Valentine's Day

The Caurapañcāśikā is a series of lyric verses in which the parted lover evokes his mistress’s presence by recollecting her beauty and the pleasures of their love. Each verse is a quatrain in the Sanskrit meter Vasantatilaka (Spring’s ornament), beginning with the phrase adyapi (even now), and voiced in the first person. [X]

My niece - ever hopeful about my love life - queried me on a special someone today.  I joked that I was more at an age for hot flushes than hot crushes:) Which is not entirely true, as a former boyfriend told me the spark of love should be present in one even at 80 provided one gets there. And it is Valentine's Day. Though if there is to be a “Valentine’s Day” in India, it is probably Holi since it is also sometimes known as Madana Mahotsava i.e. Festival of the Love God (Madan/Kamadeva).  Still any excuse is good enough to put up Sanskrit love poetry - of which god knows there is plenty and more.

Probably the most translated of love texts is Bilhana’s Caurapañcāśikā which recreates both the pleasure of union and that of separation, both of which are subjects of Sanskrit poetry. It's just a perfect little thing. And luckily there are heaps of translations around (X, X), this extract from Stoler-Miller’s book.

Poem for Today

Your Pilgrimage (Ko Un)

A slower pace, a somewhat slower pace will do.
Of a sudden, should it start to rain,
let yourself get soaked.
An old friend, the rain.

One thing alone is beautiful: setting off.
The world’s too vast
to live in a single place,
or three or four.

Walk on and on
until the sun sets,
with your old accomplice,
shadow, late as ever.
If the day clouds over,
go on anyway
regardless.

RIP Adrienne Rich

NYT ran a pretty good piece on the poet.  And Tumblr users seem to have uploaded more than a few tributes and poems.

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SONG

You’re wondering if I’m lonely:
OK then, yes, I’m lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean.

You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely

If I’m lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawns’ first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep

If I’m lonely
it’s with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows it’s neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning.

Back in Sydney

Review of Ra.One here.

And since I have been travelling and travel arouses ambiguous thoughts, an excerpt from an Elizabeth Bishop poem.

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

Rest of the poem here.

French Clothing/Indian Film

Rather unusually for me, disinterest has resulted in the lack of a clothes post in a while. Internally I have been grappling with the oh so important problem of transitioning my wardrobe to something more mature but it hardly feels pressing or interesting so I have done little apart from a burst of auditing this month. Selvedge, a textile magazine I subscribe to, however still offers many pleasures (some day I hope to do an article for them on the itinerant sari sellers of India – surely a dying breed – some day….) and I have been savouring the latest issue in bits and pieces. One of the pieces in the magazine was on the new movement towards modesty in clothing, perhaps in reaction to a decade of body con dresses, lycra and the like. Embodying this modesty is Le Vestiaire De Jeanne, a fashion line started by its designer for her younger sister. Germaine Greer once wrote that the French were one of few people who knew how to dress their young appropriately. And this line does steer clear of frills, pink and Disney pop-tart fashion. It’s a bit like a marriage between convent girl attire and Japanese minimalism and it mostly works though it could do with introducing some colour.

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I finally got around to watching a few Satyajit Ray movies I had picked up in India but after all that anticipation, they were slightly disappointing. Disappointing when compared to other Ray films i.e., they are head and shoulders above the fare I have been reviewing. Devi - in which an old man sees the Goddess in his young daughter-in-law- is about the suffocating, hallucinatory nature of superstition. Though beautifully shot and performed, it was ultimately a bit of a let down because it is a tad didactic – especially in the conversations between the young husband and his professor, representing of course the forces of reason. Without in any way endorsing superstition, there is also a hint of the smug, bourgeois sensibility endemic to such films.

Shatranj Ke Khiladi was one of Ray’s few Hindi film outings and is based on a Premchand story set in the dying days of Awadh as a princely state. It’s effete elites are part of the high culture of Lucknow and are devoted to poetry (the Nawab, played by Amjad Khan) or to chess (the players of the title). Meanwhile the British, robust and vulgar, have taken steps towards annexation – an event that would lead to the Mutiny and eventually the removal of the Company Bahadur. There are a lot of things to like in this movie and it works perfectly well when the focus is on the chess players, Mirza and Mir (Sanjeev Kumar and Saeed Jaffrey). Unfortunately there is a heavy handed voiceover explaining the events of the time (by Mr Bachchan), long dialogues on the underlying politics both in the Nawab’s court and in the British camp and though all this is meant as a compare and contrast with Mir and Mirza's chess game, it feels both lifeless and superfluous. Here and there it works, e.g. Wajid Ali Shah’s dance, the Prime Minister's (Victor Banerjee) recognition that nothing can save Awadh but for the most part it doesn’t. There is a comparison of text and film here, whatever Premchand’s intentions were it appears to have been modified for 1970s audiences and not for the better. The movie looks at 1856 through the telescope of later events but would have been much better had it let the audience connect the dots. It is hard to believe that Awadh’s rulers or the British were being little other than politically expedient and myopic, as people usually are when events are unfurling in real time. And perhaps Ray doesn’t entirely get Premchand, his Sadgati from memory also had mixed reviews.

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No Stiff Upper Lips or Trousers for Awadhi Toffs

Back to frivolity and let’s end with clothes. Apparently the fashions of 1856 dictated wide pantaloons, a long tunic and gossamer thin shawls for men and women. Unfortunately, given India is still giddy with being in the body con era, I don’t think we will be seeing an immediate revival :-)

You can see more of the clothes - and an excellent song n dance - here.  Shortly after the Prime Minister informs the Nawab that he has little choice but to sign the new treaty and quit town. 

And on the pain of quitting, a Wajid Ali Shah thumri here. As he says to his distraught Prime Minister on the verge of losing Oudh, "only poetry and music can bring tears to a man's eyes."

Devayani Behaving Badly

This week as Republic Day approaches, a review of Naam Iruvar here. As a result of reviewing the film, I ended up with a slight (OK major) Bharathi obsession for awhile. A poem I liked which is poignant in view of Bharathi’s life.

Did you think I too will

Spend my days in search of food,

Tell petty tales,

Worry myself with thoughts,

Hurt others by my acts,

Turn senile with grey hair

And end up as fodder to the

relentless march of time
As yet another faceless man?
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ACK's Devayani is mighty coy

I found a copy of Amar Chitra Katha’s Kacha and Devayani the other day. When I was young Devayani seemed enormously interesting and hard done by. First there was Kacha with his “But I am your brother!” I mean what was that! Commitment phobe much! Then the Yayati-Devayani-Sharmishtha triangle where poor Devayani was always worsted. Albeit it was a mess of her own making. Devayani is arrogant, selfish and manipulative but also upfront, she is an alpha female used to getting what she wants who finds that men are an obdurate species who will always elude her grasp. Really Devayani is quite modern, I mean she could star in her own afternoon soap called “Devayani Behaving Badly” where Kacha could be her half-brother providing for incestuous, illicit amore. Devayani could engage in verbal stoushes with Sharmishtha (who is quite the biatch at times what with pushing poor Devayani into a well) culminating in a ginormous catfight in which Yayati is the hapless stud bull prize. And if that’s too much for Indian housewives, Devayani can always make a comic strip appearance as the perfect antidote to Savita Bhabhi. Savita Bhabhi is the perfect male fantasy, nothing but a scantily clad woman who offers mindless fucks. Devayani on the other hand - whose desires are raw, immediate and honest - would leave most men terrified. Kacha and Yayati are no exception.

In a departure from my fervid imagination, Pradip Bhattacharya as usual offers an interesting take on Kacha, Devayani and Yayati. My frivolous mind is rather taken up with that “Dark Maidens with Copper Bright Nails” bit in his text. Excellent name for a female rock band!

There was one bit I never understood in the Kacha-Devayani tale. Why did Shukracharya, quite the besotted Dad, not teach Devayani the Sanjeevani? Not only would Bad Girl Devayani be provided with an intellectual side but a whole lot of grief could have been avoided! I feel a Kate Beaton cartoon coming on.

Thistles

Awhile back the thistles were in full bloom. I decided to photograph them before they entirely disappeared and whilst most by now are more thistledown than flower, a few blooms remain. 

And a poem from a Ted Hughes book of poems I have been reading.

Thistles

Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men

Thistles spike the summer air

And crackle open under a blue-black pressure

Every one a revengeful burst

of resurrection, a grasped fistful

of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up

From the underground stain of a decayed Viking

They are like pale hair and the gutturals of dialects

Every one manages a plume of blood

Then they grow grey like men

Mown down, it is a feud. Their sons appear

Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.

A visual interpretation of the poem on youtube.

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And so the year is dispersed and it ends to be replaced by a new one.

A Poem

Its quite awhile since I posted a poem.

And though of all of us my grandmother is the most sad, so sad that when she looks down at her feet resignedly - as she often does - every pore of her seems aflame with sadness, it is also summer in her garden.  The gardenia, which she is partial to, is in full bloom. The mangoes have been plucked and a small amount of honey was brought down for the first time in my memory from the mango tree outside her house.

It seems a good time as any for a bit of Neruda.

Ode to Sadness

Sadness, scarab

with seven crippled feet,

spiderweb egg,

scramble-brained rat,

bitch's skeleton:

No entry here.

Don't come in.

Go away.

Go back

south with your umbrella,

go back

north with your serpent's teeth.

A poet lives here.

No sadness may

cross this threshold.

Through these windows

comes the breath of the world,

fresh red roses,

flags embroidered with

the victories of the people.

No.

No entry.

Flap

your bat's wings,

I will trample the feathers

that fall from your mantle,

I will sweep the bits and pieces

of your carcass to

the four corners of the wind,

I will wring your neck,

I will stitch your eyelids shut,

I will sew your shroud,

sadness, and bury your rodent bones

beneath the springtime of an apple tree.

Akhmatova in Translation

Reading things in translation, one is never sure if the meaning is lost. Take Anna Akhmatova's poem, The Last Toast, of which numerous versions exist on the Net.

I drink to home, that is lost,
To evil life of mine,
To loneness in which we’re both,
And to your future, fine, --

To lips by which I was betrayed,
To eyes that deathly cold,
To that the world is bad and that
We were not saved by God.

Another translation:

I drink to the wreck of our life together,
And the pain of living alone.
I drink to the loneliness we share--
My dear, I drink to you.

I drink to the trick of a mouth that betrayed me,
To the eyes and the look that lied.
I drink to the terrible world we inhabit
And to God, who never replied.

The second one is far more elegant and understandable (in translation i.e.) but the first may well be a literal translation. And in some lines, the intent appears to be different.

Still, whichever way it is translated, there is an immediacy and beauty to Akhamtova's poems. And she was clearly a woman who knew how to convey much by being both elliptical and economical with words.

Four Short Greek poems

LAST SUN IN THE TREETOPS

From her roost the water hen stretched out
her purple-green sleek neck
the kingfisher's quick glance
shook droplets from his crown
and I thought love should always be
that brilliant on the wing and wild.
Ibykos, 6th century BC

ECHO

Up and down the meadow where the sheep graze echo,
fadingly as afterthoughts, the cries of quail.
Satyrus, 2nd century BC

SINGER

She took the myrtle branch and sang in turn
another song of pleasure, in her left hand still
the flower of the rosetree, and let loose
over her naked shoulder, down her arm
and back, the darkness of her hair.
Archilocos, 7th century BC

LOVE TOKEN

I am an apple thrown to you for love. Nod yes,
Xanthippe. You and I, though sweet, are not to last.
Plato, 4th century BC

*source here*

Improvisations

Excerpts from Conrad Aiken's Improvisations: Light and Snow:

I. The girl in the room beneath
Before going to bed
Strums on a mandolin
The three simple tunes she knows.
How inadequate they are to tell how her heart feels!
When she has finished them several times
She thrums the strings aimlessly with her finger-nails
And smiles, and thinks happily of many things.

VII. The day opens with the brown light of snowfall
And past the window snowflakes fall and fall.
I sit in my chair all day and work and work
Measuring words against each other.
I open the piano and play a tune
But find it does not say what I feel,
I grow tired of measuring words against each other,
I grow tired of these four walls,
And I think of you, who write me that you have just had a daughter
And named her after your first sweetheart,
And you, who break your heart, far away,
In the confusion and savagery of a long war,
And you who, worn by the bitterness of winter,
Will soon go south.
The snowflakes fall almost straight in the brown light
Past my window,
And a sparrow finds refuge on my window-ledge.
This alone comes to me out of the world outside
As I measure word with word.

Three Short Poems

Three Japanese poems copied out in a library many many summers ago.

MODESTY
You claim to be modest
And I will not say you lie
Yet no one wears a scarlet skirt
Expecting to get by
Without attracting notice
From the quicker kind of eye.
Anon (8th century)

KEEPSAKE
The keepsake which you gave me.....
Once I had thought you kind
So to ease the pain of our parting
But now I find
That, of intent, you have given me nothing
But a thistle in the mind.
Anon (9th century)

GREEN LOVE
No matter how one darks oneself
And I've tried, I've tried
The love thoughts that transluce the flesh
Are as hard to hide
As those green lights which a firefly's body
Suffers from inside
Anon (10th century)

My November Guest

It's been another hot November weekend. Just the time for a late autumn poem:-)

My November Guest
Robert Frost

My Sorrow, when she's here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She's glad the birds are gone away,
She's glad her simple worsted gray
Is silver now with clinging mist.
The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.
Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.

She Tells Her Love

She tells her love while half asleep
In the dark hours
With half words whispered low
As Earth stirs in her winter sleep
And puts out grass and flowers
Despite the snow.

~Robert Graves~
Poems 1938-1945

The Mountain Side at Evening

Now even falls
And fresh, cold breezes blow
Adown the grey-green mountain side
Strewn with rough boulders. Soft and low
Night speaks, her tongue untied
Darkness to darkness calls.

Tis now men say
From rugged piles of stones
Steal shapes and things that should be still;
Green terror ripples through our bones,
Our inmost heart-strings thrill
And yearn for careless day.

~Robert Graves~
The Carthusian
June 1911

On this day of sky-blue bears

I was browsing though Mayakovsky’s book on his visit to America (more on that later) and of course turned to the Net to find out more. As one does I ended up at a site which hosted V.V. Khlebnikov's poems, a man I had never heard of before. I am not sure I understand this poem completely or even know the context in which it was written but something about it grabbed me immediately. At the risk of yet another poetry post, here it is:

On this day of sky-blue bears
Running across quiet eyelashes,
I divine beyond the blue waters
In the cup of my eyes an order to wake.

The silver spoon of my extended eyes
Offers me a sea buoying a storm petrel;
And I see how the Russian bird flies
Through unknown lashes to the roaring sea.

A sea of heavenlove has capsized
Someone's sail in the round-blue water,
But the first storm is hopeless and gone
And from now on the journey is spring.

1919

Poem from this site.

The Looking Glass Wars

When I was at IIT Mumbai, I was - in a loose sort of fashion - a part of the lit group there. The group did not possess any especial talents, most of us were merely techies with literary pretensions. Our efforts found themselves in the few magazines the Institute put out merely because most people were too busy with their studies and couldn't give a rat's arse for literature of any sort. Still, there was a camaraderie of sorts, books and ideas exchanged and the like all of which could be quite heady. Of all of us who wrote, the only one (in my opinion) who had the potential to be more was my friend, Rajeev Nair. It was always a pleasure to walk down to his room and read something new that he had written. Even now when I read his poems, I find them subtle and sophisticated in tone.

Here's one that I quite like:

I. That laterally inverted, two dimensional
Image with crow's feet and greying hair
Isn't me......
I am something else entirely.

II. They told her she had a face
That would crack a mirror
Funny thing;
When she finally looked into one,
It wasn't the mirror that cracked.

III. She and I
We'd look into the mirror
And talk to each other's images
We'd do it for hours

Then the mirror broke
And we can't stand each other.

Perhaps more poems were written post IIT but in the interim years we lost touch and I haven't seen any. If the muse has long left the building, it would be a pity.

Three Things

First, I never knew about the Hungry Movement.

Second, I had little idea that a photo album on members of a literary movement could be interesting.

Third, I like the picture of the gentleman above for its general air of insouciance.

Coda from "Letter of Testimony"

Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world.
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable.
To learn to see.
Your glance scattered seeds.
It planted a tree.
I talk
because you shake its leaves.
~Octavio Paz~

Coda of the poem "Letter of Testimony" from A Tree Within.

Anna Akhmatova (1915)

Broad and yellow is the evening light
Tender the April coolness
You are so many years late,
Nevertheless I am glad you came.

Sit here close to me
And look on joyfully:
Here is a blue composition book
With the poems of my childhood.

Forgive me that I ignored the sun
And that I lived in sorrow
Forgive, forgive that I
Mistook too many others for you.

Anna Akhmatova

via comments on this site.

More Cavafy

1/2 PAST TWELVE

Half past twelve. Time has gone by quickly
since nine o’clock when I lit the lamp

and sat down here. I’ve been sitting without reading,

without speaking. Completely alone in the house,

whom could I talk to?

Since nine o’clock when I lit the lamp

the shade of my young body

has come to haunt me, to remind me

of shut scented rooms,

of past sensual pleasure-what daring pleasure.

And it’s also brought back to me

streets now unrecognizable,

bustling night clubs now closed,

theatres and cafés no longer there.

The shade of my young body

also brought back the things that make us sad:

family, grief, separations,

the feelings of my own people, feelings

of the dead so little acknowledged.

Half past twelve. How the time has gone by.
Half past twelve. How the years have gone by.