Author: Priya Jestin
Publication: The Sunday
Times of India
Date: December 3, 2000
There's a small land-locked
nation in faraway Europe whose people mouth Sanskrit shlokas and devour
Kalidasa's Shankutala and Jayadeva's Gita Govinda. Unbelievable?
Probably, but Hungary is really like that. Though most Indians don't
know much about it, this is a land where the Vedas and Upanishads have
been religiously read for the past two centuries.
"We have always been
interested in the literature of the East, especially India. However
till a few decades ago, these texts were available only to a select few."
Says Jozsef Vekerdy, a leading Sanskrit scholar in Hungary who has single-handedly
popularised Sanskrit among the Hungarian masses. Vekerdy was in Mumbai
recently to receive the Dayawati Modi Award for this achievement.
The twinkle-eyed 74-year-old
explains how he adapted the Sanskrit texts to suit Hungarian tastes.
"My love story with Sanskrit began when I was a teenager," he reminisces.
"My first contact with Sanskrit literature was through fictionalised versions
of the Mahabharata and Ramayana written by E. Baktay, one of Hungary's
prominent writers. His versions of the epics enraptured me.
That was when I decided to take up a career as a linguist."
Though there were translated
versions of Sanskrit works, they were third-hand-translated from the English
and Germans copies, says vekerdy. "I wanted to go to the roots and
get an accurate Hungarian translation of the original works," he states.
Fuelled by this ambition,
Vekerdy went on to become the first Hungarian Sanskrit scholar. Peppering
his story with a few anecdotes, Vekerdy recollects the time he was left
directionless as the only Sanskrit teacher at the University fled the nation
after the Soviet Union overtook the country in 1956. "Since I was
the only student, I finally had to teach myself," he chuckles.
However, being the only
Sanskrit scholar had its benefits, as the Russians "viewed anything Western
with a suspicious eye". "We were encouraged to have ties with countries
that were friendly with Soviet Russia like China and India," he says.
Soon, Hungarian publishers were seeking out people who could translate
the literary works of China and India. And some publishing houses
approached Vekerdy to translate Sanskrit epics.
However, when Vekerdy's
first book, a translation of Kalidasa's Meghdoot was published, he was
cooling his heels in a jail. "I was arrested with a copy of a letter
written by students to then Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru," he
says in a stage whisper. "Over 2000 students were deported or hanged
after a student uprising against the Soviet occupation. That was
when I sent the letter to Nehru explaining the conditions in our country
and soon, through Nehru's personal intervention, the atrocities against
us stopped." However, the letter led to Vekerdy's spending three years
in prison.
"Prison life has its
own advantages," he says with a naughty grin and hastily explains how he
read and translated quite a few of Kalidasa's works during his prison tenure.
It was during this time that he tried to innovate and make Sanskrit texts
more interesting to the lay reader. "All Sanskrit texts are long
and laborious to read. Hence to retain reader interest, I first translated
only selections from the Vedas, Upanishads and versified them. Later,
I began selecting a few sentences from a paragraph and then put them together
to make a cohesive text;" he explains.
Adhering to the original
text was a must and Vekerdy even got some poets to put the translations
to verse. "All metric translations strictly follow the original Sanskrit
verse format. Since Hungarian is phonetically similar to Sanskrit,
the essence of the verses can be retained in the language," he explains.
To date, he has translated at least 28 Sanskrit texts, including the Vedas
and the Upanishads. Vekerdy's labour of love seems to have paid off.
"Today, many Hungarian youngsters can recite verses of the Gita Govinda
in Sanskrit," he says proudly.
Apart from Sanskrit works,
Vekerdy also studied and later translated the sayings of the Buddha from
Pali. For a man who loves Indian culture and literature, isn't it
strange that is Vekerdy's first trip to the land? "I am a lazy man," he
explains candidly. Now that he has translated quite a few ancient
texts, Vekerdy proposes to begin translating another Sanskrit tome, a relatively
modern one this time: a poem on Indira Gandhi.
And when does he plan
to stop? "When there are no more Sanskrit works left to translate."
