Having "translated" a book of Urdu ghazals in college, I feel weirdly positioned to comment.
First, there are a ton of opinions about what it means to translate poetry, but it certain is transformative and there isn't any point in avoiding that. It becomes a series of decisions about what to retain, what to discard and even what to elevate or create.
Many people think "adding" anything is counter to the goal of translation, but what is the goal? You can read a transliteration and understand concepts, you can read various translations and triangulate meaning, you can speak the original language and grow up with the author (or be the author!) And none of it will help produce an accurate translation.
So what's the goal? To transmit some germ of the source material, to my thinking. Haikus are equally (or even moreso) impossible. What gets missed in most haiku translation is the turn of phrase, where a single word can hold two meanings in balance. Without it. A fundamental aspect of haiku is simply not there. Yet people still read translated haikus.
For me, I dropped the rhyming scheme completely. Yes, you lose musicality and the rhythm of poem. But you can better maintain the concepts and emotion and not have to fight against the boundaries of the language.
The show "boys over flowers" is translated from 花より男子, ostensibly a correct translation.
But 男子 (boys) is a homophone of 団子 (a sweet dumpling) and the entire phrase 花より団子 is an aphorism for preferring practicality over aesthetics.
Did you understand that? Of course. Yet, a joke that has to be explained loses something of itself.
Weirdly, I am fluent in Japanese, Urdu, and English. I believe that while translations have their value, they always fail to do justice – even when translated by the author! A poem is, like a joke, largely about what it affects in the audience, and such an evanescent quality is nigh impossible to preserve completely in translation, or even in a retelling.
This is why I was rather upset when Youtube began silently auto-translating audio for me with no indication of it not being the original audio (it's especially bad if you look at shorts and are multilingual...you could easily mistake what was a catchy Japanese song for English AI slop).
> A ghazal is a poetic form originating in and strongly associated with the Islamic cultural sphere.
This just feels wrong to me because ghazals have nothing to do with Islamic cultural sphere. In fact, very many poets who’re prolific at ghazals are decidedly unIslamic.
Apart from this nit, I think “translation” is incorrect way to describe converting a ghazal to English. At best, it can be an “accurate interpretation”, but it’ll always be an interpretation.
Linguistic differences apart, when you read the same ghazal side by side in Urdu and English, you’ll notice the cultural differences, sometimes subtle and sometimes very pronounced. And that’s just the nature of languages which have a vast cultural context. This context makes the feel of a piece very different regardless of how accurate it is to the original.
Having "translated" a book of Urdu ghazals in college, I feel weirdly positioned to comment.
First, there are a ton of opinions about what it means to translate poetry, but it certain is transformative and there isn't any point in avoiding that. It becomes a series of decisions about what to retain, what to discard and even what to elevate or create.
Many people think "adding" anything is counter to the goal of translation, but what is the goal? You can read a transliteration and understand concepts, you can read various translations and triangulate meaning, you can speak the original language and grow up with the author (or be the author!) And none of it will help produce an accurate translation.
So what's the goal? To transmit some germ of the source material, to my thinking. Haikus are equally (or even moreso) impossible. What gets missed in most haiku translation is the turn of phrase, where a single word can hold two meanings in balance. Without it. A fundamental aspect of haiku is simply not there. Yet people still read translated haikus.
For me, I dropped the rhyming scheme completely. Yes, you lose musicality and the rhythm of poem. But you can better maintain the concepts and emotion and not have to fight against the boundaries of the language.
The show "boys over flowers" is translated from 花より男子, ostensibly a correct translation.
But 男子 (boys) is a homophone of 団子 (a sweet dumpling) and the entire phrase 花より団子 is an aphorism for preferring practicality over aesthetics.
Did you understand that? Of course. Yet, a joke that has to be explained loses something of itself.
Weirdly, I am fluent in Japanese, Urdu, and English. I believe that while translations have their value, they always fail to do justice – even when translated by the author! A poem is, like a joke, largely about what it affects in the audience, and such an evanescent quality is nigh impossible to preserve completely in translation, or even in a retelling.
This is why I was rather upset when Youtube began silently auto-translating audio for me with no indication of it not being the original audio (it's especially bad if you look at shorts and are multilingual...you could easily mistake what was a catchy Japanese song for English AI slop).
> A ghazal is a poetic form originating in and strongly associated with the Islamic cultural sphere.
This just feels wrong to me because ghazals have nothing to do with Islamic cultural sphere. In fact, very many poets who’re prolific at ghazals are decidedly unIslamic.
Apart from this nit, I think “translation” is incorrect way to describe converting a ghazal to English. At best, it can be an “accurate interpretation”, but it’ll always be an interpretation.
Linguistic differences apart, when you read the same ghazal side by side in Urdu and English, you’ll notice the cultural differences, sometimes subtle and sometimes very pronounced. And that’s just the nature of languages which have a vast cultural context. This context makes the feel of a piece very different regardless of how accurate it is to the original.
As someone who recently attempted this, I feel attacked lol. To be fair it does feel messy to follow the rules in English.
https://aneeshsathe.com/2025/06/15/dissolving-the-sun/