A lab for language, poetry & ideas
Kannada · Hindi · English
Poetry carried across
from one tongue to another.
by a polymer engineer who couldn’t stop wondering what survives translation.
A growing archive of my English translations — verse, prose and commentary, always shown beside the original padya, gadya and bhashya.
The Lab
Experiment register
- 01Translating Bendre & other Kannada poetry
- 02Deciphering Manku Timmana Kagga in English
- 03The 108-character Gita experiment
- 04What happens to a Vachana in translation
- 05Carrying Kannada prose across into English
- 06Notes & reflections, set down as they come
- 07How does a culturally rooted emotion transcend languages
Selection of the day
Kagga 33
D. V. Gundappa · from the Kannada original
narapariksheye bommanAshyave? namma baL bari samasyeye? adara pUraNavadelli?
What is the real intent of the Creator?
Is it just His wish that keeps on testing Man each & every minute?
Is it His wish that our lives become merely a smorgasbord of challenges & difficulties?
Where is an end to all this struggle?
Fresh from The Lab
See what’s new →The Poetry Lab is a living website. New poetry, translations, reflections and experiments are added regularly.
Notes on method
Why does a polymer engineer run a poetry lab?
Because I’ve always been fascinated by what happens when something moves from one medium to another.
In engineering, we study transformation. In translation, we do something strangely similar.
Every translation here is an experiment: a hypothesis about what poetry can become in another language.
Some experiments fail. Others reveal something the original could not say on its own.
Catalogue of the collection
01Poetry— modern voices
02Manku Timmana Kagga— 945 verses on life's absurdity
03Bhagavad Gita— one adhyaya at a time
04Vachanas— 12th-century plain speech
05Prose— longer reading
06Blogs— notes as they come
07Poets & Authors— the people behind the lines
I am Krishna Joshi — a polymer engineer by trade, a barefoot runner, and a reader of Kannada literature and Indian history.
More about me and this site →