Sonnet in a Bonnet [On the 108th Birth Anniversary of the modern Hindi poet Trilochan] The sonnet was born in Italy as a lover’s serenade, and soon thereafter became the most fashionable poetic form in Elizabethan England, and after a century-long eclipse, it re-appeared with a vibrance and velocity not only in all the various Englishes throughout the world, but in many other languages, too. In prosodic terms, the sonnet is perhaps the single most complexly rhyme-woven poetic form which has attracted poets everywhere for its rhyme-weave challenge. Rhyme has always been one of the cardinal musical devices in poetry in all languages, but its intricate braiding in a sonnet, with the content and the meaning interspersed, offers the most exciting creative pleasure for the poet. One aspect of handling of the traditional form is the syntax which in Italian is more congenial to the fluidity of rhyme-sounds than in other analytical languages like English and Hindi where the syntax is more...
CREATIVITY AND TRANSLATION In its etymological sense, poetry means ‘the art of making’ and in that basic sense all creativity has poetry behind it. My point in today’s conversation is about a particular kind of creativity which is ‘translation’. And I would like to begin with the premise that all creativity itself can be likened to the process of ‘translation’. When we create art, in its broadest sense, we actually ‘translate’ an idea, an emotion or an experience into a concrete form in a particular genre of art – a poem, a story, a play or various other forms of art – music, painting, sculpture or whatever. When we create in art, the creative process itself is a process of translation of something into some form of art in a particular genre . Translation basically means change – but it implies both the process and the product, both the process of change, and the end-product. It is a process with a ...