Poetry for every day of the year, for all seasons
As we celebrated 200 years of Indian poetry in English last year, and a much longer tradition of poetry in translation — it isn’t surprising that it has been raining anthologies.
A decade-old, gargantuan poetry project by Gulzar came to fruition with the mammoth anthology, A Poem A Day, containing, across languages, the best known names in Indian poetry. This marvellously produced boxed edition is rich and diverse — featuring 365 “memorable” poems, one for each day of the year. The book, spanning the last 70 years of writing in India — since India’s Independence
in 1947 — contains the works of 279 poets in 34 Indian languages, across nearly 1000 pages. The text appears bilingually — in English original (or in English translation from other tongues), and in Hindustani — the latter translated entirely by Gulzar. This vast selection covers diverse regions from “north, south, west and east of India, as well as the North-east, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan.”
Unsurprisingly, the bigger languages dominate the volume — but the inclusion of some of the smaller, often neglected languages (Aadi, A.chik, Bhutanese, Dogri, Ladakhi, Tibetan, Khasi, Kokborok, Konkani, Kunkana, Sambhalpuri, Sinhala, etc.) make this book unique. The book opens with a powerful and visceral poem, ‘Nectar,’ by Haldar Nag in the Kosli/sambhalpuri language -- a clarion call for positivity in these grim times, imploring with folkloric wisdom: “Let the seven seas / across the world/ yield only nectar.// … // Let the nectar flow down/ from within the noble act / of human goodness.” Another poem translated from a little known language, Kokborok, is Shefali Debrarma’s Lamination that covers her STSC identity card, alluding to the larger notions of what identity and surveillance means, implies or impedes.
Poets, varied and mutlifarious are happily housed within the spine of a single book. Gulzar’s own lines: “A few of my belongings/ are still in your possession” provide a hint, that these 365 poems will remain in the readers’ possession as his legacy. A Poem a Day is any litterateur’s dream, a true collector’s item.
Singing in the Dark brings together the response of the finest poets from India and around the world to the current Covid crisis and the lockdown. Echoing Bertolt Brecht’s Motto and Thomas Nashe’s A Litany in Time of Plague, the 100+ poets
Eds K Satchidanandan & Nishi Chawla
376pp, ₹499
Penguin Random House here “reflect upon a crisis that has dramatically altered our lives, and laid bare our vulnerabilities. The poems capture all its dimensions: the trauma of solitude, the unexpected transformation in the expression of interpersonal relationships, the even sharper visibility of the class divide, the marvellous revival of nature and the profound realization of the transience of human existence. The moods vary from quiet contemplation and choking anguish to suppressed rage and cautious celebration in an anthology that serves as an aesthetic archive of a strange era in human history.”
In the book, H Perez Grandes’s ironic poem Zoom — “My zoom, my animal, my geography” — plays upon the current human-non-human dichotomy. The American poet laureate, Joy Harjo’s I Give You Back is an anthem, a plea to the ancestors to bring back a better world, a song of forgiveness, a cry to invoke peace, harmony and love. The older and younger generation of Indian poets are well represented here. In Plague Thoughts Enter The Next Phase, Vijay Seshadri, in a powerful matter-of-fact way, remarks, “‘I just don’t want to talk about it’// OK OK let’s not// … // Run run, says the plague// … // [as] Graphs chart little and big dots across the world”. The poems in this urgent anthology act as a moving and important testament for our current times.
Sahitya Akademi recently put out two anthologies of Indian Poetry in English — The Lie of the Land, which attempts an alternative mapping of the poetry terrain by including hitherto neglected voices writers, and Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians containing nearly 70 young poets. Spread over 250 pages, the latter anthology acts as Volume 2 to The Harpercollins Book of English Poetry [by Indians] that I’d edited in 2012, that contained 85 poets.
The Nobel Prize for Literature for 2020 was awarded to a poet, Louis Glück. So in spite of a bleak year, there has been a vibrant celebration of poetry — in a Brechtian way: “In the dark times, will there also be singing?/ Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.”