Nidhi Singh, 2022 Virtual Travel Fellow (Hindi)

Nidhi is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington, who lives between India and the US. Her introduction to translation was through Professor Bill Johnston’s workshop in literary translation at Indiana University. Looking for her first poem to translate, she came across “Banaras” by the Hindi poet Kedarnath Singh. “Banaras” immediately drew her in with its vivid images of the ancient city that are immersed in the slowness of its rhythm. Nidhi continued to read and translate Singh’s poems, noticing the recurrence of certain motifs—the most noteworthy being “dust.” Belonging to the same socio-cultural background as Singh, she could recognize the dust described in Singh’s poems as one that rises from the banks of the Ganges, enters people’s homes and lives, settles on clothes, dulls the green of the trees and the wood of the furniture. Reading Singh’s poetry felt to her a little like passing by home. It imparted the mysteries and absurdities of the familiar and revealed the improbable edges of what often escaped her perception.  

Translation for Nidhi, among other things, became a cure for homesickness. Reading and translating Hindi poetry helped her re-belong to her native language and reimagine the landscapes of her past. Singh’s poetry delights in colloquial diction. It has a touch of intimacy. At times, the poet gently instructs the reader to accompany him on a journey. They enter a kind of friendship as they look at the ordinary and fragile things of everyday life together anew. The animated material environment evokes the idea of space as co-created by both the poet and the reader. Syntactical links are eschewed in Singh’s poems, engendering strange allusiveness and oblique associations. There is a starkness to his poetry that results from the presence of loosely tied images. These crisp, concrete images are never abstractions or symbols of a meaning that lies beyond the poem. The reader is asked to be still and also to linger within the orbit of the poetic world itself. Interpreting these images and reshaping them into English has been for Nidhi one of the most daunting and absorbing aspects of translating Singh’s poetry. 

Till now, Nidhi has translated numerous poems by Kedarnath Singh and attempted to recreate a flicker of the wit, humor, and beauty of his work. Her translation of “Banaras” was published by World Literature Today in 2019. Learning the craft of translation has been for her a source of great creative joy, and she desires to make it a lifelong pursuit. She is grateful to ALTA for giving her the opportunity to share her work with other translators.