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No Other World: Selected Poems

No Other World: Selected Poems

by Kunwar Narain

Bilingual English / Hindi edition

Translated from the Hindi by Apurva Narain
Introduced by Harish Trivedi

Part of our Arc Translations series edited by Jean Boase-Beier

Kunwar Narain was one of the finest poets of his generation and a pre-eminent literary and intellectual figure in India. He has been variously described as a 'meditative' poet, 'dwelling on the present through the prism of myth and history', and as a writer whose work reveals 'a twentieth century sensibility in its anguish as well as its resourcefulness'. His poems are said to embody a unique simultaneity of the simple and the layered, the contemporary and the metaphysical, but, above all, a rare purity and a deep humanism. Coursing through the past and the present, the absurd and the exploitative, intimate recollections and meditative ruminations, his is poetry that in its intricate weave and egalitarianism leaves us restless and reassured at once.

The poems in this collection have been skilfully and painstakingly translated over several years by his son Apurva, who uncovers the nuanced content of the originals without compromising the allied complexities of their construct, not just in the broader demands of rhythm or fluency but also in the finer details of their 'word-music', rhyme or alliteration.

Kunwar Narain is one of the finest Hindi poets of his generation, a meditative poet of unsurpassed brilliance... there is a fundamental honesty in his oeuvre... there is little doubt that he is one of the great poets of world literature, in the same league as a Szymborska, Milosz, or Heaney... Apurva Narain's translation will definitely set a new benchmark. The translations are luminous, evidence of someone having wrestled with the inner meaning of the poems.

The Indian Express

ISBN:
978-1904614-81-4 (pbk)
978-1906570-20-0 (hbk)
Dimensions: 216 x 138 mm
Pages: 160
Published May 2010

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