A winter's tales

Hanuman is the only character in the Ramayana with an internal monologue, constantly evaluating his own actions

In winter, New Delhi’s poetry calendar is dotted with events — readings and launches and conversations — but the one I was looking forward to the most was Almost Island Dialogues 2018. This is because of poet Mani Rao, one of the guests at this intimate literary exchange that is self-consciously different from the ubiquitous literature festivals. Rao is a poet whom I have admired, and at times even imitated, for years. As fellow poet and translator Vivek Narayanan said while introducing her at the reading at the India International Centre (IIC) last Saturday, “There is no one in Indian English poetry doing things with language like her.”

One could not agree more. Sample this: “Those love cannot leave alone / Love those cannot leave alone / Cannot love leave those alone / Leave those cannot love alone / Those cannot leave love alone” (“Five-Word Poem”). The first time I had read this one, I was so baffled by it, I had written something unparliamentary in the margins with my pencil. Her imagery can make one breathless: “Every evening the trees inhale birds / Swirling back home like a warm shawl” (“Address”). It can also make one pull out one’s hair: “Moon Sisyphus / Full / Null / Life, Sisyphus / Chain” (“Poem, Sisyphus”).

My frustration then had also been fuelled by the fact that I was required to review her New and Selected Poems (Poetrywala, 2014). It had taken me days and weeks to work my way into these, almost like one claws into Celan or Hölderlin. Yet, when she read her poems at IIC, they did not seem inscrutable at all. Later, during a private conversation, I told Rao that hearing her perform was such a different experience from reading the poems by myself. Perhaps this had something to do with the fact that she has also translated Kalidasa and the Bhagavad Gita. She read out some of her translations, making her listeners aware of how the opening couplet of the Gita was fraught with anxiety rather than the singsong slokas we are more familiar with.

The anxiety of another text, Ramayana, was the subject of Narayanan’s presentation. He, in fact, read his translations before Rao, and elucidated how various works of visual art influenced his translations. Any commentary on this text is naturally political in our undoubtedly divisive times, but Narayanan focused mostly on what the epic poem has to say about killing women. Is it justifiable at all? Was it okay for Rama to kill a demon? Was it okay for Indrajit to kill Sita — or an image of her — if it would result in destroying the morale of his enemies? Was there any justification even in the death of an unknown rakshasi in Lanka when Hanuman burns down the city?  The character of Hanuman has been recently drawn into political controversy, of course; but Narayanan, through his close reading and transcreation of the ancient Sanskrit text, made the readers aware of how he was the only character in the poem with an internal monologue, constantly evaluating his own actions.

 

More directly political was the poetry of the third reader of the evening, South African poet, Ari Sitas. A pivotal intellectual in the anti-apartheid labour movements of Durban, his early poetry has often reflected this commitment to social causes. Some of it was very unorthodox, in the sense that it moved more towards reconciliation after the end of apartheid and critiques of the excesses of current governments. His poetry is also informed by a post-colonial intellectualism, perhaps most evident in his work Slave Trade (2000), in which he takes a panoramic view of 19th-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s Ethiopian years, where he was a gunrunner and slave trader.

The writer’s book of poems, Visceral Metropolis, was published in 2017, and his novel, Ritual, is forthcoming in 2019