The Joy of Things Half-Heard (in Hindi); or, Benny Lava's Loony Buns

(If you'd rather skip the context, the hilarious video can be found below the fold.)

A significant drawback of being deaf is the concentration required to carry on a conversation.  (There are others.)  Since I only pick up have a word here and half a word there, I must rely on my preternatural ability to reconstruct whole words from half-heard phonemes.  I acquired this skill through long hours, hard work, and the normal course of cognitive development: all I'd ever heard are half-words, so my brain developed to hear half-words.  So how would I know that conversing requires more concentrating for me than the hearing world?  Simple:

When I'm tired, stressed, or otherwise not paying close enough attention, words break down into their constitute phonemes.  (Poetry often has the same effect.)  These phonemes typically migrate: the first phoneme of one word because the final of another and vice versa.  Consider a previous example:

One day I went to meet with my advisor.  He inquired into the state of my "current tree search."  I stared, frozen and mute, wondering how he'd learned of my plans to purchase a potted lemon tree for the porch. 

"I'm thinking about lemons," I blundered.  Now it was his turn to stare, bewildered by my admission that I'd been considering lemons a valid object of literary study.  He asked why I'd been thinking about lemons, to which I sensibly replied "because there's not much room on the porch." 

"For your work?"

"What?"

"What?"

"What are you talking about?"

"What are you talking about?"

"Planting a lemon tree on the back porch."

"Why would I care about that?"

"Then why did you ask?"

"Then why did I ask what?"

"About my current ..." 

I trailed off exactly when my mouth, prepping to repeat the absurdity, clued my brain in to the nature of the misunderstanding.

Sometimes, as with the lemon tree, these migrations fold neatly into the English language.  Note how my brain tried to find a suitable context for my mistake: I had been planning on purchasing a tree for the porch, so my brain thrust my advisor's statement into that context.  But more often than not, I'm thrust back into language with a shock of incomprehension:

"Did you just say—you didn't just say—did you?  What?"

Most of the time, I don't have a plausible context ready-to-hand, so my confusion results in absurd, context-less statements.  I hear words, but they're not arranged into sentences.  Or I hear sentences, but the sentences make no sense.  I'm hard-pressed to provide examples of what this experience is like ... or was before I learned about Benny Lava's Loony Buns. 

The video below the fold consists of a Bollywood musical number sung in Hindi but transliterated into English.  The author of the subtitles breaks the Hindi down into phonemes then reconstructs those phonemes as English words.  The result?  The closest approximation to the shock of incomprehension so common among the tired half-deaf:

Comments

[Rich Puchalsky]

Ack! There is some weird connection with poetry, for me anyway. The jumbled phonemes and weird Hollywood (& hip-hop?) -> Bollywood -> adolescent(?) guy in middle America -> poetic context (did you know they're singing about Haiku?) cultural transfer make this one directly tap into ... some kind of unpleasant basement level or other. Something that's going to just keep churning until I re-write this as a sonnet or something.

By the way, the original is in Tamil. There is an English translation too.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Sorry, so sorry...

Let me not impede the mixup of kinds

My loony bun is fine, Benny Lava
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Med students' song of the vena cava

"I'd love to see you pee on us tonight"
If I'd been a doctor, then who knew that
My cool and moneyed visage would delight
A whole chorus with watersports and scat
Anybody need this sign? Benny Lava!
Signs more than an intention give the plan
When ninja makes a movement with guava
Or papaya to fight a barber man

If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

[I think this does it, Rich.]

[Rich Puchalsky]

Thanks -- although I'm still not seeing the stanza breaks.

As the third stanza says, this could be a pretty crushing example in the whole intentionality debates. Poetry washes up on the beach, is taken as meaningful, etc.

[Alexei]

Ah, rediscovering Dadaist poetry, one Bollywood musical sequence at a time...

[joeo]

Louis Zukofsky did similar phonetic translations of Catullus from Latin. They are not all that exciting.

[Rich Puchalsky]

It's not Dadaist poetry at all, Alexei. The original video has a sort of over-the-top, cutesy, and to my cultural frame rather odd attempt at sex appeal, which the only partially phonetic lyrics match with a sort of giggling U.S.-typical adolescent sex humor. That's why the piece works. I mean, perhaps the original may be a consciously ironic / camp regression of Bollywood trope -- look at the guy in the intro, going through the supercool moves with his jacket -- in turn being mocked by someone who we can in turn mock. But it's all good humored enough so that it isn't deadening.

Besides, anything which allows me to turn part of Sonnet 116 into something about watersports is ispo facto good.

[SEK]

Rich,

I'm disinclined to talk about found poetry because it relies so much on who found it. If a certain Joe Day Deen finds a picture of a baboon that happens to depict the reason why democracy will fail, well, I attribute Joe Day Deen's interpretation to something significant; i.e. I think the "foundednes" of "found art" principally reflects the aesthetic judgment of the findee ... and that that's not necessary a good thing. (Consider the plight of "Emo Boy," who sees his PAIN reflected everywhere he turns.)

Also, are you sure it's Tamil? I don't think Meg knows Tamil, but her translation jibed with yours, so ... damn it, I hate being married to someone who can learn languages without my realizing it sometimes.

Joeo,

Has Zukofsky did anything all that interesting? I've tried to read him, but found myself consistently unimpressed (not to mention bored). This is, no doubt, a personal failure, but still ... recommendations of non-Catullus transliterations would be appreciated.

Alexei,

I had a paragraph on Dada in the original post, but deleted it because I couldn't make it swing properly. I'm inclined to think my failure accords with Rich's statement that it ain't Dada, but I'm willing to be convinced otherwise (if only to justify my own initial instincts).

[Rich Puchalsky]

My only warrant for thinking it's Tamil comes from the two links I gave in my first comment, but as far as random links that you've obtained from Google can look like their writers knew what they're doing, they do.

I'm not sure why the foundedness of the poetry really matters. Once you get to this level of (degraded) postmodernist pastiche, everything is "found". I mean, when I realized that "My loony bun is fine, Benny Lava" had 10 syllables and 5 stresses, Sonnet 116 just sort of found itself being peed on, so to speak.

But isn't this a better washed-up-on-the-beach metaphor than the Wordsworth one? Here, a clearly human-created artifact has washed up on Buffalax' beach. Buffalax, rather than trying to figure out what it means -- which is not the point, really -- consciously assigns it known-to-be-incorrect meanings that comically play off of the universals and/or common cultural elements that are understandable, plus off of plain old xenophobia (the original video is labelled "crazy"). Unlike mysterious letters that form themselves due to no human agency, this is an archetypal form of cultural transmission -- a sort of Harold Bloomian misreading on a slapstick level. Clearly the original artists' intentions counted for something, but not everything.

As for aesthetic judgement, well, yeah, there's something lacking in this case. But the example should be the same whether it's Wordwworth washing up or something decidedly more downscale.

[Bryan]

Interestingly (perhaps?) one can make up new lyrics for songs in English, and you will subjectively hear what the subtitles say. Maybe it works best for metal songs--I've seen it with Slayer and Burzum songs on YouTube.

[Amardeep]

Rich is right -- it's Tamil, not Hindi. Most of the YouTube goofy Indian videos are actually South Indian (these days Hindi films are trying hard -- too hard? -- to be "western").

If you prowl through the YouTube comments on this video, you eventually find the source:

Kalluri Vaanil - song from Tamil movie/album Pennin Manadhai Thottu.

The actor is Prabhu Deva.

[Rich Puchalsky]

The second link in my first comment above -- the one labelled English translation -- gives all the specs for the song; the movie, the director, the composer, the actors, the singers etc. Plus the negative (self?)-stereotype that one should not expect doctors of Indian origin, or indeed any Indians, to sing and dance. Which is nonsensical, but anyway, I did think it was interesting that the main actor and actress are supposed to be med students, and that's why "operation" comes through clearly as an English word.

[Rich Puchalsky]

You know, I was wondering who Prabhu Deva looked like. We should get him to do a dance number reenactment for us. He's probably one of the few professors dangerous enough to do those moves with the jacket.

[Ray Davis]

I enjoy an occasional dip in Zukofsky's "Catullus", but, for those who prefer misheard theater to misheard lyric, part 21 of "A" is a (loose) homophonic translation of a comedy by Plautus.

His goofy technique's had some influence on later experimental types, most notably David Melnick.

[Vance Maverick]

I was going to reference Zukofsky's Catullus too. I first learned about it via Charles Bernstein. (Actually, through a self-helpish book with exercises in poetry writing, where Bernstein was by far -- miles -- the most interesting contributor. The screening process must have slipped.)

For Zukofsky, I'd start with "A"-11 and branch out. That's a great, great poem, but it's in his traditional / metrical vein, which is only one corner of his practice (as the phonetics were only one corner).

[Vance Maverick]

It's a nice touch that the subtitles arrive early -- there's enough time to read them first, ensuring that the bogus transcription is well-lodged in your ear before the fragment of lyric rings out.

[Alexei]

(spotty internet connection made it impossible to comment earlier, sorry) Scott and Rich,

While I'm not sure I can offer a strong defense of the idea that there is something Dadaist about this clip, let me give it a shot anyway. In the first instance, the attempt to parse a foreign language according to the recognizable components of English resembles Tzara's Scissors. For, as we know, what sounds like two words (or syllables, or morphemes) to an English speaker can in fact be one (or more than two) in another language. Think of listening to German, or whatever language you don't really speak (or for the theoretically inclined, think of Wittgenstein's remarks about how foreigners speak). Simply put, identifying a sound pattern as 'sounding like Benny Lava' requires a series of judgments, which 'cut,' parse, what we're hearing. And these judgments, these 'original separations' as Hoelderlin would have it, differentiate the recognizable from the nonsense, and allows us to fill in the blanks, to synthesize.

Now I suppose this doesn't sound like Dadaist poetry. But I think we merely need to stress Tzara's dictum, 'Copy conscientiously' (I think I've also seen this translated as, 'copy faithfully'). I take it that the point is to spark certain (artistic) processes, either by automatic writing or by Tzara's poetics, but surely Dadaist poetry doesn't end with method, nor is it confined to humour, irony, etc.

But all this said, I'm quite happy to see Shakespeare and water sports together again for the very first time -- though I wonder Rich: didn't Shakespeare beat you to it? wouldn't some kind of scat-play explain why his lover's breasts are dun coloured in Sonnet 154? hmmm, makes you wonder.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Alexei, I think that the critical difference in source material and apparent intent is more important than a surface similiarity of technique. The Dadaists were about destroying traditional esthetics and their own high culture. This video mocks another culture. When kids laugh at a foreigner speaking some strange language, and at how it sounds like he's saying something funny in their own language, that's not Dada.

I'm glad you liked the Shakespeare bit.

[Alexei]

Of course you're right, Rich, Kids laughing at a foreign language is downright wrong. And kids mocking another culture is even wronger. The wrongest, however, would be for kids to mock their own culture and traditions, that omnipresent source of all things good and moral. So perhaps we should say: Kids shouldn't mock anything. And kids shouldn't be exposed to anything that mocks anything else, even -- especially -- itself. That would just be too much, too confusing. So, since they're just kids, and since mockery is a serious business, perhaps we should ensure that only Adults can mock stuff. We could then tightly regulate what folks can mock by establishing shining institutions of cultural preservation, like the Office de la langue francaise, the Acadamie francaise, the Deutsche Akademie fuer Sprache und Dichtung or maybe the BBC; these bureaucracies could then provide training in mockery, and certify trained professionals, who would only be permitted to mock -- under penalty of being relegated to the status of low-brow, culturally offensive agitators -- the institutions that have accredited them. But Wait! that would be a paradox: we would be mocking the High-cultural Origin of Tradition....

In any event, though you're right to say that the clip isn't Dada -- yet. It does, however, share an insight with Dada (hence my initial remark about 'discovering Dada,' which you've called superficial. And now, since I'm into hairsplitting, I don't think that what keeps it from being Dadaist has anything to do with the material, since as it stands, the clip could be a music video on MTV (part of it's foreign language programming, perhaps), or something of MTV's ilk. In terms of its technical or compositional elements, the clip isn't at all that different from 'our culture.'

Moreover, I'm not at all worried about intentions. Some very funny stuff is unintentional, and sometimes great writing (like some parts of Ulysses) begins with a brilliant typo. INdeed the whole Dadaist experiment with automatic writing was yet another attempt to invalidate such a concept. Intention is a difference that makes a difference only in jurisprudence (and maybe at cocktail parties, where the line between something humorous and saying something embarrassing has everything to do with intention).

So intentions aside, as there are far too many untestable assumptions involved in attributing them, I think there's more than a superficial similarity of technique, and a deeper affinity, however sophomoric, or juvenile it may be, with Dadaist style. But I guess we're perfectly able to disagree on that matter.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Well, I'm certainly not issuing any condemnations of mockery in general. But I think that it particularly works in this case because the original video is so focussed on sex appeal that making fun of it in the same mode seems light-hearted, not unfair.

And it's not a big deal, but I still think you need more than that to call it Dadaist. Dadaism involves an ideology and a historical context. There was once an argument on the Valve somewhere, in which Luther Blissett said that people should stop using Surrealism to describe vaguely surreal artistic effects that weren't connected to the historically specific beliefs and context of Surrealism, and I generally agree with that kind of thing.

[alkau]

O.K. it is really time you started to use your hearing aids. Since I have the same problem without mine. Just ask your father and sister. The phrase "Do you have your hearing aids in???" is heard daily in this house. I enjoy time alone because I am not overloaded with nnoise and sounds, but know it is important for me to be able to hear when dealing with seniors at work. It just great to have another person not hearing what I am saying because they are "to young" to have hearing aids. I am a perfect example for them because I am the young person wearing hearing aids so that I can hear them and solve their problems.