Writing Water

WRITE WATER-AND NOT NECESSARILY about it-in our poems? I often find myself turning helplessly to onomatopoeia to rescue us. I begin with the sounds in Bangla, the language I was born in. 'Jal', which is the word for water, has a rhyming onomatopoeic phrase to describe its shining and reflective character: 'chhal chhal'. There are others which carry the sense of how the water is falling, its sound, volume and intensity: 'toop toop' for waterdrops slow and reluctant to fall; 'jhiri jhiri', for a drizzle; 'jhor jhor', for a slightly unexpected voluminous fall of water. There's also 'tapur tupur' for the gentle sound of raindrops, on tin roofs in particular, I think. Speaking to my colleague, the translator Arunava Sinha, about the impossibility of translating onomatopoeic sounds into English, we discussed how 'tapur tupur', the gentle sound of Bengali raindrops, was usually translated into 'pitter patter' in English. Though the consonants remain the same in both the languages-p, t, and r sounds-the gentle 'u' of the Bangla 'tapur tupur' is flattened to the English 'pitter patter'. Something goes wrong-the rains in Bengal are different from that in England

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