Dr. Vrishali Kinhalkar's poems in this collection Pangs of Love represent a wonderful combination of lyrical pathos and intense emotions. She belongs to the tradition of romantic poetry in Marathi that uses simple words which have layers of suppressed emotions under the veneer of ordinary, everyday lexical expressions. The poems are written from a woman's prespective and express physical desires, emotional agony, psychological alienation, and the angst of living in the modem age that is devoid of, or rather incapable of, honest and transparent relationships. They are addressed to a person who has been inexplicably distanced from the narrative voice and are steeped in an impossible hankering for a closeness which will never find.The loneliness of a gentle soul in a hostile world, the agony of existence inexorably locked in inane chores,duties and responsibilities, Memory, recall, desire and dreams-tese are the poems. There is an internal music that weaves the various tones and undulating rhythms of these poems into aesthetically pleasing structures of experience, a rarity in many modern Marathi poets.
Translating a poem is never an easy task. One has to capture the spirit, the soul of the asesthetic structure of the poem. images, tones, rhythms and cadences of spoken language cannot be replicated mechanically in a language like English, which often deploys understatements as a strategy of intense poetic expression. Shri. L.S. Deshpande has taken up this challenge quite successfully. The translationsread easily, fluently and re-create in the bilingual reader similar aesthetic structures of emotions. They will give a non-Marathi reader the flavor of Marathi romantic poetry.