Light like a flower

BETWEEN Shivnath's literal, Iqbal Masud's faithful but readable, Karan Singh and Surinder Singh's dull, archaic, and Mrinal Pande/ Arlene Zide's spiritless, clinical renderings, is submerged a quintessential Padma Sachdev. It is a tribute to the poet's genius that neither the intensity of feelings nor the strength of her thoughts undergo any substantial damage. Sachdev excels in simplicity of expression. Her imagery is feminine and generally universal, and had her translators been more lucid and fluent in their usage, they would have certainly achieved better results. At the same time, one is not sure whether it was wise to include just a handful of renderings not done by Shivnath. The collection contains 64 emotionally charged outbursts ranging from longing to belonging, ruminations and reminiscences, joys and sorrows, waiting and yearnings, thirst and hunger, and sublimity to fulfillment and conquest.

Split into six distinct, though unequal, sections, the poems echo the moods, tides and swings in emotions. The 36 poems included under "Poems of Longing" opens with a sensitive and emotional tribute to her native language, Dogri. And it spells out the tone of the poems in this section. "It is dawn/ Or a Yogi emerging from a trance/ Or may be/ The day melts in the evening/ Or-or/ a bridle' planquin passing by/ Does a nightingale sing,/ A child smile/ Or perhaps a passerby is speaking/ The Dogri language?" Now, while the translation succeeds in conveying the basic thought and the sentiment behind the outburst, the syntax and the grammar, the juxtaposition of lines ruins the total impact. That is why one feels that though Shivnath is able to transfer into English the basic feeling and emotion of the original, the overt lack of felicity with the language renders the effect very weak.

There are only two in the section called "The Scent of the Earth", six in "Burning Like Incense", and 10 each in "The Box of Pain" and "Poems of Fulfillment". However, it is generally the poems of longing and belonging that find Sachdev at her poetic best. Sample, for instance, "The Restless Spirit". For the intensity of thought, the profundity of imagery, preciseness of articulation and economy of expression, the poem could find a place in any anthology, and not necessarily in one of women's poetry.

Last night, before going to bed
I kept blank papers torn from a note book,
All the dreams that I dreamt in the night
Before they all ended,
On each paper turned upside down,
I placed a flower, a deep red rose.
In the morning when I got up,
I found all the papers
Written by themselves. 

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