Emotions in Translation

Books, Entertainment - By JF on Tuesday, July 27, 2010 - 16:10

For a bibliophile, a collection of poetry is interesting any day. It gets even more so when the writers come from across a multicultural nation, from different languages, and are all women. Savitha V reviews one such -- Interior Decoration.

Edited by: Ammu Joseph, Vasanth Kannabiran, Ritu Menon, Volga
Published by: Women Unlimited
Price: Rs 395

With a title like that, the book just narrowly escapes being passed by with nothing more than a swift glance. But then you see the small print: “Poems by 54 women from 10 languages”. Now that’s something. If you like poetry, here is a treasure for your library -- a collection of English translations of poems from across the country. It is not merely the literature that is fascinating, but also the glimpses of different cultures that you get, and the common threads that emerge from this diversity.

The list of featured poets is impressive -- Jameela Nishat, Kamala Das, Gauri Deshpande, Kutti Revathi, Rose Mary, Gagan Gill, Temsula Ao and Nabaneeta Dev Sen, to name a few. The poems were originally written in Urdu, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Gujarati, Bengali and Marathi. There is also a clutch of English poems.

As explained in the preface, this anthology is the result of a series of workshops held across India between 1999 and 2006, in which over 200 women writers from 10 major regional languages participated.These were organised by Women’s WORLD (India), a network of writers that addresses issues of gender-based censorship.

The passages embrace the entire gamut of emotions -- love, anger, passion, sorrow, hope, pain, what have you. There is death, the joy of life, relationships, nostalgia. Verses that chill the heart and lines that echo your thoughts. But was it my imagination, or did pain reign supreme? Sorrow and wistfulness rise from the pages, as do regrets and reproaches.

The Malayalam poet Rose Mary writes:
Look,
henceforth we need
shed our tears
Only in easy stages.
Won’t our faces
turn bleak, pallid,
with crying that shatters the heart?

In Tamil, Vatsala explains why she didn’t become a poet -- the poems dies within her. “One died when my grandmother praised/ the neat way I folded the clothes ... A hundred vanished as I/ washed my babies’ bottoms.” It’s a reality that hits you in your guts, said with such stark simplicity.

But of course, there is the sunshine of love and romance too; the joy of laughter and a morning of happiness. Temsula Ao’s endearing verses on a pair of lovers -- “Why Not / Woman to Man” and “Why Not / Man to Woman”-- are heart warming with their innocence. There is that comforting message that wherever the women come from, some things never change. Like Kannada poet Mamta G Sagar writes: “I’m exactly like my mother/ her tears flow in my eyes.”

Whatever the sentiment or subject, whatever the original language, the power of the words stand out. Be it happiness, the contents of a vanity bag, a river, a man or memories, the words demand your full attention, and you reel under their blows.