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 7
October: the Devi goddess festivities begin on this page with the work of three women poets: Beth Copeland, Meena Alexander and Rizio Yohannan Raj. All of them travel – across continents, across time, through rage and contemplation, into the secret pulse of the moment and their questing hearts.
Beth Copeland is a poet of meditation and musicality; she’s equally a poet of pluralism and protest. Lifting language into dazzling play she ranges over poetic forms and cultures; unbending in her vision yet supple in her understanding of what makes us be. The redoubled sonnets of The Origins of Silk from Transcendental Telemarketer testify to her passion to look beneath the skein of life and labour. Combining research and reverence in formal grace she writes, ‘This fine, gossamer cloth is woven from / an orphan’s wounds, from the dying silkworm/ at the center of this unwinding thread.‘ Anne-Adele Wight writes, ‘Asia influences Copeland’s writing; as in Japanese poetry, nature imagery becomes philosophy…’. Invoking the Holocaust and Hiroshima, old China, child labourers in India and women buying silk at Lord and Taylor she weaves a brocade of pain and luminosity. ‘The truth’s not always / written in elegant calligraphy/ on silkscreen scrolls. There are many versions/ of this story and all of them are true.’ In the unpublished Dressed to Dream she insightfully writes, ‘Each dress is another reason to leave/ myself, each shimmering yoke seamed/ to transparent sleeves/ of morning, to light seen through silk …’
Meena Alexander’s poetry is sparse, marked by serrations of beauty, splices of violent history and the crumbling crucible of the world she travels through, where she is at once at home and yet adrift. Heart-wrenchingly she writes, ‘Everything is broken and numinous’ in her new collection, Birthplace with Buried Stones — from which we present six poems. The Introduction tells us, ‘Place becomes a palimpsest, composed of layer upon layer of memory, dream, and desire. There are poems of love and poems of war — we see the rippling effects of violence and dislocation, of love and its aftermath’. In many poems we hear her reflections on other poets – be it Basho she is reading in the Himalayas, Mirza Galib or Aga Shahid Ali she pays tribute to, poised in the splintered peace of otherness and awareness. Formal resoluteness and intense lyricism emerge again and again to startle us, ’All this flows into me as mottled memory, / Mixed with syllables of sweat, gashed syntax, / Strands of burst bone in river sand, / Beside the buried stones of Sarasvati Koop — / Well of mystic sky-water where swans / Dip their throats and come out dreaming.’
In poet, novelist, translator and educationist Rizho Yohannan Raj’s invigorating essay, Sita Immersed in Reflection: The Tentative Figure of Translation she considers the mythological Sita as a metaphor for the act of translation while examining 20th century Malayalam reformist poet N. Kumaran Asan’s long poem Chintavishtayaya (Sita Immersed in Reflection). Rizho Raj traces connections between the figure of Asan’s Sita , ‘torn between freedom and fidelity and the tentative act of translation’ in this recasting of the mythological character. In an interview Rizho Yohannan Raj says, ‘Well, translation seems to me a fundamental human act through which we ceaselessly try to forge connections within ourselves and with the world around. As in life situations, in this translation, too, I have modified/retained the given. The use of transliteration could also enrich English in India. I think such a sahaja path of mutuality alone can connect a text with a new context. This road parallels my ultimate quest to understand the timeless connections of things in the world. The interlinking genius of ‘translation’ as an idea has revealed to me newer ways of transforming myself.’
And visit the New Releases section: books in translation that makes one swoon — from Seagull Books.
Read on…