Olav H. Hauge in Hindi Interview with Teji Grover and Rustam Singh
		Rustam Singh has recently translated approximately 90 of Olav H. Hauge’s poems into Hindi. However, whenever he felt that he was stuck, with a word or a phrase or a sentence, he asked Teji Grover to help him and she did. She also edited the final version of the translations. The book, published by the major Hindi publisher Vani Prakashan, New Delhi, is now ready in print and will be released in Delhi in December. The book has been published with the financial help of Norwegian Literature Abroad (NORLA) and the Hauge-Tveitt centennial. Teji Grover is a poet, writer of fiction and painter. Rustam Singh is a poet, philosopher and editor. They both live at Hoshangabad, in Madhya Pradesh, India. Previously, Grover has translated Hunger and Pan by Knut Hamsun and a collection of Norwegian short stories into Hindi. Rustam Singh, along with Teji Grover, has translated Henrik Ibsen’s Master Builder and Hedda Gabler into Hindi.
		by Hild Borchgrevink, Mic Media
		Hild Borchgrevink: How did you at first get in touch with Hauge's poetry? Teji Grover: It was the Swedish poet and critic Staffan Söderblom who, while touring Kerela with a group of Swedish writers, read Hauge’s poetry to the Indian writers present there. I was amazed that when asked to read his own poems in a literary gathering, Staffan said he had a better poet to read from! We were all supposed to be reading our own poems in the city of Kottayam. The event was hosted by a big and prestigious publishing house, and the idea was to introduce the visiting Swedish writers to the local poets who were also reading. We were all stunned by Staffan’s decision, as we were all equally stunned by the poems he read instead of his own. After the event I grabbed the book from him, saying Hauge is our poet, and brought it for Rustam to read.
		H. B.:Do you have a favourite Hauge poem or phrase, and if so, why this specific poem? T. G.: Whatever we have read of Hauge is very dear to us. However, we were contemplating putting the following lines on the back cover. It took us a very long time to decide on the following lines from the poem “Ophelia”: Where would we go If we didn’t have sorrow and death? Apart from suggesting the grief at the very heart of existence, it is also a very homely thought for us here, along with another very touching one: My existence causes you sorrow, therefore I should be forgiven. One immediately sees in these lines from “Ophelia” Hauge’s own intense suffering as a poet, the kind of life poetry invariably compels a poet to lead. It isn’t suffering that generates poetry, but poetry that demands suffering. A way of seeing the world that is inherently fraught with pain, and poetry is the art of transforming this pain into celebration, joy, duende [Spanish: similar to soul, emotion or authenticity. Ed. rem.]. However, the poet does not do penance or inflict suffering on himself. Suffering is not pursued in this way. The fire of penance is supposed to purify the spirit and release it from worldly reality. In Hauge’s case it is the poet’s inner craving for life itself that hurts…life hurts, and the poet seems to pray for a way of being in the world that you feel this hurt and at the same time sing and dance this hurt.
		H. B.: It is striking how poems from Norway can actually be understood and translated in India. Do you remember a Hauge text or phrase which appeared specifically "Norwegian" to you; which you did not understand at once? T. G.: None, whatsoever. What is typically Norwegian in Hauge speaks to all of us. The apple tree, the fjord, the cat who knows all…they are Norwegian, true, and precisely that’s why they are understood so far away. Rustam says, however, that he used to knit his brows to figure out what a fjord really was. No amount of reading or satellite imagery helped. When he was face to face with the fjord that inspired Hauge from his hilltop abode, when we spent several days just living with that great body of water layered by the mountains on either side, hmmm, we felt, so that’s what it is to be close to the fjord. I swore I could be there longer, for hadn’t Hauge turned it even more magical than it is standing there in the all too dreamlike landscape of Hardanger? Can the poet change the appearance of the world for you? Is he able to invest a body of water or the evening sun with his own subtle presence? Yes, that’s the primary job of a poet. A very Norwegian poet has done it for two very Indian poets. H. B.: What kind of reactions have you had from Indian readers, to Hauge's poetry? T. G.: The book has only now been published. However, a sizeable selection of Hauge’s poems appeared on the internet journal Pratilipi (www.pratilipi.in), along with the preface Rustam has written. Going by the response we got, we believe that the book will prise open a good sunny spot for itself out here. We’ll update you on that once the book finds its readers.
		H. B.: Hauge often juxtaposes transcendent matters and everyday details in a local vernacular. How did you work with these two levels of style, when translating? T. G.: Yes, right. But it’s also true that we were not translating directly from the original, though we got some help from Norwegian friends too. The charm of Robin Fulton’s and Robert Bly’s English translations is precisely that they accommodate the transcendent imperceptibly in Hauge’s everyday language. Also, the tonal variations come through strongly when Fulton uses different rhythms for the two streaks in Hauge. It comes very naturally. I am answering here on Rustam’s behalf, as I have noticed the difference myself. Rustam’s own language as a poet is very delicately negotiated and minimalistic. He is almost as reticent and shy a poet as Hauge himself. But he is also used to writing (when he must) in a more phonetically, musically rich Sanskritic Hindi. He went between the two styles as if it was really one, and what he has probably accomplished is a voice that is very different from his own voice as a poet. Something closer to Hauge’s own perhaps, though anyone who is acquainted with both the poet and his Hindi translator––who is also a poet––will be able to make out that this voice in Hindi really does penetrate the spirit of the poems in question. The transcendent is negotiated in Hindi in a slightly resonant way, at the same time making sure it is an everyday resonance that carries within it the music of the spheres, so to speak. H. B.: Are there any special linguistic challenges when translating between Norwegian and Hindi? T. G.: Since we are translating from English it is hard to talk about linguistic challenges. But applied to Hauge, even if we were translating from the original, our answer would be: Hauge is too great a poet not to glow beautifully in any other language of the world. The challenge was to find a voice that would very legitimately sound like Hauge’s own in a far away language. He would have liked that—to be able to hear his own poems in Hindi or in Chinese. We tried to overcome the limitation of not knowing the original like this: we compared the available translations when there was an overlap of poems done by Bly and Fulton. Besides, Fulton has already published a revised edition, and we have combed through the changes very minutely. We trust Fulton to the extent that we are beginning to believe that we have translated directly from the Norwegian. Getting a poet like Hauge into our own language cannot and should not wait until a bilingual person, who is also a poet, should agree to translate Hauge. Someone like that will surely come along another day, and do his\her own Hauge to be placed alongside our own book. The linguistic challenges, such as they are, are not so much inherent (in this case) in translating from a foreign language, but in being able to locate the poet in the tradition of one’s own language. Without losing any of his Norwegian features, the poet also becomes Hindi\Indian by casting his own unique reflection in a new language. And yet, very strangely, this reflection merges so beautifully with other images and reflections which are already there. We find that our own beloved Hindi poet Trilochan’s countenance has merged in such a fine way with that of Hauge, that they both begin to illumine each other’s poetry.
		H. B.: Did you notice a political voice in those of Hauge's texts that you know? Rustam Singh: Yes, in many of them, if by the “political” we do not mean the everyday politics and if by “voice” we do not mean a political ideology or a commonplace political stance. It appears from many of his poems that Hauge was deeply unhappy with the way the world had unfolded during the period of what is called “modernity”, the world as he saw it and experienced it from where he lived. He was especially unhappy with the ascendance of a certain kind of technology and the way it affected the everyday life around him, including the life of nature. Now, I’m not saying that Hauge was an advocate of a pastoral life in the “lap” of nature. I’m also not saying that he was a poet of nature or a nature poet. I think he did not at all romanticize or idealize nature. On the contrary, he was deeply aware of the gap that had developed between man and nature; as a consequence, he was aware of the gap between himself as a man and nature; and even of the gap between different things within nature itself. He was aware that in nature there was no love, no friendship, no compassion––no attachment for man or for any other thing. For him, nature was a singularly “detached” presence, which went its own way, did what it had to, in total disregard of every other thing. Therefore, he did not “love” nature, he was not “attached” to it the way humans feels attached to each other or to other things, nor did he have any “compassion” for it. As such, his stance towards nature was that of a “natural entity”, a “thing in nature”. However, precisely because of that, his stance towards nature was not that of “man”, even though he very much belonged to that species. Man had ceased to be a thing of nature and in nature and as such man’s attitude towards nature was not “natural”. First of all, it was this attitude that disturbed Hauge. At the second place, what disturbed him were the manifestations of this turning away of man from his own nature as an entity in nature. The most visible of these manifestations were certain forms that technology was adopting and their consequences for both man himself, and nature, and Hauge was deeply unhappy with this development. I think we can see that Hauge was not a “child of nature” nor wanted to be. Secondly, he was not “anti-human”. What he resented was that man had come to be what he had become, especially in the period of “modernity”. I regard this as a deeply political position. But, was Hauge, then, anti-modern? I don’t think we can conclude this from what I have said above or from Hauge’s own poems. I would rather say that he was against the disturbing power that technology had acquired over man and also over nature, which is one of the features of modernity. The technology thrown up during this period had the power to disturb you, it could interfere in your life and its surroundings against your wish. It could also frighten you: it had assumed forms and shapes which Hauge was scared of. But this technology had been developed by man. The man who had developed it had rapidly transformed himself. This man had no compunctions about disturbing people and nature. And he did disturb them. In a politics rooted in the quiet, Hauge took exception to the disturbance caused by this man.
		Photos
		1. Exerpt from the cover of the Hindi edition of Selcted poems by Olav H. Hauge (Vani Prakashan) 2. Teji Grover 3. Rustam Singh