I heard intimacies from disparate India’s, ones that dream in Hindi, in the launch panel of a Hindi poetry translation anthology called Perennial (Red River, 2025) at the Bengaluru Poetry Festival. Some of the translators read their translations alongside the Hindi original poems. Language opened up inside the Bengaluru metropolitan space quite other universes. These were not only sociologically and geographically diverse. They were diverse dream registers - dreams that spread out like tidal waves on the stage and spoke their distinctness amid a sea of Anglophone rocky shores. As water speaks with land its quiet distinction. A translator spoke the last two lines of her translation one more time in Hindi. It was about the fact that in imagination, a seed is a tree, and in memory, a tree is a seed. I apologise for the broad paraphrasing; the lines were sharper than appears in my sentence.
I study the category of time. So these lines were particularly precious to me. They were also the only lines throughout the volley of English poems heard across the day, that stayed me and resulted in this post. A simplicity that was shatteringly profound. As simple things usually are. A simple way of getting at time, nostalgia, shadow, memory, growth, decay, renewal, and being toward death.
I don’t translate on a regular basis, being somewhat daunted by the labour and intensities of those who make it look effortless. Having heard the two last lines first in English and then in Hindi, I thought how delicate it sounds in Hindi, and how monumental an effort it must have taken for the translator to convert this delicacy into an English that was not odd, and that was still our own.
Later in the day, I had a chance to chat with Vivek Narayanan, the author of the masterful verse rendition of the Ramayana called After (NYRB/HarperCollins, 2022). Vivek spoke at length about the haunting, uncomfortable, irresolute nature of the Valmiki Ramayana and how its edges get much smoothed by the time the Tulsidas Ramayana comes along. Ravana is a character of much intrigue, heroism, sex appeal, with a dark edge. He is portrayed as a masterful sovereign, said Vivek, whose one flaw is that he falls in love with Sita. That haunting quality, that ability to live with loose ends, with discomfiture is perhaps a lost art of living. Those who traverse in other, especially ancient languages, are telling us repeatedly that we need not only hear words translated along with devices of linguistic gymanstics, but also devices of living. I paraphrase, I paraphrase, with apologies to Valmiki and Vivek, two poets set apart by millenia.
Let me leave you with an Awadhi sufi pir’s song put to music by Askari Naqvi, replete with Radha Krishna tropes.