Translation, for poet and translator Ranjit Hoskote, is neither word-for-word substitution nor permission to remake a poem without limits. It is “an act of ‘dancing in chains’”: the translator works within the demands of the original while using creative judgment to carry its meanings into another language. Hoskote developed this idea in a September 1, 2024, interview with Tansy Troy for Scroll.in, prompted by his translation of Mir Taqi Mir’s poems, The Homeland’s an Ocean.
What does Hoskote mean by “dancing in chains”?
Hoskote’s metaphor holds two responsibilities together. The “chains” are the constraints of the source poem: its language, meanings, and particular choices. The “dance” is the translator’s creative work of rendering that poem in another language. He rejects the idea that fidelity requires a mechanically literal version, but he does not treat freedom as license to ignore the original.
As he puts it in the Scroll.in interview, “The luxury of interpretation lies between the chains of exactitude and the dance of creative rendering.” Interpretation is possible within that tension: the translator must attend closely to the source and still make decisions that no one-to-one substitution can settle.
Why does he reject literal translation?
Hoskote’s answer is that a poem does not always have one fixed, perfectly extractable meaning waiting to be transferred. “There are no literal originals, so there can be no literal translations,” he tells Troy. In his view, an enduring poem can sustain multiple meanings that remain related without collapsing into a single equivalent.
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He describes such a poem as “kaleidoscopic, vibrantly unstable in its range of meanings.” The translator’s task, then, is to recognize and work with that range rather than claim to reproduce one definitive version. This is Hoskote’s account of poetic translation in the interview, not a universal rule that every translator or translation must follow.
How do language and social register shape a translation?
The interview illustrates the limits of direct equivalence through Hindi forms of address. Aap, tum, and tu can signal different social registers, while the English “you” may not preserve those distinctions by itself. The example shows why a translator may need to make interpretive choices: a word’s role can include social information as well as its basic reference.
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Hoskote describes himself as “a monolingual writer who happens to be a multilingual reader.” He says his writing in English is informed by reading in Sanskrit, Urdu, German, Hindi, and Kashmiri. In the interview, this is part of his account of how a writer can work in one language while drawing on a wider experience of reading.
What is the interview’s book context?
Troy’s conversation was prompted by The Homeland’s an Ocean, identified in the interview as Hoskote’s translation of poems by Mir Taqi Mir. The discussion uses the book to explore the translator’s choices and the relationship between fidelity and creative rendering. The interview also supplies historical and linguistic framing for Mir and Rekhta; those details are best understood as the article’s framing rather than as independently established claims here.
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Read the full interview: Tansy Troy, “ ‘An act of dancing in chains’: Ranjit Hoskote on the ‘luxury of interpretation’ in translation,” Scroll.in, September 1, 2024.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What does Hoskote say poetry can do?
In response to a question about poetry and a fractured public life, Hoskote describes poetry as both inward and civic. It can console or provoke, restore balance or call people to action. He says: “Above all, poetry calls upon us to bear witness to the urgencies of our time, and to stand alongside the vulnerable and voiceless to give them strength and voice. To me, this is the pre-eminent role of poetry today.”
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He also speaks about poetry’s unpredictability, intuition, vulnerability, and human imperfection in the context of artificial intelligence. These are his stated views about poetry; the interview does not establish them as technical findings about what AI can or cannot do.
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