Aziz’s poems are based on clichés, but that sounds more negative than it really should. Aziz loves to play with the little thoughts and situations we encounter in everyday life and so the goal of translation was to turn one culture’s clichés into another, all while maintaining Aziz’s voice and humor.
Aziz came to Iowa City fully prepared, with his poems already translated into English to some extent. My goal then was to go back and hope that I could not only translate across language, but also translate the ideas into something understandable to a wider audience. This was accomplished more through discussion than reading, in the sense that we had to understand and define the ordinary and the cliché between us before we could hope to transmit it to others.
The translations here are the work I completed after Aziz left Iowa for home.
— Amish Trivedi
