Can poetry be translated without losing what makes it poetry? In his September 3, 2023 essay for Scroll.in, Ammar Aziz reflects on translating the Urdu poet Jaun Elia and argues that fidelity requires more than carrying words across languages. A translator must make a poem legible in English while attending to its form, sound, tone, silences and cultural setting.
Why Aziz describes the work as sacred
Aziz presents translating Elia not as a detached academic exercise but as a personal, almost sacred undertaking. The framing grows out of the scale of Elia’s poem Ramooz: Aziz describes it as a book-length long poem written between 1962 and 1974 and divided into alvaah, or “tablets.” Its scriptural imagery and rhetoric coexist with subjects such as capitalism and urbanisation.
The essay also quotes Elia, in the introduction to Ramooz, saying: “I have arm-wrestled god in this poem.” That line helps explain the title’s sense of a translator approaching something immense, but Aziz’s account remains his own response to Elia rather than a universal prescription for translating poetry.
What fidelity means beyond literal wording
Aziz rejects word-for-word literalism as a complete account of responsibility. A translation can be attentive to a poem’s body, soul, language and cultural context without mechanically reproducing each word. But poetic license, in his view, is not a blanket excuse to alter the work. His stated aim is to preserve the qualities that give Elia’s verses their particular force.
“My strategy is to be loyal to the form, the grandeur, the silences, and the shadows in Elia’s verses.”
Those terms point to effects that may not have a direct verbal equivalent: a line’s movement, the weight of an image, what is left unsaid, or the associations a phrase carries in its original setting. Aziz allows that a translation can sometimes acquire an independent status, but he keeps that possibility in tension with attention to the actual language of the poem.
How a single word can shape a character
To show why lexical choices matter, Aziz turns to the opening of Albert Camus’s L’Étranger: “Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.” He argues that translating maman simply as “mother” may lose the French word’s warmth and affect how an English reader imagines the narrator. The example is Aziz’s interpretation, not a claim that one English rendering is always correct; it shows how a small choice can change tone and characterization as well as dictionary meaning.
The essay sets this problem alongside Friedrich Schleiermacher’s distinction between moving the reader toward the writer and moving the writer toward the reader. As quoted by Aziz, Schleiermacher writes: “Either the translator leaves the writer in peace as much as possible and moves the reader toward him, or he leaves the reader in peace as much as possible and moves the writer toward him.” The dilemma is not simply whether a translation should be readable. It is how much of the encounter with the original language the English version preserves, and how much it adapts for its new audience.
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Form, the “invisible poem” and the language on the page
Aziz discusses Tomas Tranströmer’s idea of an “invisible poem,” but questions an understanding of the concept that would detach translation too far from the poem’s actual language. For Aziz, the poem’s meanings cannot be separated from the words, forms and cultural conditions through which they are made. A translator may need to interpret, but interpretation should remain answerable to what is present in the work.
That balance also informs the essay’s references to Walter Benjamin’s idea of “pure language” and to Borges’s formulation about an original seeming “unfaithful to the translation.” Aziz uses these ideas to think about what translation might make possible, while retaining the demand to remain faithful to the source language. The references are part of his argument in the essay, not a claim that translation can simply rise above the words of a poem.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What the translated excerpts show
Aziz reproduces English excerpts titled “The Tablet of the Coffin” and “The Tablet of Lament,” crediting the poems to Jaun Elia and the translations to himself. They let readers encounter examples of his approach rather than only its principles. As excerpts, however, they cannot establish how every poem by Elia works or how another translator might handle the same material.
The essay also quotes Ranjit Hoskote describing translation as a visceral experience: “Before it is a cultural or a political project, translation is for me a visceral experience, a pleasure of named and unnamed senses: a quickening of the pulse, a prickling of the skin, a speeded-up heartbeat, an announcement that the world has just changed course in some small yet decisive way.” Aziz’s inclusion of this passage places the translator’s felt response alongside the intellectual work of choices about form, meaning and context.
What Aziz’s essay leaves open
The essay is most useful as a record of one translator explaining the obligations he feels toward one poet. It does not offer a comparison of multiple complete English translations of Elia, nor does it settle whether poetry can be translated without loss. Its answer is more practical: translation entails choices, and those choices should remain mindful of the source poem’s language and the dimensions of its effect that English may not reproduce neatly.
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