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Translation as Literature
Dr. Sanjog Bhan
Waves is an English rendition of award winning Kashmir'.
poems written by the eminent Kashmiri poet and J&K Cultural Academy awardee
Arjan Dev Majboor. Argentinean poet Luis Jorge Borges said about a certain book
once that the original was unfaithful to the translation. Waves, rendered into
English by Arvind Gigoo may well fit into the same category of books which
according to Borges could best be read independent of the original. The book
also contains some fine sketches by the Kashmiri artist and sculptor Vijay
Zutshi.
The book has been lauded by many a literary critic for its
path breaking translation. The translator, Arvind Gigoo, has done away with old
and hackneyed translation techniques. Instead he has evolved a unique style of
his own wherein the poems appear to have a strong tint of modernism and magical
realism to them. The poems in English stand alone, divorced from the original.
Language seems to have been liberated from traditional
diction and prosody. Translation perhaps may sound misleading: the book has
actually been transcreated from the Kashmiri. The word play, the rhythm and tone
in the transcreated poems are radically different from that of the original.
And indeed, it is a landmark transcreation. a true watershed in the history of
Kashmiri literature.
Even the sketches by Vijay Zutshi comment and add to the
meaning of the poems. These sketches are Daliesque in expression and form. The
long poem To the Swan (Teol in Kashmiri) is a great poem in
contemporary Kashmiri poetry and has won the poet many laurels. Some of the
themes which the poems reflect are exile, death, loneliness, freedom, nature,
time, Kashmir and nostalgia.
The poems have brought out modernism as one of the recurrent
themes in the book and one finds the voice torn ambivalently between the old and
the new. The poems subtly herald the birth of the new age wherein old values are
still alive yet hidden. The English flavour to a native imagination has given
the book a unique place in contemporary regional Indian literatures of India.
The poetry in Waves lends itself to multiple interpretations and
at the same time attracts attention of a bi-cultural audience, viz. the
English and the Kashmiri.
The translator has given another voice to a language
otherwise known and understood by a miniscule community. The original Kashmiri
might lament the loss of the old world and old home, but the English translation
seems to speak of multiple identities, addresses and homes spread across the
world.
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