CHENNAI: During the run-up to the 2014 elections, when author Ravi Mantha was getting into the thick of the polls, he chanced upon a collection of poems penned by Narendra Modi. Reading the highly imaginative work by the PM candidate, it occurred to him that probably a section of people in the country didn’t connect with him because Modi wasn’t articulate in English. “I read his collection ‘Aankh Aa Dhanya Che’ and it occurred to me that the reason English speaking population and many in the South didn’t relate to him because he was not suave and did not belong to the coterie of the English educated elite,” says Mantha talking to CE on the sidelines of the book launch organised by the Prakriti Foundation here recently.
Intrigued by the work, Mantha wrote to the then Gujarat CM’s office about translating the work and received a non-committal response, saying that he could go ahead with the translation if he wished to. “I roped in three translators, who worked on it, and we had literal translations word by word. The Sanskritised Gujarati and the literary essence made the words sound like an incantation. In ‘A Journey’, I have tried to preserve and convey them, keeping them close to the original syntax, meaning and the incantation-like feel to the verses,” he says.
Translating one poem a day, Mantha spent over 60 days in translating verses that touched upon subjects like love, patriotism, spirituality and love for nature, as he was preparing for campaigning for BJP contenders in two constituencies — New Delhi and Guntur.
The Hyderabad-born author insists that throughout his project, the outcome of the elections hardly mattered to him. “As I read the poems, there was a man in front of me sans his politician and strategist identity,” he adds.
However, Mantha’s efforts received a subtle and gracious feedback from Modi himself, who sent a poem, telling him that he was happy with the result. That poem was translated in English and is the foreword of the book.
“It was his way of asking me to go ahead with its publication,” he says.
‘A Journey’ has been receiving rave reviews from critics, many of them who belong to the other end of the political spectrum.
“The reviews have been pleasantly surprising, leaving aside the ideological differences they might have with Modi. But the literary side has been well acclaimed,” he adds.
Mantha believes that the seminal shift in Indian politics with a man like Modi at the helm of the affairs makes the translation a lot more significant.
“It has a lot of historical context. Now, we have a man like Modi, who educated himself only in his teens, sitting in the spot that was occupied by a number of people who have had the best of education,” he says.
Published by Rupa, the book is priced at `295