'Jogada siri belakinalli, tungeya tene balukinalli, sahyadriya lohadalira uttungada nilukinalli,’ these lines which capture the natural beauty of this land – the Jog falls, the Tungabhadra river, the Sahyadris – from KS Nisar Ahmed’s Nityotsava are words that every Kannada speaker has heard.
The poet himself, known by most for his simple language and his poems which were turned into songs (Kurigalu Saar Kurigalu, Naada Deviye) is a household name. Roopa Pai, too, knew him for these poems, but as she unearthed and read more of the nearly 600 poems he composed in his lifetime, what struck her was the sheer range of his work.
“Nisar Ahmed was unclassifiable. He had a scientific way of looking at things but did believe in a greater power; he didn’t pull his punches when he had an opinion about something, but stated it in such beautiful language. Some of his poems have rhyme and some are free verse but when you read them aloud there is a rhythm,” says the author, whose debut work of translation, Every Day a Celebration (Seagull; `799) has 100 of Ahmed’s poems across 14 poetry collections. The project began 10 years ago when Pai started translating a Kannada poem each day in November for her readers on Facebook. When she met Ahmed at a literary event a few months later, his approval of a translation she showed him gave her the push to turn it into a complete collection.
Ahmed himself chose the poems, shares Pai, saying, “He used to complain that everybody knows him from the same three poems, so he may have been picking poems that had not been translated into English before, which demonstrated the different kinds of poems he had written and the breadth of his subjects.”
Although he did not live to see the book be published, Ahmed did see a finished draft, as Pai notes, “I was working on other projects and when I had a few weeks off, I’d do 10 poems. This needed a kind of immersion. It couldn’t be something I did at the end of a day of writing something else. I had finished around 80 poems by 2019 and given it to him. He would call me every two months or so asking ‘where are the poems?’ He was really on my case,” she laughs, adding, “In March, when I finally finished them, he said, ‘Actually, good job, this was quite fast’ and congratulated me. I think he must have fallen sick almost immediately after that.”
Throughout the translation process, a commitment to the musicality that Pai so loved in the Kannada poems, guided her choices. She also calls this her biggest challenge too, saying, “I knew I could translate the content but retaining the beautiful cadences, physicality, rhythm and alliteration in a way that didn’t sound stilted to the reader in English was the biggest challenge.” Although Ahmed’s poems themselves borrow words from Urdu, English and Sanskrit, Pai does not often retain original words, choosing ease of reading instead.
Initially, Pai had wanted an interview with Ahmed to be the foreword to the collection but in his absence, turned to interviews with Kannada litterateurs to contextualise him and his work. Noting that his name is often buried among the lists of Kannada poets. Pai explains, “People tend to think that for something to be literary or considered a great poem, it has to be difficult to understand. If it’s too simple, or uses colloquial language and modern expressions, then it is not placed on as high of a pedestal.”
She hopes people take away with them ‘the capriciousness of spirit that survives in his poetry and the possibility to live in the world, embracing many identities and transcending them all. And above all, it’s possible for a poet not to belong to any genre but explore his creativity with a breadth of interests.’
(Every Day a Celebration will be launched on June 27 at Bookworm, Church Street)