Sugandhi delivered the veg cutlets KumKum ordered through her for the birthday feast – Hemjit was taken ill
This session was devoted to reading poems translated into English. The group sampled poets from various languages: Hindi – 3, Malayalam – 2, and 1 each from Marathi, Bengali, Spanish, French, and Chinese. Only one poet, in Hindi, was a woman (Subhadra Kumari Chauhan).
Thommo, Devika, Geetha in conversation before the reading
There are many theories regarding the translation of poetry. Here is what Vikram Seth, who brought out a volume titled Three Chinese Poets in 1992, has to say on the subject:
Readers follow on every sort of portable device
“There is a school of translation that believes that one can safely ignore many of the actual words of a poem once one has drunk deeply of its spirit. An approximate rendering invigorated by a sense of poetic inspiration becomes the aim. The idea is that if the final product reads well as a poem, all is well: a good poem exists where none existed before. I should mention that the poems in this book are not intended as transcreations or free translations in this sense, attempts to use the originals as trampolines from which to bounce off on to poems of my own.
Birthday goodies for Oct born Devika, Joe, and Kavita
The famous translations of Ezra Pound, compounded as they are of ignorance of Chinese and valiant self-indulgence, have remained before me as a warning of what to shun. I have preferred mentors who, like the three translators I mentioned before, admit the primacy of the original and attempt fidelity to it. Like them, I have tried not to compromise the meaning of the actual words of the poems, though I have often failed. Even in prose the associations of a word or an image in one language do not slip readily into another. The loss is still greater in poetry, where each word or image carries a heavier charge of association, and where the exigencies of form leave less scope for choice and manoeuvre. But if it is felt that the limited access to the worlds of these poems that translation can reasonably hope to provide has been given, I will be more than happy.” (From the foreword)
