‘A lifetime of looking’: Arundhathi Subramanian on how Gieve Patel translated two Gujarati mystics

It feels only right to begin with an admission: I don’t think I understood what Gieve Patel’s translations meant to him until he died.

And yet, he offered clues. He once said that his translations had come into his life as a replacement for his own poetry. On another occasion, he said that he would sometimes spend an entire day looking at a translation in much the way he contemplated a painting in his studio. At the end of it, he would often do no more than delete a comma. He frequently said that the work was almost done, that he was “months away from closure”. But then, he seemed to have been saying that for almost as long as I have known him.

I will admit I had my own theories about Gieve’s reluctance to publish his translations. I attributed it to a hyper-self-critical strain, a perfectionist’s pride. Or writer’s block. I thought he was overthinking things. At times, I wondered if he felt he had lost his earlier sure-footedness. Perhaps he was simply preoccupied with his painting? Or was he just too much of a technophobe? Is that why he abandoned the lubricated ease of a computer for the arrhythmia of a typewriter?...

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