“The ecstasy which you experience by observing the Niagara Falls on a moonlit night is the same what you get while reading Gibran” – Sirpi
Your children are not your children
They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself
They come through you, and not from you...
- Kahlil Gibran on children in his masterpiece The Prophet
A city-based bibliophile, who read the Lebanese poet, painter, and philosopher Kahlil Gibran’s popular poetic novel Broken Wings, experienced restless nights for weeks, as the tragic tale left him with a laden heart. The melancholic literature even made him identify with the character Farris Effendi, a kind old man and father of the beautiful, wise heroine Salma Karamy in Broken Wings. Inspired by Gibran’s writing, the book lover later purchased all of his works and enjoyed reading them except Jesus the Son of man, which had been unavailable for years.
Though Gibran lived only for 48 years on this earth, he has earned innumerable readers across the world. One among them is poet Sirpi Balasubramaniam, a two-time recipient of the Sahitya Akademy award, who translated Gibran’s two other popular works The Prophet and its sequel The Garden of the Prophet in Tamil.
“Though many other Tamil translations of The Prophet appeared under titles like ‘Theerkatharisi’ and Kadavulin Thoothar, my Tamil rendering of the book has come with the title Deva Thoothar. I felt the title quite appropriate after reading Gibran’s enchanting lines in both of his works. Moreover, my new title would rather mean Gibran himself than Almustafa, the propagandist in the book” says Sirpi Balasubramaniam.
Sirpi, a Pollachi-based poet, was one of the pillars of the Vanambadi poetry movement, which defined Tamil modern poetry as the voice of the voiceless, liberated it from the learned few, and made it reach the masses of Coimbatore in the early 1970s.
On the enthralling pieces of literature by Kahlil Gibran, Sirpi avers:
“The ecstasy which you experience by observing the Niagara Falls on a moonlit night is the same what you get while reading Gibran”
Popular American poet Robert Frost, parodying the business of translation, once said “Poetry is what is lost in translation”. Still, what Sirpi opines on translating Kahlil Gibran is surprising.
“The pleasure of reading Kahlil Gibran is the same both in the primary language and in the target language. It seems, his poetic sense possesses a unique power to transcend itself into different languages being ‘unhurt’ by translations”
The Tamil book which contains Sirpi’s translation of The Prophet and The Garden of the Prophet, was published by Arutchelvar Dr. N. Mahalingam Centre for Translation, a Pollachi-based institution to promote the translation of pieces of literature from English to Tamil and vice versa. Sirpi rendered Gibran’s vivid poetry in Tamil, not just to introduce the two works to non-English readers, but to delight and teach them his poetry, art, and philosophy.
They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself
They come through you, and not from you...
- Kahlil Gibran on children in his masterpiece The Prophet
A city-based bibliophile, who read the Lebanese poet, painter, and philosopher Kahlil Gibran’s popular poetic novel Broken Wings, experienced restless nights for weeks, as the tragic tale left him with a laden heart. The melancholic literature even made him identify with the character Farris Effendi, a kind old man and father of the beautiful, wise heroine Salma Karamy in Broken Wings. Inspired by Gibran’s writing, the book lover later purchased all of his works and enjoyed reading them except Jesus the Son of man, which had been unavailable for years.
Though Gibran lived only for 48 years on this earth, he has earned innumerable readers across the world. One among them is poet Sirpi Balasubramaniam, a two-time recipient of the Sahitya Akademy award, who translated Gibran’s two other popular works The Prophet and its sequel The Garden of the Prophet in Tamil.
“Though many other Tamil translations of The Prophet appeared under titles like ‘Theerkatharisi’ and Kadavulin Thoothar, my Tamil rendering of the book has come with the title Deva Thoothar. I felt the title quite appropriate after reading Gibran’s enchanting lines in both of his works. Moreover, my new title would rather mean Gibran himself than Almustafa, the propagandist in the book” says Sirpi Balasubramaniam.
Sirpi, a Pollachi-based poet, was one of the pillars of the Vanambadi poetry movement, which defined Tamil modern poetry as the voice of the voiceless, liberated it from the learned few, and made it reach the masses of Coimbatore in the early 1970s.
On the enthralling pieces of literature by Kahlil Gibran, Sirpi avers:
“The ecstasy which you experience by observing the Niagara Falls on a moonlit night is the same what you get while reading Gibran”
Popular American poet Robert Frost, parodying the business of translation, once said “Poetry is what is lost in translation”. Still, what Sirpi opines on translating Kahlil Gibran is surprising.
“The pleasure of reading Kahlil Gibran is the same both in the primary language and in the target language. It seems, his poetic sense possesses a unique power to transcend itself into different languages being ‘unhurt’ by translations”
The Tamil book which contains Sirpi’s translation of The Prophet and The Garden of the Prophet, was published by Arutchelvar Dr. N. Mahalingam Centre for Translation, a Pollachi-based institution to promote the translation of pieces of literature from English to Tamil and vice versa. Sirpi rendered Gibran’s vivid poetry in Tamil, not just to introduce the two works to non-English readers, but to delight and teach them his poetry, art, and philosophy.