As I'm sure many of you know, Daljeet has become a conspicuous figure on the contemporary literary landscape ever since his debut collection.
Look, we have coming to Dover and with its work, you learn very quickly to read out punctuation marks.
Look, we have coming to Dover exclamation mark when it won the Ford prise for the first best the best first collection in 2007.
Since then, he's published two further volumes, also with Faber and Faber.
One, the Tipu Sultan's wonderfully titled Tipu Sultan's Incredible White Man Eating Tiger Toy Machine.
Exclamation mark, exclamation mark, exclamation mark. That's from 2011.
And the latest one, The Ramayana, a retelling from 2013 from last year.
I'm pleased to say that Dalgaard has not only agreed to read from all three volumes this evening,
he's also obligingly gone along with the format that I proposed for this evening's events,
which is based on the long running BBC radio programme Desert Island Discs.
The difference is that whereas the guests choose their favourite tunes in the original,
I take the prerogative in this version to choose some of my favourite poems from the guest body of work, which they then read and we discuss briefly.
We're also very keen to open up the discussion at the end for questions from you, so please make notes.
Choosing a sample of tollgates work from across those three collections, of course, hasn't been easy to make it more manageable.
I focussed on four of his guiding preoccupations and there's kind of four segments to this evening.
We'll take you through all of these. The first is his interest in questions of cultural diversity.
The second is his preoccupation with language and in particular with the English language and its history.
The third is the canons of English literature and his awareness of an engagement with that.
And the final point is his interest in translation. Yet my choices mainly reflect what I've decided to opt on and mainly reflect what I
find most compelling about the experience of reading and hearing delegate's work.
The often unnerving sense that I am watching a skilled, daring, verbal, high wire artist performing an exceptional balancing act.
The voice Dalgaard has fashioned for himself, which is as much written as spoken as I think we will hear this evening,
somehow manages to contain and encompass within itself high seriousness and St. Jerkiness,
the raucously bawdy and the studiously reflective a degree of literary,
perhaps even postmodern self-consciousness and an unabashedly unironic strength of feeling.
And at the same time, with all of this, a capacity to absorb a wide range of contemporary English idioms in a way that would probably upset both Eric
Pickles and Nigel Farage and a keen interest in archiving the Englishes of the imperial past and so much more so.
I hope you'll all get a sense of these tensions this evening and like me, enjoy the spectacle of Daljeet unique highwire style of performance art.
So thanks for agreeing not only to come this evening, but to play along with this particular format.
Right. OK, you do want to mention that because there was a quote.
Oh, yes. That was the reference to Eric Pickles in a parliamentary interview actually, for I think it's called the House magazine.
And a few years ago, two years ago, you know that Eric Pickles has been on a campaign about immigrants needing to learn English.
And in that statement, he made the particular use.
The particular phrase of the key thing was that people, immigrants had to not only learn English,
but they had to learn English like a native is the phrase that he used.
That was that was the bit that a lot of native. Right. So, as I said, I've chosen various bits from across all of Daljeet, three volumes.
And the first one that I've asked if he could read has come from his first collection.
Look, we have coming to Dover and it is called Cover Questions,
got a wonderfully long punctuated title cover questions, the ontology of representation, the catch 22 for.
Black writers, dot, dot, dot. Yeah, sorry.
So you go for it, you are going to start really negatively because I hardly ever read this poem and this is good good for me to have to read it,
because sometimes I have a sense of a voice for them and that I write them and then I find a way to interpret them.
So I'll give this a go. This is based on the NEA Bee GCSE anthology, which I think you remind me of.
It was 1996 for about a decade and it kind of cornered the market in British GCSE.
That of you might study that, I think at about 92 percent at one point of all GCSE students.
And, you know, because they were given the anthology free to all schools to give out to students.
And that was a kind of a new new approach in education.
So they suddenly kind of cornered the market and with the poetry they had as one section where they had Heeney,
sometimes Mahayni, sometimes oblique, and sometimes the Gillian Clark, and then had a section of poets from other cultures.
And it's called other cultures. And I guess one of the issues, me, when this poem was that some of those poets from other cultures actually born here,
like Menezes', Ravi and the others were the ones who were born here and actually doing it.
A Welsh poet and a and an Irish poet was seen as being partly in English,
whether in England, studied in certainly Spain, might might speak as a father.
I guess he's complained to a teacher about this anthology. And then in the poem this the father turns on me.
He's going to turn them in and he mentions Boram Bagram's, another character, and another one of my poems.
Yeah, I it's really get a sense of the madness of it.
Why give my boy this freebie of a Silky Blue GCSE anthology with his three poets from three parts of Britain?
You're HBC of any Blakelock showing us how to think and feel for Part two US
as a bunch of Gunga Din newgroup poems from other cultures and traditions.
Other is all we are to you, to this country, other, to my sons, kabbadi posse, all your poets,
other what free mounding teacher are you to love our poem where a goat's neck is cut for Blaesing new house?
Our [INAUDIBLE] poet saying such houses same as Duco, my boy.
Will he think every new baritone Muslim have got blood party barbecue?
All we do is think all we do you think is pray for the curse of incarnations as in that Scorpion Sting poem where the mother is mantid to death.
That I do not know. We have doctors and rocket rickshaw. Ambulance you teachers.
I like this Daljeet Balram, micken of me as Kabah.
I say for the garment of my voice. Maybe Sestina Sonnett Tangka with best words please.
A dictation of the way I lecture Punjabi to my boy after school.
So what can I do? He too shy to use his voice.
He brought me as funny or a type even worse.
So he is used in British anthologies. He hide in these whity fantham English Blackett to make me sound foreign language.
OK, what are one of the things I just wanted to ask you about that is that in a sense reading that poem now.
So this comes from the 2007 anthology, although you've been publishing,
you've been published since the late 90s, but so your publishing career sort of overlapped that anthology.
But now, in a sense, history is caught up with you because you are now an expert in the Akua anthology,
which I was hoping you weren't going to mention that. So you've now got caught up in all of this.
And it's particularly with the poem, again, from from this collection called SING-SONG And again,
typically with ah, with delegates work, you need to check the spelling.
So it's singing in each song. That's that's the poem that's been anthologised.
Can you get a cheap joke at the moment. Seeks the male seeks out singing and the middle name.
Could you just talk a little bit about that sense of having, you know,
writing a poem like this in which you you're taking on the GCSE anthologies and indeed yourself and now you've become part of that big machine?
Yeah, yeah. I guess when you mention the title of the previous one in a couple of questions and talking about the catch 22 of black writers.
It probably ties him to sing song in a way, because I was trying to think of when,
you know, when you see an Asian people background anthologies in British anthologies,
often the poems use the ones that sound authentically Indian, even though the poet may have had a Western education or Western upbringing.
So it's quite difficult in a sense that he wants to be recognised, but as a as a sort of person from an Asian background.
But you have to you feel like you have to put on an Asian to be accepted.
And I don't say that's cynical. I guess I just mean it realistically is quite often when I seen sort of reviews of
it's often always been that been seen in a kind of line of other black Asian poets.
And I was aware of that. My first book came out as being seen in terms of other Caribbean poets and Indian poets
who'd come to Britain since the late 50s and some of whom I actually read at all.
And I was much more familiar with, say, Shakespeare or Milton, people like that.
But I guess there's an inevitability to see you in a line. So I guess in terms of.
SING-SONG Yeah, on one hand they don't have the other culture section anymore.
So I was pleased that they got rid of that. And it doesn't surprise me that sort been there.
It's always quite jolly perky, happy go lucky kind of poem.
And I did it in a really thick Indian voice,
but I guess hopefully the of will find this little bits of subversion and that if I gets taught in schools and also said that shopkeeper I,
I would see shops, Indians having shops in a very positive light because you know, from my background you come from Lunik and uneducated education.
You're going to work in factories to to buy a shop would be a great economic achievement.
So partly a celebration of that. But I don't know if that would ever come across and on by the school curriculum.
Mm hmm. And it's also it's a kind of it's a it's a positive, uplifting, in a sense upbeat and funny, funny poem.
But in a sense and it's also it's as in the the title suggests, it's also a love poem in many ways, a kind of a curious sort of love poem.
But one of the things is that when you look across your whole the whole they've
chosen that poem to kind of represent you in this for the GCSE syllabus.
But there's also other poems that are maybe a little bit more unsettling,
dealing with similar sort of subject matter in many ways and often some of the sort of voice.
But something like Darling and Me is also a love poem.
But it's a it's a slightly more menacing Yeah. Love poem. And so what about the fact that they've they've selected that aspect of it?
Yeah, I think you're right. I guess to sing songs.
I mean, one of the things I was trying to do is write that in first generation, second generation Indians in dialogue.
So SING-SONG isn't really threatening to white Western audience because it's
not really saying anything about non Indians as that kind of debate there.
So it can be just read in a humorous way about one generation talking back to another and almost be interpreted in a sort of other cultures way.
Still, what are we learning about Indians? And that's something I guess I was aware of.
My poetry would be seen as news, you know, given information about particular small community.
And so for me, it's very important to make sure I kind of had as many contradictions in the work as possible, as many different perspectives.
So there's I guess since I'm quite happy about arranged marriage as well to some degree, and there's pain, there's an apron,
which isn't, as you know, frankly, they saw games as little tricks that unsettle settled perception of the world.
But in a sense, what happens with the presence of anthologised thing is it kind of it resettles it.
And so it's very important for people to get back to your whole collection to get the range.
Yeah, hopefully. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, I guess what really happened school.
But I mean on the positive, I'm very happy to be on anthology's. Great. Yeah.
You know, it's just as a poet, you know, when you start writing you expect to have no audience and erm for the book came out I was
still expecting to have no audience and even when it came out I was expecting no audience,
you know, no interest to be in anthologies of any wonderful things.
I'm actually happy about it.
And presumably it's also because as I said before, for most of us now, that's the first encounter with poetry is by the school.
So it's a vital word. Yes. It's great to maybe move on to the next one, which is so we're the other side of it, as I mentioned, of of of work.
That certainly fascinates me is that, yes,
there's this incredible year for contemporary English idioms in all their variety, which we'll hear more of later on.
But there's also this fascination with archiving, in a sense, the old imperial Englishes.
And I've been. I struggled and I think we'll have to watch the time, but but I've struggled to choose between two poems for this bit.
This is the history of the language bit. And the one was a wonderful poem, which we probably won't have time for.
But I really recommend you have a look at.
It's just called a scent of a Victorian woman, which is about a colonial Victorian woman making the journey from Calcutta up to Darjeeling.
And sort of it's all in her idiom and it's actually presented as a journal. It's a wonderful poem.
But for the purposes of this bit, the the poem that I've selected instead is called Appropriately for those you know, your love.
Can this be the PUCA verse?
And it comes from the Sultan Collection. Yeah.
And you can mention I've taken a few words from Hopsin Jobs and the Victorian Glossary.
I mentioned a couple of them.
I mentioned fishing fleets with the women that went to the various places in the Empire to try and find themselves a man, a husband, best women,
shame and partly thinking towards the end about mixing the mixing of cultures with letters which led to
children being born and the Indians who want the children because they were seen as half breeds or half caste,
that kind of thing. And they're obviously British. And what my says, there's a whole kind of history of those sort of children.
And I was partly thinking about the pleasure, the leisure goes and this is the ultimate leisure at the end.
And this is considered to be the Buckworth are the Raj mother in carnet Victoria Imperatrix
rules accepted Sfeir overseeing legions of maidens fishing fleets that break the waves.
Tonette The Love of a Heaven Etonians faits on lawns with mansion whacking banks or dances by moonlight at the Viceroy,
the Viceroy's Ball, the backroom Baraa Pegs of Brandy Barny and Pink Gin and tody to do flapping on Jolanda Panta for six meal days,
including tiepin with Hump's and peacock and tongue,
the lock stock and bobbing palanquins for summers on Gothic verandahs where dawn Himalayans
through powerbomb or outI Mist for Halsy House seat and hummocks under the Milky Way.
Tallyho in topi of karki with Swiger stick for Barberi Chigas and by Amoretta What a 12 bore Holli's howdah from Housers
Bang bang bang in photogenic Tiggers Panthers Leppard's Blackbox and Bustards and Kipling or Tatler to hand Atalay
gunge the rum twirling sabr curved moustachioed lavish zinfandels behind bars with a fruity hooka for the breathless
norge the norge that leads to IR's and PASSERS-BY Goody's girls snookered for Cyb sport that ends in the hushed up.
Besty Birth's of Half-Breed Half-Breed [INAUDIBLE].
Growing up, Kirsty's mad dogs and vagabonds in a jolly good lingham land overflowing with Hobson,
Dobsons of Holly and opium and silk and spice and all the gems of the Shafted Earth.
Great, the Hopsin Jobs and so many people. No, but it was a dictionary of Anglo-Indian words put together in 1886.
A Victorian dictionary editor put together by, by and Bernell.
And I just when I thought about that poem,
I also thought about a review that Rushdie wrote of a Rutledge's edition of that Dictionary of Jobs and Jobs,
and they republished the dictionary in the mid 1980s and Rushdie reviewed it.
And I just thought in terms of what he said right at the beginning, what what the the the way that he ended that review.
He said this to spend a few days with Hobson. Jobson, this is Rushdie in 1985 to spend a few days with Hobson.
Jobson is almost to regret the passing of the intimate connexion that made this linguistic and you use the word as well,
kedgeree possible, OK, is what he said. But then he said this.
But then one remembers what sort of connexion it was and is moved to remark as Rhett Butler.
This is Rushdi, as Rhett Butler once said to Scarlett O'Hara, Frankly, my dear,
I don't give a small copper coin weighing one Tuller eight mashers and seven.
As being the fortieth part of a Rupi, or to put it more concisely, a dam, you clearly, in a sense,
both in this poem and in the Victorian woman poem and in many others,
you actually do have this real interest in sort of you do give a damn in a sense about that,
that that language, recovering that language and putting it alongside all these contemporary idioms
that you're picking up in singsong and and many of your other your other poems.
And I just I just wondered what sense what sort of triggered that that kind of
archival interest and and and where do you feel yourself going in the way that,
you know, Russia is clearly resisting a certain kind of ambivalence in 1985. But you've got also a fascination with me.
Yeah, I do. I mean, I think on the one hand, it's various ways to look at it.
So I guess one way I might look at it is if I'm writing about Indians or my job is to to kind of British audience of, say, 99 percent.
I probably aren't Sikh Punjabi background. This is foreign material.
And at that point it becomes the entry point for the outside is, you know,
it's exotic and it's going to be exotic because if you're not inside that world, it has to enter an exotic space.
And there's so there's that issue then where it becomes we hopefully the reader becomes
at one with it is when they they kind of identify with some of the things they think.
Actually, we have the same issues as he does or that that character does.
But also, hopefully, if I can charge the language up as much as possible,
the readers feeling there's a density kind of nuance which is implicating them beyond the exotic.
So I want to go find exotic sounds, very technical difficulty.
So I want I want the reader to feel an exotic have an exotic engagement with the text, but also a cerebral one.
And and the way I feel I want to try and heighten the cerebral experience is by getting a very dense palette which is historically troubled.
Where the words have historically troubled aren't just sort of, you know, standard English that that makes it the standard.
English doesn't make it interesting enough for me. And on the political level,
as well as the standard English feels to use to clean those two proper feels
too Orwellian for an immigrant to to be able to speak in standard English,
someone like myself for working class background. That's quite an achievement to be able to speak standard English.
So I don't think that's the hard thing to do. So I want to put strain into my diction as well.
I've sort of digressed down. Sure. But also, in a sense, it's is a strain that is also a historical one.
I mean, it's also going back into to bring the historical in and clearly also a history of a non-standard English.
I mean, that would that would be a non-standard English, which I mean,
we were talking earlier about there's a wonderful bit of early playing with Hobson, Jobson with Edward Lear.
It really is nonsense poem called The Cumberbund,
which is one of the things that I've always thought about because I came in early in an earlier LLB version of this poem,
you actually use the word cumberbund as well. And Edward Lear turns these words into a kind of monstrous births and characters that
are sort of taunting a woman and her vulnerable woman with these monstrous things.
So he's just playing with the sound of the words. So there were games going on then from about the late 19th century, 1874.
I think he did it. But so you're also bringing that now into play.
And he is also, in a sense, a key. You want that historical depth in terms of a non-standard ness that is playing alongside the contemporary nonsense?
Yes, yeah, absolutely.
And also, the points of engagement and historical engagement between Indians and English is there in the very words used Hopsin Johnsson word.
I feel that I've had a great feeling of love in that word because the British mouth,
those words, you know, were courteous enough to want to engage with those words.
And I guess that's all very Victorian period. That sort of moves away a little bit.
But before that, you know, from 1900 on with Joe Charnock going to India, marrying a Muslim woman,
I think was on you know, I've had this real kind of cultural engagement between Indians.
And those words are kind of suitcases carrying the two worlds there.
Yeah. So it's a happy experience for me.
And I think obviously, if it wasn't for the Empire, my parents wouldn't have come here in the late 50s and I would have been born here.
So I necessarily viewed that experience as a positive one.
The empire will see the bad, but there's also the good.
Yeah, well, I mean, Rushdie begins it begins that review with a list of all the things that he also loves about the British Empire
is he's constantly showing how many words come from that have entered the language of the British Empire.
Many pundits now agree. Distended like a juggernaut upon the barbarians of the east in search of loot,
every single one of the over emphatic words being that there's a section in Tom Stoppard's Indian
India Ink the play and they play a game with as many words from Hopsin Jobson as possible.
You know, there's great passage wants the hops and jobs and you skilfully.
I think Tom saw parts of it wasn't that great.
Well, before we move on to the third point, which is which is actually two for the price of one, because in this case I couldn't I couldn't choose.
And I was glad that you mentioned that whole business of being put into a particular line and the ways in which
in some ways your many aspects of your of your writing make it impossible to work out at least one single line.
There's a whole series of possible lines that you could do, in a sense, align yourself to.
And one of them is actually just the canon of English literature.
There's a there's a tremendous awareness of that kind of alignment and the self-consciousness about it,
which is also interrogating even what that alignment means.
And the two poems that I've chosen for this aspect of your relationship to those particular canons.
The first one is I should perhaps just say right at the beginning, it's a it's a Shakespearean sonnet.
So that's a bit of a giveaway. But it's called fallacy. And I should perhaps reveal that it's fallacy with a P-H.
And the second poem, which will go on straight after that, these are both come from the Tipu collection,
is a longer poem called A Black History of the English Speaking Peoples.
So we have those two shows to fallacy. And then, yes, they both they both reference Shakespeare for the finalists in the audience.
Okay, so, yeah, there are a few Shakespeare references.
And so I guess fallacy, I want to sort of roleplay anti macho behaviour.
So this one is really about I think that how often do mate bang on at length about the length they're hung and grab their crotch to slash the air,
then chuck an arm will around the chum while necking Stella till they're lashed.
To tell the truth, I'm really not well hung and thus I hide from mates.
My Princess State. This conc is king of my poor frame.
No trunks with lunchbox fine to bank a lady's gaze.
And yet I hope the guys won't feel too down when I recount my is hardly wimpish.
Wotcher Stefanov calls from Lautz who check her out too long for she's not fit in bed.
Most nights she'll sigh. Oh love, I love the woman's way.
You work your subtle touch. Everyone uncomfortable moment is great, and if you want me to go straight to the next one.
Yeah, you're great. OK, this is very, very long one. You ready?
Ready. Just drones on because I put it in five sections because I might I guess the
starting conceit for it was the Globe Theatre and even the Globe Theatre from,
you know, from its inception to its and will have the kind of British Empire, you know, from the first globe, the second globe, the recent one.
And then there's one before that one. The one for the first one. The latest one.
We had the rise and fall, the British Empire.
And I just imagine watching a Shakespearean tragedy the globe and then sort of wander around reflecting on myself as a black artist.
I guess one way to think of it, certain an artist or signal sections.
I think near the end I mention, yeah, I've got loads of references, but a Colonel Lawrence is kind of great line.
He says the British under attack and he tells his soldiers to stand and fight to the death.
And I've got a quote from that kind of great is a forgotten line now. And I think when I read up about it, it's kind of great war.
Prysner The stiff upper lip cry, that was the one that I think one of the main ones anyway.
So black history of the English speaking people. So one, a king's invocations at the Globe Theatre spin me from my stand to a time when
boyish bravado and cannonade and plunder were enough to woo the Regal's seat,
that the stuff of Elizabethan art and a nation of walled gardens in a local one would tame the four cornered world for empires.
Dominion seems inconceivable between the birth and the fire and rebirth of the globe.
The visions of Albion that led to a rule Britannia of Tradewinds and Gulf Stream,
all conquering fleets that aroused theatres for lectures and Hottentots and chronology.
Whilst Eden was paraded in Q between Mayflower and Windrush with each necessary murder,
the celebrated embedding of imperial gusto where jungles were surmounted.
So the light of learning be spread to help sobbing suits give up the ghost of a husband's flaming pyre.
So the widows who would climb into the pie after husband die too.
So much for yesterday.
But today's time honoured televised clashes repeat the flag of a book Burning and Maids, Mohican, Churchill and all that shock and awe.
That brings me back to Mr Wanamaker's globe and Americans thatched throwback to the King of the cannon.
I watched the actor as king from the cast of Masterful Robeson, the CRA, to see my hotchpotch from the pacts and sects of our Evenflo.
My forebears played their part for the Empire's quid pro quo by assisting the rule and divide of their ilk.
Did such relations bear me to this stage, especially with McCallie in mind,
who claim the passing of the imperial sceptre would highlight the imperishable empire of our arts?
So does the red of McCauley's map run through my blood?
And I see a noble scruff who hopes a proud Academi might canonise his poems for their faith in canonical illusions.
Is my voice phoney over these oft heard beats?
Well, if my voice feels vexatious, what can I do but pray that it rain bolshy through puppetry and hypocrisy full of gung ho fury.
Three The heyday globe incited brave new verse modelled on the past,
where Times Friction's courted Shakespeare's corruptions for Tung's mastery of the pageant subject.
Perhaps the globe should be my muse. I'm happy digging for my Englands good garden to bear again.
My garden is only a state of mind where it's easy aligning myself with a turncoat T.E. Lawrence and a half naked faqir and always the Groundling,
perhaps to aid the succession of this language of the world for the poet reading the.
Roots for the debate and ourselves, now we're bound to the wheels of global power, we should tend the manorial slime,
that legacy offending the outcasts who fringe our circles for who believes a bleached yarn.
Would we openly admit the living Levingston spirit turned Kurts.
Our flag is a union of black and blue flapping in the anthems of haunted rain.
Coming clean will surely give us greater distance than this king at the globe,
whose head seems cluttered with golden age bumph whose suffering ends him agog at the stars.
And five. I applaud and stroll toward Westminster yet softly.
Tonight, the waters of Britannia bubble with flotillas of T and white gold,
cotton and sugar and all the sweetness and light bloodletting and ultimately red faced suicides and how swiftly the
tide removes from the scene the bagpipe clamouring garrisons with a field wide scarlet soldiery and the martyrs cry.
Every man die at his post till what's ahead are the upby lovers who gaze from the London Eye at Multinational's lying along the sanitised Thames.
Thanks, though. It's a it's a poem that I think comes across very quickly, easily is full of references to the English literary tradition.
And it also includes, perhaps most most strikingly,
that the line that became probably the most embarrassing line in an English poem of the 20th century.
That line the necessary murder from Auden, Spain, 1937,
which Auden himself excised very quickly and changed to the fact of murder and then orwill after that,
absolutely castigated him in the essay Inside a Whale for this sloppy bourgeois middle class
failure to grasp the horrors of war by using that ethically dubious phrase necessary murder.
Yeah, so there's all of that that history there.
But, you know, the poem itself opens up this big, big question, which in a sense, what you're addressing,
again, in this very self-conscious way about your relationship to a particular tradition.
And in a way, your own work is now caught up in that tradition in a different sort of way,
because you've published by Faber, so you've become a Faber poet.
And if if you thought, you know what most people know about if you are a poet, it's not only it's Latin,
it's Heeney, it's that whole that whole line, but it also goes back to T.S. Eliot.
And I just wondered if I know you've been thinking a little bit about, you know, you in the sort of the T.S. Eliot stable and your sense of that.
But also you've been speaking recently about your own sense of Eliot's own
earlier recuperate or interest in Indian literature and poetry and philosophy.
And just if you could talk a little bit about your your sense specifically,
not not so much of all the things of Shakespeare and Auden and all the things that are going through here.
Of course, Auden was another favour. But but but Elliott in particular were the first.
If everything I mean I mean, I don't I find I find that a kind of ambiguous thing.
Being a favour will be called a favour, because I'm always thinking maybe I'm a novelty in this in my in the stable of this publisher I'm with,
you kind of leave this very precarious, vulnerable kind of life without these things.
You know, I'm sure other poets feel out as well to whoever they're published by.
Feel like I'm going to be dropped any book. I always go through that emotion.
They're going to drop the expert. They're going to say, it's not like we don't want to come back ten years time or something like that.
I think you can live with that. So if everything feels like a curse blessing, I can speak nobly like that, though.
But yeah, I guess the thing with what's interesting more about Eliot, I guess, is that he's his kind of fascination with India.
So I suppose was sort of 19 early 1980s.
He writes an essay for In The Times, a review in the TLS, which I think is going to come to light next year in a book.
And I managed to kind of get hold of it by an academic.
But he reviews about eight, eight or nine Indian books and most of agriculture and economic policy written by Indians, really dry books.
And he starts off by saying, know what the what the the English doing there right now is exotic stuff.
This is a stuff they need to be dealing with. It is actually sort of just chastising the empire men back then.
He's kind of got this kind of really realistic perspective on India, but also just languages and cultures and traditions.
He's trying to find ways, I think, to to merge the various traditions.
And for me, something like four quartettes is as much about Buddhism,
Hinduism as it is about Christianity, and even start reading the kind of images he's got.
Those very general images, you know, the image of the rose, a lotus, and they kind of you know, they go between cultures.
And I think that's why he does have any general references.
And he's always trying to think how I mean, that's of course, it's much later on already can see his interests.
And he studied Sanskrit for a year in America, you know, for a whole year.
He works on any news Indian floorspace. And I want to be kind of influenced by it, that kind of air that somebody was trying to find,
a way to be influenced by various positions, try and absorb them, bring them together.
So that feels very important project for me in the future. That's something I'm working on.
And I guess that was one of the main reasons why I started working on Ramayana.
The Ramayana. Well, I guess we can move on.
Yeah, that's great. Well, that is that is the the last the last section that we wanted to read was from his latest project,
which is his it's called a retelling of the Ramayana.
And the bit that I've chosen is from book three and it's called the section is called Sixing Big Bro.
But I should maybe just give a little bit of context.
Yeah, it's the this is the moment in which I'm sure Pynacker, who's the sister of Ravana, who's the bad guy, is the the lord of the underworld.
She comes back to his kind of quarters and describes meeting a rama and Sita, who are both exiled in the forest.
So she's she's met them and she comes back to describe them to her brother.
So this is the moment that we're going. We've got you've got you're going to hear.
But I thought I thought maybe just to prepare your ears for what you're about to hear, I would give you this same scene,
at least a few lines of the same scene as rendered by Ralph T.H. Griffith in the late 70s.
So this is the Victorian version, Victorian English version of this particular scene.
It's called Shupe. I make a speech and it's from Kento 34 is the way he would describe it, just a few lines.
Does it give you a flavour of the Victorian English then for the Giants?
Furi broke as sure occur harshly spoke girt by his lords.
The Demon King looked on her fiercely questioning Who is this Rama?
Whence and where his form, his might, his deeds declare his wandering steps.
What purpose led to Dundar Forest? Hard to tread.
Tell all my sister and declare who maimed these us and of form most fair.
So she's been maimed as well. That's the Victorian version.
This is Daljeet version three little bit, if you like.
Yeah, yeah. If you don't mind me, this can be than starting off [INAUDIBLE].
You all shutting up, boomed Rathner in a Decadron out of tune chorus at the sight of his even more tuneless kid sister.
What the [INAUDIBLE] matter is with your face sister. What [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE].
What the [INAUDIBLE] her mother [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] with you sister.
Shurat Binaca had been repaired by the magicians but we're still hurting inside.
She approached her brother who is raving. Your nipples being cut, your nipples cut to your nose.
Who's so mad with stake is onr. Oh brother how come you have no broadcast about newcomers to Dun Dukkha?
Why, sister, it is your domain to dominate, replied Shupe Binaca.
These brothers seem cosy with customs,
yet our resident in our woods and aying for a fight they have poked their finger in a black snake's eye and goes on.
I can I just say I don't have too much sway in this. One of the few.
You picked it deliberately, and I know there's plenty of interest.
Just the last question I have and then I really do want to open up to everybody else.
One of the things that you're doing in the whole collection is, in a sense, it is a.
It is a complex translation because you're aware of many you're using many sources and there's many versions, of course,
of this of this great poem, which, of course, is for some people also not simply a sacred poem, but it's also a poem to live by.
And your version is certainly not your your grandmother's Ramayana in that sense at all.
And the way that the blurb describes what you doing on the on the on the edition that you've got, it says you're what it does is rejuvenate the story.
The plan is to rejuvenate the story for a new generation of multicultural, multifaith readers.
And I just wondered if you could, you know, give them the sense that we have of that language against the Victorian English there.
Well, what what the translation process actually involves how you went about sort of just.
Yes. To be the kind of kedgeree translation that you've.
Yeah, I guess my my my my politics would be different.
Something like Griffitts, whose version actually I read all of it. I liked it massive.
I did like it big chunks is incredible.
But I guess my politics for me, why I want to do Ramayana was I like the idea of a very it felt to me like a very insecure,
somewhat vulnerable or insecure text because it exists, as you know, it was poetry as prose, as puppet show.
As, you know, play has music and it exists in different versions in India as well.
Yeah. And comic. So yeah. And exists loads of Mercian, India, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Burma, Laos.
And so I try to get a hold as many different translations or bits from different the stories,
adverts, anything I get hold of to to help me construct my own version.
So I follow the basic storyline of you know, man gets married, wife, wife gets abducted man and goes the husband goes to win his wife back.
So get gets that basic storyline. And I've taken bits from like one of these kind of mad bull buffaloes and stuff of buffaloes,
which I think I just had bits of plotline and that's all made up the dialogue.
But it's from Olaf's version where they're trying to explore incest. And so I took bits of that one.
And I guess ultimately for me, it felt like the most fragmented Ramayana could possibly be ours after the most ultimately fragmented it.
You can say it's a North Indian or East Indian or it's a Malaysian.
And so that's the aim to create the kind of feel of something that felt kind of global,
as many different countries like possibly could, to give it a global feel, because I guess that's sort of live in London.
And, you know, it's just like a nothing of an area. Is this a global place?
Isn't it? It's London from. Yeah, yeah, yes, yes.
But it doesn't need a centre, doesn't need to rule against that sort of thing. But London is no kind of route.
Yeah. And I live in Harrow and it's very mixed and nobody claims the area and nobody disclaims it.
But nobody's got right to any more than thinking. I mean,
one of the things that just doesn't come across in a reading like this is how
a lot of what your work does is pleased with how things look on the page.
So there's a there's a kind of a visual dimension to all of this as well, which which you can maybe see a little bit better if I just hold this up.
But it's all the way through this, the play. Why was that important to you?
Capturing. Yeah, again, just to capture the feeling of different genres of film that I'm not writing a standard.
I'm not writing Griffiths. I'm not in the standard Paradise Lost type thing.
I'm not in blank verse. I'm not going to want to keep you kind of shifting away from being pulled away from conventional poetry feeling.
Yes. Well, great.