Poetry Session – June 20, 2025

The first image revealed by the Vera Rubin telescope shows the Trifid and Lagoon nebulae in the constellation Sagittarius 5,000 light years away. The stunning detail comes from its 3,600 megapixel camera

 

To our delight readers chose a varied collection of poets, from Nobel prize winners (Glück) to those even more distinguished (Auden) who failed the inscrutable Nobel test; from satirical modernists like Ferlinghetti to humorous poets who cast a comedic light on humanity (Milligan). At one extreme we had an astronomer-poet who sang lyrically about the furthest reaches of the universe (Rebecca Elson) and at the other, stately Victorian verse describing how the mythical god Pan crafted the Pan flute by notching the reeds in a river bed (Elizabeth Barrett Browning).

The W.B. Yeats statue by Rowan Gillespie in Sligo has Yeats's poems inscribed on it – over 150 "cuts" from his poems are imprinted in positive relief on the statue's surface. One notable inscription is "I made my song a coat"

KumKum introduced a new class of poems called Ekphrastic poems, which respond to a work of visual art, creating a dialogue between the written word and the image. She took a famous example by W.H. Auden depicting the Fall of Icarus in a painting by Pieter Brueghel. As it turned out the poem Joe read before her could also be classed as ekphrastic, because it takes off from the visual imagery of Marc Chagall’s paining Equestrienne of a girl riding with a boy on a white horse with a violin in its mouth.

Equestrienne, 1931 by Marc Chagall, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Why do we advertise ourselves as “A group of readers of literature in English, poetry and fiction”? Is it because we wish to ignore other languages that flourish in India? Is it because our knowledge of other literatures is so slight that we dare not tread there?

Looking through the posts in our blog which have preserved a wealth of detail about our readings and discussions over the years, you will find poems and novels from five continents – exhibited in English translation. It is not that we are ignorant of the riches in the original. You will find in the blog original translations of verse from languages like Urdu, Hindi, and Bengali. Readers have sung ghazals. There are even original translations from French and Spanish. We encourage readers to read in the original language, so long as a translation is provided into English for common enjoyment.

At KRG we have a great desire to know and appreciate the vessels that hold human culture, of which language, music, and art form an irreducible distillate. For us language is the primary vehicle through which we engage in that quest; finding pleasure in it, we sprinkle it from time to time with music and art. 

Kamala Das - popularly known by her pseudonyms Madhavikutty and Ami. She is prominent in Indian literature for her poetry and short stories

There is a trend now among prominent politicians exuding an illiberal brand of ultra-nationalism to assert that Indians speaking in English will soon be cowering in shame. Presumably, reading is still okay, and if so, one cannot do better than point them to Kamala Das who wrote her short stories in Malayalam under the pen name Madhavikutty, and her poems in English under her own name. Here’s how she refuted critics of English in her poem titled Introduction:

… Why not let me speak in
Any language I like? The language I speak,
Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses
All mine, mine alone.
It is half English, halfIndian, funny perhaps, but it is honest,
It is as human as I am human, don't
You see? It voices my joys, my longings, my
Hopes, and it is useful to me as cawing
Is to crows or roaring to the lions, it
Is human speech, the speech of the mind that is
Here and not there, a mind that sees and hears and
Is aware. 

(https://kochiread.blogspot.com/2018/07/kamala-das-her-life-through-poetry.html)

The Vegetarian by Han Kang - May 23, 2025

The Vegetarian first edition English

Though the title of this Man Booker International Prize-winning novel is The Vegetarian, it is not about vegetarianism at all. Rather it is about mental health, child abuse, choice, and conformance to norms.

We follow a woman named Yeong-hye who decides to stop eating meat after having horrible dreams. This decision of hers, especially in a predominantly meat-eating culture like Korea, fragments the family with far reaching effect. The story is in three parts, each part from the perspective of three people in her life. The first part titled The Vegetarian is narrated in first person by her husband who is always referred to formally as Mr Cheong, in a way keeping him apart from the intimate family structure. The second part is from the perspective of her unnamed brother-in-law and is titled Mongolian Mark, and the third is in first-person narrative by Yeong-hye’s sister, In-hye.

Seoul panoramic view – a megacity of 10 million, pronounced 'soul’

Though it causes so much tumult in the family, no one tries to discover the reason for Yeong-hye’s decision to turn vegetarian.  Her family, especially her abusive father, tries to force her to eat meat with disastrous effect. She mentions many times that she has a dream, but we are left to discover the dream and the possible reason for the decision, in the few portions in the book where Yeong-hye is given a voice. 

The abuse she has suffered and the trauma that she has gone through comes out in bits and pieces. Her husband abandons her; her brother-in-law sexually abuses her when she is at her most vulnerable emotional point, and her parents refuse to have anything to do with her. At a time, when she needs the most support, she has only her sister In-hye who stands by her and attempts to make sense of her situation. As Yeong-hye descends further into her insanity, In-hye realises that it could have been herself in the same situation if the circumstances had been different.

The translation was very patchy with syntax errors and use of very British slang which jarred with the text. Translations of novels are always difficult to judge especially as we have no knowledge of the original text. Does the translator replace words in one language with those of another or does he/she smooth out the narrative with the usages of the translated language? Then what happens to the idioms and speech conventions of the original language? Whatever the case, the story should have a smooth flow, which was missing. It could have been subjected to a tighter editing, and that felt strange as the Man Booker International is for books in translation. One could not agree with the reviewer of the New Statesman whose commendation was: “elegantly translated into bone-spare English”

In the end, it is a disturbing book, which almost none of the KRG members liked, but it still led to very lively discussion and debate as we tried to make sense of it.