Translating Poetry
Poets are famous for being prolific. Maya Angelou, for example, published more than a dozen collections of poetry over the course of her career. Emily Dickinson wrote over 1,800 during her lifetime, and E.E. Cummings wrote an astounding 2,900 poems. Another prolific poet–although he never broke into the thousands–is Scotland’s Robert Burns, who published over 220 poems and 400 songs by his death at the age of 37 in 1796.
Burns has always enjoyed a large following: He is widely considered to be the national poet of his native Scotland, and his works have been translated into dozens of languages for readers around the world. His oeuvre was never very accessible to speakers of non-Western languages, however, but that may soon change–at least for speakers of India’s Tamil language.
Reza Ali, an Indian businessman, recently translated Burns’ poem “A Man’s A Man for A’ That” into Tamil in what experts consider to be the first time that Burns’ work has been translated and performed in Tamil. Ali, a Burns admirer, learned that there were no existing Tamil translations of his poems while working in Glasgow in 2015, and he set out to fill that void.
Although Ali is a native speaker of Tamil, his translation was a more complicated exercise than simply swapping out Burns’ words in Scots for words in Tamil; instead, Ali endeavored to preserve the meaning of the poem across languages, which proved to be a complicated task.
“It was extremely difficult to say the least,” Ali told The Scotsman newspaper.
He began by reviewing his understanding of Scots language with the Greenock Burns Club in Scotland before producing a first draft of a translation–with the help of his mother, he pointed out–before seeking further review from the head Tamil specialist of the Singapore Parliament, where Tamil is an official language and where Ali lives. Upon completing the project, Ali performed the work in Tamil for the Greenock Club and presented them with a copy of the translation as a token of his appreciation.
Ali’s translation is impressive for many reasons, but one that resonates with me in particular is how it reveals the intense work required of poetic translations, even by native speakers. Not just a plug-and-play exercise, Ali spent months studying another language as well as his own native language before even creating a first draft. He consulted with experts to ensure his translation was accurate. He understood, correctly, that translation is not about words but about meaning, and he worked hard to make something written hundreds of years ago accessible to a modern audience on the other side of the world.
“It’s easier to convey the spirit of the poem,” Ali told The Scotsman. “The messages of brotherhood are universal and the strength of the message has been retained in the Tamil version.”
Originally published at ravishankarpoet.com on February 23, 2017.
