Mumbai and its Layers

- or the city and its poet

(Extract from Dilip Chitre’s Introduction to his English-translation of this volume)

Hemant is a Mumbai poet and his work bears the mark of the hectic, heady, anxious, and stressful pace and uncertainty of that metropolis.

But even Mumbai has its layers, facets, and aspects. It is mostly a city of immigrants from other cultural backgrounds who have carried into Mumbai traces, marks, and roots of other worlds. Hemant’s mother tongue is Marathi and it has a dynamic, eight hundred years old poetic tradition. Since the 19th century, Marathi poetry—especially poetry written in urban, industrial, commercial, Westernised Mumbai—has undergone swift transformation.

During the last decade of the 20th century, the First IT Revolution hit the world. Its shock waves still send ripples through our sensibilities. The title of this collection, Virus Alert, not only characterizes Hemant’s underlying theme of anxiety and panic in the idiom of this period, it prepares the reader for the uneasy reflections he or she sees in the mirror every morning. These poems were originally written in a fluent, colloquial Marathi that has a Mumbai ring and a Mumbai flavour. They talk to the reader from an intimate distance. I have tried to recreate their tonality, their intensity, their urgency, and their idiom the best I could. I have retained the local references and some non-English words and provided a minimal gloss that may help some readers if they were looking for it. Or it may not.

A poet’s voice is the time and space in which his poem is located. Hemant Divate’s poetry is both subjective and objective. Though it is a first person singular act of speech, the speech relates to a collective as well as a historically objective world. To trans-locate the poet’s individual voice and sensibility, as well as the collective and historical space and time in which the poem is spoken, is to simulate his identity using the resources of another language. A translator has affinities with an actor; he breathes new life into appropriated material. And actors succeed only when they disguise themselves and let a character emerge. Yet the notion of an original text is the nucleus of a translation. It is what bonds the translator with the poet. After more than four decades of practising translation, I am still full of trepidation when I translate a new poet or a new poem.

A translator must know the limits of translation. His understanding of the untranslatable residue of the source text often teaches him more about what poetry is than his fortuitous fluency in making a poem out of another poem.

What is this residue? Readers will notice that I have not translated proper nouns in Hemant’s poems. I have not changed the nicknames by which he refers to certain people. For instance ‘Dhullu’ is the pet name of Hemant’s son, Dhruva. His son’s image appears in some of his poems, and some poems are centred on that image. His wife, Smruti’s name also appears in a poem, though in other poems she is simply ‘the wife’. There are place names like ‘Taki Pathar’ that could be literally translated as something like ‘a flat-topped hill with a water-tank’. But the specific place Hemant refers to has a special spiritual significance for the esoteric ascetic sect of the ‘Natha panthi’s. Landmarks in Mumbai are evoked with their proper names which as a translator I had to retain. Brand names, logos, names of corporate entities, names of movies, actors, poets, novelists, food items, historical persons, close relatives and friends, advertising slogans, internet entities, TV entities, advertising jingles, musical instruments, and so forth define the landscape and the cultural space of the source texts. The reader has to go to them. They would not by themselves reach the reader. The translator can, at best, guide them. Such words have been italicized or put between single quotes where necessary. Not knowing them will not, I hope, hinder the flow of reading.

Hemant Divate is one of the twenty or so Marathi poets that define a 1990s generation. He does not represent a generation. He belongs to it. However, this generation of Marathi poets has been thrown up by an 800 years old literary culture that is alive and looking forward. It is a generation that is making poems out of here and now, just as it has been done all along by poets.

Dilip Chitre (1938 – 2009)

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