The art of translating The Art of Vinyasa

Julia Napier
Aug 24, 2017 · 17 min read
Richard Freeman guiding a morning practice

I am currently in the midst of my second round of Richard Freeman and Mary Taylor’s month-long Teacher’s Intensive. They are too wise to call it a teaching training and thereby trick people into thinking it will be anything but the open, vigorous observation that practice requires. Over this month-long period, we undergo long asana sessions (twenty breaths in Trikonasana while Richard tells a story), hours of seated meditation, cadaver dissections, and the philosophy talks which remind us why Richard is unlike anybody else. At the core of this experience is the fierce heart of Mary Taylor, a woman as elegant as she is strong. It is an honor and a challenge to study under these two and we have come from every corner of the world to be here, leaving our children, our jobs, our partners and our comfort behind.

Where it all happens

I was Richard and Mary’s student long before we met in person. For years, I drove around Buenos Aires (where I live) listening to Richard’s audio recording The Yoga Matrix. A self-described “student of yoga,” he somehow makes complexity seem like a blessing and is unafraid of contradiction; he also happens to have a wicked (literally) sense of humor and a body as bendy as his mind. I did the Intensive two years ago, giddy with excitement, and it marked a shift in my life. After coming home from Boulder, I began a process of unlearning what I had assumed to be true. To use Richard’s words, I began to wake up to my own ignorance, which sounds dismal but is actually a relief. As a result, I’m taking a break from teaching yoga classes, unsure about what that really means. As a repeat student in the Intensive, I feel humbler and less prepared but also more capable of listening. This time around I’m nursing an injury, so all of the manic attention to the performance aspect of asana has disappeared for me and every morning when I step on my mat, I’m just hoping to survive.

I am also in the unusual position of having spent the past six months translating Richard and Mary’s recent book The Art of Vinyasa into Spanish. During my first Intensive, they had just submitted the manuscript to their publisher, or so they told us on the first day of class. This book seemed like a linking motion, a vinyasa, to the course itself (or those are the words they might use), and I remember being curious about what it might contain. Two years later, my work as an editor and translator has linked me back to their writing, their teachings and to the process of yoga itself.

The constant process of revision…

Translation is one of those activities that, like yoga, is much harder than you would imagine. Doing even a decent job requires longer hours than could ever be remunerated in cash, and translators navigate a steady current of doubt and ambiguity. What do you most want to preserve? The meaning? The tone? How can you take one idiom and coax it another? How do you proceed knowing that so much will inevitably left out? It will never be the same, never quite as immediate as the original. It will be something else: good or bad, better or worse — different. As readers, we adore classics like War and Peace, Madame Bovary or The Plague, fascinated by the stories but aware that we are beyond the fence of the original language, looking in at the story from the outside.

I have been fascinated by words since I was a child and have considered myself a writer since my early teens. In high school, I filled notebooks with overfly felt poetry and memorized everything written by Sylvia Plath. I also spent years trying to learn French and grew curious about the gaps between one language and another. English, I understood, enjoyed a great volume of words, but French was so precise and neat. I began to feel its persnickety beauty affect my mind as I tried to incorporate the new sounds and sense. Inexpert as I was, I felt different in French, both more constrained and more refined. This all seemed to rest in the construction “Comme il faut,” which Merriam Webster defines as “conforming to accepted standards.” Over time, I understood this notion as deeply French. When I went to France and lived for months with a family, I discovered that there was, indeed, a preferred way to do most things, completely unlike the American cultural potluck in which I had been raised: “C’est comme ça” as opposed to “Whatever, dude.”

When I was a teenager, my mother gave me a book that listed similar (yet different) sayings from several romance languages. You could be skinny as a bean in English but thin as an asparagus in French and slender as a rake in Italian. This multiplicity of expression, nuanced in its variety, opened avenues in my mind. How much did language, or languages, affect the shape and quality of our thoughts? At that time, most Americans only spoke one language; our economic and military might fueled the predominance of English as the language of power. We could be understood by many without having to understand anyone else.

In college, I studied the Francophone writers of the Antilles and Northern Africa, drawn to the confluence of language, politics and identity. These writers had been schooled in a colonial language, French, while they spoke Creole at home and on the street. French was the language of bureaucracy, success, and control. Creole was the language of taste, sound, and color. A brave group of writers (led by the eminent Aimé Cesaire) forged a new language, a creolized French, that both subverted the dominant tongue and illuminated the beauty of everyday speech. Creole itself was already a language of compromise, a mixture of the African languages spoken by slaves and the European discourse of the slave-traders. But, like many people who acknowledge complexity, this new generation of francophones wrote themselves out of the mainstream. Translating their work is nearly impossible and to appreciate its value, you need to understand Caribbean history, colonial atrocity and modern geography. But behind all of these linguistic details, the big question in these novels remains: “Who are we?” Africans? Islanders? French citizens? Creoles? As a student, I wondered if these gifted writers could help to heal the wounds of the colonial past and shape the uncertain future. Or was their poetry what W.H. Auden describes as “the raw towns we live in die in, a way of happening, a mouth”?

In Praise of Creole Identity, a poetic manifesto written by Carribbean writers

Around the same time, I saw Brian Friel’s play Translations. His story describes what happens when British soldiers attempt to create the first English language map of Ireland. Wandering through the countryside, they meet a collection of brilliant Irish villagers who all attend a rural Hedge school. The play itself is written in English, but the audience witnesses the failures of language between the characters and the brutality born of naming. One of the main characters, an Irish professor of Latin and Greek, cautions one of his students:

“But remember that words are signals, counters. They are not immortal. And it can happen — to use an image you’ll understand — it can happen that a civilization can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of… fact.”

One of the English soldiers falls in love with a local girl (although they can’t communicate verbally). The soldier imagines staying forever in Ireland but knows, “I’ll always be an outsider here, wouldn’t I? I may learn the password but the language of the tribe will always elude me. The private core will always be… hermetic, won’t it?”

British soldiers, their Irish translator and a new map in Translations

This very idea led me out of academia, where I thought I belonged. Cautioned that I would never get a job teaching literature written by people with darker skin than mine, I followed my boyfriend Juan to Argentina, abandoned the Francophone writers I admired and undertook a new language. Over several years, I learned Spanish and became fluent in the words of Juan’s tribe. This process was halting, clumsy and often embarrassing (I once called someone a hooker thinking it was a compliment). Most profoundly, I wanted to become someone else (more passionate, funny, powerful and daring) through these new words. In some ways, I did. In English, I was always self-conscious and intellectual, the kind of kid who impressed adults. But in Spanish I relied on everything I picked up on the street: the slang of Juan’s friends, taxi drivers’ stories and popular music. Inevitably I became a more voluble, cruder version of my former self. Juan joked that he was my Henry Higgins, though the process was inverse; he took a well-spoken person (in English) and turned me into a street urchin (in Spanish). When I understood just how informal my Spanish was, I started reading and cleaning up my vocabulary. In Buenos Aires, a mess is a quilombo, which I later learned referred to brothels. I had always assumed this was just the appropriate word for a complicated circumstance. Al pedo was a rude way of saying sin sentido. I began to pick and choose, to appropriate instead of merely repeating, to differentiate poetry from cliché.

After several years in Argentina, I began to work as a translator (into English). Like many people, I underestimated how challenging this job can be, but I also discovered its tinkering pleasure, the satisfaction of trying one word and crossing it out, before starting over again. Most importantly, I understand the value of patience and time — as well as the limits of my own concentration. Translation, I soon understood, was one of two things: either a labor of love or a major pain in the ass.

As time passed, both my ease in Spanish and my interest in yoga deepened, I began writing in Spanish and some of it was published. I collaborated on several children’s books and edited a bilingual anthology. Feeling comfortable and (probably) overconfident, I decided to violate a cardinal rule and translate from my first language to my second. Not only was I brazen enough to do this, but my first job was to shepherd Sri K. Pattabhi Jois’s only book Yoga Mala into Spanish. In plain English, this took a lot of balls and a little hubris on my side, but I had the chance to try. Every year there are more practitioners of Ashtanga Yoga in the Spanish speaking world, and there’s precious little to read unless your English is excellent. My translation, I assumed, would be better than nothing, and I took comfort in the fact that the English edition of Yoga Mala was already a kind of mystery, a text not entirely itself.

The young Pattabhi Jois

As Eddie Stern describes in the foreward to Yoga Mala, Pattabhi Jois wrote this treatise in Kannada (a South Indian language) in the 1960’s — long before his face appeared on t-shirts and Facebook pages. Yoga Mala was a tangible piece of his considerable research and expertise, both as a teacher of yoga asana and sacred Sanskrit texts. One of Jois’s students printed a single run of the manuscript, and no one really knows where the copies went. When Eddie Stern got to Mysore thirty years later, he heard about the book and asked his teacher if any copies remained. Jois had one, which (in the tradition of the famous Yoga Korunta) was being devoured by ants. Eddie rescued the book, convinced Pattabhi Jois that it could be photocopied and found a local academic who translated every word orally, which Eddie then wrote down in a notebook and read aloud to his guru. He would ask Jois (who was known for his idiosyncratic English) if the translation sounded correct and they would make adjustments, adding here and subtracting there. So it was that Yoga Mala evolved into English, both amended and reconsidered. Eddie and Pattabhi Jois added footnotes to explain ideas foreign to Western readers, and the American Sanskrit expert Vyaas Houston translated all of the foundational texts.

I remember sitting in my kitchen in Suburban Buenos Aires at five in the morning, contemplating the insurmountable differences in time, context, experience, sound and rhythm that separated the book’s original composition from the translation I was undertaking. To be honest, I prayed. I prayed that I would listen carefully to the words and try not to get in their way, that I would respect Pattabhi Jois deeply but not so much that I would stay slavishly close to the original. A good translation should feel fresh and vibrant, as if it had always been written that way. But I am not an Indian Guru, nor will I ever be. I relied constantly on my Argentine assistant to catch inconsistencies, errors and bad calls. Soon she became an invaluable co-translator. Together, we read the translation aloud until I actually ran a fever. I don’t know if it’s good enough, but we couldn’t have worked harder. When people started posting pictures on Facebook of their Spanish copies of Yoga Mala, I felt amazed to participate in the transmission of these teachings.

The Argentine editorial team of Yoga Mala

However, the philosophy of yoga reminds us, time and again, that words will never be sufficient, specific enough, or comprehensive. As I worked on Richard and Mary’s The Art of Vinyasa, I kept a post-it on the manuscript’s cover: “The wise should be one with that silence wherefrom words together with the mind turn back without reaching it, but which is attainable by the Yogins.” This verse is from the Aparokshanubhuti (attributed to Shankaracharya), a text dear both to Pattabhi Jois and Richard Freeman. As Richard likes to tell us in class, whatever idea we can create about the Self isn’t the Self. Whatever we might think about purusha or nirodha isn’t purusha or nirodha but merely some concept of the mind. He begins the Intensive with the Kena Upanishad and its assertion that Brahman “is not understood by those who understand it; it is understood by those who don’t understand it.” All of these words, purusha, Brahman, atman are linguistic gestures towards the mysteries of divine consciousness, but in written or spoken language, there is always going to be a gap between meaning and interpretation, what can be described and what cannot.

Drafting El Arte de Vinyasa

This indeterminate space can drive you crazy or make life a little roomier. As a translator, you can attempt to pin down vocabulary or give it space to breathe. As a yoga practitioner, you can imagine that you will become enlightened if you memorize the entire Yoga Sutra — or you can sit and watch your own breath (and learn the Yoga Sutra just because it’s a work of genius). Richard likes to explain that we can make good use of our thoughts, honing and polishing them like a path of stones that lead across a river. If we go far enough, we won’t need them anymore. Language is hugely useful as a tool, but it’s not a destination.

After the morning asana classes here in Boulder, some of us walk across Pearl Street to acquire caffeine and carbohydrates before the morning philosophy section. Last week, Nuno, a Spanish-speaking practitioner (who is actually Portuguese) caught me on the way back and asked, “Oye Julia, cómo se dice ‘The Plumb Line’ en Español?”

Richard and Mary are famous for their unusual metaphors and descriptions of the body: the psoas muscle has buttons, the pelvis breathes through nostrils and kidneys have wings. This highly original, effective and sophisticated approach to yoga has made them famous the world over, but it also makes them difficult to translate. As I read their book, I tried to imagine a Spanish-speaking person who had never taken a workshop or studied with them personally. My assistant and I made a glossary of original terms and concepts that appear repeatedly throughout the book. Most writers have what I once heard described as “core obsessions” to which they return time and again. The Plumb Line is one of Richard and Mary’s.

Used by carpenters and handymen, a plumb line is a tool that measures verticality. Merriam Webster also describes it as “a line directed to the center of gravity of the earth.” As I tried to answer Nuno’s question, I was reminded again of the gaps between meaning and the inherent difficulty of explaining a bodily experience in words: “the silence wherefrom words and the mind turn back without reaching it.” Or, as the Kena Upanishad suggests, “Sight does not reach there; neither does thinking or speech.” The simple answer to Nuno’s question was “la plomada.” But what Richard and Mary invoke when they describe the plumb line is not a noun or perhaps even a place; it is the sensation of being connected to the center of the earth from the center of your body. It is the radiant, vertical flow of energy up and down through the juncture of your deepest parts. Or at least that’s my interpretation of what they mean. Who knows what they have experienced after forty years of practice and constant exploration? I am just a translator, a person trying to fill in the holes, but I also hope to honor them. As I worked on this book, I became more aware that we are always translating: digesting someone else’s words, feelings, actions — even the weather — and creating our own new text. This process can be revelatory, but it can also be painfully reductive.

In the Kena Upanishad, one verse advises, “If you think ‘I know it well’ perhaps you know it ever so little, whether it is the present form of Brahman as you or as the gods. So then you should inquire deeply even though you think it is known.” I thought it would be easier to translate The Art of Vinyasa because I know my teachers, but the more I worked, the less sure I became. Their innovation pushes against the boundaries of conventional language, and I often felt lost and uncertain. But, over time, I began to pull away from literalism, to look for the gesture in their ideas and to avoid nailing down meaning as if it were a block of wood. Nothing would be perfectly commensurate; the translation could only reflect good intentions, humility and diligence — like a decent yoga posture. The process of yoga and the process of translation share essential elements: working hard, taking your time, assuming that it’s impossible to get it just right, caring so deeply for form that you can eventually loosen your grip. And if you’re very lucky and everything comes together, your work will be invisible, done in the service of another and for others. “You have the right to work” Krishna famously counsels Arjuna, “but not to the fruits of your work.”

After pouring over Richard and Mary’s manuscript for months, I can appreciate the distance between intellectual cognition and real understanding; the latter is a kind of peace that, as WB Yeats says, “comes dropping slow.” It’s the very opposite of the impulse I often have when I sit down to work, wondering how many pages I can get done before the kids come home from school. When I’m starting a translation, I usually set myself a goal of three pages a day. This can often be as counterproductive as deciding to put your leg behind your head when you are still too stiff to touch your toes. Richard is famous for torturing his more advanced students by slowing down their practice to its very essence: take the arms up over head, bring the arms back down to the sides. Ekam, Samasthitihi. Nothing more. But if you pay attention, it’s astonishing what you can experience in those two (apparently simple) movements. As methodologies go, it’s the most powerful one I know. Over the past month, I have developed a new mantra as I practice: just pay attention. Nothing less.

Here in Boulder, I watch the spaces open up between what Richard and Mary say and what we hear, between what we see and feel, between students from all over the world who speak different languages and yet share the dialect of practice. In the cadaver lab, we leave behind the illustrations in our anatomy books to witness the bare flesh and organs of a real person. We hold their hearts and brains in our hands, peeling back layers of tissue most mortals never see. And even as we contemplate these bodies, we fight against the literal translation of mortality; as they are now, so too will we become. As graphically as this fact is presented on the slab, we still don’t really get it; but at least we are aware of the gap between believing you know something and carrying its truth in your bones.

Last week, in a lecture about the Bhagavad Gita, Richard described Arjuna’s dilemma as a situation in which the warrior prince has to act without 100% certainty of how it’s all going to turn out. This takes real courage. At every moment we risk being wrong. It’s like translation, or parenting or falling in love or anything else that really matters: you show up, do your best and at some point you let go. Krishna spends chapters lecturing Arjuna about the importance of form, but then claims that it doesn’t really matter. First we undertake abhyasa or practice and then vairagya, detachment. “Abandon all dharmas” Krishna says to his disciple, “and simply come to me.”

This is hard. It requires sticking your neck out a little farther than is comfortable, exposing yourself to failure and defeat. My impulse is to revise the translation forever, to ask for another extension from my editor, to play it safe. But as a student of Richard and Mary’s, I have to put down my red pen and accept that I am done, that it will be imperfect and that I may be wrong.

When I lose sleep over the quality of the translation I have undertaken for my beloved teachers, I think about a book that used to sit on my parents’ coffee table. Two talented photographers, David Scheinbaum and Janet Russek, spent twenty years taking and curating photographs to pair with the hexagrams of the I Ching. Their pictures are portentous, spare and gestural. In their introduction to the book, they write, “We are neither scholars of the I Ching nor authorities on its use. Our hope is that these visual companions will offer an additional metaphorical dimension to consultations with the I Ching.”

Scheinbaum and Russek have not altered the original text but given it a gorgeous breadth in which to roam. They go beyond language, touching, perhaps more closely, the spaces that the mind and words cannot reach. This is better than translation, what Andrew Marvel describes as not “a breach, but an expansion/Like gold to airy thinness beat.” It is art.

Most of us, however, don’t believe that we are artists, but tomorrow we will have to make fresh translations between husband and wife, teacher and student, parent and child, skin and air, in breath and out breath. This is vinyasa, the linking motion that makes yoga possible. We can take our time, slowing our experience down until we cease to move mechanically through our lives. Ekam, Samasthitihi. We can translate one word, one glance, one touch at a time instead of devouring everything in our path.

May our translations be solid and precise, generous and faithful, grounded in fact and open to everything we don’t yet know.

Saraswati, goddess of words and wisdom

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Julia Napier

Written by

Writer, editor, practitioner of Ashtanga Vinyasa

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