Speech delivered during the launching of the book
VAARI CHOODINUM PAARPPAVAR ILLAI-Kavithogai, the 'Sangam Literature' of China
[EVEN IF I ADORN, THERE'S NONE TO BEHOLD-Shi Jing, Book of Songs, the Classic Anthology of China]
His Excellency Ambassador Menon, Mr. Wang Xuefeng, Minister, Embassy of the People's Republic of China, Prof. A R Venkatachalapthy, Mr P A Krishnan, Mr R Mukunthan, General Secretary of Delhi Tamil Sangam, Mr Kannan, Mr Sridharan, and friends! I am delighted to stand in front of you to say few words about the making of this book. Let me start with a small story. Dean Gilmour is an actor, playwright and a director. He lives in Toronto, Canada. Muttulingam is a Srilankan Tamil writer, also living in Toronto. Muttulingam, impressed by Gilmour’s plays met him and talked to him. It was 2004, and at that time Gilmour had staged a play called ‘Ward 6’, based on a short story by Chekhov. In one of the scenes, in a psychiatric hospital, a cot should be pushed and should land on the stage. Gilmour says to Muttulingam how painstakingly it was rehearsed so that the cot lands at a particular time and at a particular place in the stage. What if the cot lands a second or two later, or one or two foot away from the intended destination? The audience will not know. True, but Gilmour says “I will know”. The director knows where and when the cot should fall. Not a second later, and not an inch further. He would work for hours, and for days to achieve what he wanted. He is a perfectionist. He will not compromise.
Sridharan started his diplomatic career with the Ministry of External Affairs in 1996 as an Indian Foreign Service-IFS probationer. In 1998 he was posted in Beijing as the Third Secretary. It is a professional requirement for any IFS officer to learn a foreign language, and Sridharan opted for Chinese, and excelled. He wanted to share with the general public the knowledge of Chinese that he had acquired and was now brewing within himself. In 2000, he was elevated to Consul and posted in Hong Kong. This is the place where I met Sridharan. From 2002 to 2003, I was the president of the Hong Kong Tamil Cultural Association. During my tenure, apart from staging the play of Lenz that I just now mentioned, the association took pride in releasing Sridharan’s Tamil language book named ‘Chinese Language-An Introduction’. The book was the first to use an Indian language to teach Chinese without going through the medium of English. Both Chinese and Tamil are Classical languages, more than 2000 years old, and have been spoken in Asia, but the relation between these two languages is at best episodic. Sridharan established through his book that learning Chinese through Tamil is a far easier way for a Tamil speaker than through the conventional pin-yin method. Days after the book release, I attended a function organized by the Consul General of India in Hong Kong, Ashok Kantha. The chief guest was none other than His Excellency Ambassador Menon, then Ambassador of India to the People’s Republic of China. I was introduced to him as the President of the Tamil Association. The Ambassador shook my hands, very hard. I was surprised, is it a great thing to be the president of a Tamil Association, I asked myself. At that time, the association’s membership stood around 200. Within seconds, I understood the reason for his warm greetings. The Ambassador told me that the Hong Kong Tamil Association had done a good thing by releasing Sridharan’s book, which would be a path breaking mile stone in Sino-Indian cultural and literary activity. I pocketed the compliment, as if I had written the book myself. Ten years later, I now have an opportunity to meet Ambassador Menon again, on the occasion of another mile stone, the release of Sridharan’s even more important book.
After a lapse of nearly three years, and after several rounds of classes, researches and discussions, Sridharan started translating. In mid-2007 he formed a Google group called “Tamil-Shi Jing”. All the members were Tamil scholars except for me who Sridharan had included into the group for the sake of friendship. He started sending the draft translations and notes through Google Documents. Many of us offered comments, varying form grammar to structure, form to content, and our Hong Kong Gilmour, now in Beijing, took into consideration whatever was appropriate. He responded to almost every comment, thanking the commenter if his/her view was taken on board, and if not, explaining why the comment was not appropriate in his viewpoint. In addition to translation he also wrote and circulated essays on introduction to Shi Jing. Many exchanges took place. Respecting the time allotted to me, I will share two instances. Out of all the people in the group, for some odd reason, Sridharan asked me to translate an essay called “Fenollosa, Pound and the Chinese Character”. The essay explains how exotic translation done by some English translators could be misleading. Shi Jing poems are simple, yet profound. I enjoyed translating excerpts of that essay into Tamil. Later Sridharan felt that this essay deals in detail on Chinese characters, their structures etc, which might be beyond the scope of the book. He has used some parts of the essay in his Afterword, to explain the difficulty of translating from Chinese. The second instance is about a song numbered 189, ‘Four Horses’ is an ode sang which wishes the brothers of a family. The wish is to enhance the relationship between the two brothers with two specific qualities, namely, sturdiness and flourishing. Bamboo is taken as the example for sturdiness and pine for flourishing. Bamboo has wide spread root system and large canopy and pine has a pronounced characteristic of horizontal branching pattern "Sturdy like the bamboo Flourishing as the pine Let the brothers Love each other Without malign" When Sridharan introduced this poem to us, I was writing a paper for an engineering journal on bamboo scaffolding which is extensively used in Hong Kong. Bamboo scaffolds, lashed together manually, acts as one big unit. Any weight loaded onto it will be effectively re-distributed. In case of failure, the loading will be re-distributed away from any failed member, and thus, the bamboo scaffolds can take up additional loads, even after local failures. The 9/11 collapse is called a progressive failure in scientific terms, meaning failure of one or few structural members leads to successive failures leading to an eventual collapse. In bamboo scaffolding, such local failures will not cause the system to collapse. This made me to appreciate the poet’s greatness by using bamboo as an example of brotherhood. Sridharan completed his translations and introductory essays in 2008, but was not satisfied. The Beijing Gilmour felt that the cot had not reached the intended destination on the stage. So in 2008 when he left Beijing for Fiji Islands as a Counsellor, a yet another elevation in his professional career, he decided to refine the poems further before it went to print. | Mu Ramanathan speaks Invitation Wrapper M Sridharan (Payani) Sridharan, Amb Menon and Mr Wang. Mr Wang recited a poem 'Guan Guan'. This has been translated in the book. Sridhran showing the poem to Amb Menon. |