MISHA

The session at MISHA was an intimate one. Although the participants came from non-literature backgrounds, they were excited to engage with language in meaningful ways. They overcame their initial degree of hesitation and began participating with great enthusiasm.

The poem translation exercise was something the students greatly appreciated and excelled at. One particular participant shared an interesting take on translation while working on this. He said that his process did not just include the text he was translating from — ‘Ramakant in the City’ by Kerooru Vasudevacharya — but also by Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak’s cinematic influence. He said that as he was translating the story, he asked himself, “How would they have written this scene? How would they approach this?” A process such as this is a testament to how various translation approaches may be, not to mention intertextual.

Other students were also creative with their translations. They were able to comprehend the nature of the poem in English, experiment with their translations and elaborate on their decisions by going into why they chose a particular word or phrase. We were happy to look back on the small group that was initially hesitant to come together to produce something creative and novel in such a short span of time.