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 7
Come July we present poems by Ellen Kombiyil and Hemant Divate, the latter translated from the Marathi by poet Mustansir Dalvi.
Ellen Kombiyil is a founder of The (Great) Indian Poetry Project; her first collection that explores astrophysics in poetry is forthcoming. Like an arcing comet her short poems traverse the spaces of intimate minutiae and the imagined; memory and possibility. She wrote her first poem when she was eight years old. It was called “Mr. Moon, Mr. Moon” and she carried it folded in the pocket of her jean jacket until the ink smeared and the paper wore thin. It seemed to arise out of a mix of her thoughts and the rhythm of her body, walking home from school. This simultaneous double life of the body and thoughts, the immediate and the inexplicable is amply reflected in her poems. Emotively detailed images resonate alongside spaces beyond the horizon’s curve as in: ‘… how I’d reach across your warmth to the nightstand for water./ I am an untethered moon, unloosed from the sun.’ The Emperor Jahangir once wrote about a couple of Sarus cranes finding their lost hatchlings after a long search. ‘Then,’ he writes, ‘picking the babies up, they spread their wings and headed off, yearning for their nest.’ Yearning seeps up like flooding groundwater through Ellen Kombiyil’s poems; her wings are spread for flight and her direction is towards an ambiguous fullness in life. We glimpse her: ‘… in another life. I am caught/in mid-frame, frozen and spliced, this slice/of my life not mine but could be mine,/ the heel of my high heel lifting…’
‘Hemant Divate writes of his world, of his everyday embedded-ment in it. A prisoner of his own reality, he is aware of his incarceration,’ notes poet-translator Mustansir Dalvi in a specially commissioned translator’s note; we carry extracts from Divate’s recent book Struggles with Imagined Gods. Divate is publisher of the often audacious imprint Poetrywala; his struggle against sentimental poetics and the shallowness of the post-globalized world is keen. Languages wear duplicities, delicacies and skins of time that reflect their philosophical strengths, street tenor and chaotic co-opted multilingual urgencies. Hemant Divate takes this between his teeth, ‘Poets have stopped/ writing in their own language/ and have, instead, begun/ grinding it down into finer and finer grain.// … languages change completely/ every twelve years./ Which means, after thirty-six years/ no language can remain our own.’ Dalvi’s translations are almost combative to contain the patois employed by this gritty poet. We sense his intelligence scanning possibilities before homing in. He writes, ‘[Divate] writes as he speaks, as is the wont of the Marathi manoos of Mumbai. The translations then, to stay authentic have to remain within the realm of the English speaking citizen of Mumbai, equally multilingual – one part Marathi, one part Bambaiyya and two parts everything else… Strange choices have to be made to make Divate’s Marathi poems into English poems.’ This is tough, high voltage stuff.
Do browse the New Releases section that highlights fine imprints from Glass Lyre Press, published by Ami Kaye.
Priya