"speaking in the voice of the Poet..."

I, like jo, was also struck by Nirmal's use of Rilke's poetry to "make sense of the confusing and dangerous land that he and so many others cling to", as jo puts it.  One of my favorite excerpts of Rilke's poetry comes at the end of the section "A Gift" (p. 298 for many of us), which Kanai quotes to Piya at the end of his letter:

Look, we don't love like flowers
with one one season behind us; when we love,
a sap older than memory rises in our arms.  O girl,
it's like this: inside us we haven't loved just some one
in the future, but a fermenting tribe; not just one
child, but fathers, cradled inside us like ruins
of mountains, the dry riverbed
of formed mothers, yes, and all that
soundless landscape under its clouded
or clear destiny- girl, all this came before you.

I loved this excerpt of Rilke's poetry so much, in fact, that I googled the first line and Rilke's name, hoping to find what poem it came from.  I was successful in this much- it's from the third elegy of Rilke's Duino Elegies.  But upon further searching, hoping to find a translation of the entire elegy (as Rilke wrote in German), I quickly realized that the English version used by Ghosh is different from the first google result.  Here are (what I assume to be) the same lines, from the website http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/German/Rilke.htm :

See, we don’t love like flowers, in a
single year: when we love, an ancient
sap rises in our arms. O, girls,
this: that we loved inside us, not one to come, but
the immeasurable seething: not a single child,
but the fathers: resting on our depths
like the rubble of mountains: the dry river-beds
of those who were mothers - : the whole
silent landscape under a clouded or
clear destiny - : girls, this came before you.

I then returned to The Hungry Tide, specifically to Ghosh's author's note at the end.  Ghosh writes, "I am grateful to B. Poulin and Houghton Mifflin for permission to quote from A. Poulin Jr.'s 1977 translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies: this remains, for me, the definitive English rendition."

From all of this, I want to comment on two things: first, the excerpt of Rilke's poetry quoted above, as translated by A. Poulin Jr., as a text in itself; and second, the issue of translation.

To me, this excerpt of Rilke's poetry says above all else that we don't love without context.  There is always history that continually informs who and when and how we love, and there's something beautiful about acknowledging how everything around us shapes one of the most intimate of our experiences.  For Kanai, a person who- as he admits- has spent most of his life primarily concerned about himself, admitting not only love for another human being but the context in which that love exists is quite powerful.  The interconnectedness that Rilke describes about love is also reflected in the environment of The Hungry Tide, in the Sundarbans themselves- everything about the environment affects everything else, and the present is always informed by what happened in the past.  

But of course, I am getting all of this not from Rilke's words themselves, but from Poulin's English rendition of them.  The translation that Ghosh uses differs greatly from the first translation that I found online, to the point where I have trouble sometimes seeing how the two are taken from the same source material.  Ghosh calls Poulin's translation "the definitive English rendition", which is quite striking to me, because how is that determined?  Perhaps it's by how elegant the translation is, and in that I could agree with Rilke, for, at least compared to Kline's translation, I find Poulin's far more poetic and moving.  But is the point of translation to be an artistic interpretation, to make what was beautiful in one language beautiful in another, or is it to be accurate?  Since it's often times hard or even impossible to convey ideas from one language in a different language, is trying to make a translation poetic just serving to obscure its meaning even further?  Do beauty and accuracy have to be mutually exclusive in translation, or can you have both?  Of course, not knowing German, I have no way of reading Rilke's original work, of comparing what he says in German with what Poulin and Kline say in English and deciding whose translation is most accurate.  All I have is my knowledge of English, and my somewhat subjective determinations of lingustic beauty.  I find being at the mercy of translators in this way quite frustrating, which, of course, goes back to The Hungry Tide, and the characters' continual need of translation (oftentimes of Kanai) to understand each other's words.  But, while Piya and Fokir could often times communicate fine without understanding each others' language, if Rilke isn't translated into English (and if I don't learn German, which may seem achievable but, when you consider the cultural context and personal experience required to truly understand a language beyond the classroom level, it becomes a lot more complicated) there's no way that I can ever read his poetry or hope to understand what he wanted to convey through it.  We may be able to communicate without language, but are there some things, like Rilke's poetry, that we can only convey through words?  And, if so, what does this mean for empathy, for striving to understand each other as much as we can (although I think we're mostly agreed at this point that complete understanding is impossible)?  Can you ever achieve as close of an understanding of someone who you don't share language with as someone who you do?