Akhil Katyal

Akhil Katyal is a writer based in Delhi. His books of poems include Like Blood on the Bitten Tongue: Delhi Poems and How Many Countries Does the Indus Cross. He was the International Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa in Fall 2016 and was the 2021 Vijay Nambisan Poetry Fellow.

Translator’s Note

“I know nothing else / but that this life / will walk along with me. / When the body perishes, / all perishes; / but the threads of memory / are woven with enduring specks. / I will pick these particles, / weave the threads, / and I will meet you yet again.” This is how ‘Main Tenu Phir Milangi’ (‘I will meet you again’), one of Amrita Pritam’s (1919-2005) most abiding poems, ends in Nirupama Dutt’s exquisite translation. This is how it ends in mine: “I don’t know much / but this I know, / in time, when I go, / all I have done will go / and when this body goes / everything goes, / but the threads of memories / are like the atoms in the universe, / I will cherry-pick those atoms, / weave those threads / and I will meet you again.” Pritam’s ‘chaityaan de dhaage / kaainaati kana dey hundey’ becomes for Dutt ‘the threads of memories…woven with enduring specks’ become for me ‘the threads of memories…like the atoms in the universe’. Pritam’s ‘main onhaan kana nu chunaan gi’ becomes for Dutt ‘I will pick these particles’ becomes for me ‘I will cherry-pick those atoms”.

How do you translate longing that will break all floodgates? How do you translate desire that will cross all thresholds, including that of mortality? How do you begin to approximate an ache and a burning in one language except to find newer and newer moulds in another that will receive the molten iron of that ache? For the Punjabi poet and translator Nirupama Dutt (b. 1955), the ‘kaaynaati kana’ finds the mould of ‘enduring specks’ – universe, ‘kaaynaat’ as that which is ‘enduring’, as always pre-existing and outliving us – whereas for me, one returns to the word itself, more than to its trait, ‘universe’, hoping to allow the word to hold its own unimaginable immensity, from which Pritam would draw (with the temerity of a lover plotting her impossible return) her ‘threads of memories’. This, and moments like this, comprise the joy and challenge of the practice of translation, opening conversations, not only with the author one is translating, but with other translators who have trodden the same path before you with a different gait. This is a community of moons (beguiling, in their own right) orbiting their authors, these are Saturn-rings forever approximating the text while giving it strange afterlives, always, new glosses to be made, new ways to be seen. This has been my effort as a translator of Pritam, Dabral and Prakash here, knowing other translators precede me.