Verse Reverse

“The translation sessions so far have been very intense though we often have interesting discussions,” says Chattarji. The talks explore the many layers of the French poems,wordplays in them and nuances. Since the French poems undergoing the translation process are highly evolved and intellectual,the Mumbai poets have quite a few challenges to deal with. “The aim is to translate them without making them contrived,” adds Chattarji. Even though the language barrier has added to their challenges,she adds on a lighter vein that they have figured out a way to communicate with hand gestures,apart from taking the interpreters’ help. Divate finds it interesting that the French poems are “full of twists and turns,deeper meaning and the ideas going back and forth”.

For the Mumbai programme,Memoire specifically wrote Il Devient Cinquitude while Jamme chose the extracts from his The Life of Beetles and Sagot-Duvaroux offered Forest,and all that. Calling it “eternally searching”,Jamme akins his prose-poem to “an Indian alaap”. Sagot-Duvaroux’s long poem is a polyphonic mingling of many voices,cultures (American-Indian,pre-Socratic) where she shifts between the familiar colloquial voice and the more distanced voice of a stranger. Memoire’s poem is,among other things,about writing “in a difficult foreign language”,where a character is “a consequence of the unfinished sentence” or “a consequence of the vocabulary itself”.

This collaborative work is the result an international poetry translation programme,organised annually by the Centre International de Poésie Marseille,titled Import/Export. “Each year,we travel to a port city to work together on a similar project. What’s special about the Mumbai edition is that we will do the translations in three languages,instead of two,” says F D Lespiau. After making its debut in Damascus,the programme has travelled to Beirut,Tangier,Amsterdam,Alexandria and Ramallah.

The programme,which brings poets of two port cities closer,however,doesn’t end with the readings. In February,Divate,Dalvi and Chattarji will travel to Marseille for a similar exercise where their writings will be translated by the French poets.