Apollo Constantine
A Shop that Sells Peace
In my neighborhood
is a shop
with loudspeakers
next to my house
He takes a hundred rupees per month that I give him
to not turn on the loudspeakers
Early morning at the break of dawn
He knows that I am
one of the unfortunate ones
who cannot live
without peace!
He knows that for the future generations
there will be more need for peace
than clean water and clean air
He knows that
times for fighting are over
and to bring the bread home
he must be a seller of peace
I am indebted to him
in a country like India
where inflation rates have flown sky high
for only a hundred rupees per month for two hours of peace per day
it sure is a bargain!
—Translated from Hindi by Apollo Constantine
A Shop that Sells Peace
In my neighborhood
is a shop
with loudspeakers
that abuts my house
He takes a hundred rupees from me per month
to not turn on the loudspeakers
Early each morning before the light of dawn
He knows that I am
one of the unfortunate ones
who cannot live
without peace!
He knows that for the future generations
the need for peace will supersede
the need for clean water and clean air
He knows that
times of revolt are over
and to fulfill his daily needs
he must undertake the selling of peace
I am indebted to him
in a country like India
where inflation rates have grown immensely
for only a hundred rupees per month for two hours of peace per day
is not too expensive
—Translated from Hindi by Apollo Constantine
My family speaks so many different languages
(An erasure poem of my interview with Ruchika Madan)
Hindi
Punjabi
are passed down from my extended family
the state of Punjab
Punjabi
our ethnic language.
Nani also learned English
Because India was a colony of the British
home language with their families
mixture of people use the common language
kids, who don't speak Hindi
with the family
I hear a lot of languages mixed together:
Punjabi
Hindi
German
English
English
German
Hindi
Punjabi
when Nani and Nana talk
I can’t really distinguish:
Hindi
Punjabi
but I hear English words mixed in.
Translator’s Statement
Kunwar Narain (often spelled Kunwar Narayan) was an Indian poet who lived from 1927 to 2017 and whose poems are some of the most popular works of Hindi poetry. Many of his works include very deep messages, often relating to death, as he was a “meditative poet” (Subramaniam). He was born in Uttar Pradesh, a state in the northern part of India, and had quite a tragic childhood. When he was 11, both his mother and sister died of tuberculosis. This contributed to the recurring metaphors around death in his poetry.
शान्ति की दुकान (A Shop That Sells Peace) was written by Kunwar Narain in 1993. I chose this poem because selling peace seems like a nice concept. It is also somewhat contemporary, and though I don’t live in India, I could relate to it. The poem is more upbeat than the other poems of his that I was looking at, and I didn't want to work with a depressing poem. I also wanted to pick something I thought my grandmother would like.
This poem was published in 2002, so the environment it describes for the most part still applies to today. In India (as well as many other places), many shopkeepers will play very loud music through loudspeakers in an attempt to gain attention and attract customers. It can become quite a problem in large cities, where buildings are so close together that many shops can be heard all at once, creating accumulative noise. Often, as expressed in Narain’s poem, the shops start playing music very early in the morning, which is extremely annoying to the people who live in apartments right next to or above them. शान्ति की दुकान describes the speaker’s interaction with a shopkeeper, and an agreement they have that if the speaker pays the shopkeeper 100 rupees per month, he will delay starting the music for two hours in the morning. I don’t speak Hindi, so the first thing that I observed about the poem when I saw it was that it has six stanzas, some with indentation choices that seem deliberate, and might be used to connect ideas between lines. The number of lines vary from stanza to stanza, but has an obvious pattern with one exception at the end. The line numbers are as follows: 4, 3, 4, 3, 4, 5.
Kenyan writer and translator Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o said that “The translator is the maker of bridges between languages” (wa Thiong’o 4). In this project, the act of translating and discussing my family heritage with my grandma and my mom was making a bridge for me to cross.
When I met with my translation mentor, Achla B. Madan, my grandma, she told me quite a lot about what she thought about this poem. She often didn’t really have very many answers for any of the specific analysis questions, but when she simply told me the analysis and thinking that she had, I wasn’t sure what category to put it in the analysis table, so I just frantically wrote notes. Those notes are most of what helped me in my translating. She also gave me her literal translation (I say it’s hers because I don’t speak Hindi so she did the translating part), and that gave me a better idea of the content of the poem. Another interesting thing about my grandmother’s translation is that she speaks and writes in proper English, but she included a few more informal phrases, such as “it sure is a bargain.”
My grandmother told me that the wording used in the poem was fairly casual; in her words, the diction of the poem is “what you would use in your common talk.” In my first translation, I chose to embrace this aspect of the poem. One big change that I made was that in the literal translation she made, she wrote “to fulfill his daily needs” which is, in fact, not entirely literal. A literal translation of this phrase in Hindi would be “to fill his stomach,” but it is an idiom that means “to fulfill his daily needs.” Logically, the daily need that selling peace fulfills is earning money. Keeping my informal writing theme, I translated this as “to bring the bread home.”
For my second translation, my focus was to do the opposite, and use flowery language to paint a picture, in part of the scene of the shop, but mostly create the imagery of the chaotic life of the speaker and the reasons behind why peace is necessary. I think that the original poem does both these things, and I wanted to continue and even give the poem more of this. I used many of the words and phrases that my grandmother gave me initially, such as “it abuts my house” and “the need for peace will supersede.” I also added my own big words, like “he must undertake” and “inflation rates have grown immensely.”
Interviewing my mother was fairly easy, because I talk to her all the time, but I have not really talked to her about my family history before, or at least not this in depth. It was difficult to keep up with notetaking when she was talking, so I had to use the recording to transcribe our interview later. I thought a lot about what I observe in the languages of my extended family members and how they relate to what my mother observed and what she told me about the history of language in our family. She described to me the ways the languages of our ancestors changed during their lifetimes, and the impacts of the Partition of India, as well as British colonization.
In creating my erasure poem, I went through the transcript of the interview and bolded anything that I thought I could use to describe my relationship to my heritage languages. Through the first half of the transcript, I had trouble figuring out how to choose sections of text that would cohesively fit together. I kept ending up with random fragments of sentences that did not lead into each other, and because of the guidelines for this project, I could not add transitional phrases in between. Once I got to about halfway through my interview, I saw that I mentioned multiple languages (English, Hindi, Punjabi and German) multiple times. Since my family often combines multiple languages when they talk, I created a cloud of languages with these, increasing the font size of the languages I heard more often. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o also stated that “Every language draws from another. Every language gives to another.” I agree with this, and I think it is demonstrated in my family. At that point in the poem’s creation is also when I started using the interviews text more creatively, and I broke up multiple sentences to create more cohesive lines for the poem.
Works Cited
Narain, Kunwar. “A Shop That Sells Peace.” Poetry International, 2002, www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/poems/poem/103-2900_A-SHOP-THAT-SELLS-PEACE#lang-org.
Subramaniam, Arundhathi. “Kunwar Narain.” Poetry International, 2022, www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/poets/poet/102-2726_Narain.
wa Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ. “Languages as Bridges.” The Language of Languages: Reflections on Translation, by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Seagull Books, 2023, pp. 55–58.