Saroj GC
The practice of Nepali authors expressing themselves in English is not a recent development; it has roots dating back to the 1950s. One notable motive for choosing English as the medium is the desire to reach a global audience and internationalize local literary works. Again, the internationalization of local creations is not only to acquire a tag of being international but to assert its presence, identity, and strength. The anthology, Kavya, edited by Khem K. Aryal et. al, stands to continue the same legacy. The anthology includes 143 poems by 36 different poets including respectable names such as Laxmi Prasad Devkota, Shreedhar Lohani, Abhi Subedi through Yututsu Sharma, D.B. Gurung, Ramesh Shrestha to more recent poetic voices, such as Mahesh Paudyal, Haris Adhikari, Sarita Bhattarai.
The anthology is diverse in its themes, flair, and styles of composition as it includes both distinguished and emerging poetic voices. The veterans in their creations point to great themes and rejoice in universal appeals. For example, the included poems of Laxmi Prasad Devkota appeal to universal themes, such as the power of music, the dire consequences of remaining illiterate as in “The Illiterate”, and his romanticist affairs with nature as in “The Brook”. Lohani’s poems address the variegated and resplendent emanations of nature and creation. His poetic voice is philosophical, and abstract alludes to the myths, and asks readers’ mind-bending attempts to decipher the meaning in the large and universal context. While “A Prayer to the Goddess”, “A Prayer to My Daughter” and “Parental Love” shower the eternal amount of love and care, other poems, such as “The Hawk”, “Confluence” and “Passage”, appeal to uncanny and mysterious ways of cosmos, and things within it.
“The anthology is diverse in its themes, flair, and styles of composition as it includes both distinguished and emerging poetic voices. The veterans in their creations point to great themes and rejoice in universal appeals.”
Next generations of poets delve more into more worldly and practical matters to accentuate their poetic voices. Abhi Subedi is always more fascinated by the off-the-mainstream characters and incidents. His poems, “A View from the Optical House in Asan”, “Pounding Laundry”, “A Hippie Woman”, and “Mason and Street” give voices to the downtrodden and everyday characters: For example, on a hippie woman, Subedi muses: “The odds and ends your collect are ours. / But the harmony and satisfaction you derive from / the odd combination is yours.” In addition, he also vehemently yet implicitly criticizes any form of repressive and elitist establishment and power structures.
Similarly, the poems of Yututsu Sharma, D.B. Gurung, D. P. Bhandari, Peter J. Karthak, Mohan Lohani, etc. descend from heavenly imagination to more concrete stipulation and rumination on everyday life. Poems like Yututsu’s “Mules”, Bhandari’s “Aryaghat”, Karthak’s “A Song by the Airport”, Lohani’s “My Morning Walk Companion”, etc. democratize the genre as they deal with more normal experiential reality, and opens the doors for the readers to experience and ruminate their creations. For example, Lohani writes: “JD is my companion. /My morning walk is incomplete without him / Hold Yourself”.
In addition, the historical cartography of the poems seems to be diverse in its themes and styles. However, the quaint poeticality— the virtue of feelings being arrayed in the mysterious robe of words— seems to have withered over the period. Some poems in the collection exemplify this decline, reading more like prose than verse. However, contemporary poetic voices exhibit increased flexibility in themes, content, and language, signalling a departure from the constrained traditional form. However, recent poetic voices share more flexibility with the themes, content, and language. Their flexibility on many occasions has not marred the subtlety of their social and cultural observations and expressions of the nuances. For example, Sartok in “Anniversary” speculates:
Yesterday, for instance, I found Ama
Sleeping in her bone
china teacup. Wrapped
in a marron chhyuba,
even in sleep she carried
her prayer beads
in her rain-bruised hand
her breath caught
between thumb and finger,
her arms folded arctic wings.
While many poetic voices in the anthology are atavistic in their rendition as they celebrate overarching themes, such as love, creation, and life, it also introduces a new emphasis on the immigrant Nepali experience, capturing the sentiments of displacement and the search for a sense of home. Moreover, the memories of home are contrasted with the experiences abroad. Poems like Khem K. Aryal’s “Losing your Country, Shade by Shade” and Saraswati Lamichhane’s “Arrival of An Immigrant” explore the complexities of homeland, memories, and Nepali societies. Similarly, a tribute to nature and the environment has been a perennial subject of personas both in Western and Eastern poetic traditions. The same legacy can be seen being carried out in the anthology too. However, the depiction of nature in the poems of later generations is straightforward and less convoluted. The persona of “Songs of the Cuckoos” by Chundak Tenzing is eloquent in praising the love of nature:
A song of love
that touches
every heard
is universal
song, a Cuckoo
bird in the forest
of Nepal sings.
While the anthology aims to be inclusive by featuring representative poems and poets, it has notable shortcomings. It overlooks poets and poems that utilize poetry as a tool for activism, employing words as weapons to raise consciousness, protest, and instigate change. The editors’ perspective, viewing poetry primarily as the spontaneous expression of subjective feelings and observations, neglects a substantial portion of the poetic landscape that regards poetry as a form of revolt and protest, highlighting social eccentricities.
A poetic work should exceed mere figments of imagination; it ought to be a revelation. By and large, the anthology is true to the statement. It tries to testify that what sets apart commendable poetry from the multitude of imitations found on several bookshelves is not just tireless inventiveness, technical mastery of words and spaces, or spontaneous flow of imaginative vignettes but also, the ability to take the readers to the path of revelation about themselves, about their surroundings, and their situatedness. It is the discernment that, even within the trappings of poetic conventions, the creations should be offering an insight into the world, reaching towards a distinctive and (dis)comforting truth beyond what can be gleaned from the pages of newspapers or the images on the news.
(Kavya is a collection of representative Nepali poetry in English, edited by Khem K. Aryal, Tika Lamsal, Saraswoti Lamichhane, Raj K. Baral, Narayan Bhattarai, and published by Vajra Publication, Kathmandu.)
