Saras, Priya, KumKum
Devika, Pamela, Saras
Significantly, several of the poets were recited in the original with an English gloss provided for understanding. Delving into the poetry of the world in this manner yields an intimate feeling for the images couched in the lovely words of another tongue. They can penetrate our understanding because it is poetry; indeed, the love for another language can be fostered by poetry.
October was the month of three birthdays of our readers: Kavita, Devika, and Joe, the last two falling on the same day. How unlikely is that! Devika invited us all over to her place with spouses to enjoy a lunch next day. Devika and Achu hosted the lively afternoon of conversation and food; the Samsung S8 mobile of Abbas has captured bright group pictures. These and some others will be added in another post.
Arundhaty, Geeta, Pamela, Saras, Devika
November is the month to announce the novels for the coming year and readers are casting around among the rich possibilities to excite our reading hunger. One of our readers is on a private mission with a couple of others to conquer Ulysses by James Joyce in an edition where the text is 552 pages of small font, and the explanatory notes are half as long again. No doubt a novel like that is beyond the pale of our reading group to handle in a single session.
Priya, Hemjit, KumKum, Kavita, Thommo
In this connection it is worth noting how the obscenity charge against the novel got over-ruled by Judge John Woolsey in 1933 in New York. He said:
“Whilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.”
Amen. How can one evade an author who writes like this (p. 251 of Ulysses):
The summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious embrace. Far away in the west the sun was setting and the last glow of all too fleeting day lingered lovingly on sea and strand, on the proud promontory of dear old Howth guarding as ever the waters of the bay, on the weedgrown rocks along Sandymount shore and, last but not least, on the quiet church whence there streamed forth at times upon the stillness the voice of prayer to her who is in her pure radiance a beacon ever to the stormtossed heart of man, Mary, star of the sea.
(Photo: courtesy KumKum)
The group photo at the end of the session was diminished by a couple of readers, who had to leave for Diwali functions elsewhere. The birthday people (Devika, Kavita, and Joe) are holding giant anthurium flowers.
Devika, Pamela, Kavita, Saras, Geeta, Shoba, KumKum (standing) Joe, Hemjit (sitting)
1. Priya
Priya
Meghdoot (The Cloud Messenger), a poem of 111 stanzas, by Kālidāsa opened the session of poetry in translation. It is one of the poet’s most famous works. It recounts how a yakṣa (nature spirit) was exiled for a year for neglecting his duties. From his banishment in central India he prevails on a passing cloud to take a message to his wife at Alaka on Mount Kailāsa in the Himālaya mountains.The yakṣa accomplishes this by giving a vivid description of the sights the cloud will fly over on its northward course to the city of Alakā, where his wife awaits his return.
The Meghadut marked the beginning of a genre called Sandesa Kavya or messenger poems, often written in the same metre as Meghadut's mandakranta metre. It consists of four padas of 17 syllables in which the stress is laid as follows (⎼ means stress, ⏑ is unstressed) :
⎼ ⎼ ⎼¦⎼ ⏑ ⏑¦⏑⏑⏑¦⎼ ⎼ ⏑¦⎼ ⎼ ⏑¦⏑⎼¦ ¦⎼ ⎼ ⎼¦⎼ ⏑ ⏑¦⏑⏑⏑¦⎼ ⎼ ⏑¦⎼ ⎼ ⏑¦⏑⎼¦¦
⎼ ⎼ ⎼¦⎼ ⏑ ⏑¦⏑⏑⏑¦⎼ ⎼ ⏑¦⎼ ⎼ ⏑¦⏑⎼¦ ¦⎼ ⎼ ⎼¦⎼ ⏑ ⏑¦⏑⏑⏑¦⎼ ⎼ ⏑¦⎼ ⎼ ⏑¦⏑⎼¦¦
Hamsa-sandesha is an example, in which Rama bids a swan carry a message to Sita, describing sights along the journey.
Priya started by reciting the opening verse in Sanskrit:
कश्चित्कान्ताविरहगुरुणा स्वाधिकारात्प्रमत:
शापेनास्तग्ड:मितमहिमा वर्षभोग्येण भर्तु:।
यक्षश्चक्रे जनकतनयास्नानपुण्योदकेषु
स्निग्धच्छायातरुषु वसतिं रामगिर्याश्रमेषु।।
It tells how the yakṣa was banished for laziness and went to live in the dense forests of Ramagiri, where Sita purified herself by bathing in the streams. You can listen to Prof Sangeeta Gundecha speak on the subject in Hindi and give an overview of the poem here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YqnnRR-p84&t=251s
Kalidas a poet of the 4th or 5th century CE is considered a great classical author in Sanskrit, known for his epic poems, Raghuvamsa and Kumarasambhava. He is most famous for his play, Abhijñānaśākuntalam (Of Sakuntala recognised by a token). The poem we are reading today has become known for its lyrical descriptions of nature and the yearning of the banished yakṣa for his lover.
Some have placed Kalidas as belonging to Ujjain in central India, because of the affection for Ujjain displayed in Meghdut. Others have maintained he hailed from Kashmir based on descriptions of fauna and flora not found elsewhere.
A folkloric story ascribes a certain lack of wit that caused Kālidāsa to be insulted by a princess who decided to test all comers for suitability for her hand in marriage. He cut such a sorry figure that the princess inquired:“Is there anything mildly intelligent you can utter?” (In Sanskrit: asti kaschit vaagviśesha?) – which is an excellent put-down all girls must learn – to be used in fobbing off boys who make a nuisance of themselves.
Our unfortunate poet went off and invested in learning, and remembering this insult, wrote three epics, one starting with asti, the second with kaschit, and the third with vaagvisesha. History gave the princess her comeuppance, for nobody remembers her. But Kālidāsa has been translated into immortality by the three ‘revenge epics’ he wrote, Kumarasambahva, Meghdut, and Raghuvamsa.
In the poem after eight months of longing, the monsoon arrives. The yakṣa begs the cloud to carry his longing to his wife. The imagery is erotic but delicate (!), said Priya; perhaps she is referring to these lines:
with his desires he enters —
Your slender body with his slender body,
Which is distressed with his that is powerfully distressed,
In the final part, (Uttara-megha), the cloud arrives at Alkapuri. Priya said this poem is more romantic than that of any of the English romantic poets. The last line is striking where the yakṣa tells the cloud
May you never be like me, separated from your lightning!
Meghdut gives Joe a pang of nostalgia. In 1960 when he was one and twenty, the Indian Post and Telegraph Department issued a 15nP (that’s naye paise for the younger set) stamp illustrating the scene from the Meghdut in which the yakṣa while sojourning in Rāmagiri, appealed to the cloud to carry his message of love and pathos to his beloved in far-off Alakā on Mount Kailās.
So taken was Joe by the sentiment illustrated that he affixed the stamp on letters he wrote to girls he knew at the time. But none was alive to the subtle hint of the literary reference on the envelope!
The stamp bears as theme the following Sanskrit verse from the Meghadūta:
आषाढस्य प्रथमदिवसे मेघमाश्लिष्टसानुम् |
वप्रक्रीडापरिणतगजप्रेक्षणीयं ददर्श ||
āṣāḍhasya prathamadivase meghamāśliṣtaṣnuṃ /
vaprakrīdā pariṇatagajaprekṣanīyam dadarśa //
which means:
on the first day of Āṣāḍha a cloud clinging to a mountain peak
did he see, resembling an elephant playfully stooping (to butt) a rampart.
KumKum wanted to do the Gita Govinda by Jayadeva, the 12th century Sanskrit poet.
2. Arundhaty
Arundhaty, Thommo, Pamela
Sachidananda Routray (1916 – 2004) was an Odia poet, novelist, short-story writer, popularly known as Sachi Routray. He was born in Gurujang, and was brought up and educated in Bengal. He married a Telugu princess from the royal family of Golapalli. Perhaps this poem called The Princess was inspired by her.
Sachidananda Routray
Routray started writing poems from the age of eleven. He took part in the Independence movement while still in school. The British government banned some of his poetry for its revolutionary charge.
Routray became famous when he published Baji Rout, a long poem to celebrate the martyrdom of a young boy who succumbed to the bullets of British police when he refused to take them across the river in his boat. He was a prolific poet and published twenty anthologies. Pallishri, a poem about village life in Odisha, was very successful. So too Pratima Nayak which portrays the suffering of a city girl. He thought of himself as a people’s poet.
Routray also published poetry with religious themes.
Routray got the Padmashree award in 1962 and the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1963 for poetry. He died in Cuttack on 21 August 2004.
The poet is self-identifying in the poem to a princess. Finding her sad he claims he has come from the twentieth century to bury capitalism, a word she recoils from. She smiles at the idea that someone needs to sing about the underlings who have been trampled down in her feudal world. She recognises in him no worthy heir to bygone stalwarts like Kalidas, Jayadeva, Bharati, Thyagaraja, Tagore, Shelley, and Byron. ‘Never mind, Mayakowsky will vouch for me,’ the poet says, ‘ … fire born of the sun.’
‘I am Sachi RautRa.’
…
I am the soil of the earth,
the poet of the sky
though my job is not just
to paint the sky.
…
When you touch my printed pages
you touch the heart of a new human being
the heart of the human race,
whose every story
comes alive in my poetry.
With this claim of being the universal poet, the poem ends.
3. Thommo
Arundhaty, Thommo, Pamela
Federico García Lorca (1898–c. 1936) has not been recited before. Lorca is one of Spain's great poets and a dramatist as well. His most well-known poetry collection is The Gypsy Ballads.
Federico García Lorca (1898 - 1936)
Federico García Lorca was born in Fuente Vaqueros, a small farming village in the province of Granada, in the very south of Spain. In Madrid in 1919 Lorca entered the Residencia de Estudiantes, or residence of scholars. While at the residence, he met and befriended artist Salvador Dali around 1921. Dali would later design the scenery for the Barcelona production of Lorca's play Mariana Pineda (1927). Lorca’s two most successful poetry collections were Canciones (Songs) and Romancero Gitano (The Gypsy Ballads).
Romancero Gitano was especially daring for the time with its exploration of sexual themes and made Lorca a celebrity in the literary world. The poetry sequence of eighteen ballads was inspired by the traditional Spanish romance. It is a lyrical evocation of the sensual world of the gypsies of Andalusia, and many readers mistook Lorca for a gypsy. The book’s first edition sold out fast. The ballads start right in the middle of things and end as abruptly. This combined with their wit and metaphorical richness made them engaging.
In the 1930s, Lorca spent much of his time working on plays, including a folk drama trilogy Bodas de Sangre (Blood Wedding) in 1933, Yerma in 1934, and La Casa de Bernarda Alba (The House of Bernarda Alba) in 1936.
His first book, Impresiones y paisajes (1918; Impressions and Landscapes), was a prose work which chronicled Lorca’s sentimental response to a series of journeys through Spain as a university student. Libro de poemas (“Book of Poems”), published later is an uneven collection of predominantly modern poems from his juvenilia, which followed in 1921. Both efforts disappointed Lorca and reinforced his inherent resistance to publication, a fact that led to frequent delays in the publication later. Lorca preferred to perform his poems and plays, and his dramatic recitations drew a large audience of admirers.
Lorca experimented with haiku, and short Spanish forms. He wrote an immense quantity of brief poems arranged in themes; they were later collected and published in 1983 long after his death under the title Suites. He got interested in Andlusian song when he collaborated with the wonderful composer Manuel de Falla. This led to his series of poems on the songs of Andalusian gypsies.
From 1925 to 1928 Lorca became passionately involved with Salvador Dalí, the painter. The intensity of their relationship led Lorca to acknowledge, if not entirely accept, his own homosexuality. More avant-garde currents in the art world, notably surrealism, suffused his poems, but he refused to align himself with any movement. He wrote a series of abstruse prose poems to Dalí, and aimed to create a more objective poetry, devoid of private sentiment. Lorca also sought to articulate in public lectures his own evolving aesthetic.
Lorca’s stay in the United States and Cuba yielded Poeta en Nueva York (published 1940; Poet in New York), a series of poems whose dense, at times hallucinatory images, free-verse lines, and thematic preoccupation with urban decay and social injustice mark an audacious departure from Lorca’s previous work. The collection reminds one of poets like Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, T.S. Eliot, and Stephen Crane, and pays homage to Walt Whitman.
Lorca also achieved his first major theatrical success in 1933 with a tragedy called Blood Wedding. In 1933–34 he went to Buenos Aires, Argentina, to give a lecture series. While there he befriended the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, with whom he collaborated on a tribute to Rubén Darío, the Nicaraguan poet. Lorca continued to write poetry. He embraced a “rehumanisation” of poetry, and returned to the personal in art in the Divan del Tamarit, a set of love poems inspired by Arabic verse forms; and Sonetos del amor oscuro (written 1935, published 1984; “Sonnets of Dark Love”), an 11-sonnet sequence recalling a failed love affair. Lorca had an abiding fixation on love and death as interdependent:
No hay nadie que, al dar un beso,
no sienta la sonrisa de la gente sin rostro,
ni hay nadie que, al tocar un recién nacido,
olvide las inmóviles calaveras de caballo.
There is no one who can kiss
without feeling the smile of those without faces;
there is no one who can touch
an infant and forget the immobile skulls of horses.
In 1934 the death of a bullfighter friend in the ring gave rise to an elegiac poem Lament for a Bullfighter, which became famous for a refrain that continues throughout the poem “A las cinco de la tarde” (“At five in the afternoon”). This four-part poem is his longest.
In the final two years of his short life he wrote three plays one of which was a reflection on the ongoing political upheaval. Lorca was at work on a play in the summer of 1936 when the Spanish Civil War broke out. On August 16, he was arrested in Granada by Nationalist forces, who abhorred his homosexuality and his liberal views, and imprisoned him. On the night of August 18 or 19 (the precise date has never been verified), he was driven to a remote hill outside the town of Granada and shot without a trial by supporters of General Franco, the Fascist leader.
In 1986 the Spanish government marked the 50th anniversary of Lorca’s death by erecting a monument on the site of his murder. The gesture bears witness to Lorca’s stature as the most important Spanish poet and playwright of the 20th century, a man whose work continues to influence writers and artists throughout the world.
(Excerpted from britannica.com and biography.com)
+++
Although Thommo had prepared two poems he recited only one, the plaintive La Guitarra, first in English and then he had a stab at the Spanish. The words try to convey the way we hear the gypsy guitar music. It wails (llanto) just the same word used to describe Flamenco singing. The repetition of the first line at the fifth, reinforces the wail which is also a monotonous weeping (Llora monótona):
Llora monótona
como llora el agua,
como llora el viento
sobre la nevada.
It weeps monotonously
as water weeps
as the wind weeps
over snowfields.
The guitar weeps for far away things. Flamenco players sing and dance the entire night. There are more metaphors of white camellias and arrows ending finally in a mortally wounded heart:
Corazón malherido
por cinco espadas.
Heart mortally wounded
by five swords.
The five swords stand for the five fingers used at once in the flamenco style of guitar playing, and the guitar itself is shaped like a heart. It is a wonderful poem dense with feeling and dotted with metaphors from nature. A great accompaniment to this poem would be to hear Andrés Segovia play the Asturias by Isaac Albeniz.
The guitar with its poetic melancholic charms, its variety of tone and colours, and its wealth of harmonic possibilities, captivated me. I had the intuition of what a beautiful music a sensitive artist could draw from it. … I consider the guitar objectively as the most beautiful instrument man has created. – Andrés Segovia.
Thommo mentioned he has heard a song by George Harrison that also speaks of the guitar weeping, and thinks GH may have got the ‘weeping’ bit from Lorca:
I look at you all see the love there that's sleeping
While my guitar gently weeps
I look at the floor and I see it needs sweeping
Still my guitar gently weeps
….
Here is the song sung by Eric Clapton and Paul McCartney in a Concert for George:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrTMc2i6Lzc
4. Joe
Joe reading Faiz (photo, courtesy Devika)
Joe selected two poems by Faiz Ahmad Faiz (1911 – 1984). Here is a short bio.
Faiz was born in 1911 and grew up in Sialkot near Lahore. As a child he memorised the Quran and learnt Arabic and Persian. He studied Urdu poetry and English literature from an early age and got an MA in Eng Litt in 1932 from the Government College University (GCU), Lahore. He loved Keats, Shelley and Browning and used the sonnet form in his early poems. His poems display a direct and personal appreciation of reality. Faiz remained a Muslim but an agnostic. One of his messages is the purifying effect of suffering.
Thus, in his last ghazal, written a few days before he died, he says:
Life gave us much or little, what regrets can there be?
The treasure of pain is ours, what matters the quantity
Faiz was critical of the authoritarianism in Pakistan and the lack of social justice. Some poems and ghazals are expressions of this. There have been many translations of Faiz into English; the first was by Victor Kiernan a Scotsman who taught in Pakistan and was a contemporary academic. It is available on the Web. Kiernan was well positioned to translate with his fluent knowledge of Urdu and acquaintance with Faiz. Faiz’s ghazals have brought him great popularity in the sub-continent, for they were sung by celebrated singers from both sides of the border.
There are eight volumes of his verse beginning with Imprints in 1941 and the last was O Traveller, My Heart, in 1981; and a posthumous volume, The Dust of Passing Days.
He married an English woman, Alys, a member of the Communist Party in Britain, who came to Pakistan and became acquainted with him as his student at the Government College University where he taught poetry. She decided to marry him but waited to make her parents agree, and then they got married, in Kashmir as it turned out, and Sheikh Abdullah was one of the two witnesses. You can listen to Alys speak at the beginning of a recording by BBC Asian Unit of Faiz’s last mushaira which took place in London.
Faiz at his last Mushaira, in London
The wedding was at the beginning of WWII. Later they had two daughters, Salima and Moneeza. Faiz joined the British Army and got a captain’s rank, but was posted to a desk job in Delhi. At the end of the war he was Lt. Col. Faiz and in 1947 he opted for Pakistan.
He was a prominent member of the Progressive Writers Movement there and later a Member of the Arts Council. Throughout his life his poetry strayed into critique of tyranny and oppression and he saw socialism as the only hope to extract Pakistan from the clutches of the feudal landlords who governed. But his themes remained non-violent and peaceful. Faiz was the editor of the Pakistan Times in the 1950s and used that position to advocate for support of the Communist Party. He later got into trouble for this and spent time in prison. He was banished and went to UK. He returned in 1964 to Karachi as principal of a college. Later, his ties with Z.A. Bhutto got him influence but he had to depart when Bhutto was executed in 1979. He returned in 1982 from Lebanon in poor health and died in Lahore in 1984.
In 1990 he was posthumously awarded Pakistan’s highest civilian honour, the Nishan-e-Imtiaz (Order of Excellence) by Benazir Bhutto. Since then many Chairs in universities and colleges in Pakistan have been named after Faiz.
Coming now to the poems. The opening verse
Mujh se pehli si muhabbat
Mere mehboob na maang
Beloved, don't ask me to
Love you as I loved you before
is easy to understand as the cry of a lover who has left his youth behind. But the middle verses where the poet speaks of dirt, violence and blood gives a hint as to the underlying sentiment. Indeed, Joe has omitted two lines while reciting, considering them too revolting to appear in such a beautiful poem:
Jism nikale hü’e amraz ke tannuron se.
Pip bahti hü’i galte hü'e näsüron se
Bodies that have emerged from the ovens of diseases,
Pus flowing from rotten ulcers—
The poet has encountered the horrors of war and it is this that he is recoiling from; at the same time he confesses he has to give urgent attention to such matters and that is why the tenderness of first love must be set aside:
Aur bhi dukh hain zamaane mein muhabbat ke siva
Raahatein aur bhi hain vasl ki raahat ke siva
There are many other sorrows in this world besides the sorrow of love
There are many other delights besides the delight of union
Zohra Sehgal gives an expressive recital of the poem here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6SSbjcGWOg
and a sensitive sung recital here by Pakistani singer Tina Sahni renders the meaning well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsVdSCk4Nk4
Faiz himself recites it for the Library of Congress archive here.
The second poem is a favourite of Vikram Seth who translated it; it begins
Raat yun dil mein teri khoyi hui yaad aayi,
Last night your faded memory came to me ...
You can hear Faiz recite it for a US Library of Congress recording.
5. Hemjit
Arundhaty, Hemjit, KumKum
Hemjit selected the Tamil poet Thiruvalluvar who wrote Thirukural or its short name, Kural. The ancient poem of 1330 couplets is said to have been composed around 2,000 BCE. Kural is a Tamil literary form consisting of two lines with four words in the first line and three words in the second line. It was composed by Thiruvalluvar or Saint Valluvar (Thiru means saint in Tamil). The exact period of his life and times are unrecorded. But based on traditional accounts and linguistic analysis it seems to have been composed later than thought, between 400 BCE to 600 CE. He is said to have lived in Mylapore in the heart of Chennai. Kural dwells on a wide variety of subjects – from love to law, management to self-realisation, religion, politics, philosophy, economics, etc. It was translated into many national languages and foreign languages, including a Latin translation in 1699. Indeed, Latin was the first foreign language into which Thirukural was translated. Christian missionaries admired the moral values set out in the long poem and the Jesuit Constantius Beschi (1700 – 1742) translated the first two parts on virtue and wealth. There are two more translations into Latin. You can see the many translations on offer at
https://tamilelibrary.org/teli/thkrl.html
The full Thirukural in English is on the Web at several places, e.g.
https://archive.org/stream/ThirukkuralInEnglishInternet/Thirukkural in English Internet _djvu.txt
Here is a contemporary translation into English neatly arranged by Chapter:
https://thirukkural133.wordpress.com/contents/
The Kural has influenced and guided men and women of various fields – scholars, lawyers, philosophers, and psychiatrists, even the common householder. Valluvar’s exact religion is unknown. Thus members of all religions – Jains, Buddhists, Hindus and Christians can, and do, claim him to be a member of their religion.
Thiruvalluvar Statue at Kanyakumari
Our translator is Kannan who wishes to enlighten the world on Kural, which has always been a guiding force in his life. He lives in Pollachi with his family. He says:
There aren’t any thoughts of mine that have not been influenced by Thirukural. I can’t think of a subject for which I cannot dig into Thirukural. When I read a management book, I cannot help thinking, ‘Oh, hasn’t Valluvar talked about this?’
But when it comes to Chapter 6 on Choosing a Life Partner, one can’t help thinking it is a bit one-sided, conceived entirely from the male viewpoint. Hemjit thinks things have changed now; but Joe said one can see the relations between men and women haven’t moved much, they are weighed down by the same misogynist views today. The couplet,
Rain will pour instantly at the order of a wife
who prays not to God but to her husband.
produced a barely suppressed siffle from the women.
There is a chapter on The Joy of Making Love (Ch 111); the expressions are surreal:
Cuddling this woman,
Her complexion that of mango,
On this subject Vatsyanana is not only more thorough and well-versed, but he comes with a dash of humour, which Thirualluvar lacks.
Saint Thiruvalluvar Sari - The national award-winning Thirukural sari woven by a Cooperative Society from Coimbatore
6. Pamela
Pamela
Pamela harked back to her school days in the Malayalam school in Delhi when she heard her teacher, a Nair lady, render the poem Chandalabhikshuki (The Outcaste Nun) in a sing-song way. By popular demand Pamela recited the Malayalam text, instead of the English translation. It is remarkable that though she grew up and had her schooling in Delhi, she is fluent in reading and writing Malayalam, thanks to her father’s insistence that she should attend the Kerala Government’s Malayalam school there; he himself had not had the good fortune of knowing Malayalam and didn’t want his daughter to miss out.
It is a poem by Kumaranasan (1873 – 1924) who was a prominent social reformer in the first quarter of the twentieth century. He initiated a revolution in Malayalam poetry, transforming it from the metaphysical to the lyrical, having a great deal of moral and spiritual content. He was a disciple of Sree Narayana Guru.
Kumaran Asan (standing right) with Narayana Guru (seated middle)
The poem Chandalabhikshuki recalls an incident in the life of Buddha (a mural at Thonnakkal Asan Smarakam)
Joe noted the recent case reported in the papers when a person refused to take delivery of food ordered online because the delivery man was a Muslim! Indians by and large remain in the same benighted mental prison they have lived in for ages, even after seventy-two years of freedom; the basic precepts of equality enshrined in the modern Indian Constitution which became law on Jan 26, 1950 have yet to take effect on the ground.
There has been some progress, if you consider the story narrated by Thommo about the plight of an Englishman in 1930 and his car driven by a Nair. The Englishman had to get out of the car and walk across a field and rejoin his vehicle farther on, whereas the driver could remain in the car and drive past the temple along the way.
Thommo said Syrian Christians still hold on to the caste system, and diligently inquire about the antecedent caste of a Christian family. Shall we call such as these: discriminating Christians?
Hemjit recited Kumaranasan’s poem Veena Poovu last year. Talitha sang a couple of lines from his poem Samayamayilla Polum from the film Karuna. The poet along with Vallathol and Parameswara Iyer was one of the three prominent poets of Malayalam to emerge in the early twentieth century.
The stories of Chandalabhikshuki are known to Asan's contemporary writers in other Indian languages, but none has treated them with the kind of poetical imagination and craftsmanship, as Kumaranasan did. To him brevity is the soul of art and each short poem he has written on an extensive theme, to use his own simile, is like ‘a dew drop reflecting an entire forest around.’ … Asan has not borrowed and whatever he has taken by way of theme or allusion, he acknowledged with disarming frankness. He has epitomised the entire Buddhist philosophy in Chandalabhikshuki with magnificent poetic imagination and amazing artistry fusing brevity with clarity … The philosophy of Asan is a harmonious blend of the eastern and the western, with a liberal rational contribution that has his clear personal imprint … Asan, by associating his women characters with aesthetic fulfilment, and cultural accomplishment for sublimating passion into pure love … generated a consciousness that enabled him to expel from the Malayalam literature the customary fondness for description of a woman’s anatomy and the erotic spirit that it manifested. … A champion of liberty, Asan was convinced that unless caste was made innocuous, if not abolished, freedom would be national disaster for the vast millions suffering from the social slavery perfected by the caste system. In Duravastha, he consoles and reassures Mother India that her wish for political emancipation will be fulfilled, the day she puts an end to the social thraldom imposed by caste. (From S.N. Sadasivan, A Social History of India)
You can hear the Chandalabhikshuki kavitha with lyrics at:
https://ruslar.pro/video/rNDuza19A1E
Biography
Kumaran Asan was born on April 12, 1873 in a merchant family belonging to the Ezhava community in Kayikkara village in Travancore. His early schooling was at a local school by Udayankuzhi Kochuraman Vaidyar, who taught him elementary Sanskrit after which he continued his studies at the government school until he was thirteen. Subsequently, he joined the school as a teacher in 1889 but had to quit as he was not old enough at age 16 to hold a government job. It was during this time, he studied the verses and plays of Sanskrit literature. Later, he started working as an accountant and met Shree Narayana Guru who became his spiritual preceptor.
Narayana Guru's influence led Asan to the spiritual and he joined Guru at his hermitage where he was known as Chinnaswami (young ascetic). In 1895, he moved to Bangalore and studied for law, staying with Padmanabhan Palpu. Asan spent a few months in Madras before proceeding to Calcutta to continue his Sanskrit studies. At Calcutta, he studied Tarka Sastra (dialectics, logic and reasoning with a view to debating) at the Central Hindu College. He studied English simultaneously and also got involved with the Bengal Renaissance, but his stay was cut short.
Asan was involved with the activities of the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam (SNDP), a charitable society working for the spiritual and educational uplift of the Ezhava community. He became its secretary in 1904. The same year, he founded Vivekodayam, a literary journal. He relinquished the position at SNDP in 1919 and a year later, took over the editorship of Pratibha, another literary magazine In 1921, he started a clay tile factory, Union Tile Works, in Aluva but when it was found that the factory was polluting the nearby palace pond, he shifted the project to a site near Aluva river and handed over the land to SNDP for building an Advaitashramam. Later, he moved to Thonnakkal, a village in the periphery of Thiruvananthapuram, where he settled with his wife. In 1923, he contested in assembly election from Quilon constituency but lost to Sankara Menon.
Asan married in 1917 but on January 16, 1924, he died by drowning, when his boat capsized in River Pallana. His body was recovered after two days and the place where his mortal remains were cremated is known as Kumarakodi.
(Taken from https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Kumaran_Asan)
Legacy
Some of the earlier works of the poet were Subramanya Sathakam and Sankara Sathakam, which were devotional in content but his later poems were marked by social commentary. He published Veena Poovu (The Fallen Flower) in December 1907 which went on to become a literary classic in Malayalam; its centenary was celebrated in 2017 when a book, Veenapoovinu 100, was published which carried an introduction by M. M. Basheer and an English translation of the poem by K. Jayakumar. Prarodanam was an elegy, mourning the death of his contemporary, friend and grammarian, A. R. Raja Raja Varma. Khanda Kavyas (poems) such as Nalini, Leela, Karuna, Chandaalabhikshuki, Chinthaavishtayaaya Seetha, and Duravastha are some of his other major works. Besides, he wrote two epics, Buddha Charitha in 5 volumes and Balaramayanam, a three-volume work.
Honours
In 1958, when Joseph Mundassery was the Minister of Education, the Government of Kerala acquired Asan's house in Thonnakkal and established the Kumaran Asan National Institute of Culture (KANIC), as a memorial for the poet. Asan Memorial Association, a Chennai-based organisation, has built a memorial at Kayikkara, the birthplace of the poet. They have also instituted an annual award, Asan Smaraka Kavitha Puraskaram, for recognising excellence in Malayalam poetry. The award carries a cash prize of ₹30,000; Sugathakumari, O. N. V. Kurup, K. Ayyappa Panicker and K. Satchidanandan have been among the recipients of the award. The India Post issued a commemorative postage stamp depicting Asan's portrait in 1973, in connection with his birth centenary.
7. Saras
Her selection was The Mad a poem of K. Satchidanandan, the well-known poet and critic, and winner of many awards; he added the Joseph Mundassery Puraskaram to his awards chest on Oct 29, 2019.
Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan presenting the Joseph Mundassery Puraskaram to poet and critic K. Satchidanandan
You can read a short bio of his at Poetry International:
https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/poet/2723/K-Satchidanandan/en/tile
and further at his wiki entry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K._Satchidanandan
Our reader, Sunil, chose this very poem in May 2012 and you may go to the post on our blog to read about it. Satchidanandan translates his own poetry into English, so English translations of his poems are readily available.
Satchi (as he is called) is a globe-trotting poet and has appeared all over the world. His readings are archived at the South Asian Literary Recordings Project of the US Library of Congress. One of the poems he recites for the archive is Prandhanmar, the poem Saras chose, The Mad, recited in the original Malayalam.
The poem does suggest one cure for caste-ridden India; we should all lose our minds.
The mad have no caste
or religion.
He proclaims the innocence of the mad, and ends with a statement about the really damnably mad – us.
The mad are not
mad like us.
This poem made one think of Manto’s story Toba Tek Singh which we read earlier this year, about the exchange of the deranged between India and Pakistan.
8. Devika
Devika who states she was never into poetry until she joined KRG told us how she chanced upon the poem she was going to read. On her recent travels she met a friend she hadn’t seen in 43 years. Not having their own transport in Europe it was difficult to meet. However her friend said she would come and pick her up from Frankfurt and as she drove she pointed to a house (they were passing Heidelberg by the river Neckar) and said, ‘That is where Muhammad Iqbal stayed when he was in Heidelberg.’ You can read more at this site Allama Iqbal in Heidelberg. There is a plaque erected on the wall to show the place he stayed when he was a student:
Iqbal Plaque in Heidelberg
Mohammad Iqbal
1877 – 1938
National Philosopher, Poet
and Spiritual Father of Pakistan
lived here in the year 1907.
This was how Devika came to choose Muhammad Iqbal whom she had never heard of before. And she got the poem ready-made too, for it was the poem Iqbal wrote called Eik Sham (One Evening) sitting beside the river Neckar that flows by the house.
The poem is a meditation on the river as it flows in the quiet of the night. You can listen to a recitation at this site. The word 'khamosh’ occurs several times to signify the silence. There are several lines internally rhyming with the soft syllables of 'khamosh’ to create the restful calm of the scene:
Fitrat Be-Hosh Ho Gyi Hai
Aghosh Mein Shab Ke So Gyi Hai
Creation has become unconscious
Falling into the bosom of the night
The ending lines, some think are an allusion to his love for his German teacher in Heidelberg, Emma Wegenast:
Ae Dil! Tu Bhi Khamosh Ho Ja
Aghosh Mein Gam Ko Le Ke So Ja
Oh heart, you too be hushed in silence
Lay your sorrow to sleep on my bosom!
His previous two marriages to tradition-bound Muslim ladies in Hindostan prevented him from going further, but he wrote many letters to Emma later from Cambridge and Lahore. Here is an extract from one in which he writes to Emma:
“Once a person has become your friend, it is not possible for him to live without you. A true friend... when hearts are fused together...distances become meaningless... ”
She lived to eighty-five and never married, and handed over her side of the correspondence to the Pakistan envoy; but since Iqbal is a revered figure in Pakistan nobody dares to publish and lay bare the many-sided man that was Iqbal.
Emma Wegenast
Here’s an interesting sidelight on the poet’s financials. Javed Iqbal in his 4-volume biography on Iqbal, admits:
“We were always short of money. My mother wanted to buy a home instead of always renting so she wanted my father to take his law practice seriously. I can still recall my mother crying and complaining that while she was working like a servant, my father was lying on a couch and writing poetry.
When upbraided like this, my father would laugh his embarrassed laugh.”
Iqbal thought Europe had lost its spiritual qualities. In a sense he was the ideological founder of Pakistan where there is an Iqbal Day celebrated on Nov 9, his birthday.
Iqbal was the author of the well-known verse so often sung in India on patriotic occasions, Sare jahan se acha Hindostan hamara. But because Hindostan means India, it is rarely sung in Pakistan. The lyrics with translation are below:
Saare jahaan se achha hindustan hamaraa
Better than all the world, is our India
Hum bul bulain hai is kee, ye gulsitan hamaraa
We are its nightingales and this is our garden
Parbat vo sabse unchaa hum saaya aasma kaa
That mountain most high, neighbor to the skies
Vo santaree hamaraa, vo paasbaan hamaraa
It is our sentinel; it is our protector
Godee mein khel tee hain is kee hazaaron nadiya
A thousand rivers play in its lap
Gulshan hai jinke dum se, rashke janna hamaraa
Gardens they sustain, the envy of the heavens is ours
Mazhab nahee sikhataa apas mein bayr rakhnaa
Faith does not teach us to harbor grudges between us
Hindee hai hum, vatan hai hindustan hamaraa
We are all Indians and India is our homeland
Bio of Allama Sir Mohammed Iqbal
Allama Sir Mohammed Iqbal
Early life
Eldest of five siblings in a Kashmiri family. Iqbal's father Shaikh Nur Muhammad was a prosperous tailor, well-known for his devotion to Islam, and the family raised their children with deep religious grounding. Iqbal was educated initially by tutors in languages and writing, history, poetry and religion. His potential as a poet and writer was recognised by one of his tutors, Syed Mir Hassan, and Iqbal would continue to study under him at the Scottish Mission College in Sialkot. The student became proficient in several languages and the skill of writing prose and poetry, and graduated in 1897. Following custom, at the age of 15 Iqbal's family arranged for him to be married to Karim Bibi, the daughter of an affluent Gujrati physician. The couple had two children: a daughter and a son, Aftab. Iqbal's third son died soon after birth. The husband and wife were unhappy in their marriage and eventually divorced in 1916.
Iqbal entered the Government College in Lahore where he studied philosophy, English literature and Arabic and obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree, graduating cum laude. He won a gold medal for topping his examination in philosophy. While studying for his masters’ degree, Iqbal came under the wing of Sir Thomas Arnold, a scholar of Islam and modern philosophy at the college. Arnold exposed the young man to Western culture and ideas and served as a bridge for Iqbal between the ideas of East and West.
At Sir Thomas’ encouragement, Iqbal travelled and spent many years studying in Europe. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from Trinity College at Cambridge in 1907, while simultaneously studying law at Lincoln's Inn, from where he qualified as a barrister in 1908. In Europe, he started writing poetry in Persian as well. Throughout his life, Iqbal would prefer writing in Persian as he believed it allowed him to fully express philosophical concepts, and it gave him a wider audience. It was while in England that he first participated in politics. Following the formation of the All-India Muslim League in 1906, Iqbal was elected to the executive committee of its British chapter in 1908. Together with two other politicians, Syed Hassan Bilgrami and Syed Ameer Ali, Iqbal sat on the subcommittee which drafted the constitution of the League. In 1907, Iqbal traveled to Germany to pursue a doctorate from the Faculty of Philosophy of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität at Munich. Working under the supervision of Friedrich Hommel, Iqbal published a thesis titled: The Development of Metaphysics in Persia.
Literary career
Upon his return to India in 1908, Iqbal took up an assistant professorship at the Government College in Lahore, but for financial reasons he relinquished it within a year to practice law. During this period, Iqbal's personal life was in turmoil. He divorced Karim Bibi in 1916, but provided financial support to her and their children for the rest of his life.
Iqbal's first work published in Urdu, the Bang-e-Dara (The Call of the Marching Bell) of 1924, was a collection of poetry written by him in three distinct phases of his life. The poems he wrote up to 1905, the year Iqbal left for England promote patriotism and is filled with the imagery of landscape, and includes the Tarana-e-Hind (The Song of India), popularly known as Saare Jahan Se Achcha and another poem Tarana-e-Milli (Anthem of the (Muslim) Community). The second set of poems date from between 1905 and 1908 when Iqbal studied in Europe and dwell upon the nature of European society, which he emphasised had lost spiritual and religious values.
Political career
While dividing his time between law and poetry, Iqbal had remained active in the Muslim League. He supported Indian involvement in World War I, as well as the Khilafat movement and remained in close touch with Muslim political leaders such as Maulana Mohammad Ali and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. He was a critic of the mainstream Indian National Congress, which he regarded as dominated by Hindus and was disappointed with the League when during the 1920s, it was absorbed in factional divides between the pro-British group led by Sir Muhammad Shafi and the centrist group led by Jinnah.
In November 1926, with the encouragement of friends and supporters, Iqbal contested for a seat in the Punjab Legislative Assembly from the Muslim district of Lahore, and defeated his opponent by a margin of 3,177 votes. He supported the constitutional proposals presented by Jinnah with the aim of guaranteeing Muslim political rights and influence in a coalition with the Congress, and worked with the Aga Khan and other Muslim leaders to mend the factional divisions and achieve unity in the Muslim League.
Relationship with Jinnah
Ideologically separated from Congress Muslim leaders, Iqbal had also been disillusioned with the politicians of the Muslim League owing to the factional conflict that plagued the League in the 1920s. Iqbal came to believe that Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the only political leader capable of preserving this unity and fulfilling the League's objectives on Muslim political empowerment. Building a strong, personal correspondence with Jinnah, Iqbal was an influential force in convincing Jinnah to end his self-imposed exile in London, return to India and take charge of the League. Iqbal firmly believed that Jinnah was the one capable of drawing Indian Muslims to the League and maintaining party unity before the British and the Congress.
Death
Iqbal Mausoleum
Iqbal is commemorated widely in Pakistan, where he is regarded as the ideological founder of the state. His Tarana-e-Hind is a song that is widely used in India as a patriotic song speaking of communal harmony. His birthday is annually commemorated in Pakistan as Iqbal Day and is a national holiday. The name of Iqbal occurs in many public institutions, including the Allama Iqbal Medical College, Lahore, Allama Iqbal Open University and the Allama Iqbal International Airport in Lahore
Influence and Legacy
Allama Iqbal is regarded as one of the most influential Muslim poets and scholars of the 20th century throughout the Muslim World. His concept of Islamic revival did not only lead to the creation of Pakistan, but also to the Iranian Revolution which he had prophesied. In Iran he is thought of as one the great Persian Poets, and in Pakistan as the greatest Urdu poet of all time, and is regarded as the national poet and hero, who was responsible for the creation of the first Muslim Nation.
Allama Iqbal in Heidelberg
Heidelberg
There is a fascinating piece written by M.A.H. Hobohm called Muhammad Iqbal and Germany in which he provides some wonderful details of Iqbal's stay in Heidelberg. This essay is worth reading in its entirety. Iqbal stayed for some time in the Pension Scherer which was a boarding house for foreign students. At this boarding house Miss Emma Wegenast was Iqbal's German language tutor. Iqbal corresponded with Fraulein Wegenast for several years after returning to Lahore. Hobohm has copies of 27 such letters which includes 2 postcards and this collection reveals not only Iqbal's fondness for his former tutor, but also his love for German literary culture and his affection for Heidelberg.
Sign for the Iqbal Ufer Bank of the Neckar
Iqbal plaque
The plaque reads:
Mohammad Iqbal
1877 – 1938
National Philosopher, Poet
and Spiritual Father of Pakistan
lived here in the year 1907.
Aik Shaam in Bang-e-Dara is a poem of ambience and conjures a lovely atmosphere in which the poet standing at the edge of the river at night experiences a calm and peaceful communion with nature. The sub-heading says, Darya-e-Neckar (Heidelberg) ke kinare par. It is not until the powerful last verse that an inner turmoil and sadness is suddenly hinted at, revealing the heart of the poet at odds with his serene surroundings.
Besides the Heidelberg reference within the text above to
http://writtenencounters.blogspot.com/2010/04/allama-iqbal-in-heidelberg.html
material has also been gleaned from the site of the International Iqbal Society:
http://www.iqbal.com.pk/
9. KumKum
KumKum chose Shakti Chattopadhyay (1934 – 1995) who was an eminent modern Bengali poet and novelist. He appeared on the Bengali literary scene after other moderns like Jibanananda Das, Buddhadev Basu, and Sudhindranath Dutta. Modern poetry was quite the vogue in his time, as Tagore’s poetry had fallen out of favour – though not his songs.
Shakti Chattopadhay was born in Calcutta in the year 1934. He had a Commerce undergraduate degree from City College, Calcutta. For his post-graduate studies, he chose Bengali Literature and joined Presidency College, Calcutta.
He started to compose poems at an early age. A few of his early poems were published in a paper edited by Buddhadev Basu. Prof. Basu invited him to join the newly-formed Comparative Literature Department of Jadavpur University, an offer Shakti declined.
During this time, Shakti Chattopadhay became an active member of the Indian Communist Party. Poverty forced him to discontinue his studies. In his early life, he did many odd jobs to keep himself going. But he never gave up writing. He worked for the Ananda Bazar Patrika newspaper for a long time. Shakti Chattopadhyay wrote nearly 50 books, both poems and novels. He also received many awards, and earned well from his writings. But, poverty remained his lifelong state, because he did not know how to manage his money. He died in 1995.
In this poem the day ends on a sad note, just as the Iqbal poem does. But what a contrast between the spareness of a modern poet who masks his personal feelings, and a classical poet like Iqbal who lays it all out!
Compare Shakti:
The day ends in a sad note
As if all were futile...
with Iqbal:
Ae Dil! Tu Bhi Khamosh Ho Ja
Aghosh Mein Gam Ko Le Ke So Ja
10. Geeta
Geeta
Geeta chose the French Symbolist poet Jules Laforgue (1860 – 1887) who was born in Uruguay but did his main work in France and died there. He was a master of lyrical irony and one of the inventors of vers libre (“free verse”). The impact of his work was felt by several 20th-century American poets, including T.S. Eliot, and he also influenced the work of the Surrealists. His critical essays, though somewhat neglected, are also notable.
Jules Laforgue
Laforgue was brought up by relatives at Tarbes in France from 1866 to 1876; then he joined his family in Paris. After finishing his schooling at the Lycée Fontanes, he attended the lectures of the literary critic and historian Hippolyte Taine at the École des Beaux-Arts. Through the writer Paul Bourget he became secretary to Charles Ephrussi, an art collector and editor of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, who introduced him to Impressionist painting. In November 1881 he was appointed reader to the Empress Augusta in Berlin and remained in Germany for almost five years, during which time he wrote most of his works. He married an English woman, Leah Lee, in London on Dec. 31, 1886, and they returned to Paris, where Laforgue, poverty-stricken, died of tuberculosis the following year.
In the verse of Les Complaintes (1885), L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886; “The Imitation of Our Lady the Moon”), and Le Concile féerique (1886; “The Fairy Council”), Laforgue gave ironical expression to his obsession with death, his loneliness, and his boredom with daily routine. He was attracted by Buddhism and German philosophy, especially by Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimism and Edward von Hartmann’s theory of the unconscious. Inspired by the example of Tristan Corbière and Arthur Rimbaud, he forged new words, experimented with common speech, and combined popular songs and music-hall tags with philosophic and scientific terms to create an imagery that appears surprisingly modern. His search for new rhythms culminated in the vers libre that he and his friend Gustave Kahn invented almost simultaneously.
He reinterpreted William Shakespeare, Richard Wagner, Gustave Flaubert, and Stéphane Mallarmé in a collection of short stories, Moralités légendaires (1887; Six Moral Tales From Jules Laforgue). His art criticism, published in the Symbolist reviews and subsequently in Mélanges posthumes (1923), testifies to his remarkable understanding of the Impressionist vision.
One of Laforgue’s main claims to fame, as Joe noted, was his influence on T.S. Eliot, which is set out in the blog post of the poetry session on Dec 7, 2018 where you will find this sentence and much else:
“But the greatest influence which he [T.S. Eliot] himself acknowledged came from Jules Laforgue, whom he referred to in these words:
If not quite the greatest French poet since Baudelaire … certainly the most important technical innovator.
[T.S. Eliot, Introduction to Selected Poems of Ezra Pound, 1928]”
The poem Geeta chose expresses extreme sadness (the title itself is Triste, triste) and loneliness. The first stanza ends:
Comme la vie est triste et coule lentement.
How sad is life and how slowly it flows.
And the last line reinforces the pathos:
Comme nous sommes seuls ! Comme la vie est triste !
How alone we are! How sad is life!
In between there is a reaching out to golden dandelions and eternal stars, but it all in vain as grief closes in.
11. Shoba
Shoba
Shoba chose two delightful short poems by Robert Desnos, Le pélican and L’oiseau du Colorado. She read it in French, a language in which she is fluent. That made it all the more irresistible, for the rhymes (one imagines the poems are meant for children) can’t be sampled otherwise.
Le pélican is sung here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2W95yuU7JiE
and recited here:
https://youtu.be/nrpuXVNvODo
Here is a voice file for L’oiseau du Colorado:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYUgM22hhZA
which analyses the prosody and illustrates the many objects referred to. Brilliantly illustrated as it is, you’ll learn what are ‘roudoudous’ and ‘dragées’ and ‘navet’; the poem is really making fun of Americans who are rich and lack nothing (!) There is also a capsule biography with a picture of Desnos in Nazi concentration camp stripes. The plaque, erected over his last residence before being deported to a concentration camp, says that he met his death because ‘he loved freedom, progress and justice.’
Kavita narrated her experience of the French aversion to the English language. Being separated from the rest of the family in the Paris Métro and not knowing how to get back to their hotel, they asked in English, but no one responded. Then they had a bright idea: why not ask in Malayalam, ‘Cheta, enganney a pokunnathu …’ Immediately their interlocutor responded in English!
Robert Desnos biography (1900–1945)
Robert Desnos
Desnos developed his writing, and took to the automatic writing techniques for which surrealism became famous. Desnos’s work from this period includes Rose Sélavy (1922), a collection of aphorisms and sayings. During the 1920s, Desnos also published in the surrealist journal Littérature. He explored the unconscious and the role of dreams in lyric poetry. Breton was especially impressed with Desnos’s ability to enter a trance state and speak lines of automatic poetry. Robert Desnos only needed to close his eyes, and he would begin talking prophetically.
During the 1920s, Desnos was extremely productive and wrote poetry, prose, reviews and essays on contemporary cinema, and scripts and adaptations for motion pictures. His books of lyric prose include Deuil pour deuil (1924; translated as Mourning for Mourning in 1992), La Liberté ou l’amour! (1927; trans. Liberty or Love! 1993), and other works. These are at once playful and shocking, toying with the logic of grammar, language, and sound to explore new realms of conscious and unconscious creativity.
Desnos’s poetry of the 1920s was also shaped by his unrequited love for the singer and actress Yvonne George. Many of the lyrics in poetry collections such as Les Ténèbres (1927) and Corps et Biens (1930) are love poems to George.
By the 1930s, Desnos had drifted from surrealist circles; in his Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1929), Breton accused him of narcissism but Breton’s own increasingly militant Marxism in turn alienated Desnos. He continued to write poetry in the 1930s, collected in the volume Les Sans-cou (1934), but he also began to write for radio and continued to develop as a journalist. His radio plays from this period include La Grande Complainte de Fantômas (1933), directed by Antonin Artaud, and an adaption of a poem by Walt Whitman, Le Salut au Monde (1936), among others. In the 1930s Desnos fell in love with Youki Foujita and began writing for wider audiences; his poetry became more lyrical and less hermetic. In 1936, Desnos wrote a poem-a-day for the entire year. He also composed cantatas and poems for children, two of which Shoba read to the group, Le pélican and L’oiseau du Colorado.
When World War II broke out in 1939, Desnos was drafted as a sergeant. His wartime journalism appeared in magazines such as Europe, Commune, and Ce-Soir. In 1940, he started writing for the newspaper Aujourd’hui. By the early 1940s, Desnos was working for the French Résistance, passing along sensitive information he received at the newspaper to Resistance fighters. Under pseudonyms he also published articles critical of the Occupation. The Nazis eventually discovered Desnos’s role in the Résistance and, in February 1944, the Gestapo arrested him. Desnos was moved among various concentration camps and died, of typhus, at Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, a few days after it was liberated. Here’s picture of his wife Youki to whom he continued to write letters filled with longing and gratitude.
Youki Desnos
Theres’ a marvellous story of how his animated surrealist spirit overrode the certain execution of a group of prisoners who were being driven to the gas chambers. But the poems he wrote in the concentration camps were destroyed by accident, it seems.
Desnos’s work continues to exert an influence on French poetry and art, as well as poets who write in English. The Voice: Selected Poems (1972) was first translated and published in English by William Kulik and Carole Frankel. Other translations of Desnos’s work into English include The Night of Loveless Nights (1974, trans. Fred Beake), The Selected Poems of Robert Desnos (1991, trans. Carolyn Forché and William Kulik), The Circle and the Star: Selected Poems of Robert Desnos (2000, trans. Todd Sanders), and The Secret Book for Youki: And Other Poems by Robert Desnos (2001, trans. Todd Sanders). The majority of Desnos’s papers are held in the archives of the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, in Paris.
(this biography is lifted from poetryfoundation.org)
12. Kavita
Kavita
The Urdu poet Kaifi Azmi (1919 – 2002) was chosen by Kavita for his poem, Makan (House). The poem is displayed in English translation side by side with its Devnagiri version and the original Urdu Nastaliq script at Kaifi Azmi’s website. There is also a sound file there of him reciting it. The poet dubbed Balraj Sahni who recites the poem in the film Sone ki Chidiya (1958).
The context of the poem may be read differently by those who know Kaifi sah’b and his socialist ideology; he wrote poems often to universalise the suffering of the labourer and the peasant. Thus the lines
इन मकानों को ख़बर है न मकीनों को ख़बर
उन दिनों की जो गुफ़ाओं में गुज़ारे हम ने
…
सो रहे ख़ाक पे हम शोरिश-ए-तामीर लिये (shorish = tumult, thamir = construction)
are clear indications these are footpath dwelling workers he is writing about, who build mansions for the rich, but themselves sleep in squalor.
Kaifi Azmi has provided the lyrics for famous Hindi films like Haqeeqat, Pakeezah, and so on. He was interviewed by Doordashan in 1999. The above picture is a still captured from that interview.
In the interview he also recites his famous poem for women, Aurat. It was written in 1940 at the height of the Independence struggle, and tells women this is not the time for ‘muhabbat’ but to heed the call to arms, and they too must pitch in.
Uth meri jaan mere saath hi chalna hai tujhe.
Later his daughter, Shabana Azmi, took up this poem as a signature poem for women’s empowerment during the march for women’s rights after the 2012 Delhi Nirbhaya gang rape on Dec 16.
qadr ab tak terii tarriikh ne jaanii hii nahiin
tujh mein shole bhii hain bas ashkfishaanii hii nahiin
tu haqiiqat bhii hai dilchasp kahaanii hii nahiin
terii hastii bhii hai ik chiiz javaanii hii nahiin
apnii tarrikh kaa unvaan badalnaa hai tujhe
uth merii jaan mere saath hii chalnaa hai tujhe
History has not known your worth thus far
You have burning embers too, not merely tears
You're reality too, not a mere amusing anecdote
Your personality is something too, not just your youth
You've to change the title of your history
Get up, my love, you have to walk with me.
Thus Kaifi Azmi foresees that the destiny of woman is not to be the appendage of a man, but to walk boldly alongside him.
You can go to a fairly extensive website
http://www.azmikaifi.com/
where you will find Kaifi Azmi’s biography, collections of his poems and lyrics, tributes and interviews.
The Poems
Here is a Link to the PDF file of all the poems recited at this session.
No comments:
Post a Comment