Translation as Transference: A Case Study of N.V.

Krishna Warrior’s
Translation of Robert Frost’s Poem
A.C. Sreehari

It is significant to ask why N.V. Krishna Warrior translated the most famous of the 20 th century
poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost into Malayalam. Frost has
produced a poem out of the tension between poetry and practicality, says Terry Eagleton. N.V.
Krishna Warrior’s (hereafter N.V.) translation of the poem too has some tensions and
contradictions inherent in it. The contradictions in N.V. find its most visible expression in Frost’s
poem, which he was unable to achieve in his ‘own’ poems in Malayalam. The translation of
Frost’s poem thus becomes an act of transferencei of his own unresolved contradictions onto a
poem that forks between “lovely, dark and deep woods” and the miles that had to be covered
before being able to go to sleep.

According to Gayathri Chakravarthy Spivak, translation is the most intimate act of reading,
which requires surrendering to the text that is to be translated (398). Translation of “Stopping by
Woods,” in that sense was a most intimate act on the part of N.V. to come into terms with his
own contradictions. Canonized Malayalam literature includes translations of epics by different
poets in multiple ways, and from different perspectives. “Stopping by Woods” itself has had
more than one translation. Poetry is not something that is lost or gained in translation, but rather
one that is transferred. This article intends to reread N.V.’s translation as a process of
transference whereby unresolved conflicts, dependencies, and aggressions of the writer and his
time are displaced onto the work of translation.

A writer with a firm ‘Perspective’ and an activist, N.V.’s poems have been considered by himself
and his critics as utterances of a ‘Karmayogi.’ However, his translation of Robert Frost stands
apart by its varied treatment of tone. Poems of a poet can be not only diverse but even
contradictory, says M.N. Vijayan in his article on N.V. The contradictions in N.V.’s poems are
not his; on the contrary, N.V. was a product of the intellectual and emotional conflicts of his
time, he argues (398). The rereading of N.V.’s translation of the poem by Frost gains
significance in such a context.

1
In the introduction written to the poems of Sugathakumari, N.V. has explicitly stated that for a
poet living in the post World War period in India, a period of political turmoil, expressions of
individual grief in poems or otherwise were considered a frailty which had to be suppressed or
kept personal (6). He did not have a double life, one for youthfulness and the other for protest.
According to N.V., Sugathakumari manifested a different, individualistic vision in keeping with
the changed political climate. Her poems, to him, display a vision that is ordered and devoid of
any contradiction. N.V. says that he cannot prescribe to such a philosophy, although he confesses
being carried away by the irresistible charm that such a vision facilitates. Poetry for N.V. was to
be a manifesto of the social and not the personal. Referring this, M.N. Vijayan has rightly
observed that N.V. might have found out in Sugathakumari’s poems, the world of romance and
sensitivity which he had to put on hold for a political life (400). This conflict must have been a
major impulse behind the translation of the poem as well.

The poem “Stopping by Woods” has been interpreted in many ways. There is the great mass of
readers, indiscriminate of age, who can conjure a few lines of “The Road Not Taken” and
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” and possibly “Mending Wall ” or “After Apple-
Picking,” and who think of Frost as quintessentially American. ii To these readers he is a symbol
of Yankee stoicism and rural wisdom. Others consider “The Road Not Taken” to be a paean to
triumphant self-assertion. The poem has become popular for its ‘misreading.’ Frost is a mainstay
of syllabus, the poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” has also been a typical text
book poem like “The Road not Taken.” The poem is usually recited ending it in a rising tone,
hinting on the need for being very alert and active on the onward journey, regardless of the
beckoning beauties of the world on either sides of the road. The sense that one ultimately gets
out of it is that nothing can deter one if one has a clear destination.

An American is bound to toil to establish a supportive environment in which his ‘Great

American Dream’ can be nurtured. For that purpose he, like all dreamers has to be controlled by
some stringent laws. One might have many things to achieve in life. A breach is sure to play
havoc with his intentions and plans. Thus he relieves himself of a transient fit of temptation and
resumes his journey. The patient farmer, that Frost is, has miles to travel before he reaches his
New Hampshire farm-house where his duties and obligations as a land owner await him. The
sadder but wiser man has to sleep in time one would conclude: The Woods are lovely, dark and

2
deep / But I have promises to keep /And miles to go before I sleep / And miles to go before I
sleep (Rising tone).

The tenets of socialism had inspired Jawaharlal Nehru to direct the society through changes in
such a way that would make it modern. It might be because of this that he took positive energy
from the poem and kept the last four lines of the poem on his table during the last days of his life.
Like the poet, he also had to travel miles before going to sleep. The kind of developmentalism
that Nehru envisioned for India, made him read the poem with the spirit of a great national leader
and no wonder he identified himself with the traveler in the poem. The context of reading the
poem changes the text of the poem. Business executives, who are usually not able to carry out
their ambitions and compensate them with lines from popular poems instead, observes M.N.
Vijayan. Nehru does something similar. N.V. resembles ordinary people who are unable to
compensate losses in this way. N.V. attempts to find his lost half in realistic and romantic poems
(405).

A recital of the poem by Robert Frost himself would prove it otherwise. The last lines may not
be even audible. A weak and tired voice speaking about the beauties of the world and how his
duties prevented him from enjoying it, could be the meaning one could get from the poet’s own
voice: The woods are lovely, dark and deep. / But I have promises to keep /And miles to go
before I sleep / And miles to go before I sleep (Falling tone). iii Eagleton is of the opinion that
there is a curious sense of stasis in the poem. The dying fall of the repletion makes it sound more
regrettable than reassuring. The poet has had a glimpse of a seductive stasis he is unwilling to
abandon (97). N.V.’s translation sounds like this. Frost’s own reading is in tune with this idea.

N.V.’s translation of the poem is one among its two important translations in Malayalam. N.V.
who was a committed Gandhian while being a committed writer, had given a translation to it that
would never have satisfied the Nehruvians. The spirit Nehru got from it was totally absent in this
translated version. His translation is loosely built up in the very ordinary prosaic Malayalam
metre - keka. It reads like this: Mohanam vanam saandragahanam neelashyaamam / Njan pakshe
paalikkenamottere prathijnakal / Pokanamere dooram veenurangeedum mumbe / Pokanamere
dooram veenurangeedum mumbe.

3
The ‘epic rhythm of keka,’ which N.V. uses in his translation, would not permit one to end the
reading in a rising tone. E.P. Rajagopan’s reading of “Kalladaivangal” would help understand the
meaning of the form in poems. N.V. “discards music, arranging words” in his long narrative
poem “Kalladaivangal” (125). In the poem N.V. retains the contradictions as such. iv N.V.
establishes in different voices the different ideologies that he agrees and disagrees with as there
lay the loss of history in both the positions (129). The contradictions of the poet and his period
have been retained in this poem, as in his translation and as in his reading of Sugathakumari’s
poems.

Eagleton is of the opinion that the rhyme scheme gives the appearance of moving forward only
to keep curving back on itself, which brings with it a curious sense of stasis. The dying fall of the
repetitionof the last line makes it sound more regrettable than reassuring (97). Eagleton speaks
about the inherent paradox of the poem as form and content move at different levels. The poem’s
ritualistic rhyming pattern, with its sober, almost fatalistic drumbeat, lends it a sense of
inevitability; but there is nothing in the situation it depicts which would seem to warrant this.
The situation itself is random, down-to-earth and open-ended, whereas the form is taught, closed
and ceremonial. It is as though the form has a meaning which is at odds with the content. Perhaps
the poet is being tempted to extract a meaning out of something which he suspects does not have
one, and this is part of the poem’s meaning. There is an unembellished, casually conversational
feel to the poem’s language (98).

However, the Nehruites would be happy when they come across the kinesis in the translation
done by Katammanitta Ramakrishnan: Manoharam mahaavanam irundagaadhamenkilum
/Anekamundu kaatthitenda maamakaprathijnakal /Anakkamattu nidrayil layippathinnu
mumbilaay / Enikkatheevadooramundavisramam natakkuvaan. The translation ends up in a
rising tone. The staccato rhythm of the horse’s hoofs is heard here. The tight form of the Sanskrit
metre enables him to achieve this meaning. And the vigor and vitality of the writer and
performer of “Kurathi” could be heard in his reading, to a certain extent, he being an ardent
supporter of the cause of the downtrodden. Eagleton speaks about inherent contradiction in the
form and content of the poem - the everydayness the event within itself rendered itself is in low
key while the closely packed rhymes thud as portentously as a heartbeat and the unvaried metre,
with its regular, metronome-like tapping (96-97).

4
Nehru's economic philosophy bears testimony from the days of the Lucknow session of the
Indian National Congress in 1936 when he said, “I am convinced that the only key to the solution
of world's problems and India's problems lies in socialism.... In short it means a new
civilization.... If the future is full of hope it is largely because of Soviet Russia and what it has
done and I am convinced that if some world catastrophe does not intervene, this new civilization
will spread to other lands and put an end to the wars and conflicts which capitalism feeds.” v
Though politically poles apart, the left, liberal, progressive Katammanitta joins hands with
Nehruvian ideology. The Marxists were subscribing to this ideology of development projects,
which were Russian in its model. Katammanitta was a Marxist and his humans were people who
revolted against the existing establishments, transformed within the space of poetry and changed
themselves.vi

Terry Eagleton raises a question whether the poem wraps itself up or simply trails off. Is the final
line indeed a dying fall or exhausted murmur, or a slight turning up of volume and emotional
intensity, he asks. In any case, we cannot be sure that it is an ominous gesture; it might just be a
tired trailing off. If the poem prevents itself from pursuing its own intimation, however, given
that it has just come to an end, it may be because of its respect for the integrity of the everyday
world it describes. According to E.V. Ramakrishnan, Malayalam has not yet found an adequate
space for including the everyday in poetry. While the world of ‘eternal verities’ influenced
poetry in a very significant way, what became formative for prose was the societal norms of
everyday life and relationships of the ordinary (172). To move into a more visionary or
metaphysical mode might risk undercutting its faith in ordinary things, a faith reflected in its
idiomatic, scrupulously unshowy language.

The darkly mysterious woods draw him in one direction whereas the un-poetic, commonsensical
horse tugs the poet in another. Perhaps it is not surprising that Frost, who was both a poet and a
farmer, should feel a tension between an aesthetic and an instrumental attitude to nature. The
poem may be about how he would simply be a poet, savouring the sounds and textures of things,
but can’t afford to do so. So this prospect is both seductive and unsettling. N.V. also was in such
an unsettled world, whether to enjoy the poems of Sugathakumari or to go out to occupy the long
queue with Mahatma Gandhi in the public space in poems like “Mohandas Gandhi and Nathuram
Godse.” “Good, better, best / never let it rest, / till our good is better / and our better best” is an
anonymous poem quoted by N.V. in his 1981 Note Book 22vii which would mean, one must not
5
be complacent but must continually change and strive to get better. His poems become
polyphonic because of this dilemma, which is actually the dilemma of his time.

End Notes

6
i
Transference in psychoanalytical parlance refers to a displacement of unresolved conflicts onto others for reasons that are
not easily understandable. http://braungardt.trialectics.com/projects/my-papers/transference-in-freud-and-lacan/; accessed
on 31/01/2017. Web.
ii
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/09/11/the-most-misread-poem-in-america/; accessed on 13.02.2017. Web.
iii
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/robert_frost_recites_stopping_by_woods_on_a_snowy_evening.html, accessed on
17.02.2017. Web.
iv
M.R. Raghava Varier writes similarly about N.V.’s anti-lyrical utterance and ambivalence in “Nannangadikal:
Charithrathmaka Patavum Patathmaka Charithravum.” Kavanakaumudi. Vol II-1. Aug- Oct 1999. 7-15. Print.
v
http://www.thehindu.com/2000/11/14/stories/13140782.htm; accessed on 03/02/2017. Web.
vi
R. Narendra Prasad. 1980. “Kadamanittayude Kavithakal.” Kadammanittayude Kavithakal. Kottayam: DC Books, 2005.
11-37. Print.
vii
http://www.nvkrishnawarrior.org/nv_archives.php; accessed on 17.02.2017. Web.

Works Cited
Eagleton, Terry. “In Pursuit of Form.” How to Read a Poem. USA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. 65-
101. Print.
Rajagopalan, E.P. “Kalla Daivangal: Vipareethangalude Yogam.” Kavithayude Gramangal.
Kozhikode: Medha Books, 2004. 122-130. Print.
Ramakrishnan, E.V. Locating Indian Literature, Texts, Traditions, Translations. Chennai: Orient
Blackswan, 2011. Print.
Spivak, Gayathri Chakravarthy. “The Politics of Translation.” The Translation Studies Reader. Ed.
Lawrence Venuti. London: Routledge, 2000. Print.
Sreehari A.C. “Words are Lovely, Dark and Deep.” Misreadings. http://vayanavikriti.blogspot.in/.
Web.
Sreekumar. P.K. “Stopping by Words on a Snowy Evening.” Stopping by Words on a Snowy Evening.
Kothamangalam: 1999. 42-60. Print.
Vijayan, M.N. “N.V.: Karmayogathinde Kavi.” M.N. Vijayan Sampoorna Krithikal [Complete Works:
Vol. 1. Literature].Gen. Ed. N. Prabhakaran. Thrissur: Current Books, 2008. 395-407. Print.
Warrior, N.V. Krishna. 1968. “Introduction.” Pavam Manavahridayam. Calicut: Poorna Publications,
1981. 5-14. Print.