Shailly Pandey

on translating Mahadevi Varma

Mahadevi Varma's command of the Hindi language is unparalleled to this day, with many of her words drawn from the ancient language of Sanskrit. It’s no surprise then that translating her poetry proved to be a challenge. I consider myself bilingual in Hindi and English; my entire life has been a swirl of the two languages. However, translating Varma made me question myself a little bit. I had to decipher some of her words by using old Hindi dictionaries. Some of the phrases she used weren’t even in those dictionaries, so I had to go further, into Sanskrit vocabulary. Her sentence structure and diction astounded me, and through translating her poetry, I learned more about my mother tongue. Varma’s poetry reads like a song, and “Kaun tum mere hriday mein?” or “Who Are You in My Heart” is no different. The first four lines of each stanza rhyme, and then the penultimate and last lines of the stanza rhyme, with the last line always being “Kaun tum mere hriday mein?” The rhyme scheme was a mark of Varma’s genius, as rhyming in a language like Hindi is extremely difficult due to the lack of words that all have the same sound in the last syllable. I initially tried to preserve the rhyming in my translation, but in doing so, I lost the dreamlike melody of the song. I decided to stay true to the meaning of the poem rather than the rhyme scene. Another thing to note is that the inflection of the last line of each stanza, though the words are the same, is meant to change in each stanza. This is a common practice in Hindi poetry — having a refrain that repeats throughout the poem, with the inflection changing every time it is read. Though I could not translate this practice into English, I tried to give each stanza of my translation a different emotional pulse, so that when the reader got to “Who are you in my heart?” it would very naturally emote the way the rest of the stanza did, be it a despairing cry or a relieved sigh.