The survival of words

“We live in our ancestors’ bones / we pick a word/ and the syntax of some earlier century/ is disturbed,” writes Ashok Vajpeyi in the first poem in A Name for Every Leaf: Selected Poems, 1959-2015 . A disruption in syntax, like a stone in a stack shifting, is an appropriate description for a collection that challenges what we know of Indian poetry. The strongest of these poems experiments with form, startle and remain with the reader, and show that many doors have been open in Indian poetry for a long time, though we still declare them shut. Vajpeyi is a Hindi poet who has “chosen holy words, written poetry, not prayed” over a career spanning several decades and various accolades. Translated from Hindi by Rahul Soni, who has previously translated Hindi writers like Shrikant Verma and Geetanjali Shree, these poems read seamlessly, retaining a quiet rhythm in most places.

Vajpeyi’s skill lies in beating the reader’s expectations, as in the poem ‘After the End’, where there will be “nothing” but also “No weak, watered-down tea,/ nor the annoyance/ of buttonholes smaller than buttons.” He addresses a poem to his mother before he was born, “like the seasons, your arms are young.” He draws a portrait of his relationship with his daughter with this simple detail, “my daughter and I/ place bets/ on which flock of parrots/ will stop or not stop at our tree.” He finds when he “touched/ Sveta’s friendly hands on a busy road/ one winter afternoon” that “the city is still a possibility.”

Travelling the expanse of human experience with him, one follows Vajpeyi into a poem with the ominous sub-title ‘Auschwitz 1’. On the heels of reading Anis Gisele’s essay ‘What Happens When Writers Tell Stories That Aren’t Their Own’ (about writers and cultural appropriation, especially in terms of tragedies that are not the writer’s own), the subject filled me with unease. But Vajpeyi owns his privilege and his distance from the tragedy, “I wasn’t there but if I were/ I would have stayed silent. / This is why I want to see what remains the way I see/ what has passed.” This is a quality he sustains throughout his writing as he finds a way to write about other people’s stories without trying to appropriate them. He positions himself as an outsider, an observer and at times an admirer. Listening to Ali Akbar Khan playing the sarod, he senses someone “pulling/ the trembling black sky,/ towards me.” In a poem for the painter Raza, he says “In the dark the colour on the canvas/ softly whispers/ to the colour in some tube on the floor”. He imagines Raza in “this battle of colours,/ in this wilderness of colours” as a “colour-burnt man / pure and bright and tender.”

A painting by Raza drapes the cover of the book. Raza’s paintings and Vajpeyi’s poetry have been previously paired in an exhibition called shabd-bindu where the poems explained the paintings themselves. Raza’s iconic concentric circles on the cover pay homage to 46 years of Vajpeyi’s poetry in its myriad forms. He is, and is widely known to be, a writer deeply preoccupied with the nature of language. It then comes as some surprise that a significant number of these poems pale by comparison to the poems that deal with other subjects. They are abstract, closed in, and leave the reader without anything to hang their hat on.

This is a collection vast in scope, quantity and ambition; it sometimes sprawls beyond what can be absorbed. It calls for a culling by the editors of what is repetitive. Certain poems are echoes of themselves, in sentiment and in tone. Two less original, less compelling Auschwitz poems follow the one mentioned above. Similarly a series of six poems on female nudity mirror each other. The high notes he achieves in his other poems are slightly dulled by these poems with a landscape that is not new and worth exploring. As these poems survey the same concepts again and again, it creates a textual equivalent of the Droste Effect (a picture being seen within itself).

In a strange turn of events I find this line, late in the book, in an essay: “A good poem is written only rarely. By good I mean a poem whose door opens on to something unexpected and which reveals to us that such a wonder is possible in language.” It appears Vajpeyi is aware that not all poems are successful. There is a commitment to experimentation, to redefinition in this volume of work. This, in part, explains the repetitions in the collection as Vajpeyi tugs at the same string over and over, looping it in different ways, as unaware as us at the beginning of a poem of whether his attempt will be successful or not.

At the end of the book are a few of Vajpeyi’s essays on poetry. He asks the literary community in India: where has the epic tradition of poetry disappeared? How did the land of the Mahabharata become one that only produces lyrical poetry? The survival of words and the survival of society are linked; Vajpeyi reminds us of this.

This collection begs larger questions: should Vajpeyi’s essays be studied in universities? Surely a Hindi poet scrutinising poetry is important to a person studying literature in India. A Name for Every Leaf is a revelatory oeuvre from a writer who remains little-known in the Anglophone world. For those of us sceptical about Indian poetry, particularly poetry in regional languages, it would be prudent to remember “Many silences need to speak out still (…) / I haven’t reveled in my childhood still./ And morning’s blue bird / hasn’t picked a twig for her nest/ still.”

Urvashi Bahugunais a poet living in Delhi who works in non-profit

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