Bridges Across Broken Tongues: Translation, Transcreation, and the Politics of Loss in Modern Indian Poetry

Abstract

Translation enables Indian poetry to circulate across linguistic communities, but it also changes the relationships among sound, meaning, cultural memory, and readership. This article examines translation and transcreation as interpretive practices through which poems acquire new forms and audiences. It draws on selected arguments by Roman Jakobson, Walter Benjamin, Sujit Mukherjee, A. K. Ramanujan, Lawrence Venuti, and Tejaswini Niranjana. Rabindranath Tagore’s English self-translation and Priya Adarkar’s translation of Arun Kamble provide concrete points of discussion. The article distinguishes unavoidable formal change from politically consequential erasure. A poem may lose a sound pattern without losing its social argument, alternatively, elegant fluency may conceal caste conflict or the authority of a marginalised voice. The expression ‘broken tongues’ is therefore treated as a metaphor for interrupted relations among speakers and readers, not as a description of defective languages. The article argues for accountable creativity: translation should acknowledge its interventions, preserve meaningful differences, and make its choices available for critical examination.