Sun, Oct 05, 2003 page18

• 'The story that must never be told' is repeated once again

  'The Sound of the Kiss' was written at the end of the 16th century and is a little-known classic that some say deserves further appreciation

  • By Bradley Winterton / CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
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  The more you investigate the matter, the more completely northern India appears to exert cultural dominance over the south of the subcontinent. Whether it's in philosophy, music or literature, it's the north that claims supremacy. North Indian classical music is serene, it's claimed, while that of the south is playful, charming, but imitative. The great philosophers and poets are all northern Brahmins; in literature the north is aristocratic and sublime, the south amusing but essentially provincial. Such, at least, is the conventional wisdom.

  This could easily be explained historically by the power of the invading Indo-European peoples who based themselves in the north. But is it actually true? The scholarly translators of this 400-year-old classic, written in the southern language of Telugu, believe it isn't. Telugu literature, they assert, has for too long been neglected and perceived as merely a derivative pendant of the great northern classics written in

  Sanskrit. They hope to redress the balance a little with this new translation.

  

  The Sound of the Kiss By Pingali Suranna 228 pages Columbia University Press

  The Sound of the Kiss -- known in the original as the Kalapurnodayamu -- was created around the end of the 16th century. It was dedicated to a local prince, King Krishna of Nandyala. "In those days poets could not sell their books and live off their income," the translators point out in a footnote, "so they depended on the patronage -- and idiosyncratic taste -- of kings." How nice, for once, not to be told by the politically correct that such writers were all fascists in advance of their time, flattering the vanity of greedy tyrants and merciless potentates!

  There's no doubt, though, that this important work is different from what was being produced in the north. The editors point to three major divergencies. First, the bulk of the book is written in a racy, colloquial narrative manner, in places so vivid and informal that it isn't surprising some people have called it the first modern novel. Secondly, there is erotic detail in the story that shocked at least one Indian scholar editing the text at the start of the 20th century. And thirdly, the main plot appears to be original rather than based on a traditional story.

  The two translators, Velcheru Narayana (who teaches at the University of Wisconsin, Madison) and David Shulman (who is a professor at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem), have gone out of their way to produce a readable modern version. More than that, they have tried to write something that reflects in English the often chatty style of the original. They say in their introduction that they've drawn the line at using contemporary slang, but even so the story reads fluently, and with dialogue of a markedly contemporary flavor.

  This doesn't mean the book makes for easy reading. In tackling it, you come up against the intransigent nature of a work written four centuries ago in a remote cultural context. No genuine scholar would want to forfeit this inevitably alien feel in the interests of a Hollywood-like immediacy and glamorous youth-culture appeal. Instead, these two professionals have taken a middle path and come up with what feels like an excellent compromise, colloquial yet not incongruous, fluent yet true to the convoluted nature of the original.

  The story concerns a beautiful young woman who falls in love with the most handsome man in the universe, who himself is in love with another girl who was the sexual plaything of the gods. It proceeds through an overheard conversation about "the story that must never be told" (the book's subtitle) and a local goddess known as The Lion-Rider. There are magical transformations, a necklace that gives the wearer knowledge of everything in the world, powerful sages, a porcupinedemon, a parrot that once listened to Brahma, creator of the world, chatting with his wife, and dopplegangers that result in mistaken identities even in the midst of passionate embraces.

  If this somehow all seems vaguely familiar, you're right. It's the kind of mix that characterizes folk stories from very nearly everywhere on earth, and even bears a strange similarity to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, a play written at almost exactly the same time as this South Indian extravaganza.

  This basic pattern of large-scale stories being mixtures of traditional characters (men, gods and talking animals), fantastic events, mistaken identities, people becoming other people, and stories within stories, may be the product of the widespread ingestion of psychedelic plants in former times (ganja, for instance, has always been eaten in India on great ceremonial occasions). One thing is certain, though -- the similarities in different continents can hardly, at so early a date, be the result of cultural transmission, in other words, of voyagers telling their stories to the peoples they met in distant places.

  This tale is predominantly comic and fun-loving in tone, but it remains a great masterpiece for all that. Solemnity and seriousness are not by any means the same thing, and there are as many comic masterpieces in the world as there are tragic ones. Moreover, no one who reads this bizarre tale can to continue to believe that the north of India is justified in claiming a monopoly on sublimity, whatever that is, or that the power of fantasy and laughter is any less than that of dire predictions, harsh reality, and tears.

  The editor-translators recommend reading this tale slowly, and more than once. It's clear they would love it to be a popular success, while recognizing that, considering the extensive complexity of the original, this is unlikely. But there are many different kinds of readers in the world and it is significant to note that this book even today enjoys a vast popularity in modern Andhra Pradesh. All books when they're first published are launched out into the equivalent of an open ocean, and it's impossible to know what their history will be. This book may find just a tiny academic audience, or something more. There really is no way of telling.
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