Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
Volume I | Issue 3
This June we are delighted to present the work of four poets: Mani Rao and Ranjit Hoskote – both extraordinary translators as well – and translations by Rahul Soni of Shrikant Verma’s Magadh.
Mani Rao’s poems, Cyril Wong writes are, ‘death-defying acts of language, more daring than love poems because they are unafraid to let love go, to release the self from itself’. Her courage and precision with language, emotional intensity and the range of intellectual traditions she scours energize poems that are simultaneously compressed and buoyant. Classic, Epitaph and So That You Know are from Ghostmasters (Hong Kong: Chameleon Press, 2010) while Peace Treaty and Poem, Sisyphus are new.
Ranjit Hoskote’s poems invoke another incandescence. Sensuous visions pulse through the subterranean rivers of history and myth that are his home ground; lovesong and lament rise as the tongue of language slices life’s dense mirages. Each poem echoes a forgotten longing, each one resounds with the metacarpus cracking as the hand reaches out. Paete, Laguna and Footage for a Trance are from Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems, 1985-2005 (New Delhi: Penguin, 1986) while Harbour Thoughts, Chimera, The Nomad’s Song and Enemy Action are new.
Shrikant Verma resides with the greats of world poetry but was, to many, a fabled unknown until the publication of these translations by poet Rahul Soni: Magadh (Mumbai: Almost Island, 2013). As Arvind Krishna Mehrotra notes, ‘Twentieth century Indian poetry has seldom been translated well, and very rarely as well as Rahul Soni’s rendering of this Hindi classic.’ Political, quizzical, philosophical, Verma’s Magadh unscrolls, in the translator’s words, ‘names from history, myth and literature – of places (Magadh, Vaishali, Kapilvastu, Amravati, Hastinapur) and of people (Chandragupta, Amrapali, Vasantasena, Rohitashva) – to chronicle the decline of once great empires. In a language that is at once sparse and richly allusive, direct and elliptical, repetitive and paradoxical, he lays bare the confusions and contradictions of his era.’