We no longer have people like Nisar Ahmed: Roopa Pai

It started with a series of Facebook posts exactly ten years ago. Between 1 and 7 November 2016, to celebrate the Karnataka Rajyotsava, Roopa Pai translated and posted poems by various Kannada poets on the social media platform. “Apart from the translation, I wrote a note about the poet and introduced them to everyone who read my Facebook page. It became quite popular; people were touched and happy that Kannada poets were being celebrated like this,” says the Bengaluru-based writer and co-founder of Bangalore Walks, a history and heritage walking and tour company.

One of the poems she translated was by KS Nisar Ahmed, best known for ‘Nityotsava’, a paean to Karnataka, which was later set to music and became a cultural icon of its kind in the state, resonating deeply with its people. “Apart from ‘Nityotsava’, I didn’t know much about Nisara. But when I saw this poem called ‘Hakku’, I thought it was cute,” says Roopa, recalling how “satirical, sardonic and snarky” it was. “He was such a famous poet, but I thought it was interesting that he could write like that too. So I took it and translated the poem.”

Roopa Pai with every day a celebration | Photo credit: Special arrangement

Then, in January the following year, she bumped into Nisar at an event at Bengaluru’s Sapna Book House. “They were celebrating their 50th anniversary and invited some authors to do some audio demos on Sapna,” he says.

A number of heavyweights from Kannada literature were present at the event, including Nisar, whom she instantly recognized from a photograph. “Everybody knew what he looked like because he always wore a suit and tie, the only thing that gave him bulk because he was quite slim.

Excited to see him, Roopa says she went to him and told him that she translated one of his poems. She showed it to him and on impulse told him she wanted to translate more, she says. “He told me to move on.

That was the genesis of Every Day a Celebration, a collection of Nisar’s poems translated by Roopa that was recently published. Published by Seagull Books, the anthology contains 102 poems, including cult classics such as ‘Sheep, Sir, We Are Sheep’, ‘Krishna, The Butter Thief’ and ‘Amma, Tradition and Me’, which the poet himself selected from his extensive six-decade-long body of work spanning hundreds of poems.

“When he sent me a list of poems and I started reading them, I was amazed at the scope of his work. He was responding to what was happening in his environment,” says Roopa, listing some of the themes explored in these poems: politics, communal conflict, identity, Bengaluru, America, philosophy.

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“He was hard to pin down, but his worries were many and his spirit was always humane and compassionate without leaning towards strong points. But he was also a critical insider and pointed out injustice and falsehood in many poems,” says Roopa, who also loves how much of a Bengalurean Nisar was. “He was able to create new words and use different languages ​​in his poetry, very much like a city person in Bengaluru would speak.

She began the project by visiting the poet at his home, where he gave her his entire collection of poems, along with a list specifying which poems to include and where to find them in the collection, says Roopa, who worked on these poems briskly “whenever I could find time because I was working on other books at the time.”

By April 2020, she had completed all the poems and sent them to Nisar, who she says was happy about it. “But something very tragic happened on May 3: Nisar died. I woke up to the news and was just devastated,” says Roopa. Something shook her, and she found it impossible to continue working on these poems with the same urgency. “Now that he was gone, I wondered what the point was because he never saw it. So I didn’t look at them for three whole years.”

Finally, around 2024, she picked up the project again and managed to send the final manuscript to a publisher by August of that year. “I got in touch with them after three years of silence and they were kind enough to say they would definitely honor the contract we signed five years ago,” Roopa says of the anthology, which is finally available in all major bookstores and on Amazon.

Although the actual project took so long, Roopa says she really enjoyed the actual process because “I was never struck by the poetry…that I hit a rock or it’s too difficult. It was just such a beautiful challenge to put it in English.” Also, since it was a poem in translation, she wanted it to stand alone as a good English poem that expresses Nisar’s spirit, she says.

“Sometimes if you insist on translating exactly what the poet wrote, it loses its flavor and you end up not conveying the true meaning of what he was saying. I thought of my English reader when translating and wanted them to appreciate Nisar the way I thought he should be appreciated.”

Despite all the delays and challenges, Roopa admits that he is pleased with the end result. “I don’t know how good the translation is, but the few people who have read it so far have loved it. That’s a big validation for me,” he says, pointing out that much of that feedback has come from some of the stalwarts of the Kannada writing, translation and publishing industry, apart from Nisar’s own family. “I always felt like a bit of a fraud. Yes, I am a Kannadiga, but I tend to read English literature more than Kannada. For me, this effort is my small offering of gratitude to the language.”

But more than anything else, she is pleased that this book is a tribute to a poet who, in her view, does not always get the attention he deserves. “When people talk about great Kannada poets, he is often remembered, perhaps because his interests were so broad or because he was so hard to fit into a genre,” he feels. But yeah, it didn’t stop him from becoming famous.

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He recalls an incident that illustrates his popularity among Kannadigas. While visiting Nisar’s house in Padmanabhanagar, the auto driver who took her there recognized the poet waiting outside and did something surprising. “He stopped the car in front of the house, jumped out and touched his feet,” says Roopa, adding that Nisar patted the youth on the back and thanked him.

“It struck me that there was a class of poets and a time when they were hailed as demigods. Nisar was also a popular poet of the masses, but we don’t have people like him anymore.”

The launch of Every Day a Celebration will be held on June 27 at 11:30 am at Bookworm, Bengaluru.