The Geisha’s Songs: Selections

Miraji (1912-1949) is probably one of the most inventive poets in any Indian language, endlessly trying out new forms of lyric as well as prose. He translated voraciously from pretty much every Indian language including Sanskrit and, in a nod to his name, was translating the medieval mystic Mirabai as he died. He also translated widely from poets all over the world as well as from many different eras, including his own time (Alun Lewis, Anna Akhmatova, HD, E.E. Cummings, Stephen Vincent Benet and such). But his focus was often on poets who had been exiled over and over from literary canons, or consigned to the garbage bins of history, then dusted off and revived, or dumped again, or simply poets who were misplaced, forgotten. Here we can include, among many others that he wrote essays on, Japanese women poets, Sappho, Korean women poets, Charles Baudelaire.

Much of the substance in the historical narratives that accompanied Miraji’s translations of lyric was garnered from accounts in English, occasionally from one source. This was also the case with the essay on the geishas—both the poetry and the essays could be said to be culled and reframed from the those that E. Powys Mathers published in his twelve-volume collection Eastern Love probably written between 1928-1930 and republished in 1953.

Commentators on Miraji’s lyric and prose rarely speak of him as a philosopher or a theorist of lyric. Nor do they attend to Miraji as someone who was deeply concerned with not just what translation might enable as a transfer of archives and source material in the guise of ‘information about,’ but as someone whose translations were meditations on politics and theory.  For Miraji translations carried in something else as well. In what he translated, how he translated, what was composed during the process of translation and what a reader became as they immersed themselves or held themselves apart from Miraji’s translations and the accompanying essays – here lay some of Miraji’s most poignant, and potent philosophical and political intercessions and elucidations.

Miraji knew well the abrasions of the tongue, the forfeitures of memory that were the intergenerational aftermath of 19^th century British colonial policy directed at reforming education and in particular at lyric as the form that spoke the everyday, the soul. For Miraji recouping what had been rubbed away could never be salvaged in a faithful fashion such as searching for archives of one’s own community; he regarded realism as the most parsimonious pathway to representation. Translation, as a literal project of transfer, was central to the politics of colonial control—whether it was through hegemony or dominance. It was the ground on which colonial laws were shaped. It was at the heart of what was carried, as commodity in the hands of scholars such as William Jones in the 18^th century, from Asia to Europe to alleviate literary decline, giving rise to European romanticism. Translation from English and European languages into south Asian ones were crucial to Lord Macaulay’s project of refashioning colonial selves by transmuting local languages to produce vernaculars.

Miraji saw possibility in the tales, fables, narratives and lyric from other lives and other places, possibilities as openings to worlds that might—if readers let themselves go, softened themselves into belonging there, translated themselves in, took account of the lessons proffered by histories–invoke a release from loss.  However, he believed that this was only likely if translators did not themselves fall into the fiction that translation was transparent, ferrying something from one language to another without mediation. Translation then, for Miraji, was an intervention, a hiatus, it was a process of composition. It was mutual becoming, where, even as a translator became those she translated, what was being translated became hers. In the process translators such as Miraji led the lyricists he translated to unexpected places (Baudelaire for example ended up in Calcutta), even as he honed in on, delved into the psychic, political, epistemic conundrums he felt were at the heart of the lyric and histories he translated.  And this is where his interventions lay. Sappho’s lyric, in Miraji’s hands in his essay on her, expands vertiginously out from fragments, many of which seem to have been composed anew by Miraji, so that Miraji almost fades into Sappho, as Sappho bleeds into Miraji and in so doing gives Miraji the space to bring Sappho into a mehfil (a poetic symposium) with poets from Hindustan.

Miraji, then, believed in being an unfailingly unreliable translator; translation was processes of recreating. This is certainly the case with both the essay on geishas and their poetry. Sections of Miraji’s essay are picked up from Powys Mathers’ own brief piece on the geishas, some of lyric is to be found in Powys Mathers’ cycle of 80 odd translations.  I certainly don’t know if any of the bits and pieces of history and explanatory text in Miraji’s essay or any of the poetry, both of which diverge quite a bit from the Powys Mathers, were garnered from somewhere else.  However, given the final poem in the sequence, which evokes the India river Yamuna, many of these poems could be said to be those by Miraji composing, reciting, singing as a geisha.  The essay and poems may well be an allegorical rumination on colonialism, its psychic costs and what could be considered routes into that loss, and moments that offer paths away from them.

I have opted to refer to Miraji as a ‘he’ because the contrast between Miraji’s poetic name, which is that of a woman, the women Miraji translated, and the gender used when Miraji is spoken about is remarkably suggestive in the ways in which it plays with desire and across gender.

Miraji taught me how to be a translator—reading his essays, lyric and translations tutored me in the task. Miraji’s translations of Sappho, Li Po, Vidyapati, Mallarmé, taught me the skills I needed, and the political and philosophical premises that were folded into those skills.

Source: Miraji, “Geshā’on ke Gīt.” Mashriq o Maghrib ke Naghmen (Lāhore: Panjāb Akademī TrāsT), 543-553.
Miraji’s introduction and selections of poems translated by Geeta Patel.

These songs are kin to those from Japan’s earliest times; some are well regarded and harmonious. Whatever the era in which a song is composed, once it has been born into the present it begins to blend into everyday lives. As they find their place, these particular songs are accompanied by the strumming of a three or four stringed musical instrument, a lighthearted, delicate viol of Japan, the samisen. The subtle timbre of the samisen seems to wash over Japanese hearts, and its echo brings the almost forgotten tales of love to life again in a tea or coffee house or reminds those in the closed houses of Yoshiwara of romances gone by. Its voice is neither loud and shrill, nor is it wildly cheerful; one may think of it as delicate, elegant and perhaps just a little sharp and piercing.

Every geisha plays the samisen, every geisha sings these lyrics, and in their lines and fragments, we notice the faint reflections and shadows of the trials and anguish of Japanese courtesans. If we could venture to coin a poetic name for these songs it might well be “waiting.” Every woman in Yoshiwara turns her considerable intellect to find a reasonable solution to her incessantly joyless sexually fraught life—searching for a compassionate customer who would be willing to enter into an agreeable covenant with her. She looks forward to a day, a path, by which her to-be-husband or master would release her from captivity by settling on a suitable price with the owner of the brothel and paying off her debt.

The owners or managers of the bordello buy her at a really young age—hauling her out of her extreme poverty or purchasing her from greedy village parents. One could say of her that her whole life is trussed into these enclosed places. There is nothing casual or ordinary about this entire business in Japan. The women spend their lives learning, and it is extraordinarily arduous and demanding.  Singing, dancing, learning to play at least one instrument, intimacy with every formal convention (such as the details of the tea ceremony), the etiquette of dressing, how to be elegant, how to adorn oneself, to choose delicate flowers for flawless bouquets—all these must be performed by these women of the market with inordinate taste and dexterity.

These songs embrace and manifest a briefly, concisely circumscribed passion; this is the character of all Japan’s finest lyric (which encompass life’s myriad aspect, ups and downs). And yet, the way that the courtesan’s education, taste, composition plays out in the unbounded romantic lyricism of all her songs seems to embody a shortfall of her facility, a failing of her skill. It’s certainly the case that when Japanese songs or lyric are translated according to western literary fashions, is almost like holding a dancing star hostage. In Japanese hearts specific image-concepts are associated with particularly striking passions and qualities and circumstances. The songs of a cuckoo bring sorrow to mind (as is also the case with poetry in Hindi). In Japanese plays, the simple call of cuckoo suggests to the actors that a truly tragic accident will transpire.   The moon’s appearance is proof of love. Autumn stands for the collective grief of the lover and beloved. And there are also the Makura Kitoba, that is “pillow words,” which are special and have unique meanings and purposes used for unusual occasions. Multiple descriptive doublings feature in this poetry, such as wife and tender, sky and beyond time or eternal.

This lyric also has another peculiar characteristic—it is peopled by fleeting or transitional words or phrases. Through them, the mind can saunter or sashay or leap from one idea to another. Other words are almost meaningless, meant merely to arouse musical or sonic intonations.

It’s important to keep in mind that these songs by Geishas do not need to be composed according to formal prosody or in ordered arrangements such those from other Japanese genres; in Urdu we think of this as a feature of rustic songs. Geisha’s songs are much harder to translate than other Japanese poetry, more difficult to bring over into another language. But they are clearer. They are more suffused with passion and replete with subtle, delicate concepts. Because their compilers follow those who write more pastoral poetry—they don’t really adhere to cultural conventions, nor do they obey precepts cultivated by class and education. So, their natural simplicity mingles with their showy lyricism, and is extraordinarily pleasurable.

In Japan confinement seems to be an ordinary habit or disposition. Binding women’s feet, special techniques for husbanding giant trees and sprinkling them with water, nurturing them lovingly to produce entirely artificial plants. And in Yoshiwara, bringing human partridges from the fresh open spaces of the village to be impossibly shackled to the chains of a despondent life, with hopeless terror as their only nourishment – all these reveal themselves in the shapes that taste takes. So, it seems natural and quite appropriate that this milieu would have a profound impression on those living in these closed quarters, and their passions would flow out as though they were confined and concise. Tiny feet are differently savored across many countries, and whatever ideas emanate from desires hanging off smallish genealogical trees, whether or not those desires are actually present, we can attest to one thing: that we see these curbed, fettered desires everywhere. In them one notices the exquisite paradox of a world conquering the supplication to which any person may happily consent.

The translation of these songs [in Urdu] follows the English one and is therefore in free verse.  These translations, then, hold onto a non-metrical almost non-lyrical form, paying rather more attention to the breath time of what is said and the life-spirit of the theme. Also, the tone and mood are Indian in just a few places, so that those who come upon all the unfamiliar nouns and names in the verses do not find them unpleasant and dislike them out of hand.

Editor’s Note: We thought it might be interesting to compare the ‘original’ E. Powys Mathers’ English translation (that Miraji had translated into Urdu) with Geeta Patel’s English translation of Miraji’s Urdu version. Ironically, as we can see from the two texts Miraji culled to translate poetry by Geishas, one was the hokku by the male Japanese poet, Takarai Kikaku, a disciple of Matsuo Basho. Here too, Miraji translates deliberately across gender, stealthily absconding with verse attributed to a male poet to weave into those voiced by women.

“Songs of the Geishas.” E. Powys Mathers. Eastern Love, Volume 7.  London: John Rodker (for subscribers), 1928, 103-135.

“Forty Hokku of Kikaku, 1658-1707.” E. Powys Mathers. Eastern Love, Volume 12.  London: John Rodker (for subscribers), 1930, 53-66.