Writing with Fire

The repeated, inhumane, and systematically careless violation of the basic tenet of universal value is what the Epstein files have made public

- By Saikat Majumdar

“TIMELESS” is one of the clichés used often to describe Rabindranath Tagore. Like most clichés, it holds much truth. But every serious reader of Tagore experiences the guilt of emotional anachronism, of loving something they know they cannot love anymore. My most recent jolt came from the experience of translating the short story, Shubhodrishti, ‘The First Look’, in my English version, for the forthcoming Oxford World’s Classics edition of Tagore’s stories. In this story, a wealthy man who is at least in his mid-20s, possibly older, stares at a local girl in a village where he is ravaging the peace with his hunting expedition. She is barely out of girlhood.

“One couldn’t quite tell her age. Her body had bloomed but her face looked young, as if nothing of this world had touched her yet. She seemed unaware of the fact that she had become a woman.”

One puts away the violence of the blazing gun (which he carries) against the vulnerability of the two ducks (which she carries); likewise with aristocratic arrogance intruding into the lives of local villagers. But what does one do with this gaze, soon to become a fascination, with this rather un-Nabokovian Lolita?

Kantichandra, the gazing man, is a whole lot younger than Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert. And we still have family memories of marriages between older men and young girls. My own grandmother was 17 years younger than my grandfather, and I suppose such memories are fairly common. All of us who nourished our readerly sensibilities on 19th and early 20th-century Bangla literature know the disorienting homeliness of the child bride. It was Tagore’s own lived experience.

How does one recreate this disorienting familiarity for the 21st-century reader in English across the world? At a time when ethical anachronisms have led to much cancellation of culture? How does one translate this moment of disturbing beauty without making it sound creepy?