Land of Lime » Poetry

Of Poets and Poetry

PDCS — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 14:40:14 +0000

Some months ago, I wrote about the friendship between Bhoja and Kalidasa. Here is another similar episode from medieval South India involving Krishnadevaraya and Allasani Peddana. A catu verse couched as a lament by Peddana offers a vision of the esteem that Krishnadevaraya had towards his favorite poet:

When he would see me on the street, he would halt his elephant
and help me up with his own hand.
For the mere asking, he gave me villages like Kokata, in any region.
On the day I dedicated my Story of Manu to him,
he himself carried the palanquin where i was seated.
He told me I alone was worthy to wear the anklet
of a triumphant poet, and it was he who tied it on my foot.
He called me Master of Telugu Poetry, Allasani Peddana, King of Poets.
Now Krsnaraya has died, and I couldn’t go with him
to heaven. I stay on,
like the living dead. [Translated by Narayanarao and David Shulman, Classical Telugu Poetry, p. 157]

Of course, this isn’t as dramatic the Kalidasa-Bhoja encounter but as we read the Classical Telugu Poetry in my graduate seminar, I thought more about how the tradition seeks to honor and remember its cultural heroes. We will leave the analysis aside for another occasion but here is another excerpt from Appakavi, a seventeenth century poet and grammarian. Notice the self confident tone of the poet as he speaks of poety:

The wise say that poetry is the only form of knowledge.
Is there any doubt? Poetry is the ultimate
learning. To know it is to know the world.
A king is honored in his own kingdom. If he crosses the border,
he’s not worth a cowry shell. A scholar, though, is respected
everywhere. A pot is better still. As the saying goes,
“If you have poetry, who needs a kingdom?” This is true.
That’s why poets write.
It’s a joy when a woman or a poem
comes naturally to you.
If you force them, they bring you grief.
All the labor you invest in learning metrics and poetics
is a waste-if you are not driven to create
well-wrought poems in pleasing words.
The learning of a man with no ability to compose
never comes to life, like the shape of things at night
in a house without lamps. [Translated by Narayanarao and David Shulman, Classical Telugu Poetry, p. 238]

In a lighter vein, here is another amusing verse by Tenali Ramakrishna on an ideal householder’s life. Here is Lord Siva himself responding to a question by Narada:

If the wife you married doesn’t nag
and your son doesn’t talk back,
and your brothers get along well with you,
and your daughter-in-law doesn’t grumble,
and your daughter doesn’t compromise her character,
and you are not burdened by debts,
and you don’t lose pride by serving others,
and you don’t suffer scandal,
and you can get rich honestly,
and you are gracious to guests,
and there is respect for the gods in your home,
there’s nothing better than a householder’s life. [Translated by Narayanarao and David Shulman, Classical Telugu Poetry, p. 202]

Prof. Narayanarao was in the Bay area earlier this week and gave a delightful talk at Berkeley. His presence was one more reminder of what a stupendous achievement this anthology of Telugu poetry is. There is nothing comparable for any other South Asian language.

Robert Fagles

PDCS — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 06:41:49 +0000

After his two superb (and best selling) translations of Iliad (1990) and The Odyssey (1996), Robert Fagles has just published a new translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. Paul Friedrich introduced many generations of his students (including me) at the University of Chicago to Fagles’ wonderful translations, which as Fagles himself says aren’t literal or literary. Still, Fagles has produced some wonderful poetry, which makes us all look forward to partaking this new epic feast.

New York Times has a story on Fagles’ new Aeneid. There are two paragraphs which caught my attention. Speaking about the text, Fagles says:

The great challenge, he said, was to master the two voices of “The Aeneid”: the stately public voice, the one that critics of Virgil used to say was just propaganda for Augustus, and the private voice of Aeneas’s personal sorrow.

“The modern tendency is to hear one voice to the exclusion of the other,” he explained. “We generally think of the public voice as the voice of betrayal, and the private voice as the only place where truth resides. But the truth in Virgil is more complicated than that, and you need to hear both.”

Fagles also talked about the contemporary relevance of Aeneid:

It’s a poem about empire, he explained, and was commissioned by the emperor Augustus to celebrate the spread of Roman civilization.

“To begin with, it’s a cautionary tale,” Mr. Fagles said. “About the terrible ills that attend empire — its war-making capacity, the loss of blood and treasure both. But it’s all done in the name of the rule of law, which you’d have a hard time ascribing to what we’re doing in the Middle East today.

“It’s also a tale of exhortation. It says that if you depart from the civilized, then you become a murderer. The price of empire is very steep, but Virgil shows how it is to be earned, if it’s to be earned at all. The poem can be read as an exhortation for us to behave ourselves, which is a horse of relevance that ought to be ridden.”

Time to read Aeneid again.

California notes

PDCS — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 15:41:08 +0000

1. Zza’s trattoria on Grand Avenue. Sitting by the window, I could look into Lake Merritt and eat my lunch.

Ordering lunch was a liminal moment. No olive oil with the garlic bread. When the waitress brings me an omlette, she brings no butter with the toast. Only jam. Which I suspect is made of organically grown fruit. I don’t want to risk eating it.

I should have known better. When I order the omlette, the waitress doesn’t ask for what kind of bread I want. Nor does she list the various potato options. She already knows what’s best for me.

I now begin to comprehend Californians will turn even grease into health food. The omlette though was delicious, with lots of vegetables and sausage. Even potatoes were baked in the oven, with no oil. Eventually I realized the toast had a little bit of butter brushed on to the outer surface.

The cooks at Valois cafe in Chicago would have been offended by the lack of grease. I was.

2. Northern California is surely different. Not just peoplewise but topographically too. As I walked through the streets of Lake Merritt and Grand, I began to pine for the flat plains of the Midwest. Here though, every block is a hill. Cleveland, where my native informant Blake lived once upon a time, is a steep climb up from the Lake Shore avenue. Nearly hundred steps to get up there, through a nice little park. How do old people live here, if they don’t drive? Even young people.Blake told me none of that. I had mapped out every single block, googled the hell out of Google Earth but I still was clueless about hills and valleys.
Doesn’t one need more grease and less health food to climb up these hills!

3. The Organic City - story telling in Oakland is really, really cool. Both conceptually and to build a community. It’s a thesis project of of Seamus Byrne and Sarah Mattern, students in CSU East Bay’s Multimedia Graduate Program.

4. Andrena Zawinski’s poem CALL HER: Morning, circling Lake Merritt in Oakland, California and imagining Paris, France is pretty neat. Lake Merritt can do that.

Here are some photos.