‘An act of dancing in chains’: Ranjit Hoskote on the ‘luxury of interpretation’ in translation

Readers know Ranjit Hoskote the poet, art historian, curator, essayist, translator, speaker – but how many of those who admire his prolific and sensitive writing would have him down as the teller of adventure stories?

Reading the introduction to Hoskote’s latest work, a translation of Mir Taqi Mir’s poems entitled The Homeland’s an Ocean, I am suddenly in the grip of a political thriller, reliving the complexities of Mir’s time (1723-1810) through overhearing the conversation – or guftagu – of its courtly and street characters, privy to the highs and woes of a crumbling empire, its massacres and intrigues. The immediacy and energy with which Hoskote describes Mir’s fallen city of Shahjahanabad – our modern-day Delhi – has me following, like a sleepwalker, the wrecked, now-homeless citizens on their quest for sanctuary and “home”.

I died and still they pelted me with stones.
The tree of my mourning bore such fruit.

(Divãn-e Duvuum: 11.757.2)

The state of melancholia, or perhaps more precisely, of “solastalgia” of a people reeling from shock after shocking invasion (1730) and prolonged violation (1730-1767) by various warlords is a principal source of Mir’s verse and as we read, we realise that our contemporaneous global state is umbilically linked back through time by the same human emotions which govern,...

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