Myths and modernity
At a poetry reading in New Delhi last winter, Mani Rao read out her interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita, translated by her into English. Instead of the soporific sing-song tune most of us are familiar with, she exposed the inter-textual tension in the poem that is less about performing one’s duty and more about a war-mongering god. She broke down the easy tune of the couplets in which the poem is written into something fraught with war cries and the premonition of death. In the volume under review, Rao turns her scalpel-sharp language to myths from a different nation — ancient Greece — with equally startling results.
For decades, Rao has been reinterpreting the Gita as well as Kalidasa for the 21st-century reader (by her own claim) as well as, of course, claiming newer beachheads of contemporary poetry with an immediately recognisable language and style. This chapbook — a slim one, with only 20 poems — will not come as a surprise to anyone, especially since the language is replete with characteristic Rao humour. In the opening poem, “Sing to Me”, she begins by appealing to the Muses, but not seriously, unlike epic poets from Homer to Milton: “O’ muses excuse / this non-descript call I / Wonder who / among you apt who / interested.”
Unlike epic poets who expected the Muses to breathe poetry into their words so that they can soar with no uncommon flight, Rao expects other things from the Muses — like the poet, they must also be multilingual: “Greek and Sanskrit / A must.” A little later, in a footnote, she addresses the reader, explaining why she has abstained from introducing the characters that populate her book: “I trust you have met the cast of this poem already, or— with the internet so ubiquitous, please get acquainted on your own.” In one stroke, Rao demands as much of the reader as they demand of her; these poems are not a translation but a reinterpretation.
Mythologies intertwine in these poems like threads — the myth of Philomela, from Ovid’s The Metamorphoses, is married to the disrobing of Draupadi in the Mahabharata and the abduction of Sita in the Ramayana. All three episodes are about the rape or attempted rape of women. The king of Thrace, Tereus, lusting after Philomela, his wife Procne’s sister, rapes her and keeps her imprisoned in a tower and cuts off her tongue. She weaves the narrative into an elaborate tapestry and sends it to Procne, who, in revenge, kills Tereus’s son and feeds the meat to him. Readers will recognise the similarities of offence and bloodlust in the narratives.
Rao writes, in the voice of Philomela’s father, King Pandion of Athens. The poem is called “My Daughter Philomela”: “Five husbands gawk / while Draupadi shuddering… / how to be / wrapped Krishna”. The words in this segment of the poem are separated by long spaces — a technique Rao has used previously. If one were to imagine epic poetry to be oral rather than written, the spaces probably indicate the impossibility of describing an event such as the rape of a woman. The last line of the poem is possibly a prescription for making a woman more powerful: “Parent, place the snakes on Medusa’s head.”
This intermingling of myths continues till the last poem of the chapbook, “Poem, Sisyphus”. In the footnote, Rao writes: “You know how Sisyphus had to roll a massive rock up a steep hill, and how it would roll back down again. But, do you know, a day in the life of Brahma = 4.32 billion years. So is a night. Brahma’s life of a hundred years (36,000 days) = 311.04 trillion human years. Human life is not manifest during Brahma’s night.” This is a sort of a philosophical realisation — more Hindu than Greek — of the cyclical nature of existence, the impossibility of existence.
“Pebble, Sisyphus / On a beach,” writes Rao. “Wave / Wave / Wave / Polishing.” With great economy, she replicates the futility of Sisyphus’s task — that, incidentally, makes him happy — with the condition of a pebble on a beach, polished, eroded, by the relentless motion of the waves. The imagery is not merely visual, but also aural; one can imagine the monotonous motion of the sea, and of life. The only complaint one has of this book is that it is so slim.