Translating a Dayaram refrain for a bilingual anthology
You are the Gujarati editor of a bilingual anthology aimed at undergraduates who do not read Gujarati. A Dayaram pada has the refrain 'Shyam re, Radhe' and plays on the double sense of 'shyam' (the dark-complexioned Krishna and the beloved). The line's metrical shape is eleven syllables. Two drafts arrive. Draft X: 'O dark one, O Radha, O dark one.' Draft Y: 'Shyam, O Radha - Shyam, my dark beloved.' The series editor says the aim is 'to make the bhakti idiom audible while remaining readable', and asks you to choose one and defend the choice in a 150-word preface note. The publisher's style sheet forbids footnotes but permits a glossary.
1. Which draft better serves the stated aim, and what is the decisive criterion?
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Decisive criterion: which draft preserves the function of the refrain - an address that names the deity and simultaneously carries an erotic-devotional double sense - without inventing meaning the Gujarati does not carry.
- Draft X is formally closer (it keeps a repeated 'dark one'), but 'dark one' in English is racially and gothically marked; an undergraduate will hear 'the dark one' as a mood adjective or a stranger, not as Krishna. It also drops the name 'Shyam' entirely, severing the poem from the vocabulary a reader will meet in every other bhakti text.
- Draft Y keeps 'Shyam' - untranslated but audible - and glosses it inside the line as 'my dark beloved'. The apposition does the double work: 'Shyam' is the name, 'dark beloved' is the sense. It is slightly longer than eleven syllables, but the anthology is printed, not sung, and the metrical loss is recoverable through the glossary note on the refrain.
Draft Y wins because it makes the idiom audible (the name survives) and readable (the gloss is in the syntax, not in a footnote). Its small metrical cost is less damaging than X's semantic cost.
2. Rewrite the refrain line once more, and justify each choice of word in two or three sentences.
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Revised line: 'Shyam, O Radha - my dark one, Shyam.'
Justification:
- 'Shyam' kept twice, framing the line, because the refrain's power in Gujarati is its repetition and because the glossary can define it once for the whole book. Keeping the name also lets the reader connect this pada to other poems in the anthology.
- 'my dark one' rather than 'dark beloved', because 'beloved' presupposes a resolved emotional reading, whereas Dayaram's play depends on the epithet remaining slightly unresolved; 'my' adds the devotional possessive that the vocative 're' carries in Gujarati and that English has no particle for.
- 'O Radha' retained as vocative, because Radha is a name, not a common noun, and the English 'O' signals the address without archaic strain at this length.
The line is now twelve syllables, one over the Gujarati's eleven. I would rather pay one syllable than lose the repetition, and the preface note can say so explicitly - declaring the loss is part of the editorial argument, not a confession of failure.