On Same Page

IN THE LATE 1940 S, the 18-year-old American poet WS Merwin made a pilgrimage to Saint Elizabeth Hospital in Washington, DC to meet another poet—Ezra Pound. Though Pound was under indictment for treason against the United States, following radio broadcasts during the Second World War in which he declared his support for Benito Mussolini, Merwin admired the poet and had wandered into the hospital looking for advice from a revered figure. Pound argued that if Merwin was serious about being a poet, he should write 75 lines every day. “But at your age you don’t have anything to write about,” he continued. “You may think you do, but you don’t. So get to translating.”

In a career that spanned almost seven decades, Merwin followed Pound’s advice to learn the art of translation so as not to be at the mercy of other translators. He translated poetry into English, from languages including German, Russian, Chinese, Egyptian, Welsh, Urdu, Japanese, Persian and Sanskrit. Translating gave Merwin more control over English—so much so, that it led the Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali to declare, in an interview, that “Merwin became Merwinesque by translating.” Shahid, who knew Merwin personally, is now located in this exquisite lineage of poets who learned to break the barriers of language through their work in translation.

Shahid is celebrated most for The Country Without a Post Office, a collection of poems that reflects on the Kashmiri people’s resistance, and the suffering brought on by the Indian government’s repression. He spent the last decade of his life reinvigorating modern American poetry by popularising the ghazal as a poetic form in the West and introducing the sensibilities and excesses of Urdu traditions into conventions of English poetry. But Shahid was also a prolific translator who familiarised the American audience with poets such as Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Mirza Ghalib. By working as a translator—a legacy that is often overlooked—he enriched his poetry, adding depth to it.

His translations of Faiz, first published as The Rebel’s Silhouette: Selected Poems in 1991, have gained a new meaning in the current political milieu of the subcontinent. Translating his works helped Shahid formulate a language that was aesthetically elegant as well as politically charged, through which he expressed the suffering of the Kashmiris, as well as his own. Today, at a time when Shahid is one of the defining literary voices of Kashmir, it is important to look at the manner in which, and the reasons why, he translated poets such as Faiz and the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who, like him, were poets who documented injustice and whose work resonated with millions.

IN MAY 2018 , I met the historian and translator Saleem Kidwai at his house in