Here is a poet, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, who has been writing for fifty-one years! Fascinated, I wished to read more about him and his work. Well, an introduction about him was very interesting. This was a piece written by the Literary Cell, IIFT, in their online magazine Trading Thoughts. It mentioned about what AKM said about a magazine called “Damn You” that he started in the 1960s, in Allahabad, where he lived and was taught English (at the University); “what about long term policy? general objectives? that’s not even funny. besides, we wouldn’t know. the basic point is that all of us write — more or less — and would like being read. hence d.y. [damn you].”
Besides being a poet, he is also an essayist, translator, critic, professor and editor. His book of Collected Poems 1969 – 2014, just goes on to show what a prolific poet, translator and editor he is. By his own submission he says about the book in his introductory lines “Gathering the work of forty-five years, the seriousness aside, is also damned difficult.” It has a collection of his new poems along with poems from his previous books Nine Enclosures (1976), Distance in Statute Miles (1982), Middle Earth (1984), and The Transfiguring Places (1998).
The book is a visual and mental delight! Each page depicts a narrative so unusual, yet you can connect with it. From nature, animals, to people, vocations (Egg Peddler, Ironing Lady) and places (Bharti Bhavan Library, Chowk, Allahabad), history (For a Slave King ), he has captured it all!
The following lines from the poem “Tailorbird” from his book “The Transfiguring Places” (1998) has such a vivid imagery,
Heading the wrong way,
She kept coming
Towards me, stolen thread
Held in her beak,
Then, the lines from the “Songs of the Good Surrealist”
“Clouds cannot always be trusted
This one broke into my house
Went behind the cupboard, barked
I left the city
And like any hunting dog
It picked up the scent.” from Nine Enclosures (1976)
The poet himself acknowledges that surrealism gave him the refuge into a world that he wanted to express himself in vis a vis the reality of the world that he actually lived in, surrounded by sounds and smells that reminded us of the compulsions of our work.
Another one of his poems that makes a place so permanently in your mind, that you’ll want to keep coming back to reading it over and over again is “Songs of the Ganga”.
I am both man and woman
I am paper boats for children
I am habits for fishermen
I am clouds for shaven monks from Nine Enclosures (1976)
These lines strike us for being able to convey what the poet wants to about the ever-flowing Ganges, with minimal use of words.
His book also has translations from “The Absent Traveller”, (about Prakrit Love Poetry from Gathasaptasati of Satavahana Hala (1991) and uncollected works of translation from some of India’s best. distinguished poets in three languages Hindi, Gujarati and Bengali. This work is one among his best, and shows his hold over the languages (he studied and learnt Prakrit to translate poetry from Gathasaptasati) and gives us a peek into India’s regional poetry.
The lines from “A Memory comes back” translated from Bengali (Shakti Chattopadhyay) to English, evokes nostalgia!
It Feels Nice, (one of his latest work, not found in his Collected Poems) is a poem translated by AKM from Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Hindi poem. It is a poem that talks about the world within us and without, in few simple words that evoke profundity.
Here are a few links to his work .
https://thebaffler.com/poems/feels-nice
Below is the link to his book Collected Poems.
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