PostScript The English Literary Society Journal
EDITORS Mahvish Khan III English
Susan Harris III English
Pooja Anna Pant II English
Radhika Chakraborty II English
Cover designed by Sohini Basak Layout by Pooja Anna Pant
Special thanks to our very supportive staff advisor Dr. Natasha Vashisht.
Editorial (Mahvish Khan and Susan Harris)
Is Everything Fine with the Fine Art of Translation?(Amrutha Jose Pampackal) 1 A Witness to Belfast (N.P. Ashley) 3 Rain (Trisha Dutt)
4 A Contract of Loyalty (Supurna Dasgupta) 6
Melquiedes’Soliloquy (Rupam Kalita) 8 The Lunar Sublime (Arjun Mahey) 10 Untitled (Susan Harris) 11 She said she wanted to go to the beach... (Philip Cherian) 12 ‘Sitting for a portrait that is not my own’ (Pooja Anna Pant) 13
CONTENTS I need to reassure my cynicism. It wavers, sometimes. (Rhea John)
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[murmurings] (Edwin Torres) 15 Creative Disobedience in Nuyorican Writing (Edwin Torres) 16 Geography (Urvashi Bahuguna) 17 A Sloping Roof (Radhika Chakraborty) 18 Spy (Naomi T. Jose) 19 Untitled (Dhruv Rajashekaran) 19 A Song of Ice and Fire (Malini Bose) 21
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Editorial Dear Nyota i wondered whether i should write to you since you get all my references and can write back to me intelligently. it makes me furious. i speculated writing a syntax-free, befuddlingto-eyes, opaque letter to you, to express my abstruseness. you wouldn’t have minded my scholarly snobbishness but you would have rejected the attitude lurking-naming it plebeian or puerile. is my logic infallible? aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh i dont think you are interesting at all. you are sexy enigmatic and quiet. all splendid reasons to desire your acquaintance i assure you. what of me holds your attention? a person cultivates oneself according to what one thinks makes a person ‘interesting’. you find people interesting and are drawn to them, because they correspond to your definition of ‘interesting’ as they have accomplished all that you want to. it is because of these fixed ideas about this definition that you can recognize an interesting person instantaneously. but there is the impossibility of conceiving him as a model because of the perfectness he has in your eyes. perfection undermines progress. the disenchantment seeps in through stages. i wonder when i wonder at all: what is not superficial today? try to see your self as a subject and an object. the object is what people think you are; what they can see of you. of course i don’t agree. it is attributable only to un-intelligence that they can see only a dominant trait. did you ever find it confounding that people must be described in their entirety using one or two words? but i can avoid that, you can’t. that is how humans perceive other humans- in concentrated nebulous adjectives. Interesting is the catchy phrase for today. what a stupid ironic tag for our time. assume ‘interesting’ is the object i covet in your person, but disenchantment works like a charm unraveling you through different stages where i even encounter the subject-which is the self minus object. what is left might not be execrable but will dull in juxtaposition, and i am impatient in my quest for the object. i will leave you again when i realize that the object that is interesting is just a thin line across your body and i tear myself away in my quest for depth. but you see the incompatibility don’t you? contemplation can see so well. yet it is never prescient or enough. Live long and prosper. Spock
PS: the answer to your question is no.
Is Everything Fine with the Fine Art of Translation?
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Among the many gifts of globalization to the developing world is the establishment of a translation industry in every country with a sizeable reading population. Thanks to India’s rich linguistic diversity and ever-growing IT sector, the machine-centered act of translation has grown into a USD 500 million industry. However, there is an aspect of human involvement attached to the act that lies beyond the mechanical use of Computer Assisted Translation (CAT) tools. It is this realization of translation as a fine art that urges me to write this piece. I will be attempting in this small space, to deal with the issues encountered by the translator, in the process of translation and by the reader in understanding the text, and suggest what is required of both parties to do justice to the art of translation. In many cases, the translation gets ‘popular’ simply because the work gets circulated in a language with a large global presence among the educated. But this educated new readership has lots of limitations in associating with the original text, some of which are self-imposed. Hardly anyone bothers to notice the name of the translator, even of much appreciated works. I am sure that not many of us know who has translated Anna Karenina and The Alchemist into English though we have read and admired these works. Added to it is the deplorable condition that many of us, while reading the so called ‘great works of twentieth century literature’ by authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Pablo Neruda, fail to notice that they were not originally written in English and that we are reading it in translation. It is sad that we ourselves are creating such obstacles when there are enough problems imposed by the language barrier. If we consider the Indian context, our recognition of the source language is mainly restricted to the identification of certain familiar surnames like Singh, Nair and Iyer scattered around in the text, which lets us guess the culture associated with the characters’ experience. It is also very difficult to translate certain colloquialisms, metaphors and innuendoes to the target language. This results in a thwarted representation of the culture among the readers who, in most cases, are devoid of any knowledge of the socio-cultural aspects being represented. The problem arises either out of the absence of exact lexical equivalent in the target language or due to cultural associations of certain words. For example, the words ‘uncle’ and ‘aunty’, when used in India, have multiple definitions unlike the single definition it has for the English. In many cases, such drawbacks lead to misrepresentation of the sourcelanguage’s cultural values. It is on such occasions that the translator emerges as an important figure. Very often, it is solely through the translator that the new readership gains access to the author, and when the translation does not do justice to the original, their criticisms are misdirected at the author who might be alien to the target language, and hence unaware of the violent death of his work in the hands of a translator. Thus the crucial role of a translator is as a creator The Naked and the Dead. The Hunt for Red October. The Worm Ourobouros. The Magnificent Ambersons. Death Comes to the Archibishop. From
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of text along with the author, which is performed where a mere literal translation of words is inadequate to convey the idea signified by them. Then, it is the translator’s choice of words that determine what he intends to do with the text. His choice can result in an entirely new reading, which need not necessarily be bad, as witnessed in certain cases where the translated text receives greater appreciation than the original.When the translator gets actively involved in reworking the text, translation gets replaced by ‘transcreation’, which in fact, is better than a literal translation, especially in the case of poetry. If the act of transcreation is absent, the famous observation attributed to Robert Frost , “what constitutes poetry is exactly what is lost in translation”, becomes true, because each word in a poem has an idea or a sea of ideas behind it which mostly gets lost by merely restating them literally. For a translator to perform the above mentioned roles is not an easy task, for, if we take Walter Benjamin’s definition, a real translation “is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully”. It might be easy to be merely accepted by a new readership in a new market which lacks knowledge of the source language and culture as it just requires a very good command over the language into which the text is translated, even while your knowledge of the source language is not laudable. However, to do justice to the art and act of translation you should have mastery over both the languages and the culture associated with these languages so that there is no lack of congruence in the texture of the two texts. A translator also has to remain faithful to the original while exercising his freedom of reproduction whenever necessary. I hope that it has become evident by now that the translator is not merely copying the text to a different language, but recreating it while trying to bridge the cultural gap despite various linguistic barriers. So henceforth, as true readers, the least we can do is acknowledge the presence of the translator and appreciate his efforts wherever it is noteworthy. - Amrutha Jose Pampackal,English (2009-12)
Here to Eternity. Point Counter Point. All The King’s Men. The Way of the Flesh. The Wings of the Dove. Tender is the Night. White Noise. White
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A Witness to Belfast The storm that was to come* Did not come at all Or came and went away Like the deceptive sun I wasn’t particularly looking for that Belfast must have been like this Its Beckettian grey could not have been greyer Its cars and carts made only the breeze of a noise Its archetypal rain any less so, ever Its taverns, brimming with reddish poetry and bitter guinness A mountain-trapped, industrial town, with Gulliver guarding And its hapless, vulnerable sun I wasn’t feeling that My visa was to a foreign land But I Ianded up in a somnambulist town That woke up in an alien lane (And had to live there) Like its dreamy, moony sun I wasn’t particularly seeing The cream of Ireland that surfaced my eyes From the undergraduate reading lists Like a charmingly, cold handed sun And the refrigerated neon bulbs on the street A not so particular touch... They said no “good mornings” They made the good mornings They adjusted the sun through clocks Made it into sharp pieces, rather. The ‘not-even-witness’ sun I wasn’t particularly noticing Now I know even the sun is not universal! _____________________________________________ * The reference here is to a storm that was to hit Northern Ireland on the day of my arrival in Belfast! - N.P. Ashley, Department of English
Teeth. Tropic of Cancer. The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. The Sun Also Rises. Their Eyes Were on God. Ragtime. The Recognitions. Revolutio
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Rain? 10:25 susan susan: trisha do you want to contribute something to our journal 10:26 please please? me me: dyou want to take something from my blog? 10:27 susan susan: wouldnt you rather write something new to be published? me me: nope. susan susan: its coming out end of this month me me: aaargh. if i think of something i’ll send it in then. susan susan: write about the rain 10:28 its been raining like mad in the nights me me: I’m not going to write about the rain. i’m asleep at night. susan susan: same here i keep missing it me: hahaha me susan susan: and in the morning its damn wet and everyone’s talking about it perplexing.
They say it rains at night. Dark clouds rolling their way through darker skies, splitting apart, ripped apart, by shreds of silver stark lightening, tidal waves broken into teardrop fragments crashing their way to the dusty bowels of concrete cities, winds by the thousand churning the still and murky air. And inside, tucked away in tiny walled boxes, you sleep. You sleep, with sweat trickling down the end of your nose, down the crevices of your neck, forming patterns around your damp hair on your bricked pillows, and you toss and turn uncomfortably. What passes through your mind? Glimmers of unread tutorial readings, perhaps. Or the knowledge that the next day’s going to be as hot as the day that has just shrivelled up and died: as hot as hell, basically. Either way, you lie there, half asleep and half awake, not hearing the welcome sound of rain lashing and whipping the walls and pavements, invisible even to the unlit street lamp that never works, the one that stands just outside the temple where they start singing in unbearable brash voices at six in the morning. Strange how you don’t hear the rain, but you hear that music (a word used loosely) and the ringing of the bells and you crack open an eye, knowing you still have an hour to sprawl ungracefully on your filthy sheets before being late to class. And then, finally, when you step outside in a valiant attempt to tolerate a new day: the sun. It shines, it shines, it shines, and your head hurts, and water starts trickling its way down your neck and it’s not because you didn’t dry yourself properly after your bath.
o nary Road. The Sheltering Sky. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The Painted Bird. Neuromancer. Never Let Me Go. The Moviegoer. A Handful of
5 The ground is ever so slightly damp though the steamy morning will soon dry it out, and later, at college, while you’re sitting in the library, Dhruv plonks himself down next to you and describes to you, loudly and unabashedly (and you thought libraries were supposed to be quiet), how hard it rained last night and how cool and refreshing it was, and how he sat watching the rain thinking thoughts appropriate to a third year student of literature (green tea versus peppermint, though he will lie about this if you ask). You’re still thinking about rain as you cycle your way home and perhaps this is why, when you hear a faint rumble and the air suddenly cools for the split half of a second, your heart leaps in a way that portends cardiac arrest in the future, and the corners of your mouth prepare to turn upwards to form a rusty smile. Perhaps things are beginning to look up. But no. The rumble was a bus that just thundered past you, forcing your cycle into the gutter, and the coolness was because you passed the metro station and a smear of air conditioning had escaped onto the street. Heart settles back into place, corners of your mouth turn down again, and as you lie awake later that night, waiting for the rain that does not come, you comfort yourself with the thought that winter will have to arrive eventually, conveniently forgetting the frozen, smoggy months spent shivering under two duvets and layers of thermal underwear and a monkey cap (if Bengali). Lesson learnt: if not in possession of air-conditioning or heaters (specific to context), the only thing that’s going to see you through life is that old cliche, a bad memory.
- Trisha Dutt, English (2009-12)
Note Note: The day after this post was written, it rained and rained and rained, and the weather is currently all things wonderful. You just can’t catch a break sometimes.
Dust. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. A Death in the Family. The Death of the Heart. The Big Sleeep. Something Wicked This Way Comes. Another
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A Contract of Loyalty “Narrative contract”, “Always historicize”, “A truth universally acknowledged”, “Dedoubling as a literary technique”…the voices merge and coalesce among similar other whispers inside the head.
Disclaimer #1: All the novelists, poets, critics, teachers and students mentioned in this paper are ‘real’ people. Any resemblance with anyone fictional is completely coincidental. “Plain Jane” never dreams of a handsome man: the moment she sets her eye upon the cranky Rochester she knows that this is the man she must be with. Browning’s Duke kills his wife who smiled at her attendants and then candidly reveals the “half-flush” along her throat to an outsider. The Lady of Shallot falls in love with images and shadows. While Jane is deemed to be caught in a limbo between the ‘Realist’ and the ‘Romantic’ movements (like her creator), Browning’s Duke wears a “double mask” and the Lady of Shallot is “a portrait of the artist”. Terry Eagleton is right: “In everyday life, talking about imaginary people as though they were real is known as psychosis; in universities, it is known as literary criticism.” Of course, this confession too, is an exemplary moment of “self-reflexivity”. Of course, Bakhtinian terms bring the inaccessible literary heights down to the “polyphonic” ground-level of the common-man, through the jargon of “heteroglossia” and the fun-filled “carnivalesque”. A man of the people, Bakhtin sees the masses subverting the dominant ideology in most Russian texts. Here he has a friend in Germany whose ideas on sub-structure and super-structure has complicated our understanding of literature forever. Therefore the modernists are “bourgeois” and the realists are the “proletariat” even though the reality being portrayed is one of bourgeois reality. So what if the writer himself is a bourgeois ‘raising a voice’ for the proletariat? As long as he is “organic” to the class of his new allegiance, nothing can deter him, ever, as Gramsci would tell you reassuringly. Organicity therefore, tends to become central to any claim of authenticity- what about us then, we who sit here with our books torn between “sympathy and judgement”? The subaltern and his voice enter the fray- is the subaltern only a body whose physical presence suffices for all the inarticulation; or does he have a voice and language? Oh and did I say “he”? My apologies for the Freudian slip: gendering this piece was never the aim. Gender is a relation to power and power is a silent presence and gender is also about performativity- building up knowledge is an exercise in power, and therefore knowledge, gender and power are all “do-ing” words that they never taught us in school as such. We learn now, as we will continue to learn forever.
Disclaimer #2: All the novelists, poets, critics, teachers and students mentioned here are people I am in complete awe of. Any trace of irreverence is completely unintended and gravely regretted.
Bullshit Night in Suck City. The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare. If On A Winter's Night A Traveler. The Elegance of the Hedgehog. You
7 I am a student of literature. People call it “fluff”, I call it life, for most of life is “fluff”. The distinction between the mental and the non-mental hardly ever coincides with that which separates the real from the unreal. No I am not trying a turncoat debate here; I am interrogating the bipolarity of attitude that people exhibit about my discipline. Literature is great, visiting the book-fair is imperative, discussing issues of global and metaphysical importance with authors is symptomatic of an intellectual bent of mind; but also, literature is only words, words are merely psycho-active, never socio-active, literature “kills” books that speak of great ideals through thorough dissection, literature is for the armchair activist. At the risk of sounding clichéd, I’d say that literature is bipolar, since it provides us with a double sense, that of stability and that of revolution, simultaneously. Within a space of three pages Neruda makes two statements illustrating this brand of bipolarity“Poetry is an act of peace. Peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread.” “I felt a pressing need to write a central poem that would bring together the historical events, the geographical situations, the life and struggles of our peoples.” Literature gives us what we desire the most- a nuanced history, a rolling machine, a history that was, a history that is and a history that will be. It is an unstated contract of loyalty with the author.
- Supurna Dasgupta, English (2009-12)
Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense. Because It Is Bitter and Because It Is My Heart. Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Sey
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Melquiedes’ Soliloquy I strung out a dithering filament from an enchanted bulb and blew it across the skies Which travelled for a hundred days. Old though I am, my hands feeble and my eyes feebler, I could see the filament fly through dusty clouds and sealed skies And finally spark into electricity like a fine gold-cased thread that has been stretched out infinitely By a pair of powerful hands, The owner of which had fled a haunting ghost And found a land that never was, That had no dead for a hundred years. His was a failed propitiation that preceded my awaking from a delicious slumber That had stolen into and immobilized my constitution. The pride that moved me was ancient in origin Bred on a hundred years of magic, gold and silver, and destitute. And I decided to lurch forward to make and destroy history In order to write my name in history. A hundred year old wisp of a man with an untamed beard and sparrow hands Stirring a cistern that smelt of thick canvas clothing, mosquitoes, gold fishes And a hundred acres of banana plantation and dreams of houses made of ice, My tribe calls me Melquiedes and I have wandered around arid topographies Like the Catalan plateaus Where I saw a stray bull mowing down a brave matador When he was taking his afternoon siesta in a gooseberry garden, And I have arrived at houses half-eaten by red ants And overgrown incorrigibly with moss and lichen Like the one where a hundred year old Buendia pored over my parchments. I fed on a palette of thriving sadism while my brethren The Sintis, the Doms and the Romas Egged me on to find a roof under the sky. Nay, it was never a lust for the circle of immortality, But the instinct for a hut to receive my people from the assaulting rain. And one day I climbed a cliff with a hundred rivers And let loose a hundred sluice-gates. The water tumbled down like a mountain waterfall that had shorn its roots with Its parent river and had transformed into an autonomous body That had no control over itself. Like an uncertified legislation that could spell disaster for the populace, Like a revolution that devours its own children, Children like the gallant colonel who fought countless civil wars Lost all and ended up as a relic locked up in a decrepit room
mour: An Introduction. God Bless You, Mr Rosewater. For Esme, With Love and Squalor. I See You Never. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Tender
9 Whom the government hounded out a hundred times To honour him with a medal of shame, And his poor relative who was a fellow traveller in a train carrying The three thousand dead corpses of his fellow townsmen Who had to maintain silence for the sake of an avowed project To rewrite history, And a defiant patriarch who spent half of his life Tied to a tree in his yard And never died. The rains took four years, eleven months and two days to embark on What the killing of three thousand people could not, Till a yellow sun took over for a blast of militant heat And forced my deathless anatomy onto the pleasant window sill of A fate-smitten, meditative Buendia, wondering who the last casualty of the thankless revolution was. - Rupam Kalita, English (2009-12)
is the Night. Suddenly, Last Summer. Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? And To Thing I Saw It on Mulberry Street. The Penultimate Peril. The Wind-
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The Lunar Sublime In 1969 I had been unwillingly deposited by my parents at a small parochial boarding school in Poona, a former military outpost four hours by car from Bombay. It is difficult to find Poona on a World Map, but it has this claim to fame: a large number of British military officers retired there during the high noon of the Raj. The Agatha Christie kind of retired officers, that is, usually of the middle ranks. It was a dreadful school. For the two years I spent there I was beaten up regularly by anyone I disagreed with, which happened often, especially by a manic young lad who later joined the Mossad and was responsible for the rescue of Israeli passengers abandoned to Idi Amin’s murderous whims at Entebbe Airport (or so I heard). I would like to think he cut his thrash-andrun teeth on me. My only refuge - quite apart from the army band which I joined and drummed for, as an escape from the atrocious regimen of militarized violence such as only boys can inflict on each other - was the world of the imagination, explored largely through books and daydreaming. I was about to turn 11. The real world and the fantasy (or fantastical) world of the imagination generally decline, then as now, to blend together; but in the summer of 1969 they took one of those magnificent, unreal leaps into the unimaginable, and managed to concoct a scenario out of my fondest immaterial dreams into the ungiving material world. I read about it on the way to dinner, or what passed for dinner, in the newspaper clipping that the seniors would post daily in the Refectory corridor. Man was going to land on the Moon. For an 11 year-old boy with a rich internal life, this was a mad, implausible, and perfect miracle. A human being on the moon? The most that had happened was dozens of people going around the earth and moon in an endless succession of circular flights. It had become worse than boring; it had become commonplace and dull. This was different; this was the substance that imagination makes whole tapestries and castles and cities out of; the stuff that allows a young boy to imagine the mundane become fantastical, like bringing the dead to life, or making waterfalls flow upwards. I was doused in breathless wonder. I kept a scrapbook of the journey (long lost) from liftoff to touchdown and back (with my own drawings, and such photographs I could manage to squirrel away in those distant days of no television) and was magicked clean out of the world for all of July and much of August. I fell in love with the sciences, remaining scientifically minded ever since, and was transformed within a year from dunderhead to mathematical wizard, later going on to become the best mathematician in school. Needless to add I read as much as I could about it: anything, everything I could get hold of in a provincial town on the wrong side of the western coastal hills. What made it
Up Bird Chronicle. Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can’t Avoid. So Long and Thanks for All the Fish. The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding. Ele
11 doubly wonderful - if anything could do that - was that Armstrong shared my birth week (if he had shared my birthday I think I might have died of ecstasy). And the scheduled day of descent onto the surface of the moon was my father’s birthday. The final miracle happened at night. On July 20, at 8.10 pm UTC, or thereabouts, Neil Armstrong landed on another world and spoke his now blunted words for the first time: ‘This is one small step for man but a giant leap for mankind’. A world away, a dozen or so of us boys were gathered around an enormous radio in a military Common Room, breaking every school rule, listening: the broadcast from the Sea of Tranquility, to Houston, to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), to Bombay, to Poona. We could not understand a word through all that radio crackle, of course, and it was almost 3.00 in the morning of the 21st by then, but we knew what was happening, and we did hear human sounds amid the static, and the sheer lunatic wonder of it left us sleepless until the next night. Why am I writing all this down? Because it happened 40 years ago to the day, almost to the hour, and I still haven’t forgotten the sensation that crept across my scalp and into my gut at that godless, divine hour when I heard the radio bring the moon down to us provincial children. A whole generation of memories has been forgotten, but not this. Nothing (except perhaps bits of Shakespeare absorbed during some of my more alert moods, gazing at the Himalayas from atop a peak within the range, and some moments of musical rapture) has managed to rival the splendour of that feeling. My 11th Birthday (the number had by now become talismanic) was one of my happiest ones. This year Armstrong (on August 5th) and my father turn 79. -
Arjun Mahey, Department of English
Author’s note: The article was completed at 1.00 pm on the 21st of July, 2009
phants can Remember. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. Never Let Me Go. The Lambs of London. The Ground Beneath Her Feet.
12 something my Id wants me to is to lick the cream between every bourbon biscuit and neatly arrange the biscuits back in and relish the cream slowly churning in my tongue and I don’t get bored ever because I am busy spinning chocolate around my coelacanth; and all you you can do is slaver and I wont even budge, and you will call me megalomaniacal and I you: a disturbing can of crap let loose which points at movies and say Nostalghia sucks. Or stab me at my heart littler than my first. What I dread is cardiomyopathy. You will gift me a chart with parts arrows showing diseases. Thriving till I feel skeletal that’s the way it works that’s the way the cookie crumbles. You won’t acknowledge of course; my wrists or knees. Nothing eats me like you do. Not nectarines. Not neophobia. I thought you you must know. Esp. before any pouncing the tiger asks, are you ready I am going to eat you. But you slink and sidle before my bloodshot eyeball and feast on my fish bones while children starve and die; where do you hide your shame in a pocket or a test tube I want to embalm it for later when you go see the time will snow and the time will snow and I will be here sleeping for you.
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Susan Harris, English (2009-12)
She said she wanted to go to the beach… She said she wanted to go to the beach. I told her for the umpteenth time that it was a waste of time. She asked me why I was so against the beach, and I replied quite honestly that it was because of the sharks. She said I had nothing to worry about, since the sharks hadn’t bitten anyone at the beach for years. I replied that that was precisely the point. I mean what’s the use of going to the beach if you can’t see a decent shark-goringinnocent-beach-goer scene? She told me she didn’t know why she’d married me, and I reminded her that I was rich. She told me that going to the beach would be a good way to spend the weekend. I told here there was nothing there that we couldn’t get in our backyard. She told me, yes there was and where was I going to get a beach in our backyard? I told her I’d leave the hose running and take some sand from the kitty-litter and spray it around. She told that would be different. I asked her how. She replied that, for a start, there wouldn’t be any salty air. I told her that I was willing to throw an entire bag of salt into the air. She told me to stop fooling around, and that the beach was a good place to enjoy oneself. I asked her but what of the sharks? She replied that there wouldn’t be any of them around, and I told her that it wouldn’t be much enjoyment without seeing anyone being eaten alive by sharks. She told me I was a perverted, sadistic man. I pointed out to her that her brother was a lawyer who’d be glad to handle a divorce.
The Moor’s Last Sigh. Looking for the Possible Dance. The Virgin Suicides. The Moon is Down. The Winter of Our Discontent. Possessing the Secre
13 She told me that the beach would be a good place to expose the kids to other people, and I told her I wasn’t going to risk them seeing a man being eaten by a shark. She told me there wouldn’t be any damn sharks in the beach and I replied ah, but then we aren’t going, are we? She told me that the sand and the salty water would be good for my health. I replied that I hated it when the sand got into my underwear, and I wouldn’t go near the water for all the gold in the world. She asked me why not, and I replied it’s because of the sharks. She told me if I loved her, I’d take her to the beach. So we’re going to the beach now. But I’ve taken a pair of binoculars with me just in case. You never know when a shark could decide to eat some unsuspecting person. I could be lucky today. -
Philip Cherian, Physics (2009-12)
‘Sitting for a portrait that is not my own’ I don’t think I quite understand how I came to be painted as the bad guy. You said there was a storm in my gaze, and a cloud upon my brow. Surely there was some mistake. I had never wanted to hurt anyone, I said. But it didn’t matter. You only saw the stubborn nature of my jawline and the tightness around my mouth. Apparently, to you, my face betrayed me and spoke of my crimes and their motivation. The creases in my forehead were the tracks of my childhood deviance. The mole on my left cheek was my abused adolescence. And my lips, well, they were that dark because of the love I spurned, again and again. I cannot trust my face. Or the things you tell me anymore. -Pooja Anna Pant, English(2010-13)
I need to reassure my cynicism. It wavers, sometimes. I need to read poems about consciously being mad[ly] in love. So much so that we now use the clichés consciously, defying Both those who use them ignorantly, as commonplaces, And those who studiously avoid the pollution, And so Proclaim to the World that our love Subverts Conventional MeaningOurs is Language and the World that’s in it! While believing, beneath, that it’s all just hormones anyway.
t Joy. Smilla’s Sense of Snow. The Music of Chance. The Buddha of Suburbia. Remains of the Day. A Prayer for Owen Meany. The Wayward Bus.
14 I need to attend plays of socio-political Worth. Nod vigorously in self-righteous assent, like everybody there, Be suitably dressed, nothing too bourgeois, like everybody there, Critique State oppression, middle class Conservatism and IndolenceBut I can never prevent those popup points: My family’s Middle Class. I don’t know who the State is. I don’t see What use it is to the downtrodden that I use my leisure time To nod vigorously at their hurt. I need to believe that they’d stutter, ashamed, helpless, without answers. I need to imagine those scenarios, you know the ones, Where my friends turn out to not give a damn, The men I love forget me, my family dies on me [The self-absorption reaches its peak here but, Threaded through the shit, can you see the naive trust?] I die, and nobody cries [Wryly smiling, viciously reminded That I am not free of the proverbs, Chinese, Yiddish, mother’s] To remember, grateful for the harshness, How little I have grown, contrary to unreasonable certainty, Or hope. I need to hear of people who have done badly Despite being born with effortless perfection, To despair, fear though never pity, Throw up my hands, exasperated at the futility, To Believe, desperately, and realize the familiarity Of it, like I never stopped doing it, and Hope that that is true, to mitigate the petty calculatedness. I need to be reduced, to be crushed and trained to cringe, Because- one final confessionI cannot live in the moment, extempore, Steadily leaving the minutes behind, like emission trails; I am tied to each one that passes as if I gave birth to it. I cannot easily turn my back on Lost friend, disappointed hope, on emptiness, Without practice. -
Rhea John, English (2009-12)
Pippy Longstocking. Love Among The Chickens. The Man With Two Left Feet. The Clicking of Cuthbert. Goodbye Chunky Rice. Mostly Harmless.
[ murmurings ]
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witness the shock of being seen <the dangerous orpheus> the mother asker <the formal confrontation> witness the eagerly looked scattered <the best moment of mirror> the mistake that inserts music <the over the ocean duende> witness the use of dude <the wound bound by boom> the window smarty ridicule reduced by the multi-lingual 3rd wheel <witness the molten vox> the washing machine populi <the recognition battle laced with modesty etcetra> the institutionally muted the attacking experimental <the culture of context> the compromise of shifted erasure <the absorbtion knowledge parading as perception’s dueña> witness the unknowing repetition figured by truth the wording careful-larity made of literature’s gratuity <witness the formal sheriff> the experted singular unpronounceable in disconnect of external-larity <witness the getting of content> the horror defamilia <the co-opted longevity of horizon’s prominent constraint that reeks of a significant willingness to read olympian work> witness the impulse of “i” <the agenda that unpacks the internal combustion> the cosmopolitan question <the illusory utopia> witness the loco localismo barebacked by feeling <by discussion of “me” in privileged oblivia> the global gorgeous linger . . . if see is what guides what guides see . . . no wanting no poetry no nation <witness the hunger for spirit> the lungspeak ambient <the micro/phonic real> the transformative organic <the dirt speech> the nationless meaning that defines nature <the interruptus phonemsicals> the spermal sublingual <the mapping social mop-up> the liquid stranger <witness the no-longer knocking> the crooked each-other <the shortened social-larity> moving wordlessly across this page (previously published in “The PoPedology Of An Ambient Language,” Atelos Books) - Edwin Torres, “Nuyorican” (New York-Puerto Rican) poet The Child in Time. An Artist of the Floating World. The Cider House Rules. Nights at the Circus. A Pale View of the Hills. Summer in Baden-Ba
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CREATIVE DISOBEDIENCE IN NUYORICAN WRITING (Presented at a poetry panel at Fordham University Lincoln Center, NYC, NY) And that title makes me question “What artist is NOT creatively disobedient?” Who among them would say they stay inside the lines when they color their shape? Which makes me wonder how far to push my artistic disobedience before I’m ignored as a mere Latino, or even further into the multi-culti pile, a Nuyorican? Was it my people who disobeyed the reason to find borders? The generational routine of “not fitting in”, incorporated as a daily performance? Could disobedience be a cloak that defines minority when we include minority in the collective other of being artist? My tangent into other…a representation of being culturally enlightened enough to know that I make a difference by not following the path. My other against normalcy, my ethnic against a nation I thought I was born in. And that awakening itself, being the path itself. I am choosing here to raise a ruckus by questioning the fact of disobedience. And is that a character trait defined as Puerto Rican or New Yorker or wise guy or smart ass or Lower E-sider? Loisaida…my vison…my home…inside me? Kazuo Ohno, master of Butoh and all things kinetic, said “my playpen is the universe” to which I, edwiiiiiin torrrres master of all things edwin, would add the word “inside”…my playpen is the universe inside. My home is always with me. As a poet, a citizen of the world, my nationality is my language. My baggage. My creative chaos is a right born into my heritage. And if my nationality is Artist, I am now the captain of my mutiny…head be my sail, bodyship be my captain. Excuse me, were there words asked to be written for this panel? Were we asked to arrive as representatives of an other? Yet one more other to exist inside each of us? I have a two-line poem called “Mystery Prize” — “Let me tell you something about arrival, it only means you’re not where you were.” My creative disobedience can be traced before Taino—the indigenous owners of the land I claim in my chromosome, before the European queen and her migrant serfs decided on a vacation spot, before the Spaniards outlawed indigenous thinking to make room for their own, before the idea of originality had roots in stones and thread. I am a living exfoliant of NEW Nuyorican hyphenation, a lingo beyond baba-loon. A by-product of an imaginary dream…a ghetto Romeo and Juliet in a harlem West Side Story, where jets and sharks play out their ballet to the death. A poet yes, but a thinker beyond. You, out there in the audience, are all thinkers beyond because I’m telling you you are. Because the brain is a mercurial god that feeds your muscles the movement you need to move in this world. If there is just one people to represent disobedience, I don’t think we Boricuas can claim a mantle on that shelf. Believe it or not, there are others who disobey. But our creativity
den. Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. No Orchids for Miss Blandish. How Green Is My Valley. The Garden Where The Brass Band Playe
17 to survive on a tiny island louder than the sun, has empowered our wings beyond Apollo to Bodega…to piragua…to J. Lo…to a cultural mainstream in fear of belonging — and one that is quick to label what we, generational Latinos, are supposed to know — according to the supposed knowers, tu sabe, so that the collective We may understand while the rest remain in a secondary tier of obedience. Well, I’m here to tell you, my citizens, that art is not about understanding, it’s about feeling. WE are a feeling — Boricua is a feeling — No-ricua is a kneeling, a creative New-ricua. These words even, my own thoughts, continually disobey me — how can I not applaud their stamina, record their genesis, celebrate the mayhem they so clearly desire? -
Edwin Torres
Edwin Torres is a “Nuyorican” (New York-Puerto Rican) poet. Torres created a movement which he called “Interactive Eclectrcism”, which combines movement, audience participation, music and songs. He has represented New York in the 1992 National Poetry Slam, celebrated in Boston, and he has won the Nuyorican Poets Cafe First Annual Prize for Poetry with his poem “Po-Mo Griot”.
Geography And when you say, I’m going home, You don’t mean a place on a map Although you may think you do, Its really an apparition you seek Of a point in time, a return to loci. Its a resurrection charm In the hope that geography Is dependable. That what you left behind will still be At the exact spot where you last saw it. Its the terror Of not knowing whether the world still waits, Whether when you leave, Someone still saves a place. -
Urvashi Bahuguna, English (2010-13)
d. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. Remembrance of Things Past. The Turn of the Screw. The Kreutzer Sonata. He Knew He Was Right. Mr. Norri
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A Sloping Roof Here is the church, here is the steeple, open the doors… The sticky warmth of a child’s two hands clasped safely over the little finger people. Houses that children draw always have sloping roofs. Sloping roofs, with a little circular window to look out of the attic. Houses are meant to have roofs like that. There are meant to be secret corridors, wood and stone floors, smoky bronze kitchens. These roofs change things. They change dimensions and proportions; they change the understanding you have of a space. A flat ceiling is very different. White walls fill the house, dividing it into geometric linear rooms and passages. A cube of habitation; the starkness of perpendicular lines jumps out at you.
A slope, nestling me under it, planting itself firmly above me. Smaller horizontal planks meeting vertical ones. Space narrowing off into a point. A naked bulb hanging from the rafters. Rafters. I am not convinced as to what exactly what they are. Rafters. Wooden beams. Eaves. Round window. Deep breath. Look around. Wooden smell. Piles of cobwebs. Isn’t that the kind of place memories belong in? Where do we store our memories? I wonder. We do not have rooms in our houses for these things. We shift things around, shove them into cupboards, and wait for moths to eat into them. We put expensive things in bank lockers and inexpensive ones under the mattress and in the loft cupboard in the ironing room waiting for them to fall apart.
Break down; reconstruct. Rebuild my house into what I want it to be. Map it out. From a child’s sketch to a building plan. From a two dimensional sofa and carpet, to the bedcover matching the wallpaper. But the ladder, will stay the same. There has to be a ladder. Leading into a square of space. A broad wooden ladder; a trapdoor, left slightly open, mustiness seeping down. Dimness lifting slowly, dust resettling, memories and old things crowded around.
But what things? What will I put there? I am scrabbling around. Vague shapes. A rocking horse turns into a plastic baby potty. A wooden chest is a carton of someone else’s papers, and there are clothes that I don’t recognize. What do these things mean? Who put them here? … Just sit by the round window and watch it rain. Look out and forget shapes and spaces. Space was never ours to construct. We just try to shrink ourselves into whatever we get. -
Radhika Chakraborty, English (2010-13]
s Changes Trains. At Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. Anthills of the Savannah. The Daughter of Time. Gaudy Night. Farewell My
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Spy An eye on the shoulder shaken by the shudder of thrumming rails, drops embarrassed by a sudden upward glance. Did it see anything then, See the small shivering scribbles that creeped across the white page timid and quiet saying Nothing at all, gesturing merely at shadows speeding thoughtlessly by on the scuffed floor
-Naomi T. Jose, English (2009-12)
White snow falls, Turns to Ice. The frozen earth. Beautiful at first, Cruel in time.
- Dhruv Rajashekaran, English (2009- 12)
Lovely. Last Seen Wearing ... And Then There Were None. The Tiger in the Smoke. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The Devil in Velvet. Devices and D
A Song of Ice and Fire
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Disclaimer: This is not a book review. Nor is it remotely literary. George R.R. Martin’s, A Song of Ice and Fire, is a fantasy series, of quite literally, epic proportions. Its first book A Game of Thrones, released in 1996, instantly received critical acclaim and fantasy awards. Four more books have been published since and together they span over four thousand pages and half a million words. I was a late player in the game of thrones. I read the first book on favourable recommendation this year and devoured the next three within a couple of months. I then waited for the fifth with millions of Martin’s fans who had, apparently, been counting the days for six long years. I will be quite displeased if I have to wait that long for editions six and seven. Excuse the morbidity, but Martin is not getting any younger. Each book has been dissected from cover to cover by fantasy gurus, literary critics and bloggers who have in turn, provided opinions about why the books should or should not be read. I, however, shall not presume to be so bold. I would only like to write what I feel about the books. While I enjoy fantasy fiction immensely, I am not capable of drawing lofty comparisons between Martin and Tolkien or Jordan or Goodkind. For those who are not familiar with the series, here’s an attempted plot summary of the first book. Most of the series is set in Westeros, a continent of seven kingdoms, ruled by King Robert Baratheon who had wrested the empire from the clutches of the Mad King, Aerys Targaryen. The first book begins at Winterfell from where Eddard Stark rules the North for his friend Robert. Robert approaches Eddard, entourage and all, requesting him to be the new Hand of the King. When Eddard, under a sort of emotional duress, takes up the offer and travels with his daughters to the capital, he becomes a reluctant player in the vicious game of thrones. Political intrigue, ambitious lords, warring noble houses, clandestine murders, illicit relationships and bloody battles are not even the half of it. I think my favourite aspect about the series is its strange genre. It is labelled fantasy, but is really bordering on historical fiction. Martin creates a world of his own but it is not populated by elves and wand-wielding sorcerers. Instead, his characters only encounter the supernatural on occasion, and are akin to the knights and kings of our medieval world. This gritty realism has been both lauded and reviled. I love it. The books are written from the points of view of a number of major characters. This pluralistic narrative would have been an unmitigated failure had it not been for the depth of the characters. Martin has really left no stone unturned in this regard. His characters are delightfully three-dimensional, so much so, that while there are obviously
esires. And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name. And The Moon And The Stars And The World. Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio. Be Glad Your Nose is
21 some characters that readers are bound to sympathize with more than others, very few are traditional heroes or villains. Eddard Stark, for all his honour, is naïve to the point of being stupid. The handsome, dauntless Jaime Lannister (the Queen’s brother) is, on the surface, to be reviled. Dig slightly deeper though, and he doesn’t seem quite so bad. Tyrion Lannister, Queen Cersei’s ugly midget brother has consistently remained my favourite character because he provides a sardonic and often downright hilarious perspective about everything, whilst technically being on the side of the bad-guys. Martin has invested a wealth of detail in the construction of each noble family and soon every name evokes a gamut of emotions. And in the midst of this faux-feudal setting, is the story of Daenerys, the exiled daughter of the Mad King. She and her brother are in the eastern continent, Essos, laying plans to reclaim the Iron Throne from the Usurper by forging alliances. This part, replete with savage tribes and peculiar rituals, is vaguely reminiscent of Mongol culture. Here, Martin strays from typical fantasy fare making the books acutely memorable. Yes, there’s a derisive dwarf who is exceedingly clever, an ugly wench who could defeat nine men out of ten in combat, a wicked queen whose beauty no man can resist, and a honourable bastard who feels ill at ease owing to the ignominy of his birth. Yes, there are inns which exist for the sole purpose of witnessing brawls and jousting tournaments that are described at length only to see the mighty fall. Yet, the story, for the most part, is so exhilarating that one is willing to look past the clichés. Good does not always triumph over evil and Martin has a curious penchant for brutally executing major characters. My one contention with Martin’s writing is its unevenness. In a few parts, the turn of phrase is beautiful, the imagery vivid and the dialogue edgy. In others, the writing is littered with hackneyed platitudes about honour and love, sacrifice and betrayal. In some, the style is anachronistic relative to the rest. The narrative flags on occasion and sometimes, entire chapters seem pointless. Not since Harry Potter have so many of my friends been hooked on to the same series at the same time as I have. Call it nostalgia, but it’s nice to be able to heatedly discuss characters and theories with people in the college café.
A Song of Ice and Fire is not, in my opinion, a masterpiece. Nor is it a benchmark of modern fantasy literature. Yet its books have the inimitable ability to shock me to speechlessness with well-stationed red herrings. While it is certainly not the most original or inventive set of fantasy books in the fray, it is gripping to the point of being sleepdepriving. And here I make the specific assumption that that is, at the end of the day, what most readers are looking for. - Malini Bose, Economics (2009-12)
on Your Face. Deaths And Entrances. Do not go gentle into that good night. Dream Deferred. Fast rode the knight. Frost At Midnight. I carry your he
eart with me. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. The Blessed Damozel. The Dole of the King's Daughter. The Fairy. Temple; Or, Oberon's Ch
