Abigail Tuscano

on translating Padma Sachdev (पद्मा सचदेव)

Translating जाल was, more than anything, an exercise in patience — clearing the straits of my lack of expertise in reading Devanagari script and the poet’s extensive use of metaphor and imagery that, often, proved difficult to understand as a non-native Hindi speaker.

I began by transferring the poem from Devanagari to a phonetic version in Latin script. I learned Hindi by listening, and being able to link words to sound proved the most effective method of finding meaning in the text. From there I translated the poem literally, then adjusted the language of my translation to account for Sachdev’s tone and my interpretation of her intentions.

जाल is a poem meant to be read out loud; Hindi poetry has a wonderful lyrical quality, rhythmic and rich on the tongue. This musicality falls flat in a language like English, whose semantics and phonetics lend themselves to harder, shorter consonants and singular meaning. To remedy this, I focused on enhancing the poem’s emotional aspect through my use of diction.

I chose to preserve much of the poem’s structure, placing line breaks and stanzas in similar places; however, I also added capitalization — a feature that Hindi lacks completely — and punctuation where it didn’t exist prior for stylistic purposes. While the original can be read with minimal punctuation, almost intuitively, the same transitions between thoughts read much less naturally in English. However, while I sought to keep the structure similar, preserving the meaning in the same direct way was much more difficult. Many phrases are untranslatable, or can be translated multiple ways.

For example, सुनो तो सही, a line that I translated as “do listen,” has no English equivalent. In its original form, it evokes a sense of both invitation and desperation, as if the poet is beseeching an unhearing stranger or seeking company between the bars of a jail cell. Similarly, कलेजे can be translated as both heart and liver. I chose liver for the gruesome, honest tone it lends to the poet’s narrative, while heart would have alluded in some ways to a romance that the text doesn’t contain.

Rather than accuracy, I sought to capture the poem’s emotional essence — the poet’s clinging to familiar pain, her simultaneous self-destruction and consumption of that which traps her.