{"id":1667,"date":"2015-10-15T06:05:37","date_gmt":"2015-10-15T06:05:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=1667"},"modified":"2015-10-25T11:50:13","modified_gmt":"2015-10-25T11:50:13","slug":"sujata-bhatt-poppies-in-translation-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=1667","title":{"rendered":"Sujata Bhatt, Poppies in Translation – review"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cShe powdered her eyelids \/ until they shimmered like butterflies.\u201d Reading that, the butterflies seem to come alive and fly off the page. Such moments of startlingly vivid imaginary presence are sprinkled throughout Poppies in Translation<\/em>, or rather they\u2019re sprinkled through weaker poems and sustainedly present in some of the stronger ones.<\/p>\n

Among the latter is the outstanding \u201cAnother Muse\u201d, whose structure seems clearly influenced by D H Lawrence but which has a hypnotic music of its own. Even by Bhatt\u2019s standards, the middle section of this poem is extraordinarily sensuous. What\u2019s truly remarkable, though, is the way physical impressions are carried on the current of an equally intensely realized sense of the quicksilver movement of a mind, one caught in the moment, living through an evolving arc of sensation and thought.<\/p>\n

\u201cToday\u201d, the first poem, is outstanding in a quite different way. It\u2019s brief, slow-paced and measured, with intricately counterpointed patterns of sound. The words are spare and reticent, although the hushed tone creates a feeling of intimacy. Spareness and reserve give weight to the question \u201cHow can you be in exile \/ when you live with the one you love?\u201d This can equally easily be taken as a real question (suggesting the irremediable sensation of exile) or as rhetorical (suggesting the all-healing comfort of love). No doubt both feelings are true at different times. There\u2019s a rich play of suggestion through the whole poem, subtly sounding many keynotes of the volume, such as what it means to live between cultures; the paradoxes of being in time, living from moment to moment while carrying the weight and endowment of the past; translation as something that happens between languages and also from experience to words.<\/p>\n

Both poems succeed so well partly because their sounds are beautifully shaped. Musicality and grace of phrasing is one of Bhatt\u2019s gifts. Visual impact is another. A number of poems are avowedly inspired by pictures involving surrealistic distortions and juxtapositions. Others, ones that as far as I know aren\u2019t directly inspired by works of visual art, have a similar effect, seeming like more or less surreal collages of verbal images. This works well when Bhatt trusts the reader\u2019s imagination to feel the pressure of suggestion within the collage itself, as in the unforgettable \u201cWhere a Scorpion Sleeps \u2013 T\u00eate Fantastique\u201d (after a painting by Wols). In weaker poems she tries to capture a sense of Significance with a capital S by rhetorical questions which gesture vaguely in the direction of meaning without actually expressing it.<\/p>\n

Bhatt seems to think like a native speaker in English, Gujarati and German. Her book contains poems centring on problems of translation which to me didn\u2019t rise much beyond the level of exercises, though some readers might find them clever and entertaining and others, with experience of living between languages, might find them powerfully evocative. This long collection has room for such slighter pieces, for experiment and specialist appeal. It also has room for the lightning stroke from Rumanian into English of the first half of the title poem, with its astonishingly vibrant expansion of a phrase by Ioana Ieronim into thirty-odd lines of Bhatt.<\/p>\n

In short, this is a book to dive into in the expectation of immediate pleasure. It\u2019s also one I\u2019ll return to in anticipation of widening and deepening appreciation.<\/p>\n

I would like to thank Peter and Ann Sansom for permission to post this review, which appeared in The North 54.<\/p>\n

Poppies in Translation<\/em>, 146 pp, \u00a39.99 pbk, Carcanet Press, Alliance House, Cross St, Manchester M2 7AQ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cShe powdered her eyelids \/ until they shimmered like butterflies.\u201d Reading that, the butterflies seem to come alive and fly off the page. Such moments of startlingly vivid imaginary presence are sprinkled throughout Poppies in Translation, or rather they\u2019re sprinkled through weaker poems and sustainedly present in some of the stronger ones. Among the latter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[106],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sujatta-bhatt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1667"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1667"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1667\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1675,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1667\/revisions\/1675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}