There was a lot said in class about
the practice of borrowing tropes, metaphors and phrases from the poetry of
other poets. Faiz Ahmed Faiz titled a collection of poems ‘Naqsh-e-Faryadi’,
taken verbatim from a ghazal by Ghalib; T.S Eliot famously uses various
quotations from classical texts in “The Waste Land”. While borrowing from other
known poets is perfectly acceptable, and, in fact, considered to be a sign of
being an informed poet, one needs to be careful about what poetry specifically
is being quoted and re-represented and why. I felt that Agha Shahid Ali’s poem/prologue
The Blessed Word engages so deeply with Mandelstam’s “We Shall Meet Again, in
Petersburg” that it risks rendering the poem too abstruse. Setting aside
aesthetics for a moment, couching the Kashmiri plight in Russian terms seemed
to me slightly problematic Of course one can make sense of it and appreciate it
without knowing the references to the ‘buried suns’ and ‘blessed women’ who
sing and rub the ashes together, the genre itself lends itself to ambiguity and
interpretation. However, I would still argue that through the evocation of a
culture far removed from Kashmir itself,
Ali’s prologue seems to widen the distance between reader and the
problem of Kashmir rather than the opposite. The trans-cultural poetic engagement
allows Ali to approach Kashmir, Srinagar via Russia, Petersburg,
increasing the length of distance between the reader and the poem. We are made
to experience Kashmir through Petersburg, while the poet himself is situated in
a third unrelated located i.e., the United States. It is as if the geographical
distance widens within the span of the poem and subsequently creates an even
longer distance, both literary and physical, between the reader and the poem.
The attempt at universalizing the ‘blessed word’, whatever it may be, is largely
unsuccessful in my view.
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