I am indebted to my friend Lothar Lutze of the South Asia Institute of the University of Heidelberg for the selection and arrangement of the poems here presented, as also for the title of the volume. He is one of the few Europeans I have met who have a genuine and sustained interest in contemporary Indian writing, particularly poetry; what is more, despite a definitely European sensibility, he has achieved a catholicity of judgment which makes dialogue between author and critic not only possible but provocative and stimulating.
The 'Pages from an Undated Diary' comprise extracts from Bhavanti (Becomings), itself a selection from the writer's journal of the 'sixties. The translation is the author's own.
I am also grateful to my friend and colleague Leonard Nathan, Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, USA, and a poet in his own right, for the many patient hours he devoted to my translations. Not knowing Hindi, he was not in a position to take liberties with the original either, so that any manifest deviations from or alterations of the text are to be charged to me. But our aim-I hope rightly-was not merely to present an accurate translation but to produce a poem; it was here that his feeling for English both as a native speaker and as a poet was invaluable. Sometimes he did not change a single word in my draft, at others he proposed changes which I resisted as going too far from the original or from my intention; both these, however, were extreme cases and in general his emendations were readily accepted. Trying to translate a poem is one way of knowing it better; I learned a lot even about my own work during our collaboration.
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