Strip off my words: ‘Aria’ poetry translated by Sudeep Sen

Be they Bengali or Icelandic, the poems included in Sudeep Sen's new book of translations are good but – perhaps even more important, for this particular work – also read well in English. The works of Mandakranta Sen, for instance, a bold young poet from Bengal, are almost oracular in tone, which would seem to be a difficult nuance to translate. "One who writes poetry in the middle of the night/ With hair undone is a witch," she writes. But with subsequent lines this emerges as a poem of subversion, giving the female power a free rein. The poet has a streak of Sylvia Plath in her work, reminding readers of the cataclysmic power of reproduction with which a woman can be endowed: She has to be possessed to let poetry flow from her. The "dawn" finds her "conceiving … the sun", and by noon she has reached the "full-blown advanced stage". This poem, with its swift movements in the process of forging life, is an accomplished work. It is romantic in vein and marked by a freshness of idiom, making it contemporaneous with the other poems featured in Aria.

This collection is an unusual mixture of translated voices from around the world, something as yet uncommon in India. Prior to Sudeep Sen, two poets in India have succeeded in bringing foreign-tongue poetry into English, Dom Moraes and Vikram Seth, the former from the Hebrew and the latter from the Mandarin. Yet all three of them go about translation in a wholly different manner from the usual understanding of the process. In his introduction to his anthology of modern Hebrew 'peace poems', A Chance Beyond Bombs, Moraes made it clear that he did not know the language he was translating from; rather, he was given literal translations, voice records of the poems, and he sat with the renowned Hebrew poet T Carmi to translate the works. Aria highlights a cosmopolitan writer's curiosity not just to regain his own past but to relate himself to the present, and so presents Sen's translations of Bengali poems from West Bengal and Bangladesh; of Hindi and Urdu poems of such poets like Agyeya, Kunwar Narain and Kaifi Azmi; as well as of Korean, Persian, Hebrew, Polish, Macedonian and Icelandic poets. Needless to say, this is a staggering range.