Nakul Krishna writes on translating the writers of the PWA (Progressive Writers’ Association) and also translates some lines by Viqaar Ambalavi

They eat the workers’ share
   (barking at the working man)
 

 work them dead by day
   (drain them of their tears by night)
 

and their hungry children wail
   (and their mothers too)
 

Fuck you Capital Worshippers
   (I want you crushed)

Vengeance, vengeance, vengeance, vengeance 

………

I like the agitprop poetics of this one, how it builds to a cold, hard fuck-you to such bourgeois notions as subtlety and ambiguity. In professing to like it, however, I run the risk of attempting to neuter its barb, addressed as it is precisely to me, ultimately the saramaaya-parast, typing on an Internet connection paid for with the profits from unpaid-for surplus value. And since I have nothing to say in my defence, I’ll just ask the revolutionary hordes to be nice when they march into these luxury apartments I’m typing from. I doubt they’ll be listening, and that is as it should be.

I was thinking about what it takes to translate the Progressive Writers’ Association into English. As follows: a sympathy with the general (if not the specific) aims of the PWA [1]. A familiarity with the Marxist vocabulary to which poets explicitly and frequently allude. A familiarity with the parallel and contemporary tradition of protest poetry and music among the English and American trade unionists. Knowledge of the Quranic and Persian origins of much imagery. A conscious suspension of irony with a willingness to sloganeer without too much queasiness.