Poetry Does Not Know Borders
Mangalesh Dabral
NA SEEMAYEIN NA DOORIYAN: VISHWA KAVITA SE KUCH ANUVAD by Kunwar Narain Vani Prakashan, New Delhi, 2017, 286 pp., 395
May 2019, volume 43, No 5

Kunwar Narain was one of the few Hindi poets who believed in the universality of all indegenous poetic experiences and thought of himself as an integral part of the great brotherhood of world poets. His poetry stands as a testimony to this. Apart from poetry and literature, his concerns ranged from world cinema, music, theatre to various branches of knowledge. Translation was also one of his passions which he considered as an extension of his original writing, a process closely associated with his creative process. He was probably the first Hindi poet to have introduced the reader to the great Greek poets like Constantine P Cavafy and George Seferis and poems by celebrated Argentinians  author Jorge Luis Borges. His Hindi versions of Cavafy’s two poems ‘Barbarians are Coming’ and ‘The City’ are still read by the readers with great interest.

While translating, Kunwar Narain never had a plan or a project of selecting the poets, he translated whatever poems he liked and found necessary to be included in the Hindi repertoire. It was just a ‘swantah sukhaay’ (for his own pleasure) effort. But what we get now is a well laid-out, 280-plus pages book Na Seemaayen Na Dooriyaan (Neither Borders Nor Distances) which he was fortunately able to see as a book in his lifetime. It is probably one of the best volumes of translated poetry in Hindi in recent years and provides a wide range of great poetic expressions starting with Homer, Christopher Marlow and Sappho and ending with moderns like Derek Walcott and Ted Hughes. Among the 30 poets, there are authentic voices from the sixteenth to the late twentieth century. Being a modernist with a fondness for classical poetry, Kunwar Narain begins with Homer, Marlow, Sappho, Dante Alghieri and William Shakespeare, but his focus is on the great voices of Cavafy (Greek), Borges (Spanish), Tadeusz Rozewicz and Zbigniew Herbert (Polish), Vasco Popa, (Serbian), Bertolt Brecht, Gunter Grass and Gunter Kunert (German) Philippe Jaccottet (French) who shaped the contours of the poetry as we know it today.

In his preface, Kunwar Narain admits that ‘even the best translation of a poem can hardly do justice to the original poem, and still, the process of translating in any mature language never stops.’ He continues, ‘for me, translation does not mean merely changing the linguistic clothes of poetry, but to reach its interior which turns it into a poem, to that specific experience that makes it a specific creation.’ It is widely believed that the translation of poetry is a difficult task and if something is lost in the process, it is the poetry itself. Some people even speak of untranslatability of poetry in the sense that if a translator remains loyal to the original, he or she bears the risk of being unfaithful to the target language and vice versa. There are some excellent translators who hold that translation is an extension of one’s poetic process and it is a translator’s domain. Kunwar Narain, a believer in ‘majjhim nikaay’, takes a middle path and says, ‘some poems are so deeply immersed in the linguistic culture and environment of their respective languages that it becomes almost impossible to carry them faithfully to the language of translation. As such, I have tried to widen the concept of translating to transcreation, and in the process, giving much liberty not only to the discipline of a translator but also to the freedom as a poet.’

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