Earlier this year, I chanced upon Jhumpa Lahiri’s book called “In Other Words”. The book isn’t about translation directly, but it looks at how we connect with languages, especially foreign ones. It brought back memories of the many translated books I have read over the years (which I did partly due to my resistance to reading them in their parent language). I see this as an act of taking the known easy road, smelling the flowers, watching the traffic and finding ourselves in an unknown destination. Without a doubt, there are many such exotic landscapes for us to explore. All we need is an inroad to reach and the fantastic essay on translation tells us how far some of them go to pave the way for us to walk on while the poem show us what these final stops are.

Read them. Explore them. Live them.

Translation is an act of meditation to elevate us, to show what is beyond the horizon of our reading shelves.

Until next time, happy reading!