Hey there, I recently read your commentary/translation of the poem "He comes to my town once a year" or what I call "the mango poem" and what am now calling "the 'nah bitch, a mango' poem". I just wanted to say I loved it so very much and that it brought me a lot of joy. I've always thought of that poem as two gals hangin' out maybe having tea together and cracking jokes and i'm so glad that the translation does indeed have that vibe. Also if you enjoy mangoes in the way I do, and also enjoy poetry, I have a mango poem for ya. (it's my mango poem. It's actually probably the best thing i've ever written)
anyway thank you for making the mango poem even more good
I am so glad it brought you joy! More extended notes on my translation process can be found here if you're interested.For pretty much all of Amir Khusrau's keh mukarni, I too like to imagine them as two gals having tea together, laughing their heads off after each ridiculous poem and egging each other on to top the ridiculousness with the next one.
I would love to see your mango poem! There can never be too many mango poems.
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This is back on my dash! And listen, I love to see Amir Khusrau getting appreciation, but this translation ignores a lot. The original rhymes! And scans! And does playful things with register! And conveys a tone of affectionate banter between the two speakers, not least because it has them both addressing each other as sakhi (translated above as “girl”) in the last two lines. I think taking some liberties with line order is worth it to preserve more of the rest—and I think there’s a better translation of sakhi. And so:
He only visits once a year,
I splurge big on him when he’s here,
His kisses make my tastebuds tango.
Who, bitch, your man?
Nah, bitch, a mango.
I’m pretty sure sakhi means “friend” or “companion” though in hindavi, the original language of this poem. It doesn’t literally translate to “bitch” (although i like the way it’s translated!) Affectionate, yes, but not in the way we translate profanity into affection to call our friends “bitch”. It’s like “GIRRRRLLLLL” Source: i speak urdu and hindi
A closer equivalent to calling your friend “bitch” would probably be calling your friend “saali”, the literal translation of “bitch” is “kutti” but it’s more derogatory than affectionate, and although “saali” (“sister in law”) falls into the category of profanity, it still has scope of being used in friendly banter.
All true and valid! As is probably obvious from the translation itself, my tendencies are to prioritize localization and register unless the context or audience demands a more literal translation. (A more detailed write-up of my translation process is here.)
"GIRRRRLLLLL" in fairness is probably a more correct translation of "sakhi" here and one I did consider — or at least I have a draft with "gurrrl" — but in the end I went with "bitch" because (a) read out loud, it felt like it broke up the meter less, and (b) a very good friend of mine regularly calls me "bitch" and means something close to "sakhi," so this one's for them.* But I would love to see other translations making other choices!
*Oddly enough I do actually prefer "girl" for "sakhi" in the "kutta" one, where again my preferred translation prioritizes conveying the nsfw connotations over fidelity to literal meaning, but "bitch" feels phonetically more unwieldy given the rapid recurrence of the /tʃ/ phoneme in "pooch":
Khā gaya pī gaya de gaya butta |
Ai sakhī sājan | Nā sakhī kutta ||
(Literally: He came and ate, he came and drank, he even came and bit me / Who, friend, your man? / No, friend, the dog)
Or:
He ate, he drank, he sniffed my cooch.
Who, girl, your man?
Nah, girl, the pooch!
apologies @daemags day, i misread the date and am afraid i have nothing bespoke to offer, only this cropped WIP section from a much larger 20-person mereth aderthad classical painting i’ve been chipping slowly away at for a couple months now!
this section shows daeron and maglor judging each other’s poetry: maglor’s parchment reads ‘how much poetry can you even write about being a cuck’ as a placeholder but will be replaced with something equally bitchy but more timeline-accurate. daeron’s own notes will read ‘the noldolantë is naught but a tyrant’s lullaby’.
also features the new maglor design i’ve landed on for this painting, aka ‘wouldn’t it be funny if he had the temperament of nerdanel but looks so much like fëanor that it gives him, curufin, and fëanor himself a complex’. fëanorians are in black here, inspired by from charcoal to nigrosin by @angamaite-der-ritter, which states “the widespread usage of black dyes became firmly associated with the Fëanárian faction, starting ostensibly in the period of Kanafinwë Macalaurë’s regency” (though i did give their clothing red accents to distinguish them from other characters in black, and idk yet what i’ll go with when i paint in their circlets).
thank you so much for running the event and the daemags advocacy, @polutrope — you have opened my eyes to the best ship dynamic in the world.
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You know which two characters I’d love to watch interact? Fëanor and Bilbo. I just know that Bilbo would put the fear of god in Fëanor. The guy would change his name to Fëarnor after ten minutes in a room with Bilbo. Bilbo says completely out-of-pocket things every five minutes like it’s his day job. He once stabbed a pillar in Elrond’s house just to show Frodo that his sword was actually sharp as if there was no other way to do it.
That Hobbit would take one look at the Silmarils and ask Fëanor why he threw away his immortal soul for “what to me looks like a glorified matchstick, my dear fellow”. He would write a five page poem about all of Fëanor’s misdeeds from the time he broke a window as an elfling to the kinslaying, and then recite it to his face and make him give constructive criticism on the rhyme and meter. He’d say Nerdanel should have “gone for the smart one, not the pretty one”. He would say “my dear father is dead too but you don’t see me going around screaming like a banshee and killing everyone, do you?” He would tell Fëanor that many problems of the psyche can be traced to trapped wind, and inquire as to whether or not he ate anything “bean-adjacent” on the morning he made the Oath. He would ask him if he’d never heard of contraception, and suggest that he try breathing exercises next time he feels the urge to burn a ship or two. He’s mansplain Tengwar to him. He’d write a letter to Finwë telling him all this was the result of not disciplining his child at the age of five and send him a list of Supernanny-type childcare tips, “in case you want to try again, because I don’t think this world can handle underpopulation”. He’d have Fëanor crying in two minutes, I know it, I know it in my bones.
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I just learned that there exists a institution of higher education called Tiffin University, which can only be the name of a university for south asian hobbits (and to those of you who say, "but it's in ohio," I say, "yes but TIFFIN HOBBITS")
This is back on my dash! And listen, I love to see Amir Khusrau getting appreciation, but this translation ignores a lot. The original rhymes! And scans! And does playful things with register! And conveys a tone of affectionate banter between the two speakers, not least because it has them both addressing each other as sakhi (translated above as “girl”) in the last two lines. I think taking some liberties with line order is worth it to preserve more of the rest—and I think there’s a better translation of sakhi. And so:
He only visits once a year,
I splurge big on him when he’s here,
His kisses make my tastebuds tango.
Who, bitch, your man?
Nah, bitch, a mango.
Hello! I saw you posted a translation note on that Amir khusrow poem about mangoes. Where did you find the original poem? I haven't had any luck trying to find the untranslated version, only that popular English version
I got it from this book. A transliteration of the original is available online here. Probably should have linked that with my earlier post! Here's the original in Hindi (sorry, I cannot read/write for shit in Urdu – same words as far as this poem goes, but different alphabet – so will not disgrace a beautiful language and also myself by attempting it):
बरसा बरस वो देस में आवे |
मुँह से मुँह लगा रस पियावे |
वा ख़ातिर में ख़र्चे दाम |
ऐ सखी साजन | ना सखी आम ||
More on my translation process below the cut.
Literal-ish translations:
बरसा - rains
बरस - yearly, annual
वो - that/those [nominative distal demonstrative, which can stand in syntactically for a third person pronoun, e.g. he]
देस - country, region
में - in, into [locative preposition]
आवे - comes
मुँह - mouth
से - from, of [genitive preposition]
लगा - to put, to attach
रस - sweet juice, fluid, nectar
पियावे - to make drink
वा ख़ातिर में - for that reason, for that one's [his] sake
ख़र्चे - expense, expenditure
दाम - price
ऐ - hey, o [vocative interjection]
सखी - close female friend
साजन - lover, beloved, sweetheart
ना - no
आम - mango
So a roughly literal rendering into English might be something like:
With the monsoons/annual rains he comes to my region
[His] mouth upon [my] mouth, [he] makes me drink sweet nectar
For his sake I spend a [large] price
[Who] O friend, a lover? No, friend, mango
Here's how the previous translation rendered it:
He visits my town once a year,
He fills my mouth with kisses and nectar.
I spend all my money on him.
Who, girl, your man?
No, a mango.
And mine:
He only visits once a year,
I splurge big on him when he's here,
His kisses make my tastebuds tango.
Who, bitch, your man?
Nah, bitch, a mango.
For context, this poem is just one example of an entire genre that Amir Khusrau originated called keh mukarni ("say [then] deny/contradict"), a series of riddle-poems in which one speaker describes something, typically in terms that would suggest that the "something" is a lover, and then subverts it by revealing that the description is of a different thing entirely.* The speakers are portrayed as close female friends, given the mutual address of सखी. That ऐ सखी साजन | ना सखी ___ || ("Who, friend, a lover? No friend, a(n) ____") pattern repeats in the other poems in the series as well. There's a teasing, bantering tone between the speakers, and the opening lines often deploy implicitly (or overtly) sexual innuendo.
As you see, the earlier translation gets the semantic content across pretty well, and manages to capture at least something of the tonal shift between the first three lines and the last. What it loses is the rhyme and scansion, and also in my view some of the playful register in the original. My translation, conversely sought to prioritize rhyme, meter (I hew pretty close, metrically, to the original), register, and localization to a modern ear, at the expense of line order and precise fidelity to literal meaning. These choices all operate on spectra of foreignization vs. localization, semantics vs. pragmatics, form vs. content, and meaning vs. affect—all of which are the subject of much debate and handwringing in translation spheres.
No translation is perfect, least of all mine, and they all must make tradeoffs between literal meaning, form (especially with poetry), emotional affect, register/formality, and implicit connotations like innuendo and allusion. But a benefit of there being multiple translations of the same work is that, if you don't speak the original language, the different choices they each make, and the different aspects of the original they each prioritize, help to better triangulate a native speaker's experience of the original work. And so, the more translations, the better, say I. Translators ahoy!
*If you're familiar with the Exeter Book Riddles, a few of those deploy a similar subversion of sexual innuendo except in Old English, stuff like "I hang below the belt and fit perfectly into a hole, what am I?" [A key, why, what were you thinking?] (Humans have been shitposting since probably the dawn of written language, and probably before that we had grand oral shitpost traditions.)
Keeping to my grand tradition of having extremely pointless thoughts on my commute, I just did some mental calculation and realised that Gollum, who found the One Ring in TA 2463, was said to have gone to hide and make a home in the cave system of the Misty Mountains round about TA 2470.
Celebrían, wife of Elrond and one true love of my life, was said to be travelling across the same Redhorn Pass of Caradhras we see the Fellowship attempt, when she was waylaid and dragged into the cave system in question where she was held in captivity for, as per my further calculations re: distance between Imladris and Caradhras and approximations of time required to navigate the cave system itself, a matter of multiple weeks at the very least. This happened in TA 2509.
This means that there is absolutely a possibility that Gollum could well have interacted with Celebrían during her captivity, which is honestly just fucking with me in so many ways. Would he be un-Gollum enough at that point for assistance, however feeble, or comfort? Or would he have made the experience even more unbearable, taunting and mocking? I do not know if this information is relevant, and nor do I know what the fuck to do with it. All I know is that I know it now and I can never unknow it.
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If any of you have missed my diabolical dry brush sketches from last year featuring Silm elves looking mildly evil and unfortunately sexy, enjoy an impromptu one from today (done on the bus ride home, mind you…) featuring a couple I have recently been giving Quite Some Thought To 😌
This is back on my dash! And listen, I love to see Amir Khusrau getting appreciation, but this translation ignores a lot. The original rhymes! And scans! And does playful things with register! And conveys a tone of affectionate banter between the two speakers, not least because it has them both addressing each other as sakhi (translated above as "girl") in the last two lines. I think taking some liberties with line order is worth it to preserve more of the rest—and I think there's a better translation of sakhi. And so:
He only visits once a year,
I splurge big on him when he's here,
His kisses make my tastebuds tango.
Who, bitch, your man?
Nah, bitch, a mango.
