About the Book
The essays and transcripts of Dilip Chitre brought together here are valuable in themselves as they offer a commentary on the Indian sense of tradition and the contemporary attitudes to literature. Every piece is of interest in itself. But, their greater worth lies in that they articulate the perspective of one of our most admirable poets on many issues that mattered to him. Taken together, they provide a basis for fathoming his poetry and should help us in making a more nuanced sense of it. Chitre was a fascinating poet, but it is not possible to say that his poetry was easily accessible to most of his readers. Like W. B. Yeats, he weaves in his poems experiences that arise in a given moment (such as the felling of a tree in his father’s house) together with many layers of timeless human quests and anxieties. He brings together silence and euphoria in an imagistic mix that is difficult to name with any precision. It is hence that this
volume of his comments, essays, lectures and other texts should be of importance for the lovers of Dilip Chitre’s literary works.
– Ganesh N Devy
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All that I Wanna Do (English)
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Dear Sanjeev
I read your poem yesterday ( last evening). Globalisation, and the consequent private Americanisation, corporatisation, computers, mobiles, mall culture and the decline of humanity in every aspect of life is your concern, and mine too.
That you and I have felt that comes with this new kind of life, and the regret that we feel because we cannot deter this decline or escape from it, the sarcastic presentation of the never-ending story of our contemporary miseries appear in your in the poem one after another; and interestingly (your) style neither accepts any poetic form nor it is written in any poetic language, and just as you were exhausted while carving a new definition of poetry, I was exhausted while reading your poem – this is what precisely I want to tell you by writing this exhausting second sentence.
What you have expressed in this poem is the philosophy of this new way of life.
Of course, I think it’s significant that while presenting this philosophy afresh, you haven’t pretended that you are a philosopher!
Yours
Hemant Divate
August 28, 2004
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Salt & Pepper
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Salt and Pepper, Sukrita’s selected poems, present an eloquent, word-induced
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multisensory, reflective silence dwells memory that pesters and heals, and
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mere unmasking of a past. What adds luminosity to Sukrita’s densely textured
poems is the layered and fluid exploration of life experience, without any sense
of closure or finality. — Shafey Kidwai—-
Words are not just words, there is a long journey of emotion, thought and
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Madhavi Apte: Sukrita’s poems are on the one hand illusive and on the other potent like her
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and the emotional, personal and impersonal. The poems are grounded and yet ethereal.
Basudhara Roy : Many-layered, teasing in its apparent simplicity, and haunting in its
profundity…Animated by her painter’s consciousness, Sukrita’s images are terse, pictorial
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Where Is the Mouth of That Word?
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I breathed. I looked up. I saw her standing in the line of fire, “simply standing/on the last line of
this page”, asking, as she looked me in the eye, “Where are you reading from?”And that, dear readers, who are about to encounter Maryam’s poems for the first time, is the
question.
You can Google her, you can hear her speak 1 , you can explore her intersecting engagements as an essayist, translator, and academic.
But first, you can find her here, as I did, in a selection of her poems – from early to later, from the spoken word to the “vocal infection of the page”, from rant to reflection, plea to command.
You could, in obeyance, “Turn the page, and leave!”
You could be sentenced
to an expired word:
(Silence)You could hear the tanin (echo) of Sepehri’s hich (nothingness) reverberating at the same frequency with which you see Dali’s ‘The Echo of the Void’ hovering in your line of vision.
You could, and you will.
For now, all that matters is knowing (asking!) where you read from.
And as for the title we eventually chose – where is the mouth of that word?
Wherever there is one – fearless enough to speak it.– Sampurna Chattarji
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Three Stories – Jibanananda Das
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Reading Jibanananda Das’s stories is like entering straight into the middle-class Bengali mind with its desire, ambition, morbidity and despair. Through the narratives around three men whose melancholy defines the structure of these three stories, the writer re-examines the concepts of success and failure, desire and fulfillment, love and weariness, ennui and death. While the insights are those of a poet, these stories marked by Jibanananda’s deep involvement with Bengali landscape, cuisine and culture, transcend his lyrical impulse to become proper, if technically innovative, short stories with the touch of a master of the genre. Chandak Chattarji’s English versions have been able to capture the provincial setting and style of the original narratives keeping intact their nuanced psychological implications and larger insights into the human condition.’ – K. Satchidanandan ‘It has been a privilege to discover Das the writer of fiction through Chandak Chattarji’s elegant and sensitive translation of three of the master’s short stories, ‘Chhaya Nat’ (‘Shadow Play’), ‘Gram o Shohorer Galpo’ (‘Tale of City and Village’), and ‘Bilash’ (which retains its original title here).’ – Ranjit Hoskote
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Variations on Silence
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Throughout Variations on Silence, Nadia Mifsud draws us into intimate scenes and gestures,
as if overhearing lovers mid-conversation. The central figure – almost mythic in scale – is
silence itself, which Mifsud imbues with weight, texture, physical presence. Silence shelters,
stirs, shakes, unwinds, “tastes / of red soil and conifer.” Miriam Calleja’s translation conveys
the ache and longing of that silence with a sensual clarity rare in English. A fabulous book.
– John Wall Barger, The Elephant of SilenceAs Dante said, love is what moves the sun and the other stars – but it is also what flows
through all things, binding them together. This is what breathes in the silences – namely, in
the poems – of Nadia Mifsud : a listening rooted in love, which through love transforms and
reintegrates lovers into the cosmos, restoring the world to something deeply connected to
our humanity. Calleja’s admirable translation – herself a poet – captures this dynamic with
striking clarity and preserves it as the central energy of the work. The encounter between
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a cohesive and coherent work, held together by a vision both profound and vast. Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, Rilke’s Duino Elegies… The poetry found in this book is capable of
traversing time and resisting it, of crossing space to bind us – irrevocably – to this cosmos,
and in that bond, to reveal the secret of life.– Pietro Federico, Most of the Stars
Every verb in Nadia Mifsud's work shimmers, echoes, and rappels down the cliffside of a
stanza. Valences expand through repetition; "waves like jaws" locate the oceanic motion. One physically hears and feels the island of Malta in the tension between the isolation,
refrain, and the sea returning to shore, empty-handed. Miriam Calleja's attentive translation brings these affects and "sea-scented places" into English without forsaking the resonances and echoes of "cockleshells" past. Variations on Silence touches the hem where displacement circles the idea of place and results in lyric. The mode is modern; the echoes are ancient; the book is irresistible.– Alina Stefanescu, My Heresies
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ON THE BRINK OF THE ABYSS
$16About the Book
The fascinating aspect of Zingonia’s poem is the paradoxical unity of the two qualitatively different domains of the earthly and the spiritual. The two are interfluent. Though the culmination of the poem is in the divine love, I prefer not to read the poem in a linear way like in linear spiritual narratives such as Pilgrim’s Progress or Divina Comedia. Here, as in TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, past and future always move to the end – what is always present – and the end is in the beginning. It is pointless to trace the narrative or paraphrase Zingonia’s On the Brink of Abyss – a series of epiphanic moments of poetry at its intensest. The only justice a reader and critic can do to this wonder of a poem is to resonate with those ineffable epiphanies that have somehow slipped into language. What more can I do except to share with readers the way I
resonate with those precious moments of epiphanic agony and ecstasy. And congratulate Zingonia on this rare achievement which has no parallel in any poetry I know of.
– H.S. Shivaprakash
Poet, playwright, literary scholar and translator -
Lighthouse for drowning memories
$16About the Book
It’s in Delhi, dystopian as ever, that Sujatha Mathai continues to live and write today, and I fear her words—“I cannot save my city / Against the degradation of dust”—will echo long into the future, acquiring new meanings. And yet I’m so happy to read a new book of hers, to see that she’s still writing her poems sharp and clear as glass, full of sympathy for the world and those who suffer. It makes me feel that literature survives and helps us survive, that it carries more continuity than we think.
— Vivek Narayanan
Assistant Professor, Department of English, George Mason University
