Editorial: 1 August 2010

June 23, 2010 Welcome to the 1 August issue of PIW.

In one poem in these pages (‘Almost Sonnet’ by Tabish Khair) the speaker deplores what he calls “all the mud of language that turns doors to walls/And makes the best of truths, despite us, false”. Yet the poems in this issue from India and Ireland are evidence that language can also be revelatory – that it can open rather than block up the ‘doors’ of the mind. And equally that it can be ambiguous, slippery, mysterious.

Each of the three Indian poets writes in a different language. In a compelling essay on her poetics, Teji Grover explains why she chose to write in Hindi rather than Punjabi, her mother tongue, or in Urdu or English, both learnt in childhood. One reason, she says, was “an initial strangeness with Hindi [which] filled me with longing for it”. Her poems express a yearning for a kind of original strangeness that lies behind – or ‘before’ – familiar things and experiences.

Tabish Khair lives in Denmark and writes in English. In ‘Immigrant’, the exile’s painful experience of giving up an original language and identity, in order to learn a foreign tongue and embrace a new culture, is compared to that of the little mermaid who trades her original ‘kingdom’ – her voice – for legs. Likewise, in ‘Rumi and the Reed’, the song of the reed flute is about severance from origins and the “longing to return”; the refrain expresses the inadequacy of language in the face of such loss:

Let its raw lips rest then;
Let all words be brief then.

For Malayalam poet S. Joseph, language can be the “scribblings in red” that define someone as a member of a despised caste (‘Identity Card’) or the “stanzas and metres” of the upper castes who seek to monopolise Malayam literature (‘A Letter to Malayalam Poetry’). Like Grover, Joseph seems to suggest that voice, song, utterance, are more important than meaning. In a poem in the journal Pratlipi, a man is filling a whole valley with his singing. “Don’t ask about the meaning of song”, the poem says; instead, “let us sit under the shade of the tree / And listen to his song.” Audio files on the poet page also enable us to listen to Joseph himself, reading three of his poems in the original Malayalam.

Like Joseph, Irish poet Michael Hartnett grew up in extreme poverty. Ireland domain editor Patrick Cotter explains that the poet developed a love of the Irish language under the influence of his grandmother, though his gift as a poet in English meant that he gave up on his declared intention of writing only in Irish. The selection here ranges from the poignant lyricism of ‘For my Grandmother, Bridget Halpen’ to the blood and guts of ‘Pigkilling’, to the humorous invective of ‘On those who stole our cat, a curse’.

The other Irish poet featured is David Wheatley, who lives in Hull. His poems here include an evocative retracing of a nocturnal walk through the city, alongside the Humber estuary; it ends, quietly but powerfully, with the speaker sitting on the quay-side imagining how long it would take “to reach the last buoy/ and from there, dry land forgotten, the open sea”. One intriguing poem is in the voice of a lock-keeper’s daughter, while another ‘translates’ the scenes and characters of Breughel’s visual world into a series of ‘proverbs’ that brilliantly capture the painter’s close observation of human behaviour.