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Tale of a Cursed Tree
Balwant’s poems from heart give voice to pangs of separation, yearning, pain and waiting without being overwrought and melodramatic. They are stoic. Similes and metaphors abound, with nature and natural surroundings giving them a character of their own. Translation of intrinsic metaphors and smiles of one language to another can be a taxing task for a translator. Nayar, with his mastery in both languages has managed to surmount the obstacle. Most of the poems run smoothly but a few exceptions (mercifully few) jar the flow. The poem that gives the title to the book is a case in point. Tale of a Cursed Tree begins adequately (I speak of the translated version and not the poem in original), and then slowly spreads its fragrance, till the middle abruptly goes out of sync. The paragraph "The moment you’re air-borne/ Kachur-laden green bough/ Shall shiver and tremble/ Scream wildly/ Before it breaks into a loud wail/ Beckoning you to come back/ The dew’ll drop off the flowers/ Helplessly/ Enfolding the earth passionately/ Shall cry its heart out." The translation of a kachur-laden tree is of course difficult, but the meaning and significance of the particular moment is lost in the translation. Kachur—does the translator/poet mean kachnar? Footnotes would have been helpful. Other lines that don’t read particularly well are from the beginning of A Prayer. "The barren land of my heart/ Unquenched, thirsting for centuries now/ Drinks in darkness/ Sprouts darkness/ Rich crop of darkness/ Fails to satiate/ Longings for a few droplets of light." The lines could have read better. But lines and paragraphs of beauty mostly overshadow these small anomalies. "Where do we go/ Hiding our sorrow. We should pray for joys galore/ And pay the price for being restless more/ Sorrow upon sorrow/ joy riding on joy/ All joy or sorrow all/ We should return to ourselves/ `85 And quietly sit in a corner" from Self Knowledge force us into introspection as does The Rolling Winds. They flow with all majesty in the second language of their rendering. "Why blame these restless rolling winds at all/ They must blow, they must flow/ For that’s the only thing they know/ But, does it make a difference any more?" Nayar’s note at the beginning is a helpful introduction to the poet and the job of translating. I looked forward to reading Nayar’s attempt at poetry after his impressive earlier works. Gurdial Singh’s Night of the Half Moon and Dalip Kaur Tiwana’s Gone are the Rivers read brilliantly in translation. Nayar’s efforts with Tale of a Cursed Tree are more than laudable. With lot of bilingual readers around, the poems in original Punjabi along with the translations would have been welcome and enhanced the poetic pleasure manifold. As Meeting ends with "A few moments/Soaked in your smile/ Raise my hopes/ For another meeting". |
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