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 8
This month we offer with pleasure poetry by professors of literature: K. Satchidanandan, Nitoo Das and Yves Bonnefoy translated from the French by poets Beverly Bie Brahic and Hoyt Rogers.
K. Satchidanandan has 21 collections of poetry in Malayalam, 16 collections of world poetry in translation, 23 collections of critical essays; he has edited numerous anthologies, won 21 literary awards, has 27 collections of his poems translated into 17 languages… His mind moves like quicksilver, seemingly converting each experience it rolls over into verse full of brio and style. Working with a tireless spirit of enquiry and energy, he’s a cosmopolitan poet of irony and vast range, whose poetry ‘tries…to name the nameless and give a voice to the voiceless…’ At another instance he writes, ’Poetry is protean; it is renewable precisely because it has no fixed rules and conventions’ which he clarifies by terming the imagination as ‘a law unto itself and one must seek poetry’s raison d’etre within and not outside poetry. It is polyphonic by nature; one hears the voice one chooses to hear. Reading is a democratic practice.’ In Old Women he writes a moment that is almost unsayable in its poignancy, ‘…trembling like waves /they stand in endless /queues in government hospitals’ while How Love Dies These Days has lines made memorable as the loss of love is not unique but nevertheless glints its memories of pleasure and loss: “Now that name will dissolve /in the rainwater and /join the ocean of names, /glistening on the edge of waves/on certain crazy afternoons, /like a knife’s edge in the sunlight.’ We carry six poems, some recent, which the poet has translated from the original Malayalam as is his long standing practice.
Nitoo Das explores the everyday in startling ways in poems that can be termed Dramatic Monologues. She situates the ventriloquist Self of these poems with exactitude in a world that mutates as it is experienced; she is a performer imbricated in the fluid and mad logic of such unfolding as well as its tangential reflecting surfaces. Her gaze lifts and examines the tactility of the inanimate, the borders of being and non-being as birds and fish become memory and smell, and the erotic as she unpeels its collapsing emotional contours to often point subversively to smoke signals of knowledge. ‘My poetry explores ideas of haziness, unknowability, subtraction, and blurring…‘ she states, and, in an early blog post, asserted, ‘1. I try not to write about myself. I write about people. Other people. 2. If in the tales of these other people, things, trees, something of my Self remains hidden, well then, fine. At least it’s hidden. 3. I look at the world around me and feel myself kindle with stories. So many stories to be told, why should I be trapped by mine? 4. An escape from my Self is not necessarily an escape from emotion.’ Rarely is the ordinary scrutinized with such ruthless tenderness; further Nitoo Das works language into fractals of reference: everyday words are torqued to take on gravity and flight as these lines on How to Cut a Fish, ’… and swing/ him quick leftrightleftright/ to remove the scales check/beneath the gills red fans/ cut them swift and/ then fins here there up down/ and tail’ or again in How to Write Erotica, ‘Be slippery. Create calligraphic circles./Cite flowers. Reveal the vanilla, declare /the hibiscus.’ From another poem, ‘I stand subtracted/ from fire and walk between trees.’ One favourite and five new poems invite us to follow her words.
Yves Bonnefoy is regarded as the greatest living French poet and is, as translator, renowned for his translations of Shakespeare – whose echoes are found in his work – and essays on art and aesthetics. His enigmatic sonnets sequences and contemplations in free verse besides the ravishing prose – poem ‘dream tales’ are profound lyrical-philosophical meditations on finitude and transcendence. Yves Bonnefoy thinks through what lies behind words, reflecting on the nature of metaphor while writing about the real conditions of existence and determinedly rejecting a poetics based solely on relations between words. In his celebrated work L’Arriere-pays he writes, ‘Poetry is the memory of those instances of presence, of plenitude experienced during childhood, followed by the apprehension of non-being underlying those instances which become translated as doubt, and then by that hesitation that constitutes life; but it is also a reaffirmation, it is our willingness that there should be meaning at the moment meaning falls away. This takes work, certainly… The task involved is called writing, because words are necessary to deploy fully the dreams in which the desire for being aims to release the institution that keeps it alive. It is a task of a lifetime…’ We carry these excerpts – courtesy Seagull Books – from The Present Hour translated by Canadian poet Beverly Bie Brahic and the forthcoming (in English) The Digamma translated by poet Hoyt Rogers.