4) What’s one thing you wish readers knew or appreciated more about this book? Both streams feed into and sharpen each other.
The momentum of the translation yielded a finished volume at my end! And now, while translating Natiq’s work, I’m working on my own novel in parallel.
After translating Perveen Shakir’s poetry, I finished the first collection of my own poetry because, unknowingly, the drill of translating poetry and the recesses to which one has to penetrate in the original work forced me to go deeper into my own poetic practice. There is (almost) no money in translation but this is just recompense, I think. The surprise was discovering how deep the connection was between the translation and my own writing. I had to spend time conducting surveys, then select works that filled gaps in the popular understanding of her as a poet. I couldn’t simply pick, say, ten poems from each book. NR: The biggest challenge with this project was choosing the angle and the architecture of the premise. 3) What were the key challenges and surprises for you during the translation process/journey? Having understood the range of her work and seeing how complex and multi-faceted it was, I felt an urgency to share it with others. A round of surveys and interviews confirmed, for me, how this perception was persistently and widely held. This meant that, often, her complex later works were glossed over. NR: My own reading of Perveen Shakir’s works did not correspond to the popularly held image of her as a poet, which was focused, for the most part, on her earlier work and portrayed her as a romantic poet. 2) Why were you drawn to choose the book for translation? NR: Defiance of the Rose is not a translation of any one complete book but of a selection of a hundred poems from different books by Perveen Shakir, excluding her first one, Khushboo ( Fragrance), and the posthumously published volume, Qaf-e-Aina ( Mirror’s Rim).
ISBN-13: 9780190700430 1) Tell us about this book and its original author. Defiance of the Rose by Perveen Shakir translated from Urdu into English by Naima Rashid
0 kommentar(er)
