LDM: I was really touched by what you were saying regarding translators trying to be glass panes, as opposed to considering themselves as these, you said they were actually prisms …

JP: They want to be glass panes. I think fundamentally, every translator comes to the work with the belief that they will set themselves aside and fully make over the space of the self to the writer whose words they’re working with. At least, that’s what I do. I believe that it’s a work of un-selfing the self. You say for this moment, in this enterprise, it is Sant Tukaram’s word over mine. Now, let my words serve Tukaram, serve this purpose. But you realise that they’re still your words. The choices are yours. The love is yours. The desire to do it is yours. Everything is yours except the source of the inspiration which is his. That inspiration has survived centuries, survived multiple retellings and recitations, and it has come down to us and is lying there on the page. It is defenseless. It has no way of protecting itself against you. You must therefore handle it as gently as possible.

So, then you come to it with this desire to be a transparent pane of glass through which the light passes without effort and comes out completely unchanged, but you realise you are a prism: when the light falls on you, it breaks into a million different colours. But then you also console yourself with the realisation that every reader is also a prism. When your prismatic performance has fallen on the prism of their reading, they begin to change it, and reverse it, multiply it, shift it around. So, I think, while we would love the perfect translation, that will never happen. There is some part of me that rejoices about that because perfect translation sounds frighteningly like artificial intelligence’s desire to do things right, rather than to do things magnificently.

LDM: I think one of the things that first struck me as I approached Behold, the word is God! is that you’ve made this decision that there are two translations. So, there is no complete view of what the text is, this myth of the complete view, so to speak. I think something I’ve enjoyed about reading translations is that you’re immediately at a distance from the source. So, you must, as you’re saying, confront that distance that the reader inherently has in every type of poetry. Indeed, the poet shares this distance. I guess I was just wondering if you could talk a bit more about that decision, and how you perceive the decision to have both your translation and Shanta’s side by side.

JP: Before this, I had worked on the Marathi Warkari women saints with another friend, the classical singer Neela Bhagwat on The Ant Who Swallowed the Sun (Speaking Tiger Books). There, we worked as a team producing a single translation. So that meant I did the Englishing as it were, and Neela did the: ‘Hmm …Yes. No. I don’t know if you’ve got the sense. Maybe you need to work it a little more,’ whatever. Neela was the filter, and therefore our names went on it together. When we approach this work, I have to say that we approach this in the spirit of play, Leela. It was something that we were just doing out of the shared desire to experience Sant Tukaram in a much more intense way than we had been doing before. Because translation is always an intense language experience. I think Shanta decided to say: ‘You know, we should just set these side by side. We’re different people, and there will be different interpretations’. Really, I think every text is subject to interpretation, and becomes another text as soon as someone reads it, and of course, becomes a third text when someone translates it. When that decision happened, the path cleared. It suddenly became clear what we were trying to do, what we were doing. Then in retrospect, we created all kinds of arguments about why it should be done. But it was instinctive, I think, more than anything else.

LDM: Another thing you mentioned that I thought I’d bring into this was this kind of timelessness of the text and how really it belongs to all times. I was just wondering if you could maybe talk about what it means for Tukaram to kind of come into today and how that friendship is alive today in your writing.

JP: I think, you know, in some senses, Tukaram did not have to be brought in today. He’s a living reality for many people in Marathi. The songs are sung effortlessly. If you were to sit in a group of Marathi people at one point and start humming one of the bhajans, everyone would be able to contribute some lines or the other.

LDM: I suppose I should clarify, it’s come alive – for me.

JP: True, but on the other hand, it’s very likely a Tamil audience would not know these works, certainly an Anglophone Indian audience would not. So, for me, that was the reason to do this. You know, if you can’t find the ‘why’ for a translation, you can’t do the translation. And the ‘why’ for this translation is the fact that the text has survived time. It has pushed its way past time. It has resolutely and obdurately refused to be obliterated by time. It’s a living text.

Now there are certain themes and tropes in religious poetry that are universal. There’s the suffering of the disciple deprived of God, there’s the beauty of reunion, but there’s always going to be something about the use of metaphor, something about the choice of approach to the Godhead that is new and different. I have a friend who told me that his grandmother wrote a love poem to Krishna every day in the morning with her devotions every morning and burned it every evening so that it was only a poem between her and God. They were her love letters to God. I was delighted by the story and saddened by the story, because who knows if she was a new Tukaram, writing magnificent, beautiful poems to her God. But this is the kind of gloriousness with which Bhakti continues today. So, we talk of Bhakti as a tradition, a historical moment, a cultural event, a movement, a revolution – all these are true. But there’s also a very clear and presentness of Bhakti today in different languages. And there will always be, as long as people love God or love something bigger than themselves. So very often when people speak to me of being spiritual or they say they’re a seeker I just feel, ‘yeah, welcome to Bhakti’. It’s not going to be easy, but it’s going to be wonderful and exhilarating.