Found in Translation

Translation was alive and well in 2024, as Arunava Sinha's pick of his favourite translations from the year affirms

- Arunava Sinha

TREASURER OF PIGGY BANKS

By Vinod Kumar Shukla

(Translated from the Hindi by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra)

WESTLAND

₹399; 208 pages

When one poet translates another, a third is born. This is overwhelmingly true of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's English version of Vinod Kumar Shukla's poem. In his Hindi writing, Shukla persistently refuses to burst into meaning or create drama or, indeed, provide any kind of aha! moment in his poetry. He examines his place in his immediate surroundings, observing with a perspective that offers no illumination, which itself becomes a way of looking at the world that the reader makes sense of. And Mehrotra, himself a poet laurate of the bare and the spare, both reflects and refracts this literature in English in a way that makes the reading of each poem a nearperfect experience.

LEAF, WATER AND FLOW

By Avadhoot Dongare

(Translated from the Marathi by Nadeem Khan)

RATNA BOOKS

₹599; 256 pages