Arts_Illustrated_-_February-March_2016

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Else, it is the ‘Blue Nude III’: Perfectly posed, poised / as if for a fashion shoot...

‘Poetry,’ Sen says, ‘is the most sacred thing I do.’ His works are widely translated

and anthologised, a poetry quarrying through the layers of a moment, of

sensuality or of history for fractals of light. He has translated poets from Bengali,

Hindi and Urdu, else from Macedonian, Persian, Danish or Hebrew and

presented the Derek Walcott Lecture of 2013:

altogether a wide citizenship of poetry.

I meticulously stitch time through the embroidered sky,

through its unpredictable lumps and hollows. I

am going home once again from another

home, escaping the weave of reality into another

one, one that gently reminds and stalls

to confirm: my body is the step-son of my soul.

Sudeep Sen grew up in Delhi with three mother tongues: Bengali, Hindi and

English. ‘Goodness and faith ...have all departed,’ Ghalib wrote as the British

flattened the city’s Mughal reign. A chaos that still simmers in Sen’s ‘Elegy for

Delhi’, carried by a prayer:

I go to the small boy to pretend I am his lost father

But he does not recognise me –

I sit next to the little girl and cry -

But our tears do not replace blood or hatred.

There is only chaos, darkness, dust and death here –

I pray for light, I pray for life...

In contrast, Jeet Thayil’s ‘Letter from a Mughal Emperor, 2006’, holds an

implacable mirror to time.

They respect only slaughter. They forget the other things we brought them, the ghazals, the

gardens, the ice and symmetry...

(^112) / arts illustrated / feb 2016 - mar 2016 /IAF - Delhi Connecting Art