The new life of English poetry

Long confined to a niche literary circle, Indian poetry in English is becoming part of the mainstream
By Mayank Austen Soofi 

Fancy giving somebody Rs.2 lakh because you like their poetry? That’s exactly what happened this year at the Jaipur Literature Festival. Arundhathi Subramaniam received the inaugural Khushwant Singh Memorial Prize for Poetry for her collection, When God Is A Traveller. The annual prize will be sponsored by marketing professional Suhel Seth.

“If Suhel Seth is giving away money for a poetry prize, then we’ve entered the mainstream,” says New Delhi-based poet-novelist-guitarist Jeet Thayil, only half-jokingly—he was on the jury.

Poetry has a rich tradition in India. It was instrumental in earning the country its first (and only) Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded to Rabindranath Tagore in 1913 for his collection Gitanjali. Old Delhi’s Urdu-speaking dwellers spice up their daily conversations with couplets of 19th century poet Mirza Ghalib and 18th century poet Mir Taqi Mir. The Sufi poems of Bulleh Shah are sung across the Punjab countryside. Indian poetry in English, which began in the 1820s, has produced its own share of canonical poets.

Poetry has a rich tradition in India. It was instrumental in earning the country its first (and only) Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded to Rabindranath Tagore in 1913 for his collection Gitanjali. Old Delhi’s Urdu-speaking dwellers spice up their daily conversations with couplets of 19th century poet Mirza Ghalib and 18th century poet Mir Taqi Mir. The Sufi poems of Bulleh Shah are sung across the Punjab countryside. Indian poetry in English, which began in the 1820s, has produced its own share of canonical poets.

Even so, Indian writing in English has mainly meant prose. That seems to be changing. “You’d be surprised at the number of people reading poetry nowadays,” says Seth. “Once we announced the award, we were flooded with applications, which show that more and more of us are dabbling in verse.” The award presented at Jaipur, he indicated, was a first of its kind. “While there are enough annual awards for fiction and non-fiction, there was none for poetry.”

Arguably some of the best poetry so far goes back to the 1970s. But though today’s poetry hasn’t yet found its way into the best-seller lists, excitement is mounting. It’s almost as if an underground club of poets, publishers, critics and readers has joined forces, defying the scepticism of some publishers. The poetically inclined have responded by turning out in droves.

Indian poetry in English is no longer the solitary art of crafting verses that few will read.

On Monday, the venerable Adil Jussawalla was given the Sahitya Akademi Award for Trying To Say Goodbye, his first collection of poetry in nearly 35 years. It was the first book published by Almost Island (AI), a small Mumbai-based outfit that began as an online journal. “Adil’s first print run of 500 sold out in a couple of months, and the second print run of 1,000 is almost sold out too,” says AI’s founder editor, Sharmistha Mohanty. Hachette India, meantime, will publish Jussawalla’s new collection later this year.

Vijay Nambisan’s forthcoming poetry book already has people gushing. “I’ve heard it’s amazing,” says poet and AI’s co-editor Vivek Narayanan. Nambisan’s First Infinities is being published by the Mumbai-based Poetrywala imprint, run by Marathi poet Hemant Divate from his home.

The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, a publishing venture founded by a troika of Bengaluru poets in 2013, has recently announced an Emerging Poets Prize. The three winners will be awarded Rs.15,000 each; their manuscripts will be published with a minimum print run of 250 copies; and there will also be a book launch.

There’s more: In February, Kolkata-based Kindle magazine had a special issue on poetry. The Caravan magazine, whose March issue contains six pages on poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, has a dedicated poetry section. So does the Mumbai-based literary magazine Indian Quarterly; the editors say they carefully scrutinize a submitted poem’s “form, style, rhythm, line arrangement, poetic devices, imagery, as well as word selection and universality”.

Last month, Hyderabad-based poet Sridala Swami completed a book-reading tour of her new collection, Escape Artist. In Bengaluru, she recited her poems at the Atta Galatta book store and the Alternative Law Forum. In New Delhi, she read at the Hauz Khas Village bar Toddy Shop—a few minutes of poetry were followed by a party that went on till the wee hours. It was the first of the monthly Poetry at Toddy evenings launched by Thayil at the bar where the bills come in poetry books.

Over the past few months, it seemed you couldn’t turn a corner anywhere in an Indian metro without running into poetry. Such verse-festing would have been unthinkable for Thayil when he launched his first collection in 1992. Gemini was a slim Viking Penguin edition with debut poems by Thayil as well as Nambisan. “It got one review in a minor publication and then was forgotten,” says Thayil. Compare that with the press notices for Sridala Swami’s book, published by Aleph Book Co. with the support of the Jehangir Sabavala Foundation. It has been reviewed by The Hindu, The Sunday Guardian, Biblio: A Review Of Books and Millennium Post.

Invigorated by well-attended book tours and prominent reviews, poets have reason to be happy. “More gratifying (than reviews) are the moments after readings when people come up to me and say they liked this or that specific poem,” says Swami, “or when people write about the book on their blogs, or tweet about it.”

So, can our poets now be less melancholic?

“Indian English poetry is on the cusp of a new moment,” says Narayanan, who accepted Jussawalla’s award on his behalf this week because the Mumbai poet has curtailed his travel. “There seems to be a bunch of very talented young poets who are revving their engines up and all the older poets are writing better than before.”

Narayanan is also heartened by the emergence of “little clutches of poets and writers running small presses” who are rigorous about how they select and publish poetry.

But will these small presses suffer the fate of Clearing House, which had eight books to show for eight years? The iconic collective was co-founded in Mumbai (then Bombay) in 1975 by Mehrotra, Jussawalla, Arun Kolatkar and Gieve Patel—names that conjure up the image of a golden age. “There are more poets, more events, more books, more experiments with writing, but we haven’t yet approached the great era of Kolatkar and his compatriots,” says Divate, who has been publishing poetry for 23 years.

The landmark book encapsulating the fabled age of Indian poetry in English is The Oxford India Anthology Of Twelve Modern Indian Poets. Edited by Mehrotra, this 1992 compilation is into its 17th impression. While editing it, Mehrotra wanted to cast the net much wider than R. Parthasarathy’s compilation, Ten Twentieth Century Indian Poets (1976), which missed significant contemporaries like Dom Moraes and Dilip Chitre and didn’t include Agha Shahid Ali, Vikram Seth and Manohar Shetty simply because they arrived much later.

“Parthasarathy’s introductions were blandly descriptive; mine, heavily opinionated,” says Mehrotra. “I had a quite different idea of Indian poetry in English, a different idea of what a poem should be. The main difference between our anthologies was in the general introduction as well as the short introductions to individual poets. I wasn’t always polite when I introduced the poets. It upset some of them. Nissim Ezekiel reportedly chucked the book into the wastepaper basket.”

Two decades have passed. Indian English poetry is regaining its vigour. While Narayanan is waiting a little longer to celebrate, Shikha Malaviya, co-founder of The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, is ready to bring out the champagne. “Indian poetry has never been more lively or diverse,” she says. “Even traditional publishers like HarperCollins are publishing more poets.”

She notes that Slam poetry (competitive performances) has also drawn many younger people. The past year has been phenomenal. Other than Subramaniam grabbing the first Khushwant Singh prize, Vijay Seshadri won the Pulitzer Prize, and Imtiaz Dharker won Britain’s Her Majesty’s Gold Medal for Poetry. “If that doesn’t say Indian poetry has arrived,” says Malaviya, “I’m not sure what does.”

Thayil’s personal experience illustrates this new reality.

“Twenty years ago, a poetry reading was an exercise in humiliation, for the poet, certainly, but perhaps for the listener too,” he says. “Last year, when I read poems from Adil’s new book at a furniture showroom in (New Delhi’s) Defence Colony, I expected 15 people at the most, including showroom staff. About a hundred turned up.”

Not all, however, share the same level of enthusiasm. Nambisan, who prefers a secluded life in Coorg, Karnataka, says, “It seems that the marketing mentality and commercialism have infected poetry as they have everything else. Publishing is, of course, rank with that infection and poetry can’t stay free of it, unless we choose not to publish. I find distasteful the idea of writers pursuing publishers with manuscripts of poems.”

Jussawalla, who rarely steps out of Mumbai, senses the buzz. “Today, there are a lot more people writing poetry with confident voices,” he says. “There are also many more readers, thanks to the Net.”

Facebook, Twitter and websites like PoemHunter.com are helping to get the word out for both new and established poets, and steadily bridging the gap with readers. It’s ironic that technology, which supposedly drives us away from reading, has brought people closer to poetry.

Much is discovered on the Internet these days, and poetry is no different, says Jaideep Warya, a landscape architect and poet who recently moved from New Delhi to London. “It is impossible to hear of a new poet through newspapers or TV. But when reading someone’s brief bio at the end of an opinion piece, you see it mentioned that the person also writes poetry, and then you google his poems. If you like these accidentally discovered poets, then you follow them online or order their books on the websites.”

The zesty poetry scene has also spawned quality commentary. “There has been some wonderful critical comment recently—Laetitia Zecchini’s lovely book on Kolatkar, for instance,” says Narayanan. “There are young writers who have just started publishing criticism—Mantra Mukim and Bharat Iyer come to mind—who are bringing the kind of intensity and empathy to their commentaries that I would normally expect only from poets.”

Even as Indian English poetry gains followers and notches up sales, some publishers are trying to look beyond financial considerations, looking at it as “art for art’s sake”. The AI website declares that it is “a space for literature that threatens, confronts, or bypasses the marketplace.”

Why be in the market then? “We love persecuting ourselves,” says Mohanty, with a mix of sarcasm and anger. “The idea that people do things only for monetary profit is an extremely superficial attitude to living. There was a need for a journal which would stand up to the market.

We are interested in great literature, whether the market considers it successful or not.”

To find new voices, the journal recently launched a manuscript-writing contest that will be judged by Jussawalla and New York-based writer Eliot Weinberger. The winner gets a publishing deal. It has also been holding an annual gathering of poets and prose writers called “Almost Island Dialogues” in New Delhi. The eighth edition was held last month at the India International Centre in the Capital.

“Both the journal and the Dialogues are funded by two people with a deep love for literature who will continue to support it, whether we make profit or not,” says Mohanty. “I have never paid myself for the work I do, and currently most of the team doesn’t get paid, or is given something which is like an honorarium rather than a salary.”

Since royal patrons are not available in modern India, those who live for literature must usually earn a living somewhere else. Poets in India have always had to find employment; it is no different for their publishers. Sarabjeet Garcha’s salary comes from his day job at a medical publishing company; he gets his creative satisfaction from Copper Coin, a press he co-founded a year ago. Last month, it published the India edition of English novelist and poet John Berger’s Collected Poems.

Garcha, who lives in Ghaziabad, near New Delhi, doesn’t even have an office for his firm. How did he manage to steal Berger? “I knew that John’s poems were being published by (UK-based) Smokestack Books,” he says. “I reached out to John’s son, who pointed me to John’s literary agent, from whom we obtained the rights for the Indian edition.”

Berger’s book is not available in New Delhi’s leading book stores, but it’s there on Amazon—Garcha’s major distribution outlet. “Publishing poetry cannot support anyone financially, at least not initially, but who’s to foretell the future?” he says. “It’s time for India to have its own ecosystem of small independent publishers who are driven by passion alone.”

Such passion is evident to anybody who has traced the career graph of independent publisher S. Anand. He says, “I have cut down on poetry because it is so difficult to sell.” Anand’s Navayana press recently brought out a memoir partly written in verse, but he isn’t hopeful about the future of poetry publishing.

“We started (poetry) in 2007 with Namdeo Dhasal’s book,” says Anand. “Despite his iconic stature as one of India’s finest poets, it took us four years to exhaust a stock of 1,400 copies of the low-priced hardback.” On a visit to The London Book Fair the same year, Anand realized poetry sells poorly everywhere. “However, in the first world, be it the UK or Australia, poetry publishing, and much of independent publishing, is supported by generous grants from the arts councils,” he says. “Between 2012-15, the grants allocated by Arts Council England for poetry alone were a phenomenal £6.6 million (around Rs.62.7 crore now). A gentle giant like Faber & Faber received £117,499 in this period. We need something similar in India.”

Anand has also published Meena Kandasamy, whose dramatic style of reciting her feminist and anti-caste poems on stage synchronizes perfectly with the title of one of her poetry collections. “Meena’s Ms Militancy has done well; but clearly, despite her high social profile, even she can’t make a living as a poet or writer,” says Anand. “But I’m sure her translations of Tamil poet Thiruvalluvar’s love poems that I’ll publish next year will be a hit.”

Anand speaks highly of Karthika V.K., the HarperCollins publisher: “She is regularly publishing contemporary poets. To sustain that in a trade publishing house is commendable.”

Karthika has brought out 22 poetry books in five years. Her poets at HarperCollins include Altaf Tyrewala, Anita Nair and Hoshang Merchant. She is now ready with a collection by US-based Kazim Ali, who has never been published in India.

Some might argue that Karthika’s rival publishing house is less suicidal. “At Penguin, we haven’t focused on contemporary poets,” says executive editor R. Sivapriya. “The exceptions are Arvind (Krishna) Mehrotra and Ranjit Hoskote.”

HarperCollins brings out about five volumes of poetry a year, each with a print run of 1,000 copies. “That’s a really small number and the reason to publish is not the revenue we earn from it,” says Karthika. She goes on to say that the belief driving the list editorially is simply that poetry is at the heart of literature, it’s where ideas and language originate, and it’s important to help sustain it.

If Mehrotra were to prepare an anthology of modern Indian poets of the new generation, who would he pick?

“It would have more poets than 12,” he says. “Thayil’s 60 Indian Poets, that comes 15 years after mine, has redrawn the map. Then there’s the Internet. I would, though, use it more to discover the past of Indian poetry in English than to keep up with its present.”

Mehrotra adds: “I’d written that the origins of modern poetry in English go no further back than the poets in my anthology. I was ignorant; I’m less so now. The parallels between us and some of the 19th century poets like Kasiprasad Ghose and Toru Dutt are too strong to be missed. Which is why we need good literary history.”

Happily, one such book is being edited in Kolkata by academic Rosinka Chaudhuri. To be published by the Cambridge University Press, New York, it may be priced exorbitantly. A wealthy poetry lover wouldn’t mind paying if it was printed in India by one of our little anti-market presses.

But, then, we are talking of a perfectly poetic world.

Read more at: http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/t16DetGjFaaUxsX1BE9fdK/The-new-life-of-English-poetry.html?utm_source=copy

Review: Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life, Stephen Parker

by Warren Leming

The Brecht Industry rolls on: doctoral dissertations, journals, blogs, websites, YouTube, and memoirs comprising millions of pages, much to the consternation of the boys at the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute, who must be musing on how it is that an ardent anti-capitalist has entranced the cognoscenti and, much like Che, taken the moral high-ground despite the ubiquitous mercantilist hard sell at Fox News. Is there a credible pro-capitalist playwright, or are we still drifting with the platitudes and prose of an Ayn Rand as counter example?

One of the answers to that riddle may be that Brecht in his short 58 years wrote forty extraordinary plays; created an exemplary body of German poetry and song, and wrote twenty volumes of theoretical work, in addition to the journals, media analysis, letters, film scripts, drafts, rewrites and dramaturgical notes. Much of this work was created while Brecht was on the run from the Gestapo, and with his name on a Nazi hit list. Still in his early twenties, he had been the toast of theatrical Berlin.

His life was played out between lethal Stalinists, flaccid Hollywood types, and Hitler’s murderous regime. He loses a number of friends to both Hitler and Stalin.

Shadowing Parker’s detailed biography is the taboo topic of the Russian holocaust Stalin’s military mistakes were of course a catastrophe, but twenty six million Russians died defeating the Nazis. Russia today is the forlorn shell of what might have been, had the Stalinists not been in charge, and the German attack not been so devastating. America’s Cold War on the Soviets carefully obliterated this historical possibility.

Enter Steven Parker’s biography of Brecht, 689 pages of carefully researched and foot-noted conjecture about this paradoxical, irritating, overbearing, brilliant Marxist whose love life would shame a Casanova, and whose intellectual praxis suggests that after Shakespeare he is one of the greatest theatrical thinkers and playwrights. Charles Laughton repeated this appraisal to Brecht’s Hollywood detractors; who like Brecht himself were wont to point out that the playwright just wasn’t a “nice guy.”

He wasn’t. Brecht’s early life seems a catalogue of obsessive, compulsive misogyny. He abandons the children of his first two serious relationships (Bie Banholzer, and Marianne Zoff). Despite a long and successful marriage to the actress Helen Weigel, but she too is victim to his infidelities. He ritually requires that his sexual partners sign “contracts” obligating them to obey Brecht’s rulebook, which he then flagrantly violates. Like Welles, Brecht is born into the world as radio, film, and modern theater come into being, and he will write original work for all of these mediums. Parker is good at the infinite detail that all of this involved, but after a few hundred pages Brecht’s immense erudition begins to overwhelm all.

Brecht left his mark on so many areas that his significance will still be debated in a hundred years. This is especially true for America where his reception has been grudging and carping at best, and studiedly obtuse and reactionary at worst. In having fallen victim to the professoriate, who quote him endlessly, his survival has come at the cost of his comprehensibility, which remains problematic. He remains the middlebrow intellectual’s nightmare: sexually avid and promiscuous; unceasingly disciplined and prolific; poetically so gifted that he changed the German language; and steadfast in his belief that capitalism must be destroyed and replaced by a revolutionary class dedicated to ending the Mercantilist putsch for all time. He was ‘”solitary, lonely, reckless and wise,” and remained to the end a self-described “Bolshevik without a Party.”

As Parker notes, Brecht was beset all of his life with failing health, heart problems, and a malfunctioning liver and spleen, which, as he predicted, shortened his life. Like D. H. Lawrence, the specter of his own mortality was ever-present. He was made instantly famous with the success of the Three Penny Opera, in 1928. His obsessions were eclectic and legendary: Kipling, poetry and song, Chicago, women, Marxism, market capitalism, even as he declares that his real subject is the migration of masses of people to the great cities.

In the 1920’s, while researching a play on the Chicago Futures Exchange, he declares: “these are people who do not want to be understood.” Out of this realization and association with Marxist thinkers like Karl Korsch, his political mentor, he is drawn to the German Communist Party (KPD,), which pays some faint homage to his work but never embraces him. Like Korsch, he remains too radical for the Communist Left. Although never officially a Party member, Brecht, in a few years, is considered the Poet Laureate of the international communist movement. A label that will see him forced to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and provide him with an FBI file that rivals the OED in size and scope. His publisher and friend Peter Suhrkamp remarked that had Brecht not encountered Marxism he would have become another in a long line of German decadents, wavering between a feeble Liberalism and the nihilism that the Nazis define.

But Brecht’s Marxism came at a price: he is relentlessly attacked, vilified, and distorted from the Left, both in East Germany, where he finally settles, and during his Exile when he attempts to write for a Communist exile journal obsessed with the Realist vs. Formalist debate so dear to Zhdanov, Lukacs, and the Party hacks. Brecht sees the SA Brown shirts marching in Berlin and remarks to a friend: “When Mahogany comes: I go.”

On the night of the Reichstag fire he enters a small bar, and hears two customers debating the event: “It was the Nazis.” “No, it was the Communists.” He does not return home but flees Germany within hours. Those who could not read events were soon either dead or in concentration camps. Parker’s primary contribution to the mountains of Brecht scholarship is his analysis of Brecht’s medical history: which is complicated, and sporadic. Diagnosed at an early age with heart problems, he is so fearful both of dying and being buried alive that his Will required that a ceratoid artery be cut before he is interred.

Brecht’s genius for survival keeps him in exile for well over a decade, and he spends the Forties in Hollywood, where he is unemployable, though there he manages a long relationship with Laughton, which produces Galileo, and one film script (Hangman Also Die), which Fritz Lang directs. Laughton will later denounce him on the advice of his manager, producing a short, bitter memorable poem from Brecht.

The critic John Fuegi will later claim that Brecht exploited his many women, who he insists wrote his work. Fuegi’s book prompts an essay from the International Brecht Journal detailing its myriad howlers. Brecht’s ever tenuous relationship with the Soviets, does get him an exit visa through Russia, and ever alert to Stalin’s whimsical penchant for murder and the Gulag, he settles in Hollywood for the duration of the Second World War; a fact which did not endear him to the German Communists who survived Stalin in the USSR and returned to found the East German state.

Western critics of Brecht’s Marxism ignore his continual problems with Marxist critics and with the East German elite who Brecht urged, following a worker rising, to simply “elect another People.” He founds, with his wife the actress Helene Weigel, the Berliner Ensemble. They create a world-class company despite government interference, three successive campaigns against him in West Germany, and continual attacks from the Cold War intelligentsia. There are repeated attempts to carve him away from his politics, and sanitize his overt support for the USSR and the many Communist parties. Martin Esslin’s biography is but one classic instance of this. Hannah Arendt insists, in print, that he had written an ode to Stalin. The Brecht scholar John Willett contests this and Arendt, wisely, refuses to engage. The charge is never proved, but remains evidence that the playwright’s enemies were legion.

Brecht was well aware that the Hitler-Stalin pact signaled the end of any Soviet pretenses to Marxism:” The USSR saved itself…at the cost of leaving the workers of the world without guidance, hope, or help.” And when Stalin adopts the nationalist, fascist terminology (“blood brotherhood, Pan Slavism”) he is quietly critical. Like so many, he discovers that the anti-Nazi’s had almost nowhere to go: the United States as late as 1940-41 is refusing to accept German anti-Nazis with Communist sympathies, in favor of relatively apolitical art figures like Max Ernst and Andre Breton.

Brecht was adept in mastering, and then putting into practice a Communist anti-aesthetic, and his Labor Theory of Value, remains one of the singular attempts to build a dramaturgy and praxis around Marxist ideas. Marxist insights abound in his dramatic and poetic work. Brecht names Heartsfield, Eisler, Grosz, Piscator and Anna Seghers as the five artists who had stood up for the German worker. His growing disillusion with Stalin culminates in the 1950s with a poem dedicated to “the honored murderer of the People.”

Brecht’s critical and theatrical reception in the U.S. remains befuddled and antagonistic. So fogged is the critical aura around him, both academics and theatrical folk find him complicated, confusing and inapplicable without that forbidden essential, a Marxist schooling. The day that one is solved, Brecht may have a chance, but not before.

His impact in the U.S. extends to the San Francisco Mime Troupe, R.G. Davis Epic West Theater, university productions, Chicago’s Second City, Theatro de Campesino, Luis Valdez, Story Theater, Paul Sills, and an equally impressive list in Europe. His early American disciples like Mordecai Gorelik and Marc Blitzstein went on to have distinguished careers.

The antipathy for Brecht is evidence of just how far behind the American theater has fallen, spurred on by the success of a corporate/defense contractor TV industry which has carried all before it- not least in its reductive, Know-Nothing attack on progressive content (consider Fox News viewer stats versus Link TV.) David Mamet has devolved to an increasingly strident right winger, and Sam Shepherd’s cowboy mystic poses are now overshadowed by materialistic Hollywood success.

Professor Parker’s book is laudable in its comprehensive attempt at fixing the history of a great thinker, poet, playwright, and perpetual goad in the battered sides of a triumphalist capitalism whose legacy is now tied to the destruction of the planet.

The plays are as potent today as when they were written but there are some mistakes; among them The Round Heads and Peaked Heads, which woefully underrated the Nazi’s anti-Semitism. But the mistake was not Brecht’s alone: the world reads the Holocaust well after its terrible success, abetted by an official indifference. Parker’s excellent book will remain a reference for years to come, but Brecht, for now, remains a carefully obscured theatrical Meister- whose message and life revile all that a media obsessed capitalism now calls Truth.    [Courtesy: logosjournal.com]

Warren Leming is a writer/director who divides his time between Chicago and Berlin. He most recently is co-director of the award-winning documentary ‘American Road’ (www.amerianroad.jigsy.com) and a producer of the forthcoming documentary ‘Nelson Algren: The End is Nothing, The Road is All.’

Bertolt Brecht

Analysis of The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

The annual literature festival extends its brand

(From left) A file photo of Barnet Rubin, William Dalrymple, Mark Mazzetti and Ben Anderson during a panel discussion at Jaipur Literature Festival, Jaipur. 2015 edition will include Jung Chang, Eleanor Catton and V.S. Naipaul among others. Photo: Vipin Kumar/Hindustan Times

If further evidence is indeed needed of the Jaipur Literature Festival’s (JLF’s) success, it is in the requests for partnerships that it seems to be getting from across the world. While the annual literary extravaganza, comprising 234 speakers and 117 musicians this time, is set to take place in Jaipur from 21-25 January, the JLF has also announced that it will be venturing into the US in September, to organize an edition of the festival in Boulder, Colorado. This follows its entry earlier this year to the UK, where it curated a day-long event as part of Alchemy, the Southbank Centre’s festival of South Asian culture, in London.

Sanjoy K. Roy, producer of the JLF, says that earlier this year, when he received a pitch from Buddhist scholars Jessie Friedman, Jules Levinson and Maruta Kalnins to take the festival to Boulder, he had to look up the place in the atlas. “But we were looking for a home in the US,” he says, and having checked out possible venues such as New Orleans and Chicago, he was intrigued enough to visit Boulder in June.

Considering the festival’s judicious mix of tourism and literature, Boulder’s positioning as the “jump-off point” for the Rocky Mountains tipped the balance in its favour. Indeed, in a display of drawing room humour, while much of the planning for the event is yet to take place, the organizers have already decided to include the tag line “Get high on literature” for JLF Boulder, part of which will incidentally take place in Denver. Involved in this endeavour will be the Boulder Public Library, Naropa University, and the University of Colorado, as well as a wide variety of civic and arts organizations in that city. Naropa University’s credentials as a Buddhist-inspired academic institution attracted the JLF organizers, who were looking for a market where “the Occident meets the Oriental”, reveals Roy.

Since its inception in 2006 as part of the Jaipur Virasat Festival, and its subsequent move a couple of years later to becoming an independent entity, the JLF has come to be counted as among the most successful in the world, making it the subject of a case study taught at the Harvard Business School. It has even become the template for countless literary festivals that have cropped up in the country, as well as in the region, over the past few years. None, however, have yet attained the international flavour or fame of the JLF.

While the JLF has drawn in well-known writers like J.M. Coetzee, V.S. Naipaul, Ian McEwan and Orhan Pamuk in previous years, participants in the 2015 edition will include Jung Chang, author of the best-selling Wild Swans, Samuel Johnson prize winner Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Man Booker prize winner Eleanor Catton, travel writer Paul Theroux, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Vijay Seshadri, and Naipaul once again. It is this international flavour that its partners at Boulder hope to recreate. Their wish list for authors, says Friedman, are “Pulitzer Prize, Man Booker, National Book Award authors and finalists, South Asian authors, and those from the diverse communities of the Americas, Middle-Eastern and European authors.”

“We get a lot of requests to partner events,” says Roy. While they declined an invitation by the Norwegian government to host the festival in Oslo, they did decide to “extend the JLF brand by creating teasers and snapshots” in places like Toronto, Canada, and San Francisco, US. Last month, authors Navtej Sarna and Canada-based Anirudh Bhattacharya represented the festival at the first Toronto International Book Fair. A similar outing is also being planned for a new literary event coming up in San Francisco. And the day-long Jaipur Literature Festival in Southbank this May had speakers like Vikram Seth, Kamila Shamsie and Girish Karnad.

The JLF’s plans to extend its presence on the map do not stop here. Its long-term strategy includes another venue in the East in two-three years, says Roy, though they don’t know exactly where yet.  
[Courtesy: Livemint.com]

Read more at: http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/5H0nlA5YvsiR3LKR5wkupJ/Jaipur-lit-fest-in-the-US.html

A Weapon for Readers

Tim Parks

Harry Ransom Center, Austin, Texas

Annotated pages from David Foster Wallace’s copy of C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

Imagine you are asked what single alteration in people’s behavior might best improve the lot of mankind. How foolish would you have to be to reply: have them learn to read with a pen in their hands? But I firmly believe such a simple development would bring huge benefits.

We have too much respect for the printed word, too little awareness of the power words hold over us. We allow worlds to be conjured up for us with very little concern for the implications. We overlook glaring incongruities. We are suckers for alliteration, assonance, and rhythm. We rejoice over stories, whether fiction or “documentary,” whose outcomes are flagrantly manipulative, self-serving, or both. Usually both. If a piece of writing manifests the stigmata of literature—symbols, metaphors, unreliable narrators, multiple points of view, structural ambiguities—we afford it unlimited credit. With occasional exceptions, the only “criticism” brought to such writing is the kind that seeks to elaborate its brilliance, its cleverness, its creativity. What surprised me most when I first began publishing fiction myself was how much at every level a novelist canget away with.

This extravagant regard, which seemed to reach a peak in the second half of the twentieth century as the modernists of a generation before were canonized as performers of the ever more arduous miracle of conferring a little meaning on life, is reflected in the treatment of the book itself. The spine must not be bent back and broken, the pages must not be marked with dog ears, there must be no underlining, no writing in the margins. Obviously, for those of us brought up on library books and school-owned textbooks (my copy of Browning bore the name of a dozen pupils who had used the text before me), there were simple and sensible reasons supporting this behavior. But the reverence went beyond a proper respect for those who would be reading the pages after you. Even when I bought a book myself, if my parents caught me breaking its spine so that it would lay open on the desk, they were shocked. Writing was sacred. In the beginning was the Word. The word written down, hopefully on quality paper. Much of the resistance to e-books, notably from the literati, has to do with a loss of this sense of sacredness, of a vulnerable paper vessel that can thrive on our protective devotion.

Tim Parks

The absolute need to read with a pen in one’s hand became evident to me watching my students as we studied translation together. I would give them the same text in English and Italian and ask them to tell me which was the original text. Or I would give them a text without saying whether it was a translation or not and ask them to comment on it. Again and again, the authority conveyed by the printed word and an aura of literariness, or the excitement of dramatic action, or the persuasive drift of an argument, would prevent them from noticing the most obvious absurdities. They would read a sentence like “For a little while in his arms Maria was like a doll, she allowed herself to be undressed and turned in the bed without taking a breath” (from William Weaver’s translation of Rosetta Loy’s Le strade di polvere) and be so captivated by the romantic context as to miss the fact that one cannot be undressed and turned in a bed without taking a breath; it takes rather longer to undress someone and have your way with them than most people can survive without breathing. This is a poor translation of an Italian mix of idiom and invention—senza emettere un fiato—which might best have been translated “without so much as a sigh.”

Or they would read, “Then came the train. It began by looking like a horse, a horse with its cart raised up on the rough stones” (from Isabel Quigley’s translation of Pavese’sThe Moon and the Bonfires), and amid the drama of the action they wouldn’t see how incongruous this image of a cart “raised up on rough stones” was, how unlikely it would be to raise up a cart on rough stones. It was just a poor translation of a horse and cart on cobbles (un cavallo col carretto su dei ciottoli).

But beyond these small technicalities, the kind of internal inconsistencies that someone like Beckett introduced into his work to wake the reader up (and again many students do not notice such deliberate inconsistencies), I would find that we had read a page of Virginia Woolf together without the students realizing that we were being encouraged to think positively about suicide, or we would read Lawrence without their being aware that the writer was insisting that some lives were definitely worth more than others. I even remember a class reading this passage from Henry Green (admittedly as part of a larger scene) without any student being aware of its sexual content:

But in spite of Mrs Middleton’s appeal, the girl, with a “here you are” leant over to the husband and opened wide the pearly gates. Her wet teeth were long and sharp, of an almost transparent whiteness. The tongue was pointed also and lay curled to a red tip against her lower jaw, to which the gums were a sterile pink. Way back behind, cavernous, in a deeper red, her uvula seemed to shrink from him.

Tim Parks

Aside from simply insisting, as I already had for years, that they be more alert, I began to wonder what was the most practical way I could lead my students to a greater attentiveness, teach them to protect themselves from all those underlying messages that can shift one’s attitude without one’s being aware of it? I began to think about the way I read myself, about the activity of reading, what you put into it rather than what was simply on the page. Try this experiment, I eventually told them: from now on always read with a pen in your hands, not beside you on the table, but actually in your hand, ready, armed. And always make three or four comments on every page, at least one critical, even aggressive. Put a question mark by everything you find suspect. Underline anything you really appreciate. Feel free to write “splendid,” but also, “I don’t believe a word of it.” And even “bullshit.”

A pen is not a magic wand. The critical faculty is not conjured from nothing. But it was remarkable how many students improved their performance with this simple stratagem. There is something predatory, cruel even, about a pen suspended over a text. Like a hawk over a field, it is on the lookout for something vulnerable. Then it is a pleasure to swoop and skewer the victim with the nib’s sharp point. The mere fact of holding the hand poised for action changes our attitude to the text. We are no longer passive consumers of a monologue but active participants in a dialogue. Students would report that their reading slowed down when they had a pen in their hand, but at the same time the text became more dense, more interesting, if only because a certain pleasure could now be taken in their own response to the writing when they didn’t feel it was up to scratch, or worthy only of being scratched.

Looking back over the pages we have already read and marked, or coming back to the novel months, maybe years later, we get a strong sense of our own position in relation to the writer’s position. Where he said this kind of thing, I responded with that, where he touched this nerve, my knee jerked thus. Hence a vehicle for self knowledge is created, for what is the self if not the position one habitually assumes in relation to other selves? These days, going back to reading the books that have remained since university days, I see three or four layers of comments, perhaps in different colored pens. And I sense how my position has changed, how I have changed.

Tim Parks

In this regard, you might say that the opportunity to comment on articles published online is an excellent thing. And it is. I do not share the view of some fellow writers that those commenting, criticizing, and protesting are beyond the pale. Often I will find comments below an article (on occasion, alas, below my own articles) that are more intelligent, even better informed, than the article itself. This is exciting, even when it is mortifying.

Nevertheless, commenting on articles online is not the same thing as writing in the margins of the novels one has bought. Online one is expressing one’s opinion for other readers. There is a risk of falling back on partisan positions, of using the space to ride old hobby horses, of showing off. Often the debate moves far away from the article itself. And once the comments are made it is unlikely one will go back to look at them, certainly not in the way one is more or less bound to go back, over the years, to Hemingway or Svevo, or Katherine Mansfield, or Elsa Morante; and then it is fascinating to see what you did and didn’t see in the past. You criticized an opinion that makes perfect sense now; you applauded a detail that now looks suspiciously fake. What will I feel about today’s comments on my next reading?

Some readers will fear that the pen-in-hand approach denies us those wonderful moments when we fall under a writer’s spell, the moments when we succumb to a style, and are happy to succumb to it, when suddenly it seems to us that this approach to the world, be it Proust’s or Woolf’s or Beckett’s or Bernhard’s, is really, at least for the moment, the only approach we are interested in, moments that are no doubt among the most exciting in our reading experience.

No, I wouldn’t want to miss out on that. But if writers are to entice us into their vision, let us make them work for it. Let us resist enchantment for a while, or at least for long enough to have some idea of what we are being drawn into. For the mindless, passive acceptance of other people’s representations of the world can only enchain us and hamper our personal growth, hamper the possibility of positive action. Sometimes it seems the whole of society languishes in the stupor of the fictions it has swallowed. Wasn’t this what Cervantes was complaining about when he began Don Quixote? Better to read a poor book with alert resistance, than devour a good one in mindless adoration.

December 3, 2014, 12:31 p.m.

[Courtesy: The New York Review of Books]

Prof. Bipan Chandra, apostle of secular values, passes away..

The SOWMEN MITTER Initiative for Language ENGLISH & Related Studies (SMILERS) mourns the passing away of Prof Bipan Chandra, one of India's pre-eminent historians and ardent crusader against distortion of History and a powerful voice against communalism at this time when an august body like the Indian Council of Historical Research may, for obvious reasons, be used to make us believe that the two epics - the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are events of History. His death at this crucial juncture means a great loss not only to the academia and cultivation of history as a discipline to seek out the truth, but also to the overall secular ethos of the Indian literati and society in general. We respectfully pay our homage to this secular soldier of Modern Indian History.

 http://smilersedu.blogspot.in/2014/08/condole.html

SMILERS mourns the passing away of U.R.Anantha Murthy

The SOWMEN MITTER Initiative for Language ENGLISH & Related Studies (SMILERS) mourns the passing away of U.R.Anantha Murthy, renowned writer and social activist. Ananthamurthy had created a style of writing with social relevance in Kannada which had a big impact on Indian literature.

A socialist by conviction, Ananthamurthy was a firm advocate of secular values, pluralist culture and social justice. In his death, the country has lost a public intellectual of great calibre.

The SMILERS conveys its heartfelt condolences to his wife, daughter and son.