I have translated my own poems into English and made them worse every time. That is not modesty. The English versions are competent — the images survive, the meaning arrives, a reader understands what the poem is about. They are simply not the poem.
People usually explain this by saying poetry is untranslatable, which sounds profound and explains nothing. The losses are not mystical. They are specific and countable, and I think it is more useful to name them than to gesture at them.
The line ends on the wrong word
Nepali puts the verb at the end. English puts it in the middle. That single grammatical fact rearranges every line of poetry moved between them, because the end of a line is the loudest position in a poem — it is where the pause falls and where the reader's attention rests.
Here are the opening lines of a poem of mine called घर:
गाउँ थियो
गाउँमा घर थियो
घर सुरक्षित थियो
घरभित्र सुरक्षित मन पनि।।
Three lines in a row end on थियो — was. Not "was" as a helper attached to something else, but standing alone as the last word, three times, like a door closing three times. The poem is about a house that is no longer safe, and the past tense is doing the whole job before the poem has said anything about what happened.
Now in English: There was a village. In the village, a house. The house was safe. Inside the house, a heart that was safe too.
Everything is there and nothing is there. English cannot end those lines on was without sounding broken, so the past tense migrates to the middle of each line and stops being the thing you land on. The repetition survives as a fact and dies as an effect.
The fourth line does something the translation cannot reach at all. It drops the verb — no थियो — and ends on पनि, also. After three closed doors, the last one is left open. In English I have to add "too" to the end of a clause and hope somebody notices, and they do not, because in English that is just how sentences end.
There is no word for you
This is the loss I find hardest to work around.
Nepali has several second persons. तँ is intimate or diminishing, depending entirely on who is speaking to whom. तिमी is familiar and level. तपाईं is respectful and holds the other person slightly away. हजुर is more deferential again. These are not synonyms and they are not politeness settings. Choosing one is a statement about the relationship, and a poem can change the whole meaning of an address by moving from तिमी to तपाईं halfway through, without adding a single word of explanation.
English has you. One word for a lover, a stranger, a child, a god and a person you are about to insult.
So a Nepali love poem that turns cold by shifting register becomes, in English, a poem where nothing happens. Translators compensate with adjectives and stage directions, adding a "my love" here or a formality of syntax there, and the compensation is always louder than the original. The original did it silently. That is what made it good.
The metre was an argument, not a decoration
Devkota wrote Muna Madan in the 1930s in a jhyaure metre — a folk rhythm, the metre of songs people actually sang, not the classical Sanskrit-derived forms that serious Nepali poetry was expected to use at the time.
That was the point. The poem is about a man who leaves for Lhasa to make money and a wife who waits, which is to say it is about ordinary people, and Devkota chose a form that belonged to ordinary people to carry it. The metre argues that this life is worth a serious poem. It is a political choice disguised as a technical one, and it is a large part of why the book is loved rather than merely respected. I have written more about that decision on his profile.
In English translation the jhyaure goes. It has to — English has no equivalent folk metre carrying the same social weight, and imitating the rhythm without the association produces a jingle. So the translation keeps the story and loses the argument, which means a reader in English can find Muna Madan sentimental and never understand what the fuss is about. They are not wrong about what is in front of them. They are reading a different book.
This is also why the translation history matters. Padma Devkota, the poet's son, produced a translation, and earlier English versions were incomplete — some did not include material Devkota added to the poem in 1958. If you read Muna Madan in English, it is worth knowing which one you read.
The words that do not have a size
Some words do not lose a nuance in translation, they lose their shape.
मन (man) is the one I keep failing at. Dictionaries offer heart and mind, and it is both and neither. It is where you feel things and also where you decide them. In the poem above, "मन" is what was safe inside the house. If I write heart I get the feeling and lose the deciding. If I write mind I get a poem about someone's opinions. There is no third option, so I pick one and quietly delete half the word.
माया covers love, affection and a kind of protective tenderness that has no single English word. आफ्नो means "one's own" but carries belonging in a way that "my" does not. None of these are exotic or hard to understand — they are ordinary words, used constantly, that simply do not map.
What the script does that print cannot say
There is a visual loss too, and it is easy to miss because it is not linguistic.
Devanagari hangs from a line. The शिरोरेखा runs across the top of the words and joins them, so a line of Nepali is literally a line — continuous, held together along its upper edge, with the vowel marks sitting above it like something growing out of the top. A stanza in Devanagari looks like a set of horizontal bars. A stanza in the Latin alphabet looks like a row of separate objects standing on a floor.
Poets use this. Breaking a line in Devanagari breaks a visible bar. It is not the reason a poem works, but it is part of how the poem looks on the page, and it is completely unavailable in translation.
Writing in English instead of translating into it
The one thing that has helped is not translating at all.
I have written a poem directly in English — Midnight Distance — and it was a different experience entirely. Composing in English, I reached for what English is good at: the flat declarative sentence, the plain image, the line that ends on a noun. I was not trying to rescue anything, so nothing was lost, because nothing had existed first.
It also made the losses clearer in the other direction. Writing in English I missed the ability to end on a verb. I missed having four ways to say you. I did not miss them as a translator misses them, as a problem to be solved, but as a writer misses a tool that is not in the room.
Which suggests the honest answer about translation: a translated poem is a new poem written under severe constraints by a second author. The good ones are good because that second author is a poet, not because they were faithful. Faithfulness produces a gloss. What you want is somebody willing to lose the right things.
What to do with this if you read only English
Read the translation. It is much better than not reading the poem. But hold it a little loosely — assume the rhythm was different, assume the address was more specific than "you", and assume at least one word was flattened on the way over.
If you want somewhere to start, the four poets I have written about — Bhanubhakta, Devkota, Bhupi Sherchan and Parijat — are on the poets page, and the movements they were arguing inside are covered in Three Ways Out. My own poems are under Nepali poems, mostly in Nepali, and mostly unresolved.
I am not going to translate them. I have tried, and I would rather you learned four words than read a version where the doors do not close.