Please click on the image to the left to get a legible copy. [Note: I haven't yet figured out how to over come this one limitation of the site to post work in a foreign language.]
This is a translation of Pablo Neruda's poem Night on the Island from the collection The Captain's Verses. I translated it while relaxing at a local bookstore before Valentine's Day and read it to my wife on Valentine's Day. Later, while I was visiting my parents in India, my dad's friend, poet and professor Sushanta Basu changed few words to make it somewhat palatable.
Some learning happened while he was going through my writing with a professorial touch. He commented that translation is not an easy thing. Then he quoted a very famous Bengali poet Buddhadev Basu as saying that translation is like a French girl - if she is good looking then she isn't following the rules of normal social conduct, if she is, then most likely she isn't attractive enough. The same principle, according to him, applies to translations of poetic work. If the translator is trying to stay too close to the original, s/he may lose its poetic essence and the translated work becomes a prose. The key is to maintain balance.
Later that evening, my uncle Sona Kaku, who is a poet and member of a poetic society in south Calcutta, told me that I should concentrate on writing original than trying to translate. However, Pablo Neruda being one of my favorite poets, I decided to post the translation that I did to kill time even if it may have lost the poetic brilliance that the original Spanish verse may have portrayed.
© 2008 Sanjoy Haldar
This is a translation of Pablo Neruda's poem Night on the Island from the collection The Captain's Verses. I translated it while relaxing at a local bookstore before Valentine's Day and read it to my wife on Valentine's Day. Later, while I was visiting my parents in India, my dad's friend, poet and professor Sushanta Basu changed few words to make it somewhat palatable.
Some learning happened while he was going through my writing with a professorial touch. He commented that translation is not an easy thing. Then he quoted a very famous Bengali poet Buddhadev Basu as saying that translation is like a French girl - if she is good looking then she isn't following the rules of normal social conduct, if she is, then most likely she isn't attractive enough. The same principle, according to him, applies to translations of poetic work. If the translator is trying to stay too close to the original, s/he may lose its poetic essence and the translated work becomes a prose. The key is to maintain balance.
Later that evening, my uncle Sona Kaku, who is a poet and member of a poetic society in south Calcutta, told me that I should concentrate on writing original than trying to translate. However, Pablo Neruda being one of my favorite poets, I decided to post the translation that I did to kill time even if it may have lost the poetic brilliance that the original Spanish verse may have portrayed.
© 2008 Sanjoy Haldar
