in her poetry a fine sense of the English language, a feeling for its rhythm and diction. The poetry of heart, the beauty of colour and wealth of imagery charmed her. The sentiments expressed in Gensoul’s My Village echo the translator’s own sense of loss of her dear ones:
Oh fair sky of my native land,
How much I miss thee here!
And there, oh home – oh sweet retreat.26
In fact her translations are nothing but transcreations and reveal the force of her personality in its relatedness with greater cultural and literary heritage. For example in the translation of Vincent Arnault’s The Leaf, Toru achieves a heightening of emotion and communicates not only the original poet’s sensibility but also her own:
Detached from thy stalk,
Leaf yellow and dry
Where goest thou amain?
The tempest’s fierce shock
Struck the oak proud and high.27
Her treatment of diction and rhythm is so remarkable that she was regarded by many critics as an English man writing under the pseudonym of Toru Dutt. There is elasticity in her verse, which makes it graceful and interesting. The modification of diction according to the need of the occasion may be easily found in it, she has thus used monosyllabic as well as polysyllabic diction with much success. As an example of the first variety we may quote following stanza from Sindhu:
Ah me! what means this? – Hark, a cry,
A feeble human wail,
“Oh God! It said – “I die, - I die,
Who’ll carry home the pail?”28
And for the second variety, the following extract from Dhruva may be quoted:
Mother, thy words of consolations find,
Nor resting place, nor echo in this heart,
Broken by words, severe, repulsing love
That timidly approached to worship. 29
The vast resourcefulness of Toru’s diction is quite surprising. She, however, did not hesitate to give a twist or twang to the original whenever necessary and this makes her translation readable and pleasant. In some of her versions, the ideas rather than the actual expression of the French poem are reiterated or elaborated; Hugo’s Napolean Le Pefit is a good specimen of her work. Though largely a free translation, it successfully reproduces the swing and the sarcasm of Hugo’s verse and her substitution of Tom Thumb for Le Petit is a happy and original rendering. The first stanza of the rendering runs like this:
His grandeur dazzled history;
The god of war,
A star he was, - a mystery;
To nations far,
All Europe at his nod inclined
With terror dumb
Art thou his ape, March, march behind,
Tom Thumb, Tom Thumb. 30
Some time Toru rejected words, phrases and sentences of the original, as seen above and replaced them by new ones. In this case the first stanza of Beranger’s My Vocation may be quoted here:
A waif on this earth
Sick, ugly and small,
Contemned from my birth
And rejected by all.
From my lips broke a cry,
Such as anguish may wring,
Sing, – said God in reply
Chant poor little thing.
Its French original goes thus:
Jete sur cette boule
Laid, chetif, et souffrant;
Etouffe dans la foule
Faute d’etre assez grand;
Une plainte touchante
De ma bouche sortit
Le bon Diew me dit:
Chante Chante, pauvve petit! 31
At Toru’s hand the third and fourth lines underwent a meticulous change and ‘Une plainte touchante’ of the fifth line become ‘such as anguish may wring’. But her weakness is also obvious in this translation – the substitution of ‘Sing ____Chant for ‘Chante, Chante’, it would have seen better and more English had she given us ‘Sing. … sing’. But she failed at a crucial moment here.
There are certain archaisms, inversions, and twisting, limping lines in her poetry. But such short comings are not remarkable. Toru has blended French words and expressions in her poetry without any hesitation, viz.Va-nu-pieds in the poem On the fly-leaf of Erckman–Chatrian’s Novel Entitled “Madame Therese”. It must be admitted that she is not conversant with the colloquial turns of modern English.32
As a whole her diction is often in harmony with the theme and context. In short, it beguiles her years and the reader is left winking at the rich resourcefulness of her vocabulary. Edmund Gosse rightly praised:
“Toru possessed the rare virtue of absolute and unaffected exactness. An English translator will always try to smooth over elegance, rather than give us a true but awkward equivalent of the original. Toru even at the expense of losing her poetic value made a true translation”.33
Rhythm
Rhythm involves patterns of diction that are phenomenally present in the music. The most striking feature of Toru Dutt’s poetry is its lyricism. There is no doubt, some of her renderings in the Sheaf and most of the poems in Ancient Ballads are marked by much force and fire. In her verses lyricism touches a high water mark at times. One may take up the following from the Sheaf as on illustration:
Love cheered for a while
My morn with his ray,
But like a ripple or a smile
My youth passed away
Now near beauty I sigh,
But fled is the spring!
Sing – said God in reply
Chant poor little thing. 34
There is a flow in these lines. A soft music rings in our ears while we are reading them. The following extract taken from Ancient Ballads presents a fine example of soothing rhythm in Toru’s verse:
Past all the houses, past the walls,
Past gardens gay, and hedgerows trim,
Past fields; where sinuous brooklets small
With mother silver to the brim
Glance in the sun’s expiring light
Past frowning hills, past pastures wild,
At last arises on the right
Foliage on foliage densely piled. 35
The poetess grows ecstatic here in describing the joyous marriage procession marching along the streets of Madra. This is very clear in the repetitive device adopted in use of words by her. For example the repetitive use of ‘Past’, and ‘I’, ‘g’ and‘d’ sounds produce an appealing rhythm. The occasion of description is such as renders the poetess lyrical and effusive in the expression of her soft secret feelings. The simplicity of her verse reminds us of Keats and Shelley.
V. K. Gokak observes “Genuine lyric poetry and lyrical narrative poetry came fully into their own in the last quarter of the 19th century with the generation of Toru Dutt.36 Her major stylistic peculiarities are the element of repetition and the use of hyphens as well as compounds. The poet seems to adopt repetition and hyphens by way of a technical strategy to overcome the difficulties of communication in an alien medium. Rarely, she gives loose constructions and awkward inversion for the purpose of rhymes.
Noted critic Harihar Das finds fault with Toru’s repetitions of a word to fill up the requisite number of syllables in a line, and refers to the following instances:
“It was that fatal, fatal speech”
“A gleam of faint, faint hope is born.”
“Pale – pale the stars above them burned.”
“The clay long, long will not appear.”37
It is possible the repetitions are of deliberate imitation of Keats.
Toru was at ease in the handling of ballads and sonnets, and the reader feels delighted to read them. They are also free from the burdensomeness and flatness
of her blank verse. What actually Toru lacked was “mellow sweetness” to perfect her as an English poet, and “of no other Oriental who has ever lived can the same be said.38 Speaking of her melodies, Anant says that they “were often foreign if not harsh to the English ear.” And that they were “the melodies of Bengal, her native land, the melodies part of her very soul.”39 Her lapses in rhythm can be easily traced in Sheaf, at least in some of her renderings. Such as:
They are the watch dogs, terrible, superb,
Enormous, faithfully that Paris guard,
As at each moment we could be surprised.
As a wild hord is there, as ambush vile,
Creeps sometimes even to the city walls. 40
There is neither rhyme nor any rhythm in this extract. Milton produced deep and memorable music in his blank verse, but that is totally lacking here.
Apart from her skilful management of pause and overflow, her internal rhymes in Sindhu echo41 the charm of Coleridge’s the Rime of the Ancient Mariner:
Lord of my soul - what means my pain?”
The horried terror, - like
Some cloud that hides a hurricane;
Hang not, O lighting, - strike;
It is not Sindhu – who art thou?
And where is Sindhu gone?
There’s blood upon thy hands – ovow!”
“There is” – “speak on, speak on. 42
As far as Miscellaneous Poems are concerned Near Hastings is the first poem; artistically the poem is not as fine as some other piece here, especially The Lotus and Our Casuarina Tree. The poem has Toru’s characteristic clarity and simplicity of style. It has a clear diction, as can be seen in the following lines:
Sweet were the roses, --- sweet and full,
And large as lotus flowers
That in our own wide tanks we cull,
To deck our Indian bowers.43
France–1870, Written in a strangely irregular, metre. This inspiring poem has verve of expression which makes us easily overlook the roughness of its metre:
Lo, she stands up,---stands up e’en now,
Strong once more for the battle-fray,
Gleams bright the star, that from her brow
Lightens the world. Bow, nations, bow,
Let her again lead on the way! 44
This poem is full of passionate feelings, when the ear becomes habitual itself to the oddness. The charm of the poem lies in the great irregularity of the rhythm in which no two verses are alike. There is also “an exultant ring” 45 in it.
The next poem, On the fly-leaf of Erckmann-Chatrian’s Novel Entilted “Madame Therese”, is marked by a greater irregularity of rhythm than that found in France 1870. It is not so easy to decide the metre of the following line:
Va – nu - pieds! When rose high your Marseillaise.46
Similarly, the rhyme ‘point’ with ‘confront’ is a case of excess in prosody.
Her Sonnet Baugmaree is enriched with simple diction and free rhythm. This shows Toru’s “native genius.”47
A sea of foliage girds our garden round,
But not a sea of dull unvaried green. 48
The next two Sonnet The lotus and Our Casuarina Tree have been considered as beautiful poetic pieces, the outburst of poetic genius.49
Among her shorter poems Our Casuarina Tree can claim its place with great, and immortal poems in the whole range of English language, by virtue of its structural beauty, rich and subtle and metaphoric design. The poem is written in the eleven-line stanza form. Rhyming abaa, cddc, eee. It was really a fresh experiment equivalent to Keats and Shelley.
K.R.S.Iyengar’s opinion on this poem is worth quoting: “In the organization of poem as a whole and in the finish of the individual stanza, in its mastery of phrase and rhythm, in the music of sound and ideas, ‘Our Casuarina Tree’ is a superb piece of writing and gives us a taste of what Toru might have done had not the race of her life been so quickly run.” 50
Versification
In the very beginning of her literary career Toru’s versification was found to be rough and impassive. The Englishman pointed out, “Miss Dutt’s metre often limps, her grammar is not always faultless and her expressions are sometimes quaint or tame”. In this context Mr. Edmund Gosse quotes: “The Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields is certainly the most imperfect of Toru’s writings, but it is not the least interesting… the English verse is sometime exquisite; at other times the rules of our prosody are absolutely ignored, and it is obvious that the Hindu poetess was chanting to herself a music that is discord in and English ear.” 51
In the context of versification Dr. E. J. Thompson remarks: “It is easy to feel that, in the work done, she never escaped from the influence of her favourite English poets, such writers as Mrs. Browning, whose work did not furnish satisfactory prosodic models. The metre used by Toru Dutt are nearly always of the simplest, and her use of them is marred by much crudity yet against this must be set the many signs of haste and lack of opportunity to finish. The punctuation of the Ballads, for example, is chaotic….. Yet, even amid the many marks of immaturity and haste, there are signs that she would have escaped before long from many of her prosodic limitations.”
Dr. Thompson took the example of Our Casuarina Tree and further comment. “In any case, there is enough to show that experience and practice would have brought release from the cramping and elementary forms that she used…”52
Harihar Das contradicts the views of the critics and is of the opinion that “Toru’s command of English is wonderful,” and that “it is difficult to realize that the book is not the work of an English writer.” 53 The metrical skill of Toru Dutt is equally admirable. Although her metre, as pointed out by the critics, limps at times, it is often powerful enough to meet the occassion.
Sri. Aurobindo also supports the views of Harihar Das and observed: “Toru Dutt was an accomplish verse builder with a delicate talent and some outbreaks of genius and she wrote thing that were attractive and sometime something that had a strong energy of language and a rhythmic force.54 Else where he is said to have remarked that “she has written poetry not as an Indian writing in English but like an English woman.” 55 E. F. Oaten appreciates Toru’s real creative and imaginative power and her almost faultless technical skill.56
The Friend of India commented “this Bengali lady has given us a real book of translations from French poets in highly creditable English verse.”57
As far as, the Sheaf, is concerned, we find the metre at least is smooth and suggestive of no extra effort or hard toil in its making. Usually, Toru tries and succeeds to reproduce for the most part the actual metre of the original (or a metre as closely associated as possible) and such diversity of metre as the book displays, only serves to emphasize her own talent and skill.
Such for instance, is Brat’s My Normandy or Peyrat’s Roland. This is the last stanza of My Normandy:
There is an age, alas! In life,
When every idle dream must end,
An age of introspection rife,
With memories that cross and blend,
When such an age arrives for me,
And folds her wing, my Muse, to rest.
May I behold my Normandy.
The favoured land I love the best.58
The same kind of smooth rhythm and rhyme we can find in Aru’s rendering of Morning serenade; which critics have praised a lot.
The following extract from Hugo’s lines appropriately shows Toru’s sensitiveness to English tones:
Methinks Remorse
Hath such a cry, and such a force
Wail mothers thus for children gone!”59
The whole effect of the last line is in the simple inversion so deftly made. Similarly, her rendering of Hugo’s The Rose and the Tomb reveals the vitality and the beauty of her work:
The tomb said to the rose-
Of the tears the night strows,
What makest thou, O flower of the dawning? 60
Here the metre is as clos
e to the original as possible.
Toru tried her hand at blank verse too, but it seemed to be inexpressive and dull sometimes. Had she lived longer, let us so hope, she might have attained some distinction in it. In a note to a piece by Louis Bouitut, she says, “Although a Frenchman would faint away at the idea of blank verse, which is not allowed in French poetry, we have not hesitated to render this piece in that form, as well as others.”61 Her lines are all end stopped and she felt not so much comfortable in the handling of blank verse, though a few lines in The Death of the wolf and some in the Ancient Ballads, especially The Royal Ascetic and the Hind, Dhruva, and Sita lead us to believe that with more practice she would have been just as much adept in it, with the intention of form as in so many others, notably the sonnet. Here is a notable passage with which the piece entitled The Royal Ascetic and the Hind ends:
Not in seclusion, not apart from all,
Not in place elected for its peace,
But in the heat and bustle of the world,
’Mid sorrow, sickness, suffering and sin,
Must he still labour with a loving soul,
Who strives to enter through the narrow gate.62
She handles a variety of stanza pattern though she appears to favour sonnet in particular. This is evident in some forty sonnets to be found among her translations and two in Sheaf.63 Harihar Das speaks of Toru’s partiality to sonnet, but he is mistaken when he says that she gave us only two poems, Baugmaree and The Lotus in that form. While discussing Ancient Ballads, he says:
The next two poems, Baugmaree and The Lotus are interesting, apart from their matter, as being the only poems (that we know of) written by Toru in Sonnet form. Their success makes us regret that she did not use the form move frequently.64
If Das means here original sonnets by Toru Dutt, there is at least one more sonnet, which seems to have escaped the biographer’s attention, the one entitled A Mon Pere.
It is an original verse and a very beautiful one and it has been considered ‘quite perfect’ by some critics.
The sheaf is strangely unequal in merit. There are poem in it which read like bad prose translations, their closeness to the original being their sole worth. They lack the depth and gravity that is required for a good creative work. But some other poems of the volume are true product of genius.
Toru Dutt Page 17
