What River Saya

Contemporary Odia Poetry, unlike Poetry in other languages of India, exhibits a character that renders it untranslatable into a host language of non-sanskritic origin. The multiple openings, the verbal imageries, the inflections and the oralities subsumed by written words, often make it a translator’s nightmare. In that sense Bijay Mahapatra is a difficult Poet to translate into English. I am delighted to see that Prof. Kamala prasad Mahapatra in rendering BM’s Poetry into English succeeds in tiding over most of the obstacles posed by the typical knots and chains in which the Poet spins his metaphor laden content, often leaving his intent shrouded, opaque or playfully half done. As a translator of repute and a Professor of English, KP knows only too well that the route to meaning in highly metaphorized poetry is bedeviled by allusions, and extrapolations not quite amenable to the discipline of the English Language. He gets over the glitz by overflying the intended, the implied and What the River Says 5 the conjectured by sticking to the literal. That in fact is the route to reach the sensory subtext of fascinatingly illusory Poetry. Our thanks are due to both, the Poet and the Translator for setting this stage for us to show how the contemporary Odia poetry functions as a site for translation.

— Haraprasad Das, Eminent Poet