'prem' and 'karuna'

Satyam from my Blog Ef , writes on 'prem' and 'karuna' too .. more elaborately ..

Your translation is perfectly fine. Certainly you could not have done better with an impromptu attempt such as this is. I shall repeat my comments from elsewhere but before I do so and speaking for myself I should add that with any important thought or work or body of work new spaces are opened up for discussion. The important then lies in this space or these new avenues. Agreement or disagreement are beside the point as long as the work enables such exchanges and assuming one responds in ways befitting the rigor or thought of the work. I cannot hope to do so with my comments. Nonetheless I engage in this very incomplete and unworthy response:

A fascinating thought for sure. But couldn't one problematize it? The
Christian notion of love seems to shed such an opposition and completely
incorporate mercy. In other words no authentic mercy exists without
love and vice versa. Having said that I don't completely subscribe to
this idea. Because this definition of love is achieved bu stripping down
everything that is essential to love and making it something 'other'
and much more spiritualized. Which of course makes sense within the
context of faith but otherwise does great violence to any normative idea
of love.

Getting back to your father's opposition perhaps the selfishness of love
isn't such a bad thing. There is undoubtedly a selfish economy
minimally operative between the lover and whatever is loved but
sometimes this is a means of preservation. It preserves what is loved
more (or longer) than it otherwise might have. But it also perhaps
preserves the ethical in one's own self.

It is true that mercy does not operate with the same sense of exchange
but is it completely free of any economy? Isn't it precisely the self
that is somehow benefited each time the act of mercy is performed? At
the very least there is this possibility.

Contamination then on either side of this opposition..

In any case that wonderful paragraph from your father certainly branches
out in many different directions and calls for engagement. Which is all
that one can expect from a 'rich' thought or thinking..

In the same vein the biographical detail behind any such thought is of relatively less significance. Why, when and how your father wrote what he did enlightens us about his state of mind but the thought must stand independently. Now one could certainly complicate the same by offering other bits of evidence or other references from your father's work where he perhaps argues against what he has argued for here. Or maybe he doesn't argue against it but makes the opposition even more nuanced. Either way the original thought whether revised or corrected must stand on its own. And even if one disagrees with such a thought one has not in any way 'lessened' its significance. The truest homage is always one where one authentically engages with a work. To do so one one must necessarily 'argue'. A weak or blind 'obedience' in this sense would never be worthy of the work or thought. It would completely misunderstand even the notion of 'fidelity'. To use a register from elsewhere or a word that I like a lot any such thought is a 'provocation'. Because it invites those who might be interested to respond in similar ways. One cannot hope to equal the 'gift' offered by the thought but one must strive to respond in 'apposite' fashion. In doing so we also enrich the original work. We expand the range of its possibilities. We expand its meanings. So on and so forth. Even where there is revision or correction by a later voice or generation it only enhances the prestige of the thought that gave rise to it. We never overcome the heritage of thinking, we just keep responding to it anew. It is the same with any other work worthy of the name. Hence on my part I keep revisiting the site of the angry young man...



perhaps... I can't claim to have any serious knowledge on the Hindi though I think Amitji's translations here are correct. It's then a question of which meaning one chooses from a range of possibilities. Always of course the problem with translation. But Amitji's choices make sense because these sharpen the 'opposition' with love. if however you choose 'compassion' you start out perhaps more of an overlap. Again this is just about nuance and I certainly don't have any expertise whatsoever in Hindi. But this is where different translations create different tones. Also some of these meanings are thematically linked. So for instance one could argue that proper mercy isn't possible without authentic compassion. So the former might presuppose the latter. These problems often arise in translation because the original word has a whole web of semantic references that are interconnected. But when you translate you have to choose and even if in a footnote you mentioned those other possibilities as translators often do you wouldn't be able to evoke the same 'web' in a different language.