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 6
In September: a bonanza. Poems by Malathi Maithri, Salma, Kutti Revathi and Sukirtharani translated from the Tamil by Lakshmi Holmström, poems by Nabina Das and Sudeep Sen and our first specially commissioned essay by poet Sumana Roy.
Nabina Das is among the surest of the younger Indian poets: audacious in her use of language and form, supple in her flow from past histories to present discoveries and her probing of memory. She traverses the in-between of cultures, between their slide and seizure, and between reality and reverie to make surprising connections. In “Uru Habba for the Red Soil” she writes “And when it gets lonely/ For bats hanging in papaya fields/ She looks back at the slick roads of cities/Like a century that knows its wounds” or again, in “Music by the River Side” she juxtaposes the ‘ferries’ honk’ with the sudden rhapsody of ‘They go/ tra la la la la./Their rapture. The tin-band men from my past” thus dispensing with the nostalgia normally associated with remembrance. These are from her recent collection, Blue Vessel (Les Edition du Zaporogue, 2012) and her forthcoming The Migrant City.
Award winning poet Sudeep Sen’s work is translated into twenty-five languages; he has edited major anthologies of Indian poetry published in the USA, Europe and India and presented his work on world stages most poets only dream of. Also a photographer and graphic artist Sudeep Sen’s poems reflect his keen eye for colour, line and texture as well as his bewitchment and, equally, deep ease with the other arts. In “Bharatanatyam Dancer” he writes about the theatre’s darkness as one “where darkness itself is sleeping light/ light that merges, reshapes, and ignites/ dancing delicately in the half-light./ But it is this sacred darkness that endures/ melting light with desire…” as he homes in to the pause where nascent movement shapes both the dancer’s body and the space she inhabits. Sudeep Sen’s gift is the liana –like line, brief and twirling around a central thought that climbs from one resonance to another with cadenced embroidery in a seemingly effortless extension towards light. We present poems from various collections including his recent Paper T[r]ails.
Poet, reviewer and columnist Sumana Roy appears in her incarnation as essayist with the startling “Women in the Rain: Shards through a Torn Black Umbrella”. An admirer of writer Dubravka Ugrešić who melds fiction and fact in cadenced quilt of provocations, the poet structures her essay as a sprayed rain of reflections: “Rain is singular and plural, an essay structured in instalments. An essay about rain should therefore be like the rain, its raindrops separate and yet united, together and distant at one and the same time. And hence these drops of rain, these poems by women, related to each other just as every drop of rain is the distant relative of all other drops of rain…” she writes. Among the most lucent of her generation, in this essay Sumana Roy swings between child-like innocence and insights as she quotes her compatriots with rare and felicitous generosity: Sridala Swami, Sharanya Manivannan, Nitoo Das, Anindita Sengupta, Karthika Nair…
Lakshmi Holmström has legendary status among translators for decades of work in bringing Tamil voices, both ancient and contemporary, to the world in words nuanced and accurate. In her powerfully evocative translations we present poems by Malathi Maithri, Salma, Kutti Revathi and Sukirtharani from Wild Girls Wicked Words (Sangam House & Kalachuvadu Publications 2013). In the early 2000s the Tamil moral police charged them with obscenity and immodesty for their poetry is, indeed, charged with the erotic and challenges societal norms . “It is perhaps useful to remember that the traditional values prescribed for the ‘Good’ Tamil woman were fearfulness, propriety, modesty or shame,” Lakshmi Holmström notes, “our poets have chosen instead, the opposite virtues of fearlessness, outspokenness, and a ceaseless questioning of prescribed rules.” None of them comes from a privileged background, some are Dalits yet each one rose against various forms of oppression and opposition to engender a movement in contemporary Tamil poetics. Beginning with the politics of sexuality their body of work enlarges, like a stone-rippled pond, to question the body of language as well as the poet’s body in the world in its many roles as lover, warrior, mother, thinker, child, activist etc.
To quote from Holmström’s Introduction: “Each poet has struggled to find a language of her own to express her particular vision. ‘Language must be redeemed from the grave of its own inadequacy’, Malathi Maithri wrote in 2001, in her Editor’s Note to Paratthal Athan Sudandiram, putting forward, later on, the possibility of a pey (demon) language. Sukirtharani seeks an ‘infant language’, with all the rough and physical reality of new birth, still sticky with blood. Kutti Revathi invents a blazing language of love. Salma reaches out, even to the ‘rust of silence’.”