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 4
For celebrants of poetry this July we present poems by Aryanil Mukherjee and Mamang Dai, and an essay by Mani Rao.
In Aryanil Mukherjee’s stimulating and resolutely lowercase poems John Ashbery notes a voice that ‘… is always fresh, always firmly in and out of focus’. Writing from the Midwest, USA, he pushes the notion of transcreation – a term associated with marketing – into poetics. It implies rewriting the source text in order to target a specific linguistic and cultural demography – a concept dazzlingly turned on its head by the poet. The poems are first written in Bangla then transcreated into American English (The New York School style is particularly discernible) via the rub past British English. The particularities of each language jostling with others add a sharp resonance as when he writes, ’the pain of translating the passive resistance of literature/ to another/ what is history to a country is memory to its neighbor/ a memory of dismemberment/ is recollection reliving ?/ or a reconstruct /a kohl-case where one lid inverts/ and closes upon the other…’ We are happy to present six excerpts from code memory.
Mamang Dai is a contemporary bard in fullest sense of the word. Her poems are lyrical but never sentimental; and through short, convey an epic quality about her homeland, Arunachal Pradesh ‘where the bones of our fathers are buried/ surrounded by thoughts of beauty’. Her words, imbued with animistic reverence, invite us into a world where hills, rivers, clouds, crickets and wild cats call even as violence stalks alongside strangers bearing guns. For Mamang Dai protests in a voice of aching tenderness; she raises alarm in meditative whispers; she stuns us with distressed insights into the erasure of memory and the slaughter that occurs in these far hills. She sings: ‘The history of our race/begins with the place of stories. /We do not know if the language we speak /belongs to a written past. / Nothing is certain.’
Certain is the Ṛgveda. Mani Rao’s essay, Reading the Ṛgveda, makes fine cause for this text to be read first as poetry. ‘Reading a hymn from the Ṛgveda, I feel its perfection,’ she writes. ‘Every syllable here is inevitable. This is not a poem wearing prosody. Its form is uncontrived, organic, like that of a seashell, tree, cloud, or person. A tradition of manic precision in utterance is called for.’ In these sonic sacraments the ‘word’, vac, wrapped in a preordained arrangement or DNA of syllables is shaped into meters to act as messenger, rite and armour. This, come to think of it, is a process not unfamiliar – whether done unconsciously or consciously – to every poet as she writes. Following an uncompromising poetic logic Mani Rao’s essay reaches a startling conclusion. Read on.
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