Stepping Across Absolutes to Explore and Create Anew

This compendious five-hundred pages of poetry entitled The Dragon’s Heart is a carefully curated compilation of translations in English undertaken over the past ten years, for the Poetry at Sangam House initiative. Apart from procuring veritable gems from across all conceivable corners of the globe, this labour of love pushes postmodernist frontiers regarding translation-theory and that too without vaunting aloud about doing so. None would challenge the fact that the performative multivalences which translation theory hinges upon, forge connections across linguistic and cultural divides thereby disseminating humanism in a world starved for the same. This review however will refrain from extolling those virtues and dwell rather on the aesthetic of the poems in question. As Priya Sarukkai Chabria, one of the two editors of this compilation points out, translation per se enables an expansion of the reader’s creative imaginary. So, whether we refer to the act of deep-reading and interpretation as what Roland Barthes pronounced to be ‘death of the author’, or prefer to be on safer shores with perfunctory adherences to overall context and such like, readers of these poems will undoubtedly forge connections as per their inclinations, whether subjective, cultural and/or political.