Friday 12 April 2024
Slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut – Mar 26, 2024
Saturday 16 March 2024
Poetry Session, 26 February, 2024
When readers at KRG choose their poems they cast a wide net. On this occasion we had a Malayalam poet, Edasseri Govindan Nair, represented by a poem. Malayalam poems are usually sung or chanted as chollal, but here it was delivered as the English translation of a modern poem of hope and longing; hope for the future made possible by a new bridge to transform the countryside, and longing for the old days. Other Malayalam poets who have been recited at KRG are K. Satchidanandan, Balachandran Chullikad, O.N.V. Kurup, Sugatha Kumari, Balamani Amma (mother of the poet Kamala Das), Kumaran Asan, and Chemmanam Chacko.
When one of our readers, Kavita, chose the ever popular Maya Angelou, Joe raised the question of who has been the most recited poet at KRG – after William Shakespeare, of course. The answer is Keats (13), then Eliot (11) and numerous Romantic poets with 8 occurrences. But how is it that Rumi, the most widely published poet in modern times, scarcely finds mention in the pages of KRG’s blog? He wrote lines like this (translated by Farrukh Dhondy)
T.S. Eliot, ever popular at KRG was represented by two short poems that did not require the usual annotation to lay bare obscure meanings. In the first poem the poet hears the noise of plates in a basement kitchen rattling somewhere as he gazes on the street from a window, and then
The brown waves of fog toss up to me
Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,
The second poem featured a fictional cousin of modern mores who smokes and dances all the fashionable dances. The poet holds up the censorious sight of Matthew and Waldo (that is, Matthew Arnold and Ralph Waldo Emerson) trained on Nancy Ellicott – not that she cares. The last line (‘The army of unalterable law.’) is taken from another poet, Meredith, but Eliot is contrasting his reference ironically with modern devil-may-care attitudes.
Mary Oliver, the Pulitzer prize-winning poet whose rapturous odes to nature and animal life brought her critical acclaim
Mary Oliver was another outstanding presence at the session when Saras chose two of her poems. We know her poems from three earlier occasions when she has been presented. She is also the marvellous author of a handbook of poetry, that lays bare the mechanics of how a poem is built, from meter and rhyme, to form and diction, being imbued with sound and sense. Mary Oliver employs wonderful examples, ancient and new, to illustrate her exposition. It will surprise no one that six of the ten poets chosen at this session were women.Most prominent of these is The New Colossus, a Petrarchan sonnet (rhyming abba abba cdc dcd). The entire sonnet is engraved on a plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour and lines 10 and 11 are often quoted:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free
These words are a tribute to the diversity of America, which has been under threat from the masses who seek to enter America from its southern border. The press of poor people entering from Mexico is no longer a welcome sight to Democrats or Republicans. The original Colossus of Rhodes was a towering statue of Helios the sun god, built in 280 BCE to commemorate the defence of Rhodes against the attack of Demetrius. The sonnet of Emma Lazarus contrasts this ancient colossus with the Statue of Liberty presented by France as a symbol of liberty illuminating the world (La Liberté éclairant le monde).
Tuesday 20 February 2024
Mother of 1084 by Mahasweta Devi, Jan 30, 2024
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naxalbari_uprising
Naxalism and Naxalites were terms in use at the time, and spread to some cities, where violence took the form of killing persons in power and snatching rifles from armed policemen deployed to quell the violence on streets. Joe used to live at the time in the area named as relatively calm in the novel (Park Street and Camac Street) but it was common to see policemen holding rifles chained to their waist lest Naxaals attack them and wrest the weapons from their hands.
Mahasweta Devi may not have been violent herself, but her lifelong sympathies were with the tribals whom she worked to educate, uplift, and write about. Why she wrote this novella, at first a play, is no mystery. She wanted to depict the empty veneer of materialism that paraded as culture among educated upper-class urbanites, and contrast it with the idealism of those who revolted and led movements to bring justice to the poor. As she wrote:
“In the seventies, in the Naxalite movement, I saw exemplary integrity, selflessness, and the guts to die for a cause. I thought I saw history in the making, and decided that as a writer it would be my mission to document it. As a writer, I feel a commitment to my times, to mankind, and to myself. I did not consider the Naxalite movement an isolated happening.”
The violence was not only by the government on the Naxal participants; it took place as bloody warfare between opposing groups of leftist partisans which Mahashweta Devi recounts:
“A bloody cycle of interminable assaults and counter-assaults, murders and vendetta, was initiated. The ranks of both the CPI(M) and CPI (M-L) dissipated their militancy in mutual fightings leading to the elimination of a large number of their activists, and leaving the field open to the police and the hoodlums. It was a senseless orgy of murders, misplaced fury, sadistic tortures, acted out with the vicious norms of the underworld, and dictated by the decadent and cunning values of the petit bourgeois leaders.”
In Mother of 1084 (published serially in a periodical in 1973, and later as a novella in 1974) Mahasweta re-enacts the senseless killings of the Naxalites. The author does it evoking the intense love of a mother (Sujata) for her son (Brati) whose motivations and struggles she does not understand. Much of the novel is given to the mother’s search for the secret life of her son with his comrades, including a lover (Nandini) who is tortured by the police to extract information about others in the movement. The third woman who suffers is the mother of Somu, a comrade of Brati, who is also killed in the internecine warfare; but she can wail her loss openly, in a way Sujata cannot.
The passage of time is referred to often in the pages of the novel by the women who bear the suffering of past grief, the unbearable grief of losing a beloved son, and the poignant loss of a comrade in arms at the flowering of his youth.
In the first simile on p.61 Time is likened to the flowing of a river, Grief is the bank of the river where sorrow accumulates. As the river flows, the alluvium carried by the river water is heaped on the accumulated grief on the bank, submerges it, and soon new shoots of hope grow to mitigate the sorrow.
In a second simile on p.77, Time is seen firstly as the compression of loss: the past is gone forever. Secondly time is seen (as above) through the same prism of flowing water carrying fresh alluvial soil to cover the mudbanks of grief heaped by the past. And that brings new hope.
In yet a third simile on p.79, Time is cast as an ‘arch fugitive, always on the run.’ It reminds one of the Latin maxim tempus fugit (time flies) which is shortened from Virgil's Georgics, where it appears as fugit inreparabile tempus: “it escapes, irretrievable time.” In the novel Sujata ‘would never be able to retrieve the moment when Brati in his blue shirt stood at the foot of the stairs.’ Will the two women, Sujata and Nandini, be always in search of lost time, like Swann in Proust’s novel Remembrance of Things Past?
Samik Bandyopadhyay, the translator, says he had the privilege of working with the author who contributed her own notes on the translation.
Tuesday 9 January 2024
Humorous Poems – Dec 16, 2023
Sunday 10 December 2023
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka – Nov 30, 2023
Wednesday 1 November 2023
Poetry Session – Oct 26, 2023
Tuesday 24 October 2023
The Good Earth by Pearl Buck – Sept 28, 2023
Thursday 31 August 2023
Romantic Poetry Session — August 25, 2023
Poets for the session on Aug 25, 2023
In addition to the usual English suspects, Shelley and Keats, we had two American poets Whitman and Emerson, a French poet Victor Hugo, and a Polish poet, Adam Mickiewicz.
Within the English Romantic poets there was the younger generation consisting of Shelley, Keats, and Byron, that rebelled against the the older generation, signified by Wordsworth and Coleridge. Not only was the lifestyle of the youthful poets freer, but they were uncompromising in their support for the French Revolution, and for greater freedom of speech and belief, which they hoped would usher in a freer Britain. Byron’s contempt for Southey, Wordsworth and Coleridge (the old guard) led to the creation of a freer and even more Romantic era of poetry.
Wordsworth and Coleridge were close collaborators in writing poetry and in developing theories about poetic values and how poetry arises, culminating in the Lyrical Ballads. That joint collection of poems, first published in 1798, is generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature. The 1800 edition had the famous Preface that set out the changes Wordsworth hoped to bring about by treating poetry not as elevated speech, but common speech enlivened “with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness” toward Nature. He gave his famous definition of Poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.”
The younger generation knew each other’s work and generally had good opinions to share. Keats did not come from nobility as Shelley and Byron did, and did not have the benefit of University education that came as a birthright for the well-born. However he made up for it by reading everything he could get his hands on via his friend Cowden Clark.
Shelley and Byron did collaborate during their famous 1816 sojourn in Switzerland. Poems like Julian and Maddalo by Shelley about two friends: Julian the idealist who is like Shelley, and Maddalo the aristocrat who resembles Byron. That Swiss contact made by Lake Geneva where the Shelleys and Byron rented villas, had many other literary consequences. There Byron found the medieval Château de Chillon, which inspired his long poem, Prisoner of Chillon. Mary Shelley wrote her famous thriller, Frankenstein, Or, the Modern Prometheus. And Byron finished the third canto of his epic poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, in the villa Diodati.
Villa Diodati in Cologny, Switzerland by Lake Geneva where the Shelleys and Byron met in 1816
The modern poet Vijay Seshadri writes about how he was inspired by the grand old poet – Whitman. Seshadri says in an interview that he is amazed by the delicacy of Whitman’s technique, the more so because he is thought of historically, as “massive and powerful.” Seshadri says Whitman “has a control over the minutiae of poetry that is of the same order as Emily Dickinson’s. You can just marvel and marvel at the little effects, and the little changes.” But the greatest challenge in Whitman is “the visionary life and the prophetic experience” he brings. Can one rise to that?
Thursday 10 August 2023
Fathers and Children by Ivan Turgenev – July 21, 2023
Turgenev – Fathers and Sons, First Edition, 1867, English translation bay Eugene Schuyler
Fathers and Sons is a novel by Ivan Turgenev published in 1862. Its reputation in Russia and abroad remains stout as ever after it gained a following in continental Europe as the foremost Russian novel of the 19th century. It highlights the conflict between the established order and the younger, more radical generation in society. In a way it is a preview of the Bolshevik revolution to come.
Bazarov, the central character of the novel, representing the younger generation, is represented as a ‘nihilist’, or a skeptic about any political causes and philosophical –isms that are advocated in society by their champions. However, though Bazarov sets himself up as a nihilist, he has humanist tendencies; for example, he puts his medical skills in the service of the peasants he freely associates with, though he is the son a small landowner himself. So too the brothers Kirsanov with whom he has arguments have long since freed their serfs; their liberal-minded egalitarian nature is evident.
Falling in love is treated in various ways. There is the simple seigneurial manner in which Nikolai Kirsanov takes to Fenechka; the romantic manner in which Arkady ultimately falls for Katya, sister of Odintsova; and finally the more intellectual, and at the same time refined attraction that emerges between Odintsova and Bazarov. Bazarov’s first reaction is: “What a magnificent body; shouldn't I like to see it on the dissecting-table.” But when his plan to possess her physically fails, he won’t fall for chivalrous sentiments. He has to admit finally the fact that he is in love with a real but unattainable woman.
The duel scene in Chapter 24 is set up on the flimsiest of excuses, that Bazarov who stole a kiss from Fenechka, the concubine-mistress of Nikolai, has been caught in the act by Pavel, Nikolai’s brother. Some see it as the dramatic high point of the novel, but it is in fact a comic absurdity. Whether Turgenev meant it thus is debatable, but our readers derived only general merriment from the scene.
Turgenev lived in Paris in the latter part of his life with his friends, Madame Pauline Viardot and her husband. Turgenev, it seems, had a passion for painting and was a discerning critic.
Friday 23 June 2023
Poetry Session – June 16, 2023
Collage of Readers on Zoom
We had ten poets represented, five American, three British, and one each from Russia and Argentina. The only translated poems were those of Pasternak from Russian, and Borges from Spanish.