Select
Songs of Kanakadasa. Tr. Shashidhar G. Vaidya. Bareilly:
Prakash Book Depot, 2018, pp. 160. ISBN 978-81-7977-635-3.
Kanakadasa, a 16th century poet of
the Bhakti Cult, is a Kannada saint-poet known for his 'keertans'.
Unfortunately he is little known to most Indians who do not know Kannada. His
poetic stature as a saint-poet, notes Dr A V Navada, is no less than that of
Guru Nanak, Tulsidas, Meerabai, Kabir, Narasi Mehta, Lalleshwari and many
others recognised world-wide.
The Kannada poet is sung in various 'raga' and 'tala' for his surrender to God,
pursuance of Truth, revelation of reality behind appearances, sociospiritual
vision, condemnation of superstitions in a caste-ridden society, and all that
disturbs the common man today. He still motivates us for awareness of human
realities and following moral values in a degenerating society.
Dr Shashidhar Vaidya's bilingual and bicultural competence as translator of the
Kannada poet's 102 selected 'keertans', divided into 11 sections, gives a feel
of the original flavour, meaning, music and lyricism. He is helpful to readers
in negotiating Kanakadasa's vision with his short summary, glossary and
explanation that follows each song.
Congrats Dr Vaidya on your great
achievement as a contributor to Literatures in Translation and Indian Writing
in English.
2.
Chandrakanta
by Devaki Nandan Khatri. Tr. Ram Bhagwan Singh and C.L. Khatri. New Delhi:
Prabhat Paperbacks, 2018, ISBN 978-93-5266-738-3.
I first read the Hindi novel as a boy. My
father had its copy, which is now lost. But with hazy impressions of its first
reading, and reading the work Singh and Khatri have produced in English, I can
imagine how challenging their task must have been to create the flavour of the
original fantasy and romance in today's English.
The challenge lies in their interlingual
abilities in trying to provide with clarity and precision expressions for the
almost untranslatable Hindi idioms and phrases, signs and symbols, imagery and
locale, and culturally loaded metaphors and verbal ethos. One can guess how
difficult the choice of vocabulary and phrasal idioms must have been to be
faithful to the 19th century Hindi discourse style.
A sympathetic reader alone can sense the flow
and energy of the original composition despite certain pragmatic communicative
issues in the translators' use of a mix of word-for-word and sense-for sense
approach.
Their book is a major contribution to the
growing corpus of Indian Literatures in Translation. Kudos to Professors Ram
Bhagwan Singh and C.L. Khatri.
3.
Anastasia Dumitru. Inimii/The Gift of the Heart. Romanian/English. Constanta: Editura
Celebris, 2018, ISBN 978-606-8849-56-0
The initial impression of Anastasia Dumitru's
INIMII/THE GIFT OF THE HEART I had proved more than correct when I read the
entire book again.
It is indeed a search for truth, for new life,
for experiencing the heaven within, via divine effulgences in some very fine
micro lyrics. The poet-professor’s 3-liners are meditative, contemplative, and
spiritually uplifting, lyrically making the moments of silence evocative. As a
truth-seeker, she turns her soul-realization into symbols of love, hope
and faith that refresh the spirit, purify the heart and illumine the mind.
It won't be exaggerating if I say that The Gift of the Heart is an epic romance
in brief lyrical fragments, rather flickers, with rare fervour, vigour and faith vis-a-vis the whirlpool of
longing, the hunger of spirit, the tossing in agony, and the turn of
imagination to grasp eternity in a moment of awareness: "give me only a
moment--/I give you all my heart/in eternity ." Such a surrender, both
physical and mental, to experience liberation through prayer, contemplation,
compassion and love, a genuine salvation, or even nirvana, here on earth, in
this life, is possible by discovering the heaven within, by human becoming
divine: "in prayer--/the clay having the wings,/becoming the spirit."
I enjoyed participating in Anastasia's inner
adventure and search for spiritual emancipation.
--Dr R K Singh, Retd Professor of English,
IIT-ISM, Dhanbad
