The Mystery Grows Clearer: some notes on Laxmanrao Sardessai

 I don't believe I've discussed it here, but a few months ago I received an email from Dr. Paul Melo e Castro, the man responsible for the Archive of Goan Writing in Portuguese, from which you may recall I chose a poem almost at random and translated it into English. As it turns out, Dr. Melo e Castro found my translation of Laxmanrao Sardessai's "O Mistério Aclara-se" good enough to invite me to translate several more of Sardessai's poems for a future issue of Muse India. Said issue will be dedicated to Indian writing in Portuguese that's been translated into English. I'm excited to make a contribution.

Over the past three and a half months I've been reading and translating the bulk of Laxmanrao Sardessai's published poetic output, which consists of under a hundred poems, I think, written and published between 1962 and 1966. To my knowledge Sardessai did not write poetry in anything but Portuguese, but he wrote hundreds of stories in Marathi and Konkani, which makes his relatively brief foray into a língua portuguesa all the more interesting. Given that Goa was facing a 1967 referendum on maintaining its independence as a territorial unit vs. integration with the neighboring, and much larger, state of Maharashtra- a fate Sardessai opposed- it makes sense that he would employ Portuguese, as well as the languages in which his writing was better-known, to sway a wider audience into voting against integration. Once the referendum ended with Goa remaining independent of Maharashtra, there was no more need for Sardessai to write in Portuguese. (For publication, anyway; he may have continued writing privately in the language.)

In addition to the Muse India translations, I hope to have news of a related project sometime in the next month or two, but for now I'm keeping my lip buttoned, lest I jinx it. That said, in the course of my readings Dr. Melo e Castro was kind enough to send me the photos he took of Sardessai's poems as they first appeared in the Portuguese-language Goan newspaper A Vida. Not only has this allowed me to fix typos and such, but it's allowed me a brief glimpse into life in Lusophone Goa in the 1960s. (When was the last time you saw a poem in a newspaper?*).

Below is the original text of "O Mistério Aclara-se", published on 15 April 1966. The sharp-eyed among you may note that it contains different punctuation than the version I used in my translation, which will necessarily result in revisiting my initial effort.

Muito obrigado to Dr. Paul Melo e Castro for putting in the work in Goa's archives and sharing his findings with the wider world. Lengthening Shadows, his two-volume collection of Goan short stories translated from Portuguese to English, will soon be available from Goa 1556, and I wholeheartedly suggest you check it out. There is another project of his in the works, but I'll discuss that at a later time.

Hope all is well, dudes. Take it easy.

D.A.S.

*I can think of an example, actually, and one I saw as recently as this past summer, at that. Like A Vida above, it too is a Lusophone paper published in a territory where the use of Portuguese faces an uncertain future. I refer to Plataforma Macau 澳門平台, a bilingual weekly I enjoyed reading over coffee at Caravela in the afternoons.