Unveiling the word

Reading a translation,quot; remarked the celebrated Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai, on his trip to India some years ago, quot;is like kissin...

Reading a translation,quot; remarked the celebrated Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai, on his trip to India some years ago, quot;is like kissing a woman through a veil.quot; Despite the sexist and Orientalist overtones one may choose to read into that, I recall being struck by the near-aphoristic quality of the observation.

It8217;s strangely apt, isn8217;t it? On reading translations of the Chilean poet, Neruda, I remember being assailed by the feeling that I could almost reach out and touch the Spanish language, its texture, its cadences. And yet, there was also the sense of something withheld 8212; some elusive fragrance, some indefinable, perhaps mythical, essence. There are also occasions, some self-satisfied translators tell me, when the veil is actually more interesting than a face-to-face confrontation!

It is easy enough to imagine the enduring fascination that the act of translation holds for so many artisans of the word 8212; the sheer excitement of creatively grappling with language, excavating its latent resources,sifting through semantic resonances, testing the farthest syntactic frontiers8230; No wonder there are some who prefer to term it quot;transcreationquot; 8212; the process is, after all, about transmigrating the soul of a poem into another lexical universe. A birthing of a kind.

Although not bilingually competent enough to attempt it myself, I think I can intuit 8212; and therefore, envy 8212; the thrill of the translator8217;s challenge that so many of my colleagues at Mumbai8217;s Poetry Circle seem to enjoy. For Abhay Sardesai, translating from Marathi and Gujarati becomes a kind of idiomatic limbering-up, frequently becoming an inspirational source for his own poetry. For T R Joy, there is the sheer exhilaration of discovering another pantheon of poets in Malayalam 8212; not merely the canon of English poets he was reared on in school and college. Ranjit Hoskote relishes the process of quot;testing your own language, pushing limits, finding new solutionsquot;.

On the other hand, for those of us who read poetry a small but yetundismissable minority in this world, translation offers access to other cultural sensibilities and mythologies, as well as a glimpse of unexplored linguistic pasturelands. I think of all the poets I could never have read without translation 8212; from Baudelaire to Akhmatova, from Basho to Omar Khayyam. In a subcontinent teeming with innumerable languages and dialects, translation becomes a vital means of understanding one8217;s own neighbours. As Menka Shivdasani and Anju Makhija point out, the anguish of Partition that permeates the fibre of so much Sindhi poetry, may have been doomed to a circumscribed readership if it had not been for their efforts at anthologising a book of English translations.

Recently, the Poetry Circle, in collaboration with the NCPA8217;s interactive forum 8212; Chauraha which I happen to co-ordinate, has been presenting several poetry-related events, entitled the Polyphony series. A section of this series has been devoted exclusively to translation, in which a variety of poetsengaged in such projects, share excerpts of their work.

The next encounter of Poetry in Translation will feature translators from three languages: Kashmiri represented by Ranjit Hoskote, Oriya represented by Prabhanjan Mishra and Hindi represented by Yash Merchant.

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And for those who secretly believe that a poetry reading is about the endless droning monotone of people who love the sound of their own voices, think again. Tomorrow at NCPA, a vibrant variety of poetic voices will be heard 8212; the musings of Lalleshwari, the 12th century woman mystic of Kashmir, seguing with the romantic melancholy of Hindi film icon, Meena Kumari8217;s verses.

Try it out. Revel in the polyglottal richness of image and rhythm. Share the translator8217;s perennial struggle to combine the integrity of the original work with the freedom of a new creation. And if you have any views about the translations in question, air them. Because that8217;s what a forum like Chauraha8217; is all about, anyway.Polyphony III: Poetry in translationon June 25, 1998 at the Audio Visual Room, NCPA. Time 6.30 pm.