As someone who has managed to master English to some extent and is blessed enough to still have remained deeply rooted in his mother-culture, I consider it my foremost duty to take my literary heritage to the world in the language of the world. Marathi has one of the oldest literary traditions among all the modern languages of the world but, unfortunately, those who are deeply immersed in that tradition shy away from English, while those Marathi speakers who have the ability to express themselves in English lack the deep connection with that tradition, which is the prerequisite for a good translation of this kind. This realisation increased my sense of duty towards my Varkari heritage infinitely and gave birth to the translator that I am today. It was with this realisation that I began to translate Varkari poets a decade ago, and to commemorate the centenary year of Rabindranath Tagore’s One Hundred Poems of Kabir, I published my first works of translation One Hundred Poems of Tukaram and One Hundred Poems of Chokha Mela in 2015. I chose this year not because I am a fan of Gurudev’s translation (for me, paraphrasing cannot be termed as translation), but I understand the significance of his book of 1915: It was the first English translation of Bhakti literature by an Indian, to the best of my knowledge. Also, 1915 happens to be the year in which J. Nelson Fraser completed his Poems of Tukaram, making it a golden letter year for the translation of Bhakti literature in India.

 

Perhaps it is because I translate the poets whom I revere that I do not agree with the prevalent flagrant standpoint: A translator requires / possesses more creativity than the source writer. I also have very strong objections to the incestuous liberties that the translators are taking with the source text in the name of their pseudo-creativity. In fact, I firmly believe if you have so much creative juices flowing, why not go ahead and create something of your own? Why feast parasitically upon someone else’s creation? This standpoint of mine should not be misinterpreted as assigning the translator’s work and talents lesser significance. Quite contrarily, I believe that a good translator possesses the highest possible verbal intelligence and works as the bridge between minds that would not have come together ever otherwise. However, I refuse to weigh the source writer and the translator in the same scale simply because only one of them has the power to create something new and for me, even the best translation cannot be as considered as creating something new. Set aside all other arguments and ask yourself this question: Can a translator even exist without a source writer?

 

For me, as a translator, the form of a poem is as important as its contents and the smallest unit of translation is the line in a stanza. Looking from this vantage point, I try to recreate the nearest possible English copy of the abhang at hand, line by line, stanza by stanza. If there are multiple interpretations possible, I try to retain those too in my translation. I would have loved to retain the rhyme scheme also, but such efforts proved to render the translation veering far off from its source, so I had to abandon rhymes in my translation. I am painfully aware of the fact that this approach of mine has resulted in some very awkward phrases and frequent contorted syntax, which may lie far away from natural English - some might even refuse to call it English at all - but that is the compromise I choose to make in order to remain semantically as loyal to my source as syntactically possible. 

​