Sachin Ketkar

Writes Hemant Divate on the poet of his choice:

“Sachin is one of the most unusual talents in contemporary Marathi poetry today . . . He can be very detached about himself, and at the same time, he reflects upon the world in an exceedingly personal way. This makes his poems paradoxically self-centred and other-centred. He usually writes about mundane and ‘un-poetic’ objects in an exceptionally imaginative way.
“He translates the everyday world into an outlandish and bizarre work of art. . . . He grapples with contemporary social and personal problems in a poetic way by using and abusing images from the technological sphere and the present-day metropolitan milieu: the world of internet and mobiles, multiplex theatres, shopping malls and photocopying shops.”
Divate’s observations are clearly substantiated in the three Ketkar poems selected for this edition. While images of a fast-moving globalised world flow thick and fast, the poems seem essentially fuelled by a spirit of intellectual enquiry. A world of blogs and limited-over cricket matches rubs shoulders with a medieval world of myth and epic. Thus, in the poem about Jarasandha – the king of Magadha in the Mahabharata, who was memorably vanquished in combat by being torn apart lengthwise and thrown in opposite directions – the images  seem primarily to be a means to probe cultural ironies and historical dislocations: “I order desi liquor / In the English wine shop. / In the desi shop/ It's the English liquor that I order.” Torn between his native soil and the cyber café, between T.S. Eliot and medieval Marathi saint poet, Dnyaneshwar, the poet parodies the postcolonial predicament in an extended literary conceit.

Divate concludes: “All this makes Sachin Ketkar’s vision and style particularly idiosyncratic and original. He is also one of the best young translators and critics in Marathi today.” Bibliography

Poetry

Bhintishivaicya Khidkitun Dokavtana, (Marathi poems), Abhidhanantar Prakashan, Mumbai, 2004

A Dirge for the Dead Dog and other Incantations' (English poems), Sanbun Publishers, New Delhi, 2003

As Translator and Editor

Live Update: An Anthology of Recent Marathi Poetry, Poetrywala Publications, Mumbai, 2005


Links

Live Update: A Brief Introduction to New Marathi Poetry 
Poet, editor and translator Sachin Ketkar discusses a contemporary Marathi poetry milieu in a state of creative ferment, and introduces his anthology of new Marathi poetry.

esnips;  Live Spaces; Good Reads
Some websites with Sachin Ketkar’s profile and more English and Marathi poems.

Geocities
Sachin Ketkar's English translations of the 15th-century Gujarati saint-poet, Narsinh Mehta