| Summary: |
This essay explores the loop of translations and re-translations of ‘Eastern poetry’ from Asia into Europe and back into (South) Asia at the hands of ‘Oriental translators’, translators of poetry who typically used existing translations as their original texts for their ambitious and voluminous enterprises. If ‘Eastern’ stood in all cases for a kind of exotic (in the etymological sense of ‘from the outside’) poetic exploration, for Adolphe Thalasso in French and E. Powys Mathers in English, Eastern love poetry could shade into prurient ethno-eroticism. For the Urdu poet and translator Miraji, instead, what counted in Eastern poetry was oral, rhythmic and visual richness – song.
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