The One Star book Review Guessing Game

There's a tumblr that picks the best of Good Read's one star reviews (there must be a tumblr for everything). It is GOLD. No, I won't link to it just now because then you'll know which books these reviews refer to.

What I want to do is to play a guessing game. We'll start with something easy:

"Maybe my main issue with this book was just that it wasn’t lighthouse-y enough.”

Ok, you got that (surely you did?). Try these:

“I wish I could meet a lifelong love by vomiting through his window.”

“Even if you read this book 500 times, it has always the same plot line.”

"it might be a satyr and all but I did not like it."

“not interested in books about Satin.”

And from my top 5:

“I didn’t really get the cookie thing.”

“I don’t know if my book was incomplete or if this whole thing was some kind of weird joke.”

“Reading this story is like taking a cold bath with someone you dislike.”

“A 24-foot dirty old man creeps down the streets late at night, when all the grown-ups are asleep, peering in through little children’s windows. No, not the subject of a court case, just a momentously popular piece of fiction by the much beloved [name redacted].

“HOW MANY BOOKS HAS SHE WRITTEN ANYWAY HUNDREDS RIGHT ? WAY TOO MANY I TELL YOU — STOP THIS WOMAN”   

Okay: you can start guessing now.*

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*Answers here. 

Review: Anand Thakore's books of poetry

A couple of months ago I'd review Anand Thakore's books of poems, Elephant Bathing and Mughal Sequence, in Biblio. Since it wasn't available to read online, I didn't post the review here. But since then, Nandini has found it online somewhere, and I thought I'd link to it, even if not post the whole thing here.

Re-reading it, I realise that much of what I've said is a result of organising my own manuscript; perhaps I'd read the books differently if I hadn't been reading them in light of my own anxieties.

There are a lot of related questions and thoughts but this is not the time to air them. Perhaps I need to write a whole, separate essay with those ideas.

For now, here's the link to my piece on Anand Thakore's books. (pdf alert!).

ETA: I have just realised that Blogger is not allowing me to put html for italics in the post title field. Wtf, Google?

Shrikant Verma's Magadh

My review of Shrikant Verma's Magadh, in a new translation by Rahul Soni, appeared yesterday in The Sunday Guardian.
*

Magadh

Srikant Verma, translated by Rahul Soni

Almost Island. Pp.157. Rs. 399.

*

The Hindi poet Srikant Verma wrote Magadh over two years: 1979 and 1984. For this work he was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award posthumously in 1987.

A cursory search on Google throws up several translations of the work, not just into English but also into Bengali and Gujarati. Rahul Soni’s translation, therefore, is not the first one. A journal that Soni himself co-edits, Pratilipi, has translations of two poems from Magadh by the poet Vijay Dharwadkar.

Comparing that translation with Soni’s it becomes clear that there is something unique about the project that Soni has undertaken over the last half decade: in his translator’s note, Soni describes his process as a movement from ‘free renderings’ to ‘a stricter more faithful method’ in order to ‘mirror its simple, crystalline vocabulary’.

The vocabulary and syntax is the first striking thing about Magadh. A child could read these poems more easily than they could any lesson set them in their second language course. But this simplicity is just a distraction. Verma, like the Vetal that the speaker of the ‘Invocation’ claims to be, is a master of misdirection. The poems may appear to be simple but they hide serious conundrums behind the paradoxes, repetitions and rhymes, between the deliberate statement-and-restatement and the rhetorical questions that Verma employs.

In many of the poems in Magadh, people are leaving or returning to cities. They are giving up their right to call one city their own while they live in another. They experience a divided sense of self and loyalty when they move between cities. And roads to and from cities seem to have a life and a destiny all their own. The pivotal question of the collection is, ‘Horseman/ where does this road go?’ but the traveller often cannot stay for an answer, cannot accept the one he is given or cannot interpret it to his satisfaction.

Read together, read as a whole, the accumulated effect of these poems put the reader in a state of deep confusion that can only be called existential. What do the names of these ancient cities matter to us, who cannot easily identify Magadh, Kosala or Ujjaini on a map? The speaker in the poem ‘Hastinapur’ speaks our mind for us when he says, ‘Consider/ a person/ left all alone – / why should he care when the Mahabharata was fought?’

In Magadh, the speakers – though they are sometimes guides or travellers – are often insiders or people loyal to those in power. In one poem, the speaker says, ‘Kosal is a republic in my imagination/ The people of Kosal are not happy/ because Kosal is a republic only in the imagination’. The tiny, subtle shift from one person’s imagined republic to a general, abstract idea of a republic that has not materialised, is a clever one.

As an insider himself – Srikant Verma began his political career with the Congress (I) first as spokesman, then as the General Secretary and finally was elected to the Rajya Sabha – Verma knows the value of mythologising the political and of making it ahistorical and for all time. A person left alone may not care when the Mahabharata was fought, but as no one knew better than Verma, a person is rarely left all alone and must therefore care about Hastinapur, Magadh, Kalinga – about all these other cities to which there are no roads.

Verma saw politics from close quarters and his experience of it is expressed in often disquieting ways in these poems. In ‘Interference’, the lines ‘peace must remain in Magadh’, ‘Order must remain in Magadh’ and ‘What will people say’, create a sense of unease that recall an earlier poem, ‘Wailing from the Inner Chambers’, that ends with these lines:

When

everyone

behaves

themselves,

when

everyone

thinks before

they speak,

why these tirades?

Find out.

Suddenly, the words’ find out’ take on a more sinister tone, its intent less benevolent and concerned and more punitive. It is hard not to remember that some of these poems were composed in the years following the Emergency.

Which brings me to the only quibble I have with this translation: I would have welcomed a little more context with regard to the composition of these poems. The Foreword by Ashok Vajpeyi discusses Verma’s involvement in politics and Soni himself mentions, but leaves unexplained, the intriguing fact that these poems were composed five years apart: some in 1979 but most in 1984.

Why did Verma let these poems be for all those years? What made him return to the earlier poems and give them their current shape with newer poems? An historical account of how Magadh came to be would have satisfied my curiosity with regard to the two dates 1979 and 1984. It is clear that the Emergency has something to do with the tone of some of the poems, but when in ’84 were the other poems written? Before Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination or after? Or both before and after?

Without this necessary context, the poems remain caught in a mythical mayajaal, whereas it seems to me that Verma’s poems are directed as sharply towards the present as they are to the distant past.

In all other ways, this translation is impeccable. Soni’s immersion in the text has resulted in a pared down, burnished rendition of Verma’s cycle of poems. His care with line breaks, his use of words chosen not just for meaning but sound, argue for a kind of rigour that is very welcome. Soni’s Note on the translation is a gem of precision and clarity, and completely free of any displays of pomposity.

As with Adil Jussawalla’s collection, Trying to Say Goodbye, also brought out by Almost Island, much care has been taken over the design of the book. The poems in Hindi and the translations on the facing page move together, nearly perfectly line by line. Going by the quality of paper and size of book, it would seem that Almost Island is going for a specific ‘look’ for their poetry collections and that – if it means that there will be more poetry in the months to come – can only be good news.
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In other news, I had recently reviewed two of Anand Thakore's books - Elephant Bathing and Mughal Sequence - for Biblio. It's not one of the free articles, so if you want to read it, you'd have to buy it and I don't even know why I'm telling you this, but just thought I'd put it out there.
*
Also, this continued absence from the net is very addictive and I just can't seem to drag myself back. What to do? (I say it as if it's a bad thing).

 

Review: Sita's Ascent

Last week's Sunday Guardian has my review of Vayu Naidu's Sita's Ascent.

Suddenly there's a lot of Ramayana- related writing going around. There was Zubaan's anthology of speculative fiction about the Ramayana called Breaking the Bow. (I'm sad to say I've only read one story from it but will get around to it eventually). I'd been meaning to get Arshia Sattar's translation of the Valmiki Ramayana for some time now and used my mother's birthday recently to get it and her book of essays as well. Most recently - like, this morning - I finished Samhita Arni's The Missing Queen.

I feel I shouldn't mix up a straight review post with my thoughts on Arni's book, which were decidedly mixed; but I guess, I hope, I'll get around to it. Eventually. (Why does this sound like something I've said before? Oh wait.)

*

In her endnote to Sita’s Ascent, storyteller and performer Vayu Naidu explains that one of her aims in writing the novella was to explore the ‘function of memory as a metaphor for ‘re-membering’ a dismembered story because it is told to us infrequently and in parts’.

As anyone growing up with stories from the epics knows, every telling is a new one – not just a remembering and a reclaiming, but a re-visioning. In Sita’s Ascent memory is the primary hallucinogen, unlocking the past in a dream-like manner.

The story begins with the pregnant Sita being delivered to Valmiki’s ashram by Lakshmana. She thinks she’s on a visit, and though Lakshmana knows better, he chooses silence. In the shock of abandonment, Sita begins to fail until Valmiki pulls her out. Sita begins to live in the ashram and Lava and Kusa are born and grow up, the older people pass on the baton of remembering as if they were runners in a relay race.

Naidu has clearly immersed herself not just in stories from the Ramayana but also in the critical texts about the epic, and in ways of writing about epics. It is easy to see in the structure of the book – each chapter given over to one character – the form of the older Yuganta by Iravati Karve. In the sourcing of stories, Naidu cites Paula Richman’s Many Ramayanas, especially Velcheru Narayana Rao’s essay on the Telugu songs about the Ramayana sung by women in Andhra Pradesh. Naidu writes as one who is fully aware of the multiplicity of narratives and perspectives.

And yet, oddly, the multiplicity of perspectives does not always produce a variety of psychological responses in the narrators. Sita’s love, her well-managed anger and infinite capacity to endure comes across less as steadfastness and more as passive acquiescence. Surpanakka’s anger is entirely avoided because what she recounts is Sita’s swayamvara and Ravana’s failure at it. In Naidu’s narrative, she is Ravana’s sister first and always; never the desirable and desiring woman punished for her outspokenness. If there is some kind of push-back, it comes from Urmila, who rebels by disguising herself and escaping from the palace to live with Sita in the ashram.

The question I find myself asking is, can a retelling of the Ramayana in the 21^st century entirely ignore feminist critiques of the epic? There are, after all, demonstrable ways to write against the grain of the central and indisputably patriarchal narrative: just to take the example of one writer, Volga’s story ‘Liberated’ (‘Vimukta’ in Telugu) reinterprets Urmila’s years of supposed sleep as one intense, solitary meditation out of which she emerges liberated and strong; in another story, ‘Reunion’ (‘Samagamam’ in Telugu) Surpanakha and Sita meet in the forest and find deep empathy for each other.

Given how vividly these characters recall the past, it is surprising how little they examine the reasons for the actions of the people involved. The one exception is Lakshmana. In an incident drawn from the Velcheru Narayana Rao essay, Naidu has Lakshmana fall into an ecstasy of laughter when he sees the goddess Nidra approach him in court. As he laughs, Lakshmana watches and calibrates everyone’s reaction to him – each person imagines Lakshmana is laughing at him and begins to examine his conscience.

Not just this incident, but the guilt Lakshmana feels in having precipitated the entire war by attacking Surpanakka, his self-pitying and horrific justifications – ‘I had been provoked’ – then and later, when he draws the lakshman rekha around Sita – ‘I had never seen her eyes flash fire and her mouth utter such filth. Did she say that to provoke me? – are chilling, but give us psychological depth where we have grown used to archetypes.

A part of the problem lies in the choice of medium. I can see how the impressionistic narrative structure would work as performance and storytelling. As a novella, though, the tone is sometimes disconcertingly casual and colloquial, sometimes mystical and mostly slanted towards the now-tired tropes of the bhakti tradition.

Which is why the actual event of Sita’s ‘ascent’, her final refusal to undergo another test of chastity/purity/loyalty is elided over entirely in this book: when Lava and Kusa finish recounting the Ramayana to the man they do not yet know is their father, Naidu considers the story resolved – ‘The leaves shivered and there was a stream of light where she stood. There was no pain or need for reconciliation. Sita had ascended time cycles.’

If that isn’t a cop-out I don’t know what is.

In another recent retelling of another epic, Amruta Patil’s Adi Parva: Churning of the Ocean, the narrator is the river goddess Ganga who is surrounded by a sceptical, disruptive, bawdy audience. To them she says early in the narrative: ‘Much is made of unflagging optimism – that blind, bouncy state which understands neither cause nor effect.’

I wish any one of the narrators in Naidu’s book had a grain of this kind of self-awareness. It would have raised the book from a tolerable and not unreadable tale to one worth returning to, as any epic worth its salt should be.

Review: Selected Poems of Subramania Bharati

Last week in The Sunday Guardian, my review of Usha Rajagopalan's flawed translations of Subramania Bharati's poems.

Selected Poems: Subramania Bharati

Translated by Usha Rajagopalan

Hachette India. Pp 151. Rs 350.

*

About a century ago, two poets were writing transformative verse in languages other than English. In their own ways, these two poets changed the way people read and spoke about poetry. One was Rainer Maria Rilke and the other was Subramania Bharati. While Rilke’s poetry has been translated into English many times, it’s incredibly hard to find an English translation of Bharati’s work.

As a child growing up outside Tamil Nadu but immersed in Carnatic music, I have always had a frustrating relationship with Bharatiyar’s poetry: I know it only through song, both classical and filmic but I cannot read his poetry off the page and have always needed someone to translate his verse for me.

It was with delight, therefore, that I began Usha Rajagopalan’s translation of Bharati’s verse. It seemed to me a necessary project, to bring this poet who sang of ships and minerals as joyfully as he sang about Krishna and Shakti, to the notice of the Anglophone world. I was even more thrilled to read that Rajagopalan’s journey through his work also began via song.

It helps that this is a bilingual edition as, I think, all translated poetry should be. Unfortunately, this is as far as the good news goes. The risk in a bilingual edition of course is that for those who can read the source language, the shortcomings in the translation are inescapable and apparent. Every translating decision is laid bare on the page and the translator’s only defence – if it can be called that – lies in an Introduction.

This translation of Bharati’s poetry does not have an Introduction. It has a list of important dates and an account of his life that very briefly outlines his engagement with the Independence movement, his political writing, his subsequent escape from British India and his life as an ardent spiritualist-nationalist. But there is nothing from Rajagopalan on what her approach to translating his work was or how she engaged with the very different kinds of poetry he wrote: the spiritual/love poems and the rousing nationalist verse.

Not all translators need be scholars or even be in a position to contextualise a poet’s work and place it in the broader framework of the times in which s/he lived. The Selected Poetry of Rilke translated by Stephen Mitchell, for instance, has a comprehensive and intelligent Introduction by the American poet Robert Hass. If it was beyond Rajagopalan to write an Introduction that examines Bharati’s poetry with the care it deserves, surely someone else could have been commissioned to write one?

For a reader who is not already familiar with Bharati’s verse, this plunge into the deep end of his work is very disorientating: the first poem is an invocation, which is all well and good. It is followed by a poem that Rajagopalan titles ‘A Special Song’ but in the Tamil is called ‘Ammakannu Paatu’. Even for someone whose Tamil is as workaday as mine is, it is apparent that ‘Ammakannu’ is a term of endearment and ‘Special’ in no way conveys the tenderness and affection of the title in Tamil. The poem itself is a barrage of trochees that assault the ear: The hand opens a lock,/Wisdom opens the mind./ Melody makes a song/A woman makes a home happy. For a poem that is called ‘Song’, it is singularly unmusical.

There are many such instances through the book and it would be unnecessarily cruel to draw attention to more of them. Let us admit that poetry is not easy to translate. When it is done well, it is a cause for celebration.

But when a translation of poetry does not read or sound like poetry, I would imagine that those involved in the project would do anything rather than put the work out into the public domain. They could, for instance, have had two translators: one who knew the source language well and the other who knew the mechanics of poetry in the target language well.

Here for instance, is Stephen Mitchell translating Rilke:

You, Beloved, who are all

the gardens I have ever gazed at,

longing.

            (‘You Who Never Arrived’ from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke)

And here is Usha Rajagopalan translating Bharati:

If I can forget Kannan’s face,

What use having eyes at all?

            (‘Kannan, My Lover – I’)

Someone who knows nothing about Subramania Bharati, who cannot even struggle through the Tamil on the page or have someone read aloud the original Tamil so they can absorb the beauty and power of the sound – if not the sense – of the poetry; someone whose first and only encounter with one of 20^th century’s greatest poets is through this translation is absolutely sure to ask what the fuss is about.

Bharatiyar’s poetry is in no danger of being forgotten in his native land. It is a great pity that our definition of ‘native land’ must be more narrow and parochial than his own expansive one, at least until a better translation replaces this one.

Review: The Poetry of the Taliban

In the Sunday Guardian last weekend, my review of The Poetry of the Taliban.

The Poetry of the Taliban.

Edited by Alex Strick Von Linschoten & Felix Kuehn

with a Foreword by Faisan Devji.

Hachette India Rs. 499 Pp. 247.

*

Quick: tell me what names come to mind when you hear the words ‘War Poetry’. If you said ‘Wilfred Owen’ or ‘Siegfried Sassoon’, you wouldn’t be wrong. We can be certain though, that nobody said ‘Abdul Basir Ebrat’ or Shirinzoy. At the very outset, this ought to tell us something about ourselves as readers and as consumers in the economy of literature.

As citizens of a post-colonial state, it is shaming but unsurprising that we should know more about the poetry and the poets of the First World War than we do about the poetry of our near neighbours in Afghanistan. So much of what Anglophone India reads or considers worthy of reading is mediated by the West’s narrative of its own literary history that a book like The Poetry of the Taliban demands a serious effort on the part of the reader.

 The Poetry of the Taliban is a collection of poetry published on the Taliban’s website over the last decade, though there are also poems dating from the Soviet occupation of the 1980s and 90s that are included in the book. The editors, Alex von Linschoten and Felix Kuehn have chosen 235 poems and arranged them roughly thematically into ‘Love and Pastoral’, ‘Religious’, ‘Discontent’, ‘The Trench’ and ‘The Human Cost’. So far, so universal.

But I had to remind myself that it was not the Taliban that had edited this book or had it published; they certainly had poetry on their website. Someone even curated it – after a fashion – though it is not clear that everyone who contributed a poem necessarily approved of the Taliban. At any rate the poetry was reaching, without translation, those it was meant to reach.

 I had to ask who this book was for, even while ruefully taking note that the poems are now being studied by American military analysts for what insight they might provide about the Taliban. It’s hard not to think of Vietnam and the US military’s efforts to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the Vietnamese.

For a South Asian reading the book, therefore, there is a good chance that she is going to feel strangely displaced: this is clearly a poetry that has deep cultural roots that seem intensely familiar to us on the subcontinent, as when the poet says, ‘The ignorance of the dark turned to light when you came’ [‘Prayer’, Abdul Basir Ebrat]; or when a poet signs off with a takhallus – ‘I wish I could tell Mohammed Stanikzai about myself;/I wish my voice reached the wind though my mouth is closed’ [‘I wish’, Mohammed Stanikzai]. There are also familiar tropes of the Beloved, of intoxication and there is the symbolic power of colour or landscape.

And yet the poetry is often strident and so radically ‘other’ in its invocation of God, jihad, bravery, sacrifice and reward that it takes some effort to realise that this is not uncommon to nationalistic or patriotic poetry; and to see that beyond the tone of the poems lie a complicated web of identities and loyalties – to history, tribe, language, region, culture and ideology.

I suspect that if the poems in this collection had uniformly sounded remorseful or at least displayed a decent war-weariness, it would be easier for the Western reader to empathise. It is to the credit of the editors that they have refused to simplify anything. Their Introduction is, of course, a way in to the poetry and its history, but it also becomes significant for what aspects of Afghan society they emphasise and what they elide over – the near-total absence of women poets from this collection, for instance.

I could only wish that they had chosen better translators than Mirwais Rehmany and Hamid Stanikzai. So much of the poetry reads as if it could have been eloquent in different hands. In the poem ‘Sunset’ by Abdul Hai Mutma’in for instance, the translation reads:

‘The fast wind makes the branches of the trees hit each other;

Rays of sunlight go back and forth, they don’t remain in one place.”

If a poem from the section ‘Love & Pastoral’ can sound so clunky, it’s not hard to think how badly served the political poems are by the translation. In fact, for a project of such significance, a good translation should have been the first priority. Sadly, it seems to have been almost an afterthought.

The book is a useful, if not an entirely satisfactory one in the South Asian context. Perhaps one day, some poet from the subcontinent will translate contemporary poetry from Afghanistan, not in order to explain or humanise the people to anyone, but in the way that Faiz Ahmed Faiz translated Nazim Hikmet: as an act of homage and exchange.