Long live Santiago

Ernest Miller Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, a novella that reportedly bloomed high and handsome from a paragraph of his magazine essay On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter, provided rich inspiration, more than ingredients, for his voluminous three-part valedictory ‘sea novel’ Islands in the Stream that was, ironically enough, published after his death. No wonder, the grand old man Santiago won Hemingway the Pulitzer Prize and also paved the way for the ultimate Nobel Prize honour.

Old Man and the Sea is a soul-stirring account: of unyielding desire traveling hand in hand with inevitable despair, and transcendental redemption wrapped in transient resignation. One can sense Hemingway’s personal experience seep into this intimate third person account.

His inimitable profundity, trials, triumphs and tribulations in life as also his own fishing expedition to Havana have immortalized the epic figure of Santiago, his worthy heir Manolin and even the majestic marlin, Santiago’s adversarial soul mate. When the beach tourists mistake the marlin's skeletal remains for that of a shark at the very end of the epic tale, its glory assumes folklore proportions but is unflinchingly faithful to Hemingway’s iceberg theory that expects the reader to unearth and savour the implicit lying beneath the surface elements.      

Lurking in the seemingly straightforward plot – of an epic battle between an old Cuban fisherman past his prime and a huge, unswerving marlin fish - are umpteen allusions and delusions that bless the reader with fresh insights on every successive read, provided he or she suspends judgment and refrains from the temptation to manufacture and market loquacious interpretations for personal glory.    

  

Santiago’s cyclical suffering is not a melodramatic sob story, nor is it a perfunctory prescription of a laugh in lieu of a sigh. In some ways, Santiago reminds us of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: “Tragic optimism is the mood of the strong man who seeks intensity and extent of experience even at the cost of woe and is delighted to find that strife is the law of life.” 

And yet, Santiago is not really at war, he is more of a ritualistic doer in perfect harmony with nature’s bounty as well as its fury. Defeat in his case is inevitable, and yet he is not destroyed. His pride to reclaim his societal honour may be excessive, but it is liberating in essence and hence sanctified. In his tragic solitary collapse is a monumental triumph that Manolin unfurls as the designated torchbearer.     

In hindsight, it only seems destined that the Marathi translation was done by our very own P L Deshpande, gifted writer, humourist, playwright, actor, composer, singer, harmonium player and much more. The power of his pen has masterfully recreated the essence and significance of Santiago for Marathi readers. He consulted several fishermen and ichthyologists to get the parlance right, as also to avoid the inadvertent gaps that descriptions of milieus alien to the native populace are inherently prone to. The Marathi title is the only creative liberty he indulged in, and rightly so. 

Borrowing the first two words from a textbook verse “एका कोळियाने एकSदा आपुSले जाळे बांधियेलें उंचS जाSगी” (Once a fisherman hoisted his net high above), he aptly came up with the crisp and suggestive “एका कोळियाने” thereby co-relating the innocence of the poem with the indefatigable spirit of Santiago, rather than staidly settling for “म्हातारा आणि समुद्र” in what would have been a literal but arid translation.