Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
Volume II | Issue 1
Dear Readers, Each One
May your choicest dreams for 2014 come true!
We are delighted to present in our first issue of the new year poetry by George Szirtes and Sumana Roy, and an essay on translating Kalidasa’s Śyamalādaṇḍakam by poet Usha Kishore.
Poet, translator and mentor George Szirtes, who has won the T S Eliot Prize and numerous other awards is, without doubt, among the most inventive and meditative poets writing today. Among his favourite poetry sayings is Wallace Stevens’s ‘Poets acquire humanity’, a thought amply reflected in his work that stretches the possibilities of form and question language and its mastery. His haunting poems echo and re-echo with the fragility of memory and the impossibility of forgetting; the traumas of history and the need to “…open the door/to listen out for the question. Where am I? Who am I?” George Szirtes‘s painterly eye regards the world with profound tenderness; it often alights on purely domestic moments before his gaze reveals, like a door opening into a mansion, the complex architectonics of being as in “ Once there was a room which was, like any other room/fit to be born into or stare out from, a room half- darkness/half unquenchable light.” These extracts are from his adventurous and wise The Yellow Room, a long poem, mostly in mirror verse, with free-ranging passages between each group of three mirror verses. We present five new poems and the previously published On Angels.
Sumana Roy is a columnist, teacher, author of the novel Love in the Chicken’s Neck shortlisted for the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize and undoubtedly ranks among the finest younger Indian poets. Metaphors come to her with magical ease as in “I was a pagoda of fireflies/I glowed in the light./ No one noticed me burn.” from the long poem House written for her late, beloved mother-in-law. She frequently slips in end rhymes that work as flaring aural bridges to lead us across the ellipses that stud her poetry. But Sumana Roy’s forte possibly is her ability to transmogrify a single object or thought into shape-changing refractions that are scattered through the poem, each time refreshed by further scrutiny. In this sense, her poems are fundamentally non-linear, an exemplar is Dancing Girl, Mohenjodaro , in which the ghazal form is worked in tricets. She writes, “‘Pendulous lips’: that phrase swam in me all night, fish and worm./ History, like desire, is inside: you were its interior decorator besides./ Was that desperation or disobedience – your hand on that waist?” We present six new poems.
Poet Usha Kishore in her in-depth and scholarly essay On Translating the Divine Woman plunges us into her approach to translating the Śyamalādaṇḍakam, considered the first lengthy composition of Sanskrit court poet Kālidāsa whose flourit is approximated to be between 4th and 5th century CE. The poem is a paean, Tantric in orientation, to the goddess Śyāmalā, a form of Sarasvatī who is regarded as one of the ten Mahāvidyās (Wisdom Goddesses). Usha Kishore states, “Texts like Śyamalādaṇḍakam certainly pre-empt Western écriture feminine by writing the female body and by listing feminine virtues or qualities. In effect, the text can be classified as a blazon as it idolises womanhood by cataloguing female attributes; in this case, the woman happens to be divine.“ While some translators edge towards recasting the original, adhering to its sprite but not letter, Usha Kishore elaborates how she overcame, for instance, the problem of Sanskrit to English word order, “ by using rhetorical devices like anaphora, repetition, listing and parentheses… My attempt has been to recreate the mellifluous verse of Śyamalādaṇḍakam by … following certain recurring phonological patterns… while adhering to the elaborate imagery and figurative devices like upama (simile), rūpaka (metaphor), utprēkṣa (personification) and atiśayōkti (hyperbole).”
Also in ‘New Releases’, information on ordering Athena Kashyap’s much awaited collection, Crossing Black Water.
Read on.
Warmly
Priya
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