My fatherland is dead/they have buried it/in fire/I live/in my motherland/word – Rose Ausländer
While translating an Austrian Holocaust poet, Rose Ausländer, into Hindi, the above poem struck me. Perhaps that was because, at that time, I, too, was going through the same state of mind – barring the fact that, fortunately, my motherland (that is fatherland for Ausländer) was well and alive – though far away.
Language for a writer is almost everything, and its loss is disastrous. As Vladimir Nabokov says, it is “as if one had lost seven or eight fingers in an explosion and would now have to relearn all the daily moves.”
I immigrated to Austria, a country whose language was alien to me, almost two decades ago. It came as a tremendous culture shock. I witnessed how, within no time, one turns from an eloquent person to a dumb dude.
It was as if you share the destiny of writers who had to flee from their countries during the Nazi invasion; sometimes, they succeeded to cope with the trauma – as in the case of Elias Canetti. However, there were also instances when some of them failed to do so. Tragically, they ended their life. Klaus Mann, for example, remained undiscovered for a long time like Rose Ausländer.
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