Daniel Weissbort

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

Periplus means 'the action of sailing round, a circumnavigation; a voyage (or journey) round a coastline, etc.'; in The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a first-century account that describes coastal routes from Egypt to India and along East Africa, it is 'a narrative of such a voyage' (OED). Periplus: Poetry in Translation attempts to do both. It sails round or along certain coastlines, some of which might be unfamiliar, and whenever possible it narrates what occurred or did not occur on the journey. A degree of randomness is inevitable in a volume not restricted to any one period or country, and the translation voyages undertaken here range widely. A. K. Ramanujan reworks, from existing materials, the poems of the fourteenth-century Kashmiri saint-poet Lalla; Weissbort and Musial collaborate to bring over into English the experiment at work of the late Polish poet Miron Bialoszewski; there is a Korean shaman song; Arun Kolatkar's Marathi poems are translated by himself in response to various reading invitations and are gathered here for the first time. In the Introduction to Modern Poetry in Translation: 1983 (MPT), Ted Hughes, looking back on 'the unique tidal wave of poetry translation that swept through English (and through the other chief Western languages) in the sixties and the early seventies', said that many of the translations done at the time now form 'a great series of naturalized poetic monuments'. That tidal wave, at whose crest stood poets like Miroslav Holub, Zbigniew Herbert, Vasko Popa, Janos Pilinszky, and Yehuda Amichai, was a wholly European affair. Periplus, like MPT, features European poets, but at the same time explores an area hitherto neglected: the versetraditions of the Indian subcontinent. Almost a century into the age of translation, perhaps it is time to see if we cannot have a new balance of poetic power.

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