Q. The story of your having picked up Charles Johnston’s translation of Eugene Onegin is often cited as a seminal moment in your writing life. Have there been other such turning points?
A. There have been several such moments; I’ll mention just one. In my second year at university, where I was supposed to be studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics, I went to the Oriental Institute, thinking I’d slip unnoticed into a Japanese class. I went to the wrong floor, and ended up in a Chinese class. I was thrown out as an interloper a week or two later, but it gave me a taste for the language. At about the same time, a friend happened to lend me the Penguin Classics translation of the poems of Wang Wei, an 8th century Chinese poet. He wrote of nature, friendship and solitude in a way I had never come across before. These poems moved me deeply and I decided then and there to learn enough classical Chinese to read them in the original. And in fact, many years later, in the year after the Tiananmen massacre, mulling over the troubled times of famine and civil war that Wang Wei himself had lived through, I translated his poems for myself.
Q. Have your experiments with poems written in monosyllabic words been informed by your translation of Chinese poetry?
This story is from the October 18, 2021 edition of India Today.
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This story is from the October 18, 2021 edition of India Today.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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