– Should one prioritise the content or the spirit of the poem?
– Should the translation remain faithful to the text, or is a freer version required?
– How should the quirks of an author’s unconventional syntax be rendered into the target language?
– What to do with cultural and linguistic details like rituals, gestures, dialectal colloquialisms and idioms?
– Should footnotes be used to explain allusions to history, mythology, and prior literature?
– If the original poem has a formal structure such as meter and rhyme, is it necessary to retain that and if so, at what cost?
– Should divisions such as line breaks and stanzas be followed?
The ideal is that translations should not read as translations, but as “poems, a new voice perfect in their own right, transcending the barriers …” (Wendy Doniger)
While Nabaneeta Dev Sen had the close collaboration of her daughter to create the translations, in Victor Hugo’s case (poem A Sunset chosen by Zakia from the collection Feuilles d'Automne or Leaves of Autumn), the translator was the original poet and mystic, Francis Thompson, well-known for his poem The Hound of Heaven:
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
We had two Welsh poets represented, Alun Lewis the war poet who wrote two small poetry collections and two short books of prose which have stood the test of time. He was dead at 28 in a brutal war he despised but which he joined, ignoring a long history of mental depression and a strong pacifist bent. He said: “I’m not going to kill. Be killed perhaps, instead.”
Geetha’s choice was an eloquent rendering of Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas, the more famous hard-drinking poet of Wales who was considered too Welsh to be English in England, and had the simultaneous misfortune of being too English for the Welsh. Everybody remembers him for his villanelle Do not go gentle into that good night
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
To reciprocate Joe’s choice of a Bangla poet, KumKum chose a Malayali poet, though one who wrote all his poems in English, having been brought up outside Kerala. Apart from writing poems, the best experience in his life was getting married to a wonderful doctor, Kavery Nambisan, from Kodagu (Coorg) who is a literary person, in addition to spending a life of service as a doctor in remote areas.
Kavery Nambisan who works in rural hospitals has written seven books novels and children's books
Thomo was true to form in choosing a lyricist and song-writer, the front man of the Led Zeppelin rock band. He sang for us one of the famous numbers, Stairway to Heaven, which delighted everyone. But having to go off on a rescue mission to a wedding, he could not be present. Readers must be thankful he sent a recording which is permanently theirs to listen to from a link below within this blog post.
Arundhaty chose a poet, Suniti Namjoshi, who is in the forefront of the feminist movement, but began her professional life as an officer in the Indian Administrative Service before pursuing higher studies abroad. She wrote poems and stories and became a noted academic in Canada, USA and UK. The poem chosen was somewhat dark:
like any other creature, talks perhaps
more than is normal, her doom no brighter,
nor her death less dismal than any other.
We had Devika reciting an elegy for Africa (a continent of countries she loves) by one of its famous sons from Sierra Leone who overcame racism and prejudice to contribute at the highest level of academia, medical science and poetry – Davidson Nicol. Africa, he describes, as a continent for loving:
and the bougainvillea in mauve passion
entwines itself around strong branches
the palm trees stand like tall proud moral women
shaking their plaited locks against the
cool suggestive evening breeze;
Shoba recited an astrophysical poem by Marie Howe, inspired by black holes and the singularity (infinity) Einstein found as one possible solution to his famous equations of Gravitation in 1916. Black holes were made popular by Stephen Hawking (to whom the poem is dedicated), although it was the physicist John Wheeler who first used the term in 1967. The poem is titled Singularity and written in the form of an interior monologue, reflecting on the origin of the universe and humans.
Singularity by Marie Howe
