Experience of Translating Kunwar Narain’s Poetry

Nicola Pozza is a senior lecturer at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. His current project examines the construction of the Himalayan space in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Hindi travelogues. Besides publishing essays on Hindi literature, he authored a two-volume French manual on Hindi (Le hindi… comme en Inde, 2022 and 2023) and co-edited India in Translation through Hindi Literature (2010). He has translated Geetanjali Shree’s novel Khālī jagah (Une place vide, 2018) and a selection of Kunwar Narain’s poems (Confluences, 2025) into French.Apurva Narain is a literary translator, writer, and editor. As Kunwar Narain’s son, he oversees his father’s literary estate and has edited some of his later works. His English translations of Kunwar Narain’s works include the poetry collections No Other World (2008) and Witnesses of Remembrance (2021); and the co-translated story collection The Play of Dolls (2020). His work has appeared in several journals and anthologies. He has had professional interests in international development, ecology, and public health ethics.

• List of Figures. List of Contributors. Acknowledgements. Note on Transliteration, Translation, and Style. Introduction Part I Poetics and Translation: Reading Between Words Extract: The Troubled Soul of Conscience 1. The Translator’s Tasks and Kunwar Narain’s Poetics: The Short Poems, 1956–93 2. The Topography of Narain’s Poetics: A Dialogue Between Place and Location 3. The Poetics of Water and Translation as Negotiation: Challenges of Rendering Kunwar Narain’s Poetry into Bulgarian 4. The Wonderland of Words: Strategies and “Creative” (In)correctness in the Translation of Kunwar Narain’s Poetry into Polish Part II The Re-creation of a Translator: The Example of Kumarajiva Extract: The Historic Contribution of Translators 5. Kunwar Narain’s Poetic Re-creation of the Buddhist Translator Kumarajiva and the Spirit of Translation: Passages to Humanness 6. Kumarajiva, Kunwar Narain, and I: A Dialogue on Translation 7. On Translation, Transculturality, and Kumārajīva: Some Observations in the Context of Kunwar Narain’s Epical Poems Part III The Experience of Translation: Words and Worlds Extract: In Praise of Translation 8. Between WorLds: Kunwar Narain’s Poetry Across Cultures and Languages 9. “Translation as Challenge…”: A Few Thoughts on Translating the Poems of Kunwar Narain into Polish 10. Un/veiling the Poem, Un/veiling the Self: On Translating Kunwar Narain’s Ātmajayī into English 11. Images of Transcendence in Kunwar Narain’s Poetry: Notes on the Intersemiotic Transcreation of Words into Cinematographic Images 12. Kunwar Narain’s Poetry and Literary Cinema: Strategies for Intersemiotic Translation Appendix 1 Kunwar Narain: Selected Bibliography Appendix 2 Kunwar Narain’s Poetry Collections Appendix 3 On the Poetry of Kunwar Narain (Pankaj Chaturvedi). Index