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Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →Translator and editor Rahul Soni treats the source text as the boundary of his work, and he says those boundaries are what make translating enjoyable. In an interview with Sayari Debnath, published by Scroll on 8 July 2023, he explains how he approaches fidelity, ambiguity and poetic form, using his English translations of Shrikant Verma’s poetry collection Magadh as the main example. What follows sets out his arguments in the order he makes them, with the dates and qualifications his account carries.
Where this account comes from
The main source is the Scroll interview of 8 July 2023. Soni’s own website republishes the same interview and notes its original Scroll publication, so the wording is consistent across both. Everything below is Soni’s own account of his practice, given in a single conversation. It is a practitioner’s testimony, not an independent study of translation or a review of his books.
Translation as answerable to the source
Soni describes translation as writing that has to answer to the original. His stated aim is to recreate the effects of the source in the target language without adding or subtracting anything. He is candid that this is an ideal rather than a rule, because languages do not always allow the same choices. A construction that works in Hindi may have no clean equivalent in English, so the translator has to decide which effect to protect when one cannot be kept in full.
The ideal he names is captured in his own words:
“For me, I think, what I like to aim for is to try and replicate the effects of the original in the target language without adding or subtracting anything – that is ideal.” — Rahul Soni, translator and editor.
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Leaving ambiguity unresolved
A second principle concerns interpretation. Soni says a translator should not impose a reading on the text. Where the original is ambiguous, the translation should keep a comparable ambiguity rather than settling the question for the reader. This is a demanding standard for poetry, where a translator may be tempted to choose the sharper meaning because it reads more smoothly.
“As a translator my job, I feel, is not to impose meaning on a text – if there is ambiguity in the original, the same kind of ambiguity needs to be preserved in the translation too, for instance.” — Rahul Soni, translator and editor.
Why he calls constraints liberating
The headline phrase comes from Soni’s answer to the interview’s central question: whether following the text so closely while translating poetry feels restrictive. He does not deny the tightness of the constraint. He argues that the original supplies everything the translation needs to work with, and that working within those limits gives him something to push against.
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“The constraint is the original text and everything that it brings with it. I find such constraints quite liberating and exciting to work with” — Rahul Soni, translator and editor.
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This is a personal stance. Other translators work differently, and Soni’s account does not claim that the approach suits every text.
Keeping form: the Magadh and Mirabai examples
Soni’s most concrete example concerns formal fidelity, which he treats as a series of decisions rather than a mechanical rule. For Magadh, he says he could keep the general shape of the poems. For the Mirabai verses, he changed his approach. Reproducing the original line breaks made the English lines longer and looser, which weakened the compactness of the verses. He therefore used compact stanzas with short lines.
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| Element | What Soni kept | What he changed, and why |
|---|---|---|
| Magadh poems | The general shape of each poem | Not stated as a change in the interview |
| Mirabai verses | Their compactness, as he understood it | Replaced mirrored line breaks with compact stanzas of short lines, because the mirrored breaks produced longer, looser English lines |
The example shows that the same principle, replicating effects, can lead to different formal choices in different poems. The question for a reader is which feature a translator has treated as essential.
The Magadh timeline
Soni says a friend recommended Shrikant Verma’s Magadh to him in 2007, and that he began translating it before he had finished reading the collection. He was drawn to its language, diction and syntax, and wanted to learn how to do comparable work in English. The dates below come from the interview and its introductory text.
| Date | Event | Source of the date |
|---|---|---|
| 2007 | Soni begins translating Magadh | Soni’s recollection in the interview |
| 2013 | First published translation of Magadh | The interview’s introductory text |
| May 2023 | Revised second version published by Eka, an imprint of Westland Books | The interview’s introductory text |
Soni describes the revision as an opportunity to bring the translation closer to the original and to correct misreadings or misunderstandings from the first version. The interview does not list the individual corrections, so readers comparing the two editions will need to do that comparison themselves.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Other work mentioned in the interview
Pratilipi
Soni links his early translation experience to Pratilipi, a bilingual journal he co-ran. He says it became multilingual, published more than a dozen issues, and produced several translated books during its four years. He presents this as a recollection, and the interview gives no independent circulation or sales figures.
Dopehri and Pankaj Kapur
In discussing his translation of Pankaj Kapur’s novella Dopehri, Soni says working with the author on the text’s oral and aural qualities taught him about the sound and cadence of language.
Other titles
- A Name for Every Leaf, Ashok Vajpeyi’s selected poems, which Soni says was commissioned.
- The Room Beneath Their Feet, Geetanjali Shree’s novel, in Soni’s translation. The interview’s introductory text says Penguin reissued it in May 2023.
These titles show the range of his work. The interview does not rank them or compare how they sold.
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Questions to ask of any translation
Soni’s examples suggest a practical way to read a translation. The questions below are drawn from his arguments, not from a scoring system, and none of them has a single correct answer.
- Does the translation reproduce the effects of the original, or does it add or drop material to make the English read more easily?
- Where the original is ambiguous, does the translation keep that ambiguity or settle it?
- Which formal features, such as line breaks, repetition, rhyme or meter, are kept, and which are adapted?
- When a formal choice was made, does it serve the compactness, sound or cadence of the original?
What the interview does and does not establish
The interview is a single conversation, published in 2023, and it reports Soni’s own recollections and reasoning. It does not offer an independent review of his translations, and it does not support broad claims about the translation field. Soni’s ideals, such as replicating effects without adding or subtracting, describe what he aims for; they are not measured outcomes.
For the current availability of his books, including the Eka edition of Magadh, check a bookseller directly. The interview does not confirm stock or listing details at the time of reading.
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