Bentley Rumble: June 2018

Thursday 28 June 2018

Think About It 038: LAURA RIDING

It is very sad then that so many children are hurried along and not given time to think about themselves. People say to them when they think that they have been playing long enough: 'You are no longer a child. You must begin to do something.' But although playing is doing nothing, you are really doing something when you play; you are thinking about yourself. Many children play in the wrong way. They make work out of play. They not only seem to be doing something, they really are doing something. They are imitating the grown-ups around them who are always doing as much instead of as little as possible. And they are often encouraged to play in this way by the grown-ups. And they are not learning to be themselves.

Four Unposted Letters to Catherine (1930)

Use the link below to read more about the life and work of North American poet, critic, novelist and essayist LAURA RIDING (1901–1991):

https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/riding-laura

You might also enjoy:

Think About It 026: GORDON LIVINGSTON

Think About It 020: WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

Think About It 014: DOROTHY ROWE

Thursday 21 June 2018

The Write Advice 109: CLAIRE MESSUD

As a writer, I subscribe to Chekhov’s world view: 'It’s not my job to tell you that horse thieves are bad people. It’s my job to tell you what this horse thief is like.' The more accurately one can illuminate a particular human experience, the better the work of art. I’m not an autobiographical, or biographical, writer, except in some abstract sense. If I had to summarize, most broadly, my concerns as a writer, I’d say the question 'how then must we live?' is at the heart of it, for me. It can only be addressed in the individual, not in the general; each of us on this planet must come to terms with this question for him or herself.
As a reader, I’ve long felt passionately about fictions that articulate anger, frustration, disappointment — from reading Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, in high school, when I thought, 'my God, fiction can do this? Fiction can say these unsayable things?' to reading Beckett or Camus or Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater to Thomas Bernhard — these are all articulating unseemly, unacceptable experiences and emotions, rage prominent among them. Because rage at life and rage for life are very closely linked. To be angry, you have to give a shit.

An Unseemly Emotion: Publisher's Weekly Talks with Claire Messud [29 April 2013]

Use the link below to read the full 2013 interview with North American novelist CLAIRE MESSUD:

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/56848-an-unseemly-emotion-pw-talks-with-claire-messud.html

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The Write Advice 096: JOSHUA JENNIFER ESPINOZA

The Write Advice 079: ANTON CHEKHOV

The Write Advice 059: KRISTINA HAYNES

Thursday 14 June 2018

Poet of the Month 048: AMRITA BHARATI

AMRITA BHARATI
c 2000

DEEP IN THE STILLNESS

He threw me away
like a clod of earth.
He didn't know
I was a thing with a soul.
He didn't know
I was alive.

He kept on throwing me
like a clod of earth
out of his way ––
onto that neglected path
that happened to be mine.
And so I kept travelling
along my own way.
Each time some fragment broke off ––
some infatuation, some addiction to happiness,
some earthly hope,
some dream squandered on man.
Each time some fragment of my being
would break off.
And now it was my turn.
The world was already left behind ––
like a desert in a sandstorm,
like an ocean in a hurricane,
like a desolate city.
Man, step by step descending,
was already left behind.
And now it was my turn.
Standing on the last patch of earth
I gathered myself into a whole thing
and hurled myself into the stillness.
This was my silence ––
pervasive and expansive.
Now the world was either a dream
or a sea-flower
imagined at the end of the ocean.
Deep in the stillness.
Only the sound of my footsteps.

date unspecified

Translated by

LUCY ROSENSTEIN

The following biographical statement appears on the website of The Poetry Translation Centre. [It is re-posted here for information purposes only and, like the poem re-posted above, remains its author's exclusive copyright-protected intellectual property.]

Amrita Bharati (born 1939) is one of the most gifted and prolific female poets of her generation: she has written seven books of poetry and a volume of prose. Yet her name has no currency in Hindi poetic circles, or in western scholarship: there are no studies of her poetry and some of her collections are out of print.

This sentencing to silence seems astounding to anyone who has encountered Amrita Bharati's unique poetic world. Her poetry is a witness to a complex spiritual journey which takes her from a land of intense existential angst, agony and anger to a refuge of serenity where ‘the mind stops' and the anguished protagonist finds herself and ‘Him'. The visionary power of her poetry is all the more astounding as she treads totally new ground. Unlike her main predecessor –– Mahadevi Verma –– whose poetic 'I' is a stylised, idealised image of the eternal woman in love, a product of the poet's imagination rather than a reflection of her experience –– Amrita Bharati has the 'courage to probe into [the] inner world, and to make it public property.'

Amrita Bharati's poetry is undoubtedly informed by her studies of Sanskrit (she did an MA and a PhD in Sanskrit at Benares Hindu University) and her intimate knowledge of Sri Aurobindo's work (she has translated several of his poems in Hindi). Her poems contain numerous references to Vedantic ideas, Tantric images and Krishna bhakti.

The critic Nirmal Verma said of her, 'Amrita Bharati is probably the most alone signature on the slate of contemporary Hindi poetry. Alone and unique.'