It began with a series of Facebook posts exactly a decade ago. Between November 1st and 7th, 2016, to celebrate Karnataka Rajyotsava, Roopa Pai translated and posted poems of various Kannada poets on the social networking platform. “Apart from the translation, I wrote a note about the poet, introducing them to whoever was reading my Facebook page. This became quite popular; people felt touched and happy that Kannada poets were being celebrated like that,” says the Bengaluru-based writer and the co-founder of Bangalore Walks, a history and heritage walks and tours company.

One of the poems she translated was by KS Nisar Ahmed, best known for ‘Nityotsava’, a paean to Karnataka, which was later set to music and became a cultural icon of sorts within the state, deeply resonating with its people. “I didn’t know very much about Nisar apart from ‘Nityotsava’. But when I saw this poem called ‘Hakku’, I thought it was cute,” says Roopa, recalling how “satirical, sardonic and tongue-in-cheek” it was. “He was such a well-known poet, but I found it was interesting that he could write like this too. So, I picked it up and translated that poem ”

Then, in January the following year, she bumped into Nisar at an event at Bengaluru’s Sapna Book House. “They were celebrating their 50th anniversary and had invited a few authors to give a few soundbites about Sapna,” she says.

A number of heavyweights from Kannada literature were present at the event, including Nisar, whom she immediately recognised from a photograph. “Everyone knew how he looked, because he always wore a suit and a tie, the only thing that would give him some volume since he was quite slim.”

Roopa, who was excited to see him, says that she went up to him and told him that she had translated one of his poems. She showed it to him and, on impulse, told him she wanted to translate more, she recounts. “He told me to go ahead.”

That was the genesis of Every Day a Celebration, a collection of Nisar’s poems translated by Roopa, which recently came out. Published by Seagull Books, the anthology, which came out this month, contains 102 poems, including cult classics such as ‘Sheep, Sir, We are Sheep’, ‘Krishna, the Butter Thief’ and ‘Amma, Tradition and I’, handpicked by the poet himself from his vast, six-decade-long body of work comprising hundreds of poems.

“When he sent me the list of poems, and I began to read them, I was struck by the range of his work. He was responding to whatever was happening in his environment,” says Roopa, listing some of the themes explored in these poems: politics, communal conflict, identity, Bengaluru, America, philosophy.

Also read: How to make friends with the trees around you

”He was difficult to slot, but his concerns were many, and his spirit was always humane and compassionate, without taking strong sides. But he also was a critical insider, calling out injustice and fakery in many poems,” says Roopa, who also loves how much of a Bengalurean Nisar was. “He was able to create new words and use different languages in his poetry, very much like how an urban person would speak in Bengaluru.”

She began the project by visiting the poet at his home, where he gave her his entire collection of poetry, along with a list specifying which poems to include and where they could be found in the collection, says Roopa, who would work in spurts on these poems “whenever I could find the time, since I was also working on other books then.”

By April 2020, she had finished all the poems and sent them to Nisar, who, she says, appeared happy about it. “But by May 5th, something very tragic happened: Nisar passed away. I woke up to this news, and I was just devastated,” says Roopa. It shook something in her, and she found it impossible to work on these poems with the same urgency anymore. “Now that he was gone, I wondered what the point was anymore, since he would never see it. So, I just did not look at them for three whole years.”

Finally, in 2024 or so, she picked up the project again and managed to send the final manuscript to the publisher by August that year. “I got in touch with them after three years of silence, and they were gracious enough to say that they would definitely honour the contract we had signed five years before,” says Roopa, of the anthology, which is finally available at all major bookstores and on Amazon.

Though the actual project took so long, Roopa says that she truly enjoyed the actual process because “I never felt stymied by the poetry…that I’ve hit a rock, or this is too hard. It was just such a lovely challenge to bring it out in English.” Also, given that it was a poem in translation, she wanted it to stand alone as a good English poem that conveyed Nisar’s spirit, she says.

“Sometimes, if you insist on translating exactly what the poet wrote, it loses flavour and you end up not conveying the right sense of what he was saying. I was thinking of my English reader while translating, wanting them to appreciate Nisar the way I believed he should be appreciated.”

In spite of all the delays and the challenges , Roopa confesses to being delighted with the final result. “I don’t know how good the translation is, but the few people who have read it so far have liked it. For me, it is a big validation,” she says, pointing out that a lot of this feedback has come from some stalwarts of the Kannada writing, translating and publishing industry, apart from Nisar’s own family. “I’ve always felt like a bit of an imposter. Yes, I am a Kannadiga, but I tend to read English literature more than Kannada. For me, this effort is my little offering of gratitude to the language.”

More than anything, however, she is glad that this book is a tribute to a poet who, in her view, doesn’t always get the attention he deserves. “When people talk about the great Kannada poets, he is often an afterthought, perhaps because his concerns were so broad, or because he was so difficult to slot into a genre,” she feels. But yes, it didn’t stop him from becoming a household name.

Also read: ‘Bengaluru’s bookstores bring people a little closer to calling this city their own’

She remembers an incident that illustrates his popularity among Kannadigas. On a visit to Nisar’s house in Padmanabhanagar, the auto driver taking her there recognised the poet waiting outside and did something startling. “He stopped his auto in front of the house, jumped out and touched his feet,” says Roopa, adding that Nisar patted the young man’s back and thanked him.

“It struck me that there was a class of poets and an age when they were celebrated as demigods. Nisar, too, was a beloved poet of the masses, but we don’t have people like him anymore.”

The launch of Every Day a Celebration will be held on June 27 , 11.30 am at Bookworm, Bengaluru.