Meena Desai has been translating Gujarati poetry since the 1980s. Her doctoral research was about communication in theater. She worked in the telecommunications industry, and she still pursues communication across cultures. Two experiences inspired her to translate Gujarati ghazals to highlight their little-known but excellent contributions to the genre. One of them was her husband’s vocal music teacher who composes music for the best Urdu ghazals he finds across books, the web, and other sources. Hearing them, she felt compelled to put them into English for her own enjoyment. The other reason was, Gujarati singers who, when visiting the Rocky Mountain region, sang ghazals among other lyrics. Inspired to share these excellent lyrics with non-Gujarati speakers, she continued her work. Coincidentally, she was an early classmate of the Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali who introduced the ghazal, in its classical form, to Americans. Ali compared each ghazal couplet to “a stone from a necklace”, which should continue to “shine in that vivid isolation.” 

For Meena Desai, translation is an opportunity to expand perspectives across boundaries. A poet’s expression is embedded in language and motifs, and the source poet’s meaning takes prominence in her translation while attempting to preserve its spoken poetic rendition in a different language. 

She also works on translating the fifteen century poet Narasinh Mehta’s lyrics celebrating the joy in the eternal human-divine intercourse by blending the spiritual and the physical into a higher realm. His non-sectarian, yet quite worshipful, viewpoint is very much like the Sufi viewpoints of Kabir and Rumi, and can enhance world literature.