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Hemang Desai 241But as the poem is written in the Gujarati transliteration ofVraj, a dialect of Hindi, one cannot take the possible interpretationof chup chup as ‘chupke chupke’ which means ‘secretly’, ‘covertly’etc. when it suits the semantic context so perfectly. The poet saysthat in love one has to save oneself from the vigilant and censuringeyes of the world, as the world is always intent upon snapping thebond of love and intimacy between lovers. Worldly-wise people canindulge in foul play or chicanery, which, in turn, can assume lethalproportions for lovers. On a figurative level, this interpretation canbe imputed to a devotee\gopi who wishes to be one with LordKrishna in spite of being married. Such a gopi also needs to keepeverything about her love affair hushed-up because if the sāsu ornanand, that are a variety of societal codes in the case of a devotee,comes to know about the said contravention, moral and ethical, shewill put a stringent check on all the activities of the gopi\devotee. Toretain both these opposite nuances I have translated chup chup as‘covertly’ and ‘quietly’ respectively in the first two stanzas. To put itin a nutshell, the fluctuating relationship between the signifier andthe signified poses problems for the translator.Some of the hardest riddles in translating a text from anIndian language into English are the literary tense and the authorialvoice. In English the simple past tense is the narrative tense. Thestory, which is believed to have already happened, is recounted byan authorial voice, which either is a character in the story or anomniscient and omnipresent force. Though in Gujarati the narrativetense is unequivocally simple past, sometimes authors out of theirzeal to make the narration sound lively and dramatic purposelyswitch over to simple present tense. However, a story, whichvacillates between present and past tenses in the course of thenarrative, is likely to fuddle a reader who is not accustomed to suchtime fluctuations. Tense causes problems when one attempts to mapGujarati tenses onto English ones because the time referenceconveyed by them is different. That is why most Indian speakers ofEnglish use tenses wrongly, the common errors being using past