Artikel
Welcome to Indian poetry - September 2005
18 januari 2006
Kunwar Narain (born 1927) is a senior litterateur, associated with the New Poetry movement in Hindi (though he remains wary of all card-carrying aesthetic practices). For him, the word is an almost picaresque figure in its own right, a wayfarer travelling through the turbulent centuries, acquiring various flavours and resonances along the way. He speaks of the ‘personality’ of words, and reveals a deep interest in their etymology: “the experiences and adventures that the word has passed through over the ages to arrive at its precise meaning”. He is also aware of the life that pulsates in the interstices between words. He draws a parallel between these and the seemingly fallow intervals of time between one book of poetry and another. “They (my books) are ‘joined’ by time-space gaps, similar to the gaps joining two words.”
For noted modern Bengali poet, Joy Goswami (born 1954), the word is a refuge, a desperate haven in a world of fast-eroding and fragmenting meaning. The hauntingly surreal images that pervade his poems in this selection became an integral part of the poet’s process of self-healing. Rescuing the word from the cacophony of daily living is for him part of an urgent quest for sanity, resolution, redemption. “If I am surrounded by people when a line arrives, unannounced, I find the press of conversation and voices unbearable . . . For me, carrying the line around from the time it occurs to me to the time when I will finally write it down becomes an act of preservation. I rescue the line from the babble around me for the moment when it will become part of my poem.”
The poems are accompanied by translations as well as interviews with Narain and Goswami. These conversations, richly veined with anecdote, present both poets in searching, reflective mode, as they offer invigorating personal insights into that mysterious collaboration with words that is poetry.
There is awe. Sometimes there is a playfulness, born of familiarity. But above all, there is fascination. When poets speak of their relationship with words, it is seldom a dispassionate utterance. For every wordsmith is a word-watcher. And word-watchers are always aware that that banal dank substance called language is capable of putting forth something green and alive when they least expect it. It is the moment they wait for. The moment – despite all their craft and linguistic techno-savvy – on which their art depends.
The two poets in this edition of the India domain occupy two diverse generational and linguistic contexts. But the way they speak of words carries the seasoned ring of those familiar with Sibelius’s old line about composers never being able ‘to go against the will’ of their materials. Kunwar Narain (born 1927) is a senior litterateur, associated with the New Poetry movement in Hindi (though he remains wary of all card-carrying aesthetic practices). For him, the word is an almost picaresque figure in its own right, a wayfarer travelling through the turbulent centuries, acquiring various flavours and resonances along the way. He speaks of the ‘personality’ of words, and reveals a deep interest in their etymology: “the experiences and adventures that the word has passed through over the ages to arrive at its precise meaning”. He is also aware of the life that pulsates in the interstices between words. He draws a parallel between these and the seemingly fallow intervals of time between one book of poetry and another. “They (my books) are ‘joined’ by time-space gaps, similar to the gaps joining two words.”
For noted modern Bengali poet, Joy Goswami (born 1954), the word is a refuge, a desperate haven in a world of fast-eroding and fragmenting meaning. The hauntingly surreal images that pervade his poems in this selection became an integral part of the poet’s process of self-healing. Rescuing the word from the cacophony of daily living is for him part of an urgent quest for sanity, resolution, redemption. “If I am surrounded by people when a line arrives, unannounced, I find the press of conversation and voices unbearable . . . For me, carrying the line around from the time it occurs to me to the time when I will finally write it down becomes an act of preservation. I rescue the line from the babble around me for the moment when it will become part of my poem.”
The poems are accompanied by translations as well as interviews with Narain and Goswami. These conversations, richly veined with anecdote, present both poets in searching, reflective mode, as they offer invigorating personal insights into that mysterious collaboration with words that is poetry.
© Arundhathi Subramaniam
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