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 9
Greetings for the festive season! In this issue we are delighted to present the work of Janice Pariat, Vesna Goldsworthy and Iqbal translated by poet Mustansir Dalvi. Again, by happenstance, all the poets reflect on the movement of history and its turbulent wake, on loss, identity and its luminous yet often shadowy companion, love.
Janice Pariat ranks among the finest young Indian poets though she is possibly better known for her award winning collection of short stories, Boats on Land set in India’s troubled and stunningly beautiful Northeast. In these six poems – four of which are new – she journeys over the hills and across the seas, to Portugal and Wales, at times contrasting familiar practice with new visions in a voice that is elegant and contemplative as when she writes in A Walk in Wales: ‘back home, we had no graveyards and no/ churches – instead those open hills, and dark /clusters of praying pine – our dead were turned /to ashes, winnowed corn from empty chaff,/ light as dust, we travelled on the wind./ here, they keep them close, as though distance /will render them forgotten.‘ Loss, for Janice Pariat, lives as much in the past as in the cadences of the present; she favours ringing echoes and the gentle glance – a position especially commendable given the spaces from which she writes.
Vesna Goldsworthy is a bestselling memoir writer, broadcaster and British university professor who grew up in communist Yugoslavia but then moved to London. Her first collection of poetry, The Angel of Salonika, was born perfectly formed; it won the Crashaw Prize. J M Coetzee writes, ‘(it) moves on the shadowy borders where the wounds of separation turn into the scars of loss. European in sensibility, elegiac in tone, these poems mark the arrival of a welcome new voice in English poetry.’ We carry excerpts from this collection and her equally outstanding recent poems which are meditations on evanescence and memory in language that is measured and resonates with emotion. In Venice, Intermezzo she writes: ‘In the fractured gothic ossuary/ Anchored deep below the lagoon/By petrified Dalmatian pine,/Against the brittlest, /The most fragile lattice/ Your hand is uncertain,/Unexpectedly calloused, cold./ But I take it, of course I take it./ What else could there be?/Beneath so much transient splendour/ Lies a coast stripped bare.’
Architect, columnist and poet Mustansir Dalvi is respected for the clarity, courage and muscularity of his writing; he carries these qualities into his translations from the Urdu of Muhammad Iqbal’s work: Taking Issue and Allah’s Answer: Shikwa and Jawaab-e-Shikwa, first recited by the poet in 1909 and 1913 respectively. Iqbal, who both travelled and read widely, is possibly best remembered for the rousingly patriotic ‘Sa Re Jahan Se Achcha’ which is embedded in every Indian schoolchild’s memory; it was a position he was to change. In an interview Mustansir Dalvi elucidates, ‘In India, they (poems) may be read as an exhortation to place religion over country. In Pakistan… these poems can be seen as a manifesto for a future Islamic state. Both positions are problematic. I have, therefore, taken a position in translating these poems that are not coloured by events and interpretations subsequent to the time of their writing. This has led to the insight that Shikwa is a cry from the heart of an Indian Muslim, hurt by the overshadowing of Islam and its cultural richness in his own country and beyond. Jawaab then, becomes a possible vehicle for redemption…’ Shorn of the facile ornamentation that mars most translations from the Urdu shayari tradition, these interpretations of Iqbal’s laments exhibit the translucency of plasma. The poems and the excerpt from the introduction are courtesy Penguin Classics. Here is a verse from Shikwa: ‘In submitting to You, we found our glory,/in chords of silence /we now vent our voice./ Our song strains at our lips, /but will not be stifled./Hear us out, /for we have no choice./ God! Listen to our plaint; /we are Your faithful,/and although we praise, /we have our grouses too.’
Read on…
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