The Experience of Translating Kunwar Narain’s Poetry No One Is the Other

Introduction

Apurva Narain and Nicola Pozza

Part I             Poetics and Translation: Reading Between Words

Extract: The Troubled Soul of Conscience

Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh

1.         The Translator’s Tasks and Kunwar Narain’s Poetics: The Short Poems, 1956–93

Vinay Dharwadker

2.         The Topography of Narain’s Poetics: A Dialogue Between Place and Location

Margus Lattik

3.         The Poetics of Water and Translation as Negotiation: Challenges of Rendering Kunwar Narain’s Poetry into Bulgarian

Milena Bratoeva

4.         The Wonderland of Words: Strategies and “Creative” (In)correctness in the Translation of Kunwar Narain’s Poetry into Polish

Monika Browarczyk

Part II             The Re-creation of a Translator: The Example of Kumarajiva

Extract: The Historic Contribution of Translators

Kunwar Narain

5.         Kunwar Narain’s Poetic Re-creation of the Buddhist Translator Kumarajiva and the Spirit of Translation: Passages to Humanness

Annie Montaut

6.         Kumarajiva, Kunwar Narain, and I: A Dialogue on Translation

Alessandra Consolaro

7.         On Translation, Transculturality, and Kumārajīva: Some Observations in the Context of Kunwar Narain’s Epical Poems

Heinz Werner Wessler

Part III           The Experience of Translation: Words and Worlds

Extract: In Praise of Translation

Geet Chaturvedi

8.         Between WorLds: Kunwar Narain’s Poetry Across Cultures and Languages

Nicola Pozza

9.         “Translation as Challenge…”: A Few Thoughts on Translating the Poems of Kunwar Narain into Polish

Danuta Stasik

10.       Un/veiling the Poem, Un/veiling the Self: On Translating Kunwar Narain’s Ātmajayī into English

Maria Puri

11.       Images of Transcendence in Kunwar Narain’s Poetry: Notes on the Intersemiotic Transcreation of Words into Cinematographic Images

Gautam Chatterjee

12.       Kunwar Narain’s Poetry and Literary Cinema: Strategies for Intersemiotic Translation

Teena Amrit Gill

Appendix 1      Kunwar Narain: Selected Bibliography

Appendix 2     Kunwar Narain’s Poetry Collections

Appendix 3     On the Poetry of Kunwar Narain (Pankaj Chaturvedi)

Biography

Nicola Pozza is a senior lecturer at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. His current project examines the construction of the Himalayan space in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Hindi travelogues. Besides publishing essays on Hindi literature, he authored a two-volume French manual on Hindi (Le hindi… comme en Inde, 2022 and 2023) and co-edited India in Translation through Hindi Literature (2010). He has translated Geetanjali Shree’s novel Khālī jagah (Une place vide, 2018) and a selection of Kunwar Narain’s poems (Confluences, 2025) into French.

Apurva Narain is a literary translator, writer, and editor. As Kunwar Narain’s son, he oversees his father’s literary estate and has edited some of his later works. His English translations of Kunwar Narain’s works include the poetry collections No Other World (2008) and Witnesses of Remembrance (2021); and the co-translated story collection The Play of Dolls (2020). His work has appeared in several journals and anthologies. He has had professional interests in international development, ecology, and public health ethics.