Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
Writer and editor Dibyajyoti Sarma has published three volumes of poetry (most recently Book of Prayers for the Nonbeliever, 2018) and three books of translations (most recently Indira Goswami: Five Novellas about Women), and two academic books, besides having numerous writing credits in literary journals. He was born in Assam and now lives in Delhi, where he works as a journalist and runs the independent publishing venture Red River.
I started translating when I was studying literature in Pune. Those days, translation for me was my way of keeping in touch with my mother tongue—it was an emotional exercise. The approach remains the same. So, I would call my translations populist rather than literary.
My first allegiance is to the target language—the translation should flow in it. It should not sound broken or awkward. Therefore, I try to avoid using local/indigenous words as much as possible, unless they are integral to the text. Second, the translation should be faithful to my emotional response of the text—not what the poet meant, but what I, as a reader, receive from the poem.
As far as languages go, Assamese and English are completely different. Assamese is a more emotional language. We tend to repeat sentences, phrases, words for maximum impact. We tend to use excessive adjectives. We tend to say the same things using different images, metaphors. Since Assamese is fluid, most of its poets do not care about punctuation. English, on the other hand, is a cold and clinical language. It demands precision. Again, Assamese sentences make perfect sense without the subject or verb. This doesn’t work in English.
So, as a translator, I have to make choices.
In the case of these poems, however, there were no radical choices involved. The first two poems were part of two long poems. Each came with a number. So, I added the titles. These were simpler translations in that sense that in most cases, I stuck to the dictionary meaning of words the poet used, except in some places.
In ‘Poem’, the poet uses the word ‘baat’, meaning path, way, road. I thought these words would sound too banal. So, I used the word ‘escape’. However, the poet felt that it was not conveying the meaning. So, we settled for the word ‘passage’. Sometimes, it helps working with the original poet. Again, the poem did not have discernible stanza breaks. I thought two-line stanzas would work better for the poem.
In ‘To Stay Alone, Walk Alone’, there were no pronouns, except in one stray line, and no punctuation. So, I decided to use the second person pronoun to make the lines sound English and added punctuation for better readability.
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