APURVA NARAIN

Apurva Narain is Kunwar Narain’s son and translator. His books of translation include a collection of poetry, No Other World, a co-translated story collection, The Play of Dolls, and a recent selection of poetry, Witnesses of Remembrance. His work has appeared in several literary journals such as Asymptote, Modern Poetry in Translation, Indian Literature, Asia Literary Review, Poetry International, Two Lines, Scroll, Columbia Journal, etc. Educated in India and at the University of Cambridge, he also has professional interests in the fields of international development, ethics, and ecology.

Note on Translation

“I remember a river flowing inside my father and never growing old; a whole forest of intimate, detached trees, birds, people, stones and reveries evolving all around it; and the dark cosmic sea of a world hardly begun, in which we immersed. I remember the silent history of words; the mirrors and places that all of us lived in unreal time; and the dizzying constellation of memories and wishes and stars through which we tried to map our journeys and our meditations. I remember the circles of chance and choice that he, she, we, all of us, circussed through in the carnival; and the curious colours of cities through which nomads, kings and ordinary human beings loved, wept and passed.

Even as these random allusions to my father’s creation of a poetic world flit through my mind, I look back and see that these may not be as random as they seem after all. Even as I engage with his poems one by one, as they dawn on me each day, I find that the whole is far more than the sum of its parts … that they may be connected to much more than meets the eye.”

“It was edifying for me to keep in mind that translating too, indeed like praying or loving or writing, is perhaps better directed at changing oneself than wishing for something… allowing oneself to be humbled and moulded by the unknown, by the entity or poem in front of us, than wishing a new life for it … and if a new and beautiful life is nevertheless born, it is perhaps because of the transformation wrought in us rather than by us. Indeed, these poems changed me more than I changed them.

As mentioned, there is not much overt linguistic legerdemain in the poems—they are profound without being smart or sensational. Like them, their translations had to whisper rather than shout out their presence. Translating this easy, open quality was exacting work—like in the original too, the poet’s effortless style perhaps entailed much effort.”

– From Apurva Narain’s Introduction in Witnesses of Remembrance: Selected Newer Poems, by Kunwar Narain. Published in 2021 by Eka, an imprint of Westland Publications Private Limited.