Shayari


Format:
The format of presentation for most Hindi/Urdu stuff is:
  • Introduction: Format for poetic lines;
  • Devanagari Script: कविता या शेर;
  • Roman Script: Kavita ya Sher;
  • English Translation: Poem or Couplet;
  • Comments: (if any).

Disclaimer:
The Translations of Shers (ToSs) appearing in most of the blog posts are my own unless otherwise stated. I am fully aware of their crappiness or to put it in a rather light-hearted tone: My ToSs are not-at-all on par with the Original Shers (OSs).

They are just a part of my brain’s effort to continue having faith in the belief that ‘I know English’. They are also a sympathetic heart-felt apology to those few Hindi/Urdu-illiterate souls who get lost on the web and end up here once-in-a-while.

I would also like to emphasize that BETTER ToSs from my readers (occasional or frequent) are always welcome (and eagerly expected!). Any criticisms regarding my ToSs is to be tossed somewhere else because you definitely did not read the first paragraph of this disclaimer.

Rant:
Most people tell me that my translations are literal as if that were a 'bad' thing but for a long time, I too agreed with them about it ('literalness') being so ('bad'). However, while brooding over the meaning of my life in recent times, I realized that the notion of 'literalness being bad' does not hold water here at all.

Here, a translation is supposed to be literal. Don't give me the crap about special phrases, idioms, proverbs, etc. If one knows the meaning of such things, one would substitute proper replacements. For example, If I know what "in one's shoes" means as a phrase, I'll translate it as "किसीके जगह पर" otherwise it will become "किसीके जूते में". Both translations are 'literal' & 'correct' depending on the context but then we're not talking about contextual correctness, are we?

That's because I'm translating poetry not prose, which means I'm not trying to elucidate what the poet wants to convey (which I may not be able to grasp in the first place [check out the comments on this post]). I try to retain the 'hazy' & 'rhyming' quality of the originals in the translations. Thus, they are worded to invoke a similar thought-process in the reader of the translations as the originals invoked in me. I also try to keep the physical length of the lines proportionate (to whatever scale seems to emerge while I'm translating) and so some wordings may seem weird [check out the stanza in this post or just read the shers in the post linked above].

Obviously, some translations are just bad not because they are literal but because I'm not good enough and due to the phenomenon that I've been dubbing 'Lost in Translation' in some of the past blogposts [check the second & fifth sher in this post]. Apart from these occasional hiccups, I feel like I'm doing a pretty decent job and if you disagree, I couldn't care less [Didn't you read the first paragraph of the Disclaimer?]!