Be they Bengali or Icelandic, the poems included in Sudeep Sen's new book of translations are good but – perhaps even more important, for this particular work – also read well in English. The works of Mandakranta Sen, for instance, a bold young poet from Bengal, are almost oracular in tone, which would seem to be a difficult nuance to translate. "One who writes poetry in the middle of the night/ With hair undone is a witch," she writes. But with subsequent lines this emerges as a poem of subversion, giving the female power a free rein. The poet has a streak of Sylvia Plath in her work, reminding readers of the cataclysmic power of reproduction with which a woman can be endowed: She has to be possessed to let poetry flow from her. The "dawn" finds her "conceiving … the sun", and by noon she has reached the "full-blown advanced stage". This poem, with its swift movements in the process of forging life, is an accomplished work. It is romantic in vein and marked by a freshness of idiom, making it contemporaneous with the other poems featured in Aria.
This collection is an unusual mixture of translated voices from around the world, something as yet uncommon in India. Prior to Sudeep Sen, two poets in India have succeeded in bringing foreign-tongue poetry into English, Dom Moraes and Vikram Seth, the former from the Hebrew and the latter from the Mandarin. Yet all three of them go about translation in a wholly different manner from the usual understanding of the process. In his introduction to his anthology of modern Hebrew 'peace poems', A Chance Beyond Bombs, Moraes made it clear that he did not know the language he was translating from; rather, he was given literal translations, voice records of the poems, and he sat with the renowned Hebrew poet T Carmi to translate the works. Aria highlights a cosmopolitan writer's curiosity not just to regain his own past but to relate himself to the present, and so presents Sen's translations of Bengali poems from West Bengal and Bangladesh; of Hindi and Urdu poems of such poets like Agyeya, Kunwar Narain and Kaifi Azmi; as well as of Korean, Persian, Hebrew, Polish, Macedonian and Icelandic poets. Needless to say, this is a staggering range.
But is it really possible, the reader inevitably asks, to translate poetry from a language one does not know, to bring out the subtleties and nuance? The only choice the reader is left with is to trust the given translation, perking up one's ears to the individual rhythms of the verse. First off, though, in his introduction, Sen does make an attempt to dispel readers' doubts. It all began, he writes, when he was participating, along with other non-Israeli poets, in a translation workshop in Jerusalem. "We, the participants, were given English literal translations of the original poems [of the Hebrew poet Avraham Ben Yitshak], background historical and cultural information, and other relevant reading matter. After we went through the materials in some detail, we were given a verbal introduction to the poet, and his poetry was read out in Hebrew." After several sessions and the assistance of Hebrew scholars and poets, Sen says the participants came up with several working drafts of the poems – "accurate in terms of their content but not finished as poems. Then each of us took over and was expected to turn them into proper poems in our own languages."
In Aria, Sen thus works as both a translator and collaborator, translating "with the poet". Through each step of the translation process, he has worked on the given draft in English, closely following the poet's voice, even tallying the visual shape of the original and, in particular, trying to retain the rhythm. The translator's sole aim was to produce "a set of English translations that in the English language read like original English poems", retaining "recitative qualities of the original poem". Translating a poem felicitously into another language is not enough, seems to be the lesson, as a poem is as much an aesthetic experience for the eyes as for the ears. In order to achieve the desired effect, a practicing poet in the target language is also likely to do justice by bringing in 'musicality' to the translation. In this context, what matters most is to recite the original piece side by side with the translated version, in order to achieve the most judicious similarity to the original rhythm.