Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry A one-of-a-kind collection of work by one of India's best contemporary poets. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is one of the most celebrated Indian poets writing in English and an important translator from Indian languages, but until now his work has rarely been available in the United States and Britain. Mehrotra’s poetry combines the commonplace and the strange, the autobiographical and the fabulous, and reflects an intense and original engagement with American poetry, especially the work of William Carlos Williams and the Beats. This book provides a comprehensive picture of Mehrotra’s achievements as a poet and translator and includes a striking new poetic sequence.

Selected Poems and Translations

Amit Chaudhuri

Vidyan Ravinthiran

Reputed to have been compiled by the Satavahana King Hala in the second century CE, this is a celebrated collection of 700 verses in Maharashtri Prakrit, composed in the compact, distilled gatha form. The anthology has attracted several learned commentaries and now, through Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's acclaimed translation of 207 verses from the anthology, readers of English at last have access to its poems. The speakers are mostly women and, whether young or old, married or single, they touch on the subject of sexuality with frankness, sensitivity and, every once in a while, humour, which never ceases to surprise.

Prākrit Love Poetry from the Gāthāsaptaśatī of Sātavāhana Hāla

The Absent Traveller

Daniel Weissbort

Periplus means 'the action of sailing round, a circumnavigation; a voyage (or journey) round a coastline, etc.'; in The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a first-century account that describes coastal routes from Egypt to India and along East Africa, it is 'a narrative of such a voyage' (OED). Periplus: Poetry in Translation attempts to do both. It sails round or along certain coastlines, some of which might be unfamiliar, and whenever possible it narrates what occurred or did not occur on the journey. A degree of randomness is inevitable in a volume not restricted to any one period or country, and the translation voyages undertaken here range widely. A. K. Ramanujan reworks, from existing materials, the poems of the fourteenth-century Kashmiri saint-poet Lalla; Weissbort and Musial collaborate to bring over into English the experiment at work of the late Polish poet Miron Bialoszewski; there is a Korean shaman song; Arun Kolatkar's Marathi poems are translated by himself in response to various reading invitations and are gathered here for the first time. In the Introduction to Modern Poetry in Translation: 1983 (MPT), Ted Hughes, looking back on 'the unique tidal wave of poetry translation that swept through English (and through the other chief Western languages) in the sixties and the early seventies', said that many of the translations done at the time now form 'a great series of naturalized poetic monuments'. That tidal wave, at whose crest stood poets like Miroslav Holub, Zbigniew Herbert, Vasko Popa, Janos Pilinszky, and Yehuda Amichai, was a wholly European affair. Periplus, like MPT, features European poets, but at the same time explores an area hitherto neglected: the versetraditions of the Indian subcontinent. Almost a century into the age of translation, perhaps it is time to see if we cannot have a new balance of poetic power.

Poetry in Translation

Periplus

Brings together some of the best writers and thinkers on Indian literature in English from Rudyard Kipling to Salman Rushdie, covering everything of literary significance in India.

A History of Indian Literature in English

Poems

The Transfiguring Places

"Complete with brief biographical and critical introductions to each poet, this is the definitive anthology of modern Indian poetry in English"--Publisher.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

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