Review by Mohini Sharda
Seema
Jain’s translation of ‘Dil Se,’ a
collection of selected poems by Dr. Veena Vij ‘Udit,’ merits and deserves serious
critical attention. Translating poetry, be it from Hindi to English or any
other language, is a challenging task. Life per se has a silent, inbuilt mosaic
of complexities, intricacies and truths that vary from person to person and are
diverse. Added to these are the problems of human relationships, personal
dilemmas, conflicts and nagging feelings about filial blood bonds that grow,
evolve or sometimes perish altogether. To give poetic expression to all such
multiple intersecting hues of life in a target language requires great poetic
effort. Seema Jain’s pen does not lag behind in this creative endeavour in her
fourth book of translation. A poetic world that reflects these realities is
likely to enchant and perturb, fascinate and make us ponder, in equal measures.
To express such a world, a translator has to sift through multiple layers of
meaning, find exact or near equivalents of cultural contexts and fathom the
traces of metaphors embedded in the text. All these add to the area of
difficulty, but Seema Jain negotiates this danger of untranslatability quite well.
Seem Jain’s words have their own
self-governing beauty that enhances as these words get dressed in ink and lend
profoundness to their meaning. While dealing with issues of contemporary
relevance and importance like in ‘Blood Soaked Lake,’ that echoes with the
moans and groans of the people of Kashmir valley or natural calamities like Covid-19
given voice to in ‘Natural Calamity’ or an advocacy for peace in the poem ‘Insurgency,’
her pen is clinically precise and reflects the pain of the disaster and the
human cost involved.
However, in poems on nature, she deftly and
adroitly, with the dexterity of a skilled craftsman paints word-pictures
through her language and accentuates the beauty inherent in the original poems.
In ‘Onset of Spring’, we actually feel an
exhilarating splash of liquid gold in:
The rhythmic wind plays a dancing tune
It flaunts its floating golden veil …
The gentle sunlight flits through trees
The
yellow mustard seeds paint a golden hour
The word-woven magic in ‘Crimson Hues of the Setting
Sun’ and the unmistakable sensuous ring brought out in the following lines
leaves us awestruck:
If only you could witness
How the dewdrops slipping from the petals
touch
The green grass that beguiles itself
With illusions of a long awaited embrace
The beautiful
imagery in ‘Sunlight Peeps Through my Window’: “When the moon rays of memories
descend upon casements of the heart,” testifies to her creative skills.
Spontaneity is an outstanding quality of Seema Jain’s style and these poems go
straight to the heart of the reader. There seems no conscious or deliberate
effort to create an effect. Had it been so, it would have marred the musical
flow of her translation.
Veena Vij’s genius, as revealed in the book is
essentially subjective, dealing with treasured emotions born out of everyday interaction
of common individuals leading their humdrum existence. It appears she has
dipped the pen in her own blood to give words to her own feelings and Seema
Jain has beautifully translated the ebb and flow, the advancement and the receding
of emotions through her fluency in the target and the source language.
The book is
replete with poems vibrating to myriad emotions. For instance, in ‘Stream of Inner
Thoughts,’ the carefree laughter of childhood knocking at the threshold of
memories evokes a deep sense of nostalgia for childhood now gone forever.
‘Flimsy Bonds’
expresses a deep sense of agony over all flimsy bonds of relationship that
Slowly nibble at us
Like termite
Corroding us
Mark how
poignantly portrayed is the heart-wrenching cry of a mother for a loved one in
a foreign land in the poem ‘Echo’
Out of the four
shoulders carrying my corpse
One will be yours,
now any faith fails to endorse.
My restless eyes
will look for you in my last-hours.
My motherhood will
yearn to embrace you for my love shower
Or the deep
longing for liberating death in ‘Adieu’
Wrapped in the cloak of life
The body is now tired
And wants to bid adieu
Thus, there are
multifold examples of varied emotions. And the reader transparently sees in
them a true reflection of his/her own sentiments and sensations because Seema
Jain’s well-chosen, well-placed words make the reader feel the writer’s
emotions and intentions. In poems of love, expressing passion for the loved
one, her words emerge as a guiding force to the feelings that lie submerged in
the text’s layers or between the lines.
The poem ‘Sweet Company’ reverberates with the
deep yearning of the beloved for the lover in these lines:
The
turmoil of whose thoughts
Goes
on inside
The
hope of being one with him
Tickles
the entire being
In ‘Soul Thirst’ the beautiful use of imagery
suggests desolation and emotional sterility:
The drowsy breeze gently touches the leaves
But no
spring comes to caress the tender buds …
The Rain God kisses the dark face of clouds
The
lightning strikes, but no rain showers fall
In this poem Seema
Jain successfully portrays the brokenness, the barrenness, the loss of vitality
and physiological collapse of the modern word. ‘Your proximity’ with its rich
wealth of imagery delineates a beloved’s pangs of heart.
So the impressive
use of imagery in love poems enables the reader to gather various traces of
love and the nuances of feelings scattered therein.
While summing up, one can confidently assert
that with the amount of thoughtful time invested in translation, Seema Jain has
successfully brought out the passions and sensations in these poems as emphatically
and empathetically, and as effectively and soulfully, and has captured the fragrance
of the original poems.
***
Seema
Jain
is a bilingual poet, translator and editor. Ex-HoD English at KMV Jalandhar, she
has authored, edited and translated fourteen books, contributed to about 100 anthologies,
as also to the Stanford University Archives on Life in Quarantine, besides working on some projects and having
published two books with the Sahitya Akademi. Her poems are widely published,
translated, anthologized and recited. She is the recipient of many awards.
***
Veena
Vij is a versatile personality who is an
inspiring actor, author, poet and artist who has made significant
contribution to the fields of acting, writing, and poetry. She has three poetry
books, three storybooks and a book of memoirs to her credit. The Authors Guild
of India adjudged her first storybook, Pighalti
Shila, the best book of the year 2006. She has received many awards like
Punjab Kala Sahitya Academy Award, Vidya Vachaspati Award, and Adha Jahan
Award, to name a few. Her works have been published in magazines and
e-magazines in India and abroad, and have been translated and published in Urdu
and English. Her memoirs on her Face book page have elicited good reader
engagement and were subsequently published as a book titled Chhut Put Afsaane. Dil Se is an English
translation of her selected Hindi poems.
***
Prof. Mohini Sharda is Ex-Associate Professor and Head, English Department KMV Jalandhar. She has published and presented papers at national and international levels and compeered many national/international events and edited many books. She has been Director, Women’s Studies Centre, KMV, besides having been a member of Juvenile Justice Board, Punjab government. She has presented poems in online poetry meets and attended World Poetry Conference IV. Her poems are published in Vibrant Voices: An Anthology of 21st Century Indian Women Poets, (Sahitya Akademi publication) Mosaic of Poetic Musings: Contemporary Women Poets from India besides online international journals ESBB and Setu.
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