The rough ground of translation and bilingual writing in Arun Kolatkar's Jejuri

摘要

This essay is about the bilingual poetry of Arun Kolatkar (in Marathi and English), specifically about his book, Jejuri, published in two languages and bookending the career of the poet 34 years apart, from the publication of the English book of poems in 1976 to the posthumous publication of the Marathi Jejuri in 2010. It studies how a creative impulse can be said to relate to linguisticity as a faculty or endowment, independent of the language(s) in which it finds embodiment and realisation. The article raises questions about the concept of simple translation and demonstrates the complex variants in this hold-all term that deny any possibility of straightforward transfer of meaning from language A to language B in such a bilingual creative process.