The Poet of the earth - Astha Sharma

Lyrical bridge connecting the English and the Hindi reader’s group.

What may sound like a review or critical appraisal, enveloped in vibrant words with illustrations of all kinds, let me take a moment to remember poetry thriving in this digital age. Fifteen years ago, I had read an article in an English newspaper’s literature section, discussing about saving poetry in a world full of prose. From that article I gathered the impression that although the poets were dwelling and writing like earlier, many of the readers had become disinterested in spending time or pennies on poetry or poets .  Cutting back to 2024 when the kavya-goshthi has risen from a room full of intellectuals to a public feast, it can be said that the free-floating concerns of yesteryears have settled and are now are flourishing on Instagram literary marathon. In the post pandemic world when creative urges have taken a splurge and “poetry for a survival mechanism” is the top selling inspiration, sometimes the authentic poet seems to be stuck on a traffic signal, while the handful of readers are heading in a different direction. It’s more a matter of chance than efforts for the authentic poet to be read and discussed. Translation, in recent times, is helping by increasing this chance.

Poetry might be for the poet, but its translation is for the reader. An expectant avid reader who is waiting on the lines of a broken verse that he wrote ages ago, ready to rhyme and find its meaning in the words of the poet whose book he accidentally purchased while looking for the best-selling author’s recent release in the bookshop. The readers of poetry are a special class of people who have attempted to or routinely write poems themselves. Occasionally, there are a few trespassers too, who were accidentally present at the book inaugural ceremony and ended up enjoying the recital while munching the free snacks.

From the fabric of the language to the expectation brimming in a reader’s mind, the job of a translator is a pure work of art. Translating poetry is going up a notch, as apart from the challenge of preserving the beauty of the language and structure of the craft, the biggest onus that lies at the nib of the traslator'pen is to recreate poetry itself.

Poetry Decides is the first translated work of Kumar Mukul, a widely read Hindi poet, with numerous published poetry and prose collections to his account.

Kumar Mukul draws a vibrant sketch on his poetic canvas. In one of his poems Moon’s jest / chand ka mazak  he begins to paint a moon and visualizes the brimming of a romance . He then quickly lands on the earth and starts painting horses and grass but then he stumbles upon the stones hidden beneath the grass. He also paints a room, a window and doorway. He seems grounded even in his flight of imagination. He is the poet of the earth who is drawn towards the mountains yet decides to speak about the gravity?
In his widely appreciated poem Mountains (Pahad)  he says,

Why are we drawn towards mountains,
even though gravity resides within the Earth?

And then he looks up at the sky and thinks of a bunch of happy trees holding it up, high and above.

In all his nature poems, the familiar image of mountains, moon, forest, grass and river keep recurring. But it looks like he goes closer to nature to find a deeper meaning of existence and re-create themes like sustainability and viability in the changing landscapes of the modern world.

This poetry collections ranges from nature poems to love poems to interesting subjects like the Van gogh’s Ursula serves as one of the most striking poems and has been beautifully translated too. Kumar Mukul’s subjects are diverse. Poems written on socio-political backdrop (11 September/political/Israel) are intense and those dedicated to specific muses like Meena Kumari or the Left Hand are heart-warming.

The language of the poems is interactive and communicative of the poet’s world in a bunch of words. Although, the poetic choice of words must have posed a tough job for the translator of this beautiful collection Shivam Tomar. A poet himself who began this translation out of interest and that reflects because translating a poem like

Netra hath

Lines

Translation

This shows a work of passion

While going through the book I found some other beautiful  poems like East wind , death, how beautiful and my feet.

Though the poet here talks about his feet…  but it somehow reminds me of one of  Pablo Neruda’s poem titled “Your feet”

Which he begins with by saying

When I cannot look at your face
I look at your feet.

But I love your feet
only because they walked
upon the earth and upon
the wind and upon the waters,
until they found me. 

As Shivam Tomar accepted in the beginning of the book, the main challenge for him was translating the short poems in this collection. The wit, the punch and the sharp cutting satire of Kumar Mukul’s short poem is his USP and decoding that is not an easy job. In poems like Udasi , kahan rakhun tumahri yeh udasi ka dhardar hira ,

Another poem

Teri tasveer jabtak bolti hai

Tujhe sunta rahunga main

To find the exact words that will convey the exact meaning in all their beauty and glory is not just difficult but impossible too and that’s why they seem to be lacking the finishing and clarity like other poems of this collection.

Now when the world is preparing to create a set of global readers who are looking for novel ideas and contents this book is not just going to be valuable but would also serve as lyrical bridge connecting the English and the Hindi reader’s group.

I am immensely thankful to translators like Shivam Tomar for taking this effort as imagine living in a world where nobody translated the works of Pablo Neruda or Franz Kafka , no lorca and not even Rainer Maria Rilke to inspire Kumar Mukul .