Arvind, thanks so much for agreeing to do this. I know it's not the ideal format for anything,
and it's always it's always challenging to know what you can do in an interview that you can't do elsewhere.
But I hope we can we can get get something out of this that would be good for everyone.
Um, the format that I thought we might go for is kind of an inverted version of Desert Island Discs, where normally on that BBC radio programme,
you would get to choose your favourite tunes and then there would be some discussion in between them.
But instead, I've taken the the bold approach of being the interviewer, choosing some of my favourite tunes for you to read.
And and then we will have some discussion about them in between the lists of theme that I thought might.
Give some unity to our discussions is an aspect of your work that's always fascinated me,
is that in so many different ways you always seem to work and think via triangulation.
It's almost as if you want to get from A to B. You always find some C to take a detour to get to B,
and it's that aspect of your work in all ways as a poet, as a critic and as a translator,
because you've really over the last 40 years, you know, become, you know,
an accomplished figure in all those fields that I thought we might try to touch on.
To begin with, so I thought maybe as a poet, we would have, if you could read from your latest collection of poems,
which is Transfiguring Places from 1998 and the poem that I chose there again
to try to touch on this notion of triangulation is the one called Bohorquez.
Uh. Before reading this poem. Well, thank you for.
Doing this. Programme. I just wanted to explain one reference in the poem, which.
Listeners may not be familiar with it, there is a reference to the Quincy and but more particularly to the Quincy similar.
And it's a story from. Confessions of an English opium eater.
And the story is that there was a man from Malaysia who appeared in that village where.
The currency was tame, but the villagers didn't quite know what to make of this man because they couldn't understand his language, but.
He already had the reputation of being a scholar because he had so many books around him in his in his in his house.
So they took him to the Quincy. And they hope the Quincy will be able to understand what the Miller know wanted.
And the Quincy says that the easternmost language he knew was Greek.
So he tried some Greek on him, which know which, of course, you know, got him nowhere with the with the Malay.
And so the Quincy says,
then I gave him a large sort of I gave him a lump of opium enough to kill six dragoons and their horses and sent him on his way.
So so that that is and also I also refer to the Quincy, because Borås was a great fan of Dickens's work.
Borrus, before the Ganges flows into the night, before the night rusts,
the dream lose its crescent shape before the tiger runs for cover in your pages, perhaps I must write the poem.
Insomnia brings lucidity and a borrowed voice sets the true one free lead me who am no more than
differences Malay or speechless shadow in a world of sound to the labyrinth of the earthly library.
Perfect me in your work. Great, thanks very much.
Inevitably, you you have guessed that it was the borrowed voice, yes,
the triangulation viable has to your act of all the act of writing that is described there that that made me select that poem.
But it also takes me back to a question I wanted to ask you in relation to that kind of
triangulation in the 1960s and a comment you made in a in another recent interview where you said,
you know, discovering the French and the Americans lb William Carlos Williams, Ginsburg was for me a moment of liberation.
And then you said, you know, my subjects do not lie in Europe or the United States.
But I had first to make a detour to those places through their poetry to to realise that my subjects lay nearer nearer home, if not at home.
The thing that I wanted to ask you about was, in a sense, the larger cultural dynamics for you.
I mean, you know, we probably need to remind people that you are you are the Midnight's Child, 1947.
You're a teenager in the sixties coming into literature, poetry and that whole process of triangulation,
of discovering the Americans or discovering the French surrealism, various things that influenced you.
And, of course, the issue of inevitably in that sort of immediate early post-colonial moment,
continuing or deciding to write in English, that perennial question,
could you just have some sense of what what you felt the the background was there in particularly
because I have in the back of my mind that that wonderful magazine that you started called Damu.
And I was really interested to know what sort of pressures you felt you were under,
who that you might have been that you were wanting to them at that point.
You know, this word that you used in the beginning of triangulation.
It's not something that I was aware of that I was making this.
I was doing this triangulation on making this triangulation or.
Well, for a moment, I didn't even understand what was being meant when you use the word triangulation is only when you
gestured with your hands and suggestion that there was something elsewhere which you appoint outside,
which you used to get, then get back to a point closer to you that I could I could get the points of the of the triangle.
And now I begin. And now that you mention this, I begin to see what I was doing.
Age 17 or 18 and why this triangulation happened,
why why this triangulation was was necessary for someone like me growing up when I did born in 1947, I started writing in the mid 60s.
I was 15, 16, 17 years old. Now, when you're 17 years old and you're living in Islamabad, India, and you and you want to write.
What are the. What are your. From, you know.
What is the world from which you are coming? What is that what is the literary world out of which you are?
You are writing? Yeah. What is the literary soil? What is the way go to plant the seed called writing.
So what was my literary soil? It is 19 years old or 18 years old.
Younger. I was 17 when I was an undergraduate at the University of Alabama.
So before me were the English sort of romantic poets.
So, so, and those are the ones you got from school, from school and from and from and from university.
Yeah, so one was reading the words were actually kids that didn't that didn't seem like soil enough in which I could plant anything for one.
I didn't know what the Westwind was. I didn't know what what Autumn was. I didn't know what a Skylake was.
I didn't know what English unknown was. But this is an old problem with, you know, with all colonial societies where you will you given texts to read.
You understand half of it. You don't understand the other half of the you could read into an Arabic,
but neither Clinton nor obedient anything to me, you know, but you could you could get the point.
There was no problem with understanding the.
The still sad music of humanity is that where the line lined up so, so but but then Tintern Abbey was over, the dead lost.
The other soil, the other alternative, where do I pitch my tent?
It's that kind of the other place was in the literature.
Now at 19 or at that age, you're not aware of any Indian literature.
All you are aware of is probably Tagore or you may have been aware of a few other nationalist poets who wrote in English.
We were certainly not aware of any poets in the in the Indian languages because the Hindi one was taught was was mediaeval,
Hindi was was Kabeer and so did the US.
And of those Bacteroides, but they didn't mean very much, partly because, you know,
it's like it's like giving a 17 year old British student middle English to read.
You're going to give them, you know, but you really did get it at school. We did get Kabeer at school.
We did get Kabeer at school. And I think that wasn't a very good idea to make.
You know, 11, 12 year olds do the mediaeval Hindi poetry.
So. So. One wanted to write, but one didn't have.
We didn't have a language, we didn't have a literary language.
But into into this situation arrive.
People like the American beat poets, the French surrealists.
So that kind of opened up that there are other ways of writing poetry, that there are other languages.
And so that triangulation, I think so I think what I'm trying to say that in the passage that you just read, in order to get to yourself,
you have to go elsewhere and you approach yourself through through that through that detour,
through that triangulation, or as far as what I said, perhaps is a borrowed voice.
That's the true one free. But that button only begins to emerge as we speak.
And for me, little did I realise that it has been it has been there all along.
So it's so so this triangulation that you're talking about must have been there from the beginning.
But then it needs someone looking at it from the outside who can see this pattern through someone like me for me,
you know, I'm just working the way, the way I work. I was not aware of this triangulation of this of this detour till it was pointed out,
even though I had been describing it myself, but without seeing the pattern that that that that it was making.
So, so, so I think that is one thing. So this is the borrowed voice setting, the true one.
Free that. You you are reading the British romantic poets, but suddenly you get the American beats,
you get the penguin modern poets and you also get the penguin modern European poets more or less at the same time.
How you came across this, what were they the kind of the intermediaries who gave you access to that will find them bookstores in stores?
Yes, absolutely. And this is this this is an elaborate you walked walked in in Europe.
They were revealed. They were available.
There was a very good book distributor who a publisher, Rupert and company whose books are still you know, they are still publishers.
They have stopped importing penguin books. Have you ever since Penguin became came into the country 25 years ago as publishers.
But in the 60s, they were the main importers of Penguin Penguin Books,
and they had been doing it since the 1930s and 1940s and they had an office in Islamabad.
So within weeks of months of the book being published, available in England, it was available in in Allahabad.
So one could have that whole set of penguin modern modern poets right from the first issue to the first volume to I think 22, 23, 24.
And so, so well educated oneself on that.
And they were very cheap. Two and six, three and six. That's that's so true.
That opened up possibilities of writing that there were other ways of of of doing poetry or the same thing happened with the French surrealists.
I don't know where I picked up Britain, but. I don't recall the exact title that I that I picked, but Ezra Pound was available.
Ezra Pound was certainly available and in the Faber anthologies said that that was the other thing which was available to us.
Elliotts bound selection was available for five shillings with his introduction and with a literally literary essays were available.
And there's all the sort of Faber Faber paperback.
So and these books were available on on University Road or they were available in other other bookshops.
And did you have did you have a sense that that was that was specifically because of things going on in Elevado,
or was it quite widespread across India at that time?
I think it was fairly widespread across India that these books were available in in all the main educational centres.
Certainly, I would go to Bombay and I would see the same same books, maybe a few more titles when I when I did go there and in Delhi.
So when one heard of heard of these things and one so one was that that moment of triangulation.
I think what's happened happened quite early. I sort of I'd staked the ground, as it were even and coming coming to two damu the magazine,
which I started with two friends of mine when I was an undergraduate. We were also exposed to the little magazine because of the.
There's an uncle of the of my friends and with whom I was editing Damu, he lived in New York and he sent us copies of The Village Voice,
where we read about this magazine called [INAUDIBLE] You, a magazine of the Arts.
Now, in Alaba, you couldn't get away with Vacuum of the Arts.
So we called it Damu, a magazine of the arts.
But what I found interesting about the little magazine scene and even when I was doing this little magazine,
I find this I still I was thinking about it yesterday that little little magazines have an international perspective.
It's the larger magazines even today, which would seem limited in what what they are doing.
But if you if you look at a little magazine, even today in the United States,
I'm sure there would be there would be more responsive to literature from around the world than, let's say, The New Yorker would be.
Or the Atlantic would be. So there's a kind of cosmopolitanism going on, going on in the mainstream.
Yes. And also so soda. So the little magazine, what it did was that it opened up a lot of new American literature to us,
because once we started bringing out this magazine, we learnt of other magazines on the little magazines network.
And once you send out a few issues, they put you on the list.
They. The. They kind of have a list of magazines that they have received, and similarly you have a list of magazines that you have received.
So by being on each of those lists, then others started and other addresses would appear.
So they would start sending more American magazines, would arrive in the mail, as would go out to more magazines.
And so we know before about two or three years before, we had we got magazines from from England and from America primarily.
Occasionally a university library like University College London would hear of this.
And we would receive letters from librarians saying that they would be interested in subscribing to these magazines.
And I don't think UCLA still has the early issues of of Damu as opposed to New York Public Library, as I was told recently.
And you mentioned pound in what you were saying there.
And maybe that's where we could move on to our second our second reading,
because also this this process of triangulation, as much as it's affected you in your own in your own writing,
in your own practise as a poet, it's also had, in a way, interesting effect on how you've worked as a translator and what you've been drawn to.
And I remember in some discussions that we've had in the past that the collection, the absent traveller,
you your translations from the the the Procrit, where you when you engage with this 12 year old Guta society tradition and translated.
But which is it? Again, you are talking about getting covid at schools.
All of this is part of your part of your background. But in a sense it was reading pounds, obviously.
And I know you were very, very inspired by interested in impounds images and that kind of tradition,
but it was reading pound in this case, the Detour guys a pound to make you go back to the poems, back to a 20 year old tradition.
And then, in a sense, having that layered over by pounding and images led you to that that that act of translation, which I know started quite early.
And then the collection came out initially with Ravid. I was not there in 91.
And then it became a penguin Indian classic in, I think, 2008.
So maybe what we could do now is just read a few of those poems and then just talk about that aspect of your triangulation.
Moves. Well, these are these are poems, as you just said, they are 2000 years old.
They were written in a language called Marangaroo Procrit. It's not a language that I know or can read or.
Understand, but. There are very good additions available.
From Procrit, procreating to Sanscrit,
from Procrit into Hindi and into some of these editions which I was using along with the tutor to unravel these poems.
But before actually reading the reading, the reading, these puns, what I wanted to I wanted to bring in I don't care about whom they're going to talk.
At some point during this interview and I was reading.
The guard has a speciality in Bombay. This is in the early this is in the mid 70s, right.
I know when I visited him, he was sitting with this book and it was a Marathi translation of this Procrit poems, and he read out a few to me.
And the poem that he read out, which I which I still remember. These are Two-Line poems.
These are they are like couplets or they are couplets and the poem.
Is about a lamp. An oil lamp which is sitting on a shelf, it's actually in an alcove in the wall.
And the lamp is watching a couple in bed.
And it and the poem just says that the lamp was so engrossed in watching these two that it continues
to look at them even after the oil is finished to just the flame is left and the flame is still.
Watching what's going on, and there is no oil left in the lamp, so so any read out a few more.
But this was this was one of the four or five points that he read.
And I asked him about, you know, I saw the book. It was in Procrit and Moratti.
I knew the language, so there was no way I could read this book.
Then I started to find out, find out more about the Gator Society.
It was not in the days of pre Google days.
So I had to go to the library. I had to go to the science department when I returned to Islamabad from Bombay.
So everyone said, yes, well, there is the subsidy. And then I was able to get hold of copies from the library.
And I slowly started to read these poems, basically to read them for myself.
But then as often happens with translation, you translate because you want to share the joy of reading with others,
because you have had you know, you have the pleasures of the text of these are not pleasures which you want to keep to yourself.
These are places that you want to share with others.
So this translation, you know, as as as with the Kabeer, it's to share something with readers that, you know, I've enjoyed it so much.
Maybe others will also. So these are these are dramatic poems in the Garden of the Day.
It's all of them involve men and women or a man and a woman.
It's all about love. They are highly erotic, but eroticism is more in the suggestion than in something being something being said.
That's what they are saying. And we can be very simple, but that that simple statement can have often carries an erotic charge.
The poems are spoken by women most of the time. There are very few poems spoken by men.
Well, this is. This is one woman telling.
Telling her husband or her or her lover bookish lovemaking is soon repetitive, it's the improvised style wins my heart.
And there's a there's a similar this is this is this is a woman telling telling her friend.
He finds the missionary position tiresome and grows suspicious, if I suggest another friend, what's the way out?
A lot of the poems are about. You know, a bystander, a passer by.
Observing something that the bystander or the passer by would will notice a man looking at a woman or a woman looking at a man,
and then [INAUDIBLE] comment on it what he's seen. This is one of those forums, you know, it's an observer.
All he wants is see her armpit, so asks the garland maker the price of a string.
And I'll read I'll read one more. It's just a.
Description, it's a it's a description of a. Of a path or a road.
The right way to the village like a party in its.
Great. That was one thing I wanted to just pick up from this collection, the UPS and Traveller collection,
and it's something you raised that the well you raised in the introduction in what you say in your translator's note,
it also sort of made me think of some of the aspects of pound and so on.
But you made this I just I was just drawn to this really interesting and in a sense
quite complex collocation where on the one hand you're saying about the poems,
you know, because of the procreated, the issues of the language, the specific language, you say that you say you make this claim.
The language of poetry is not that of representation, nor does any language have a duplicate.
You know, it raises that whole question of what's going on in poetic language and the whole problem of of translating it.
But the point just before that, talking specifically about the character of these poems, he uses this wonderful phrase talking about them.
You say this script of the images, the script of the images,
and then you talk about the standard gatta separately images like cupped hands, a pregnant woman, a man staring.
And you say the script of the images, like international signs that are understood everywhere, they hardly seem to need translators.
That's a I just really interested that this a juxtaposition between the the untranslatable and in some ways of the language and those sort of issues,
but then there's also some sort of international sign system.
And, you know, there was one thing I remember you've mentioned to me in the past, the issue of how international is that?
Because you you you mentioned the one thing about the Bengel on a on a woman's arm.
And it seemed to me that in a way, actually you needed to know rather quite a lot about very culturally specific things to be able to grasp that.
But I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about that distinction between the the images of the script and the and the language.
You know, where I I think where I got this idea from about the image and the translator ability of
the image is from Ordenes introduction to Cavafy in the early translations of Cavafy.
If you I think the essay is available in. It's either in forwards and afterwards or or the Dio's hand and.
Audiences that.
There are so many translations of havarti or Cavafy is easy to translate because he uses images and images are easier to translate than than music.
You can translate the music of the language, but you can translate the images. And I think something of that sort.
So when I was looking at these poems, so I was coming at it not not through just through found,
but also through that Auden statement that this would be easy to translate because
the work on images and the work on speech and the work on a man woman relationship,
which again is a universal sign, only a few.
What I'm trying to what I also trying to say is that between men and women, only a few moves are possible.
Only a few things can happen. Only a few gestures can be made. It's not it's not it's not limitless.
Hanschen Dutch. Words can be said, but more than that, it becomes variations on on on on a few things.
And that is, I think, what I meant by these international signs.
That these poems could be read anywhere. But at the same time, certain gestures or certain moments can be culture specific.
They may not translate as easily. And you would you would need a footnote.
And one of those images, though, it is an image, but outside the tradition of Procrit and Sanscrit VOYCE, that image may not be legible.
So in one such image, is the Bangles slipping from the hand.
Very often someone will make a comment on the Bengel look, the Bengal slips from my hand and the Bangles slipping from the hand,
which is what she's trying to the person is trying to say is that she's pining for her lover or for her husband.
She's grown thin. And because of she's lost so much weight, the Bengal slips from her hand.
Mm hmm. So that that makes it so.
There are there are moments when you need to explain certain things. But I think by and large.
The poems can be understood without recourse to to to to footnotes.
So I think that is what drew me to these poems.
You know, in the sense that they are I'm talking about their accessibility so that accessibility is both at the level of theme,
which is the man woman relationship and access accessibility at the level of.
They're being image based. So that is that is the great you know, you've you've done a lot of translating work.
You've also written, interestingly, about translation in all sorts of ways and introductions and so on.
And the most most recent one came out last year, 2011 is is your songs of covid where you did go back to those poems from that,
as you said earlier on, that you were there with you from your school days and revisit them.
I wondered maybe we could just read a few of of those poems first and then discuss them.
And particularly, I suppose, one of the things I would like to pick up on and to go a little bit beyond these poems in that way.
But there's a particular American idiom in some ways that you pick up in the the version of English that you translate them into.
And there's also a number of American references in those wonderful notes and epigraphs and things that you attach to the poems,
which you can also talk about. But but part of part of what I wanted to maybe talk about once we've read them
is is in a sense the wider sense of of of what America meant for you as well,
partly because you lived there for a certain period. But maybe we could first begin by a few reading a few things from songs of songs of covid.
Well, the first I'll read out, I'll read out two points,
the first one is A is what is called an upside down point, where everything appears, everything comes.
As being the opposite of what it usually is.
So. These ones are difficult.
They are all image based, the the Topsy-Turvy. This is the topsy turvy ness of the of the images.
And but. The Topsy-Turvy, this is the topsy turvy ness of the images, which leads to.
Difficulty in quite understanding what is. Being hinted at in these poems so they can be interpreted in different ways.
And this poem is. Precisely about the difficulty of interpretation, so you get a stream of images and then Kobie almost asks you, what does this mean?
Brother, I've seen some astonishing sights, a line keeping watch over pasturing cows,
a mother delivered after her son was a guru, prostrated before his disciple, fish spawning on treetops,
a cat carrying away a dog, a gunnysack, driving a bullock out of buffalo, going out to graze,
sitting on a horse, a tree with its branches in the earth, its roots in the sky, a tree with flowering roots.
This verse says Koby's is your key to the universe, if you can figure it out.
I'll read I'll read another poem. Which is very which is a very different point from the one I've just read,
and it has an epigraph which is from the American blues singer Leadbelly, it takes a man that have the blues to sing the blues.
Open ended, your hair splitting, so much [INAUDIBLE]. I'm surprised you still get away with it.
If parroting the name of rum brought salvation, then saying sugar cane should sweeten the mouth,
saying fire burned the feet, saying water slake thirst and saying food would be as good as a belch.
If saying money made everyone rich, there'd be no beggars in the streets.
My back is turned on the world. You hear me singing of rum and you smile one day, says Kabeer, all bundled up.
You will be delivered to that will. Great.
Thanks very much, Ivan. The clearly as we're getting from those poems, both the the references to Leadbelly,
the the language itself as we've spoken about it before, you know, all the American poets that influenced you in the 60s.
Well, America meant an enormous amount to you, its literary traditions of poetic traditions in particular.
But at one point also, in fact, you lived from from 1971 to 73 in Iowa City.
What would you comment on the sort of the America of your of your mind, as it were,
of the literary landscape versus the America that you lived in because you eventually
decided you couldn't live there anymore and you went and you had to go back to India,
you felt you had to go back to India. But but what what what what was the experience like?
Of the of the the actual America, if you like, but there are two things.
One is the America of the imagination and then the America of the country in which you are, which you arrive and live there for a few years.
So the American imagination was started when we started Damu, a magazine of the arts, and you had built up an idea of America, of American poetry.
So for five or six years, you know, you you had this you almost thought you were an American poet,
even though you were living not in America, but you were living in India.
But in 1971, when I was 24 years old, I was invited to the international writing programme,
which was started by Paul English, who had earlier started going to the Writers Workshop in Iowa.
And but after he retired from the workshop,
he started the writing programme where he invited writers from all over the world to spend nine months in Iowa City.
So suddenly here was this Indian American poet myself.
I found myself in the United States of America. I found myself in Iowa City.
In the thick of American poetry. And then I suddenly realised, as you know, as the.
Weeks passed that I didn't want to become an American,
but that I was I was better off being an American poet in India than being an American poet in America,
because in America, I would never be the American, but I will always be the Indian poet in America.
Yeah. And I didn't want to be the Indian poet in America. Yeah.
And that is why I stayed there for two years. After nine months were over, I asked if I could extend my state any, any.
Agreed. So they didn't invite the writer the second year so they extended my, my stay there.
But after those two events, those two years were over and I'd made up my mind that for good or ill, I had to return to India and whatever.
I was twenty six when I came back and I didn't have much of an idea of what I was going to do or how my career would develop as a poet,
I had not written any criticism. I had not edited any anthologies.
I barely done any translations. I'd written a few poems. But I knew this much that I couldn't.
Lived through those winters and. And right, because I realised that the things I wrote about weren't in the.
And I might as well be back then and write about them than live elsewhere and write about them.
I think that's what I and I did meet a couple of Indian poets, at least one Indian poet, who who got a rather sort of sad figure.
He was he was neither accepted by the Americans.
People in India didn't know him. And it was a kind of in-between figure.
And and I didn't want to become like him, you know, I didn't want to be this this Indian poet in the Midwest.
And and I couldn't see myself fitting into any any.
Into any story of American poetry, this was long before we had any great writers and we have is poets,
we had you know, we didn't have those kinds of things in the in the in the early 70s.
They were just American poets. There was Ramanujan at the University of Chicago who had published one book, but people hardly knew him as a as a poet.
They always they always thought of him and they still knew him as a.
Folklorist as a as an entomologist, as a translator from the Tamil Classics, very few in America know him as a known as a poet.
So so I have never regretted that decision, so for me, being in America,
imagining America and being actually being there were two entirely different things.
And I'd still rather imagine my America than than lived there.
I just love the fact that in a sense, you've got you've got a wonderful turn on the notion of the immigrant period because, you know,
you can imagine Beckett to Joyce escaping Ireland because they want to escape the Irishness in certain ways and or at least narrow forms of Irishness.
And there's a lovely irony about the fact that actually know, the trouble is when you go to a place like America where you go somewhere else,
you can actually it's there that you are forced to be the Indian poet. Yes, exactly.
Whereas in India, back in India, you could you could get away with being an American.
Yeah, that's that's exactly that's exactly true.
You know, you can you can pretend to be an American poet in India, but you can't pretend to be anything but an Indian for.
Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And the last thing I wanted to turn to is is a is a really I mean,
it's at the back of my mind here is it is a wonderful, critical essay of yours that you wrote.
The Emperor Has No Clothes, which is which is a missionary's reprinted in his Pickerel book of a modern Indian literature.
And one of the things that struck me most about that essay was you arguing against certain models of multilingualism,
and particularly these were models of multilingualism that were being promoted in India by other critics in the 60s and
70s where you have this you make this great distinction and I know you make use of a bit of Georgetown is after Babel
when you make this distinction between a kind of geological strata based model of multilingualism where in a sense
you're your first language or what used to be called your mother tongue is is somewhere at the bottom of everything.
And then everything else gets layered on top in some sort of geological formation.
And in contrast to that, you you say, no, the multilingual experience is much more osmotic.
It's about osmosis. It's it's not about solid things. It's also about water and fluidity and movement in that way.
And one of the the moments at which this seems to become, you know,
starkly aware is is apparent is in those wonderful well, it's the one poem, Three Cups of Tea.
This is a collect call poem from your collected poems of uncoloured, which blood is brought out in 2010, not just just very recently.
And I wondered if if well, maybe again, we could read them a little bit.
First, read the two versions of the poem that you have at the end of the collection,
and maybe also just the sort of concluding paragraph of the that you where you talk about the essays called What is an Indian Poem,
and then maybe just come back to that notion of of of the models of the osmotic and the the geological.
This poem was written by written in in Bombay Hindi.
The original is not in Marathi, it's not English.
The two languages in which I wrote these poems written in the early 60s.
They were these are actually found poems, they are snatches of conversation, which he picks up in a speakeasy.
I think it was during the days of prohibition, and he would and he would sit there with his drink,
but he was always picking up these these bits of conversation going on around him.
It's just about men bragging or talking about their lives.
You know, just seeing some very ordinary things.
But the minute you take it out of that context of a speakeasy and put it on the page and it completely transformed and the language the language is,
is this Bombay Hindi, but is splattered with English words.
And this is what I say in the essay, that if you if you forget the motto, forget the Bombay Hindi words and just look at the English words.
You can, you can, you can, you know, it'll it'll appear like a Greek fragment that only a few things are of a present,
but the rest of the rest of the words are missing. So over here, the English words,
you can pick up a bit of the readers or the listeners will be able to get our manager company rule table police complaint.
Mayor Manager Kobol, Pergament manager Bolar Company, Ruleset Bogar Electrical Mitiga was quickly able to pay pretty many great Khalia,
our manager call police Djokic chorused Adekoya Bullah.
Other complaint Canaletto. Carlo Maria Ruleset Bogar.
Oggi Hoga. And this is Galactus translation of his.
Of the of the poem, I want my pay, I said to the manager, you will get paid, the manager said, but not before the first.
Don't you know the rules? Coulier picked up his wristwatch that lay on his table, want to bring in the cops, I said, according to my rules.
Listen, baby, I get paid when I say so. Now, as you will see over here, he's he's he's moving between three languages,
is is going Bombay Hindi, his is doing English and he's doing American English.
And this is the learing, you know, this is one language superimposed on another.
And then the third language and all three all three languages coming from the same point.
It's not so as someone else who if someone else had translated this poem,
he may not have got the American it may have translated it without the Americanisms,
but when Calarco translates it, he he substitutes the Bombay Hindi with the American idiom.
And this is I think this is. Partly because we in India don't have.
A spoken register. You see that over here in Britain, it's Cockney, which is which is, you know,
which has been standardised as when you want to do a different as a vernacular voice.
America has has its you know, we are all familiar with that through through music and through through through literature in India.
If you there is no there is no vernacular. There is no demotic.
And so if I if someone else were to translate this poem,
they wouldn't know what to make of it or they would certainly not go as far as collateral has gone.
But he does this over and over again whenever he wants to bring into spoken idiom,
whether it's in his notes, which he writes to himself and which I've reproduced in this book,
or it's in his in his English poems, whenever he wants to use to get the spoken idiom, he he he goes for the American as as he as he does over here.
So so this is these are three languages.
There's a and but this is not what I what I meant when I was writing that that essay you referred to at the in the beginning,
the emperor has no clothes. What they're what I was fighting against was this notion of Indianness which somehow got linked to the mother tongue.
And it's by its and that I found very strange that why should and how does this.
Indianness, how does Ingenix Indianness in poetry, in English, express itself?
Well, according to some, it expresses itself by your using referring to Indian mythology, Indian gods using Indian forms, perhaps.
Or it expresses itself by reference to Indian mythology.
And I found that a very crude, which is your geological model that you were referring to,
because things have to be a little more interesting if you have, you know, another language,
if you are bilingual or trilingual, in many cases that happens in India,
you can certainly everyone who bothered to write in English or they write in Hindi or write in Bengali.
Most Indian writers are bilingual, the very few who are.
Who don't read any don't have any English.
I don't know a single one I don't know of a single Indian writer of the last in the last 50 years who did not read English.
So the question now is, what is that English doing to the Bengali?
And similarly, for those who write in English, what are the Indian languages that they are familiar with,
which they know which from their childhood doing to their English, and is all those languages putting some pressure on their English?
Is their what is the relationship between mother tongue and.
And English, if you're writing in English, and I was just unhappy with this whole idea that and then it gets also attached to this idea of.
Know value starts getting attached to whether you have a mother or you don't have a mother tongue,
are you using those images or those stories or those?
Myths or you are not using them.
Are you two Europeanised in that sense, so we get into a simple a simple model of we're either authentic in some way or inauthentic.
It's that kind of distinction.
That distinction comes in, because if you if you're if you have a mother tongue you're using about the tone you're making,
the use of the mother tongue obvious. In your references, then you are more authentic than someone who was not using any of that.
And so that was my that was my problem with the model and enjoyed stoners after people and especially extraterritorial.
I you know, when he talks of Russian and and an English, when he refers to Nabokov or Bauhaus and Spanish and English and what is.
How is boathouses Spanish different from the Spanish of other Spanish writers because of the
English putting pressure on his on his Spanish and what is Russian doing to Nabokov's syntax?
And that made me think that maybe English are Indian, the Indian languages that that we know that he may in the gentle Mohapatra.
Leah, what are these languages doing to add to the English that we use?
And perhaps that may be a more interesting way of looking at at the at the multilingual imagination than a simple geological model.
And we would also work if you just took a language like Bengali and thought about the Persian and all the influences on Bengali,
there's those sort of issues. There's other sort of pressures are going on in all languages in some way, isn't it?
So this idea, Savala has a phrase that there are all these languages crawling inside inside my head.
Yeah. Yeah. So you may know one language, but there are all these other languages as well,
especially if you live in a city like Bombay, you would you would be hearing three or four languages in the in the street.
And of course, in a sense, here we are talking in a sense, it feels like a fairly tame literary critical context.
But these issues that we're talking about in terms of language and identity and so on can play out fiercely in the wider public
sphere in terms of people fighting over what would be considered a certain sort of identity and recognising it via language.
So these these things have implications beyond beyond the poem or.
Well, know the way it plays out in Indian literature, in English,
and when you think of Indian literature and the position occupied by English, is that.
All of literature written in English in India is.
Still and quite often dismissed as inauthentic for the sheer fact of being written and.
For being written in English, so it's a it's a very deeply entrenched position that some have taken.
It's another matter that this position is not particularly of very little interest to people in India.
This nativist position is of great interest to people outside India.
So people outside India, the the the Western Academy has been bullied into into thinking that the authentic Indian writer is writing,
is writing and is writing in Bengali or is writing in an area or is writing in Marathi.
It is the less authentic writer who is writing in, who is writing in English.
But but but this place, it doesn't play out so much there.
And also I think the other reason is, is there is economic I think Indian writers who write in English,
some of them make so much money that when people in India look look back, they think there's something must be wrong with this way of way of writing.
So not only are they inauthentic, but they are selling their authenticity to to to others,
to more to more gullible people, you know, in the West who were picking all this up.
I mean, that is a Reuters novel was.
An example of that to one one person, one critic got up and said that with the money advances that she has received,
the money she has got, she could buy up all of the publishing. It also the one one novel by Arundhati Roy is worth all of in publishing in terms of.
So that is the kind of terms in cash terms and customs.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But but but these are these are not literary discussions at all.
You know, they become the get into the literary market place in a very crude sort of way.
Yeah. But again, it's it's very unhelpful to use these terms.
It doesn't help us to read. Look at a piece of literature. Yeah.
And then which is the other thing that I have against it. Yeah.
It's you know, it doesn't get you anywhere in terms of understanding what is on the page,
but it's in a sense also what you what your osmosis model as an alternative talks about much more complex exchanges.
And I think, you know, if you look at it slightly differently. It's more the more they may be more interesting ways.
Of looking at this,
and that's where the example of osmosis struck me and what the boundaries between literatures and languages they are, they are porous.
And if the boundaries between cultures, if those boundaries are the boundaries between languages are are even more porous because languages,
languages are porous languages in a language like English,
I'm sure the number of Hindi words or Indian words in the English language are similar to the number of English words in in contemporary Hindi.
So much so that there is a new language called Hinglish, especially in advertising and commercial jingles on television.
Yeah.
So languages are at the least pure of of things which we which we use now annotated many forces out there that are trying to define them as pure.
Exactly. So that's that contradiction is something which I've not been able to understand because the language you're using Hindi,
but that Hindi that you are using. That is hardly that is hardly untouched by other languages.
So how can using another language, in a sense, multilingualism is in all languages or language that is inherent in the nature of language.
So maybe there should be another more interesting way of looking.
Looking at this multilingual multilingualism is not is the ultimate form of authenticity.
Multilingualism is the. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.
That's the only form of authenticity. Yeah. There is no other form that we have to think of language.
Maybe we should even even. Yeah.
Some of the issues that I've been thinking about, maybe we should even not use the word multilingualism that suggests even that's to divide it up.
Little bits and pieces. That is and is the authentic state it is.
You know, it is language. It is this simply and it is.
And it is mixed up. Yeah. You know, it's. Yeah.
So we actually are all living in Finnegans Wake, but also in a sense we living in those poems.
But maybe, maybe we could end by just reading out, especially in the light of what we've just been talking about,
your your last paragraph where you just sum up that that point about the poems, I think brilliantly in know three cups of tea.
First appeared in Olympia Adina's Anthology, Contemporary Indian Poetry in English.
In 1972, the anthology was the first to represent the New England poetry in English and Three Cups of Tea has been part of the canon since.
I don't have a date for when Callachor made the translation,
but I suspect it was made after 1965 after his discovery of Harold Nauseas Belly, the Italian poet.
Or the poet who wrote in I 19 early 19th century Billy and the demotic American that had all those employees who translate Romanesco.
If you want to be funny, it's enough to be a gentleman. So there it is, your Indian point.
It was written in a Bombay butler, which I've called Bombay, India, by a poet who otherwise wrote in Marathi and English.
It then became part of two literatures, Marathi and Indian English, but into the letter,
which is Indian English in a translation made in the American idiom.
One of sources, or if you will, inspiration's, was an American translation of a 19th century Roman poet.
Great, great. Thanks so much. It's been a real pleasure.