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Literary Review
POETRY
Overpowering images
ANUPAMA R.
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Sarang approaches the themes of disillusionment and exile in innovative ways.
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Another Life, Vilas Sarang, Poetrywala, Rs. 150
Reading Vilas Sarang is like eating blue cheese: You are shocked by the strong taste, but you want more. The latest collection of poems, Another Life, leaves you with a strange feeling that combines awe, surprise, anguish and unease.
Predominant themes
Hailed as one of the most ingenious modernists writing in Marathi and English, Sarang approaches the predominant themes of disillusionment and exile in innovative ways. Satire and existentialist metaphors — his trademark weapons — rule the poems, just as it did his last collection of short stories, The Women in Cages (Penguin, 2006).
Most images are overpowering and acutely original in the 45 poems divided into three sections. The fourth is a set of five translations. ‘A Balcony Endlessly Crumbling’, the first section has predominantly war poems in which Sarang draws from his experiences in Iraq and Kuwait as professor of literature.
‘War-Torn’ emerges as one of the strongest with its poignant lines: “Poetry, as the poets have told us for centuries,/Is for eternity, bombs are for the present.”
A few pages later, we are confronted with Sarang’s “Kuwait”, a “crowless country” where “the arms of a scaresparrow flap in the wind.” By the time I finished reading the lines, I could picture a barren landscape where the queer bird became a symbol of many things.
Powerful lines
“Habibullah” about a war prisoner describes life in an open-air prison. I particularly liked the last lines, “Warm rain/falls all over my body. Raindrops glisten/On the barbed wire in the moonlight, like an ache/Stretching across many oceans and many ages.”
“All they’re bombing is stones/The stones of emptiness”, says Sarang in “All they’re Bombing”, evoking a visually powerful war-torn reality. Such lines dissolve geographical boundaries, making the pain and suffering at once universal.
However, there is no fuss, no melodrama. Irony and black humour clinically portray the poet’s disenchantment. In ‘Mending Language’ (immediately reminding you of Frost’s “Mending Wall”), he says “The worst casualty of war/Is language: Collateral damage, target of opportunity/And all the unspeakable, nauseating lingo/That fairly makes you puke.”
“Fasting Feasting” juxtaposes the “champing” glee of the sheep in the fasting months and the “festive eating” later when the “sheep will be missing”. The readers will at once recognise wordplay and humour.
The poems in the second section, interestingly titled “Brahman is Broccoli” are comparatively lengthier. The first few poems, “One Man’s Meat”, “Obidil Oddities”, etc. look into food, sex and death with subtly unattractive images: Fission, genes, chromosomes all abound, perhaps intended to underline the lack of intimacy.
Alienation and exile become Sarang’s preoccupations in the next section, “Dis/Locations”. “We, too/Need to dislocate the self into meaning/We are like words/We are words…”, says he in ‘Translantic Poem’. Sarang’s philosophical undertones also look into the craft of writing. We listen to the “low measured tones” of the English poet and watch the “strident voices and extravagant gestures” “of the vernacular poets in “Poetry Reading, Bombay”.
Translations
In the last section of translations, some verse from Vasant Abaji Dahake, Bahinabai Chaudhari and Janabai have been rendered in English. “Crazy Jani Speaks to the Lord” is my favourite in which Janabai says, “Cast off all shame, And sell yourself in the market place, Then alone you may reach the Lord.” Though unfamiliar with the original, Sarang’s translation breathes life into words of yore (Janabai Ca. 1298-1350.)
Despite the occasional typographical error, Another Life is an engaging read.
Another Life, Vilas Sarang, Poetrywala, Rs. 150
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