[A] Damn my awkwardness on encountering your beauty, always too much To bear. Dear, to hear what I wanted to say tonight, listen to the nightly rain.

You keep vanishing, yet return as dark memory occasionally returns when I see a face framed in the window of a train, barreling down into heavy rain.

Your eyes always open within mine, as certain dark Lilies slowly push their heads out into this spring rain.

[B] To caress your hair with these crude hands, to cradle your body of stars In a language, which is only spoken between a field of grass and the rain!

When will my body hum with music, that slap of water against stone? Only when I can hear your quick laughter, always flaming in the rain!

Who has played Holi in your alley today? Who is she who has colored you today? And whose handprints cover your eyes, Sashi? Surely these are not that of rain!

Last evening was spent in the company of poets, before and after one of those almost uniquely American spectacles: a poetry reading. While such experiences in the past year have been more frequent that what is, perhaps, required by the human organism – for really gossip, even when done by ‘professional’ poets, is, or soon gets to be, numbingly dull. How many conversations revolve around the yet to be ‘professional’ poets, i.e., M.F.A students sucking up to the full-time pros, or the full-time pros reminiscing about literary conferences from a distant time, taking about who got which grant, award, or fellowship (as Tom Disch in ‘The House of Indolence”, a book of essays on poetry, more trenchantly calls it, ‘institutional welfare’), or in unguarded moments, which range into sexual proclivities, expeditions and so forth of the muse-anointed-few.

While this begs the question: why do I go, which I won’t attempt to answer, après self-analysis, last evening proved to be somewhat superior than the others, because one of the poets involved (Robert Bly) was gracious enough to climb down for Mount Olympia (or which ever mountain pro-poets sit in conversation with the muses), and make conversation with the hangers on, like yours truly.

So I got my few words edgeways about my discoveries of some fantastic poets, notably Tomas Transtromer, via his (in Transtromer's case good) translations, which like his own poetry are pretty uneven; a few of Kabir and Meera Bai are, really, terribly bad, and those of Ghalib merely insufficient.

But then I may be prejudiced, having a reasonable access to (and understanding of) these poems in original. And maybe because my critical awareness was heightened after reading, recently, Dan Gioia’s ‘demolition’ job of Bly’s work:

"By propagating this sort of minimalist translation Bly has done immense damage to American poetry. Translating quickly and superficially, he not only misrepresented the work of many great poets, but also distorted some of the basic standards of poetic excellence. His slapdash method ignored both the obvious formal qualities of the originals (like rhyme and meter) and, more crucially, those subtler organizing principles such as diction, tone, rhythm, and texture that frequently gave the poems their intensity. Concentrating almost entirely on syntax and imagery, Bly reduced the complex originals into abstract visual blueprints. In his hands, dramatically different poets like Lorca and Rilke, Montale y Machado, not only sounded alike, they all sounded like Robert Bly, and even then not like Bly at his best. But as if that weren’t bad enough, Bly consistently held up these diminished versions as models of poetic excellence worthy of emulation. In promoting his new poetics (based on his specially chosen foreign models), he set standards so low that he helped create a school of mediocrities largely ignorant of the premodern poetry in English and familiar with foreign poetry only through oversimplified translations."

And some of the above points are valid, and very well made by Gioia.

Bly also told us that Transtromer had recently suffered from a stroke, which took away his mental functions for using words (I thought of Beethoven going deaf in his latter years), and for forming sentences. What a fate for a poet!

Subsequently we also gossiped about his methods of translating Ghalib, with help from his PhD-cop-Indian son-in-law, and other personal matters regarding how he wrote, lived, what his children did etc. This was followed by the reading, which was compared to a few other affairs I had subjected myself to, fairly enjoyable, if not because of the poetry read then for the literary asides and anecdotes told, especially by Heather McHugh (the other poet on the bill of fare). These ones were especially witty (I don’t recall to whom these quotes were attributed to):

Dear Sir, the distance between the covers of your book is too great. I shall waste no time reading your wonderful book. The writing in this book is both original and ugly; where it copies from others’ work, it is original, and where it does not, it is ugly.

Following this Robert Bly took to stage, and read from some of his recent work, most of which he claims to have written in the ghazal form. If he did use this form, they didn’t sound like ghazals to me, and even if they were ghazals, they lacked the intensity the best of ghazals (here I am thinking of Faiz Ahmed Faiz in Urdu) possess when viewing the world. But then, perhaps, if one is as famous as Bly is, stuff like this can be passed off as the real ghazal. However to end, (and stop playing the amateur cirtic), on a nice note: Mr. Bly also gave me two of his books gratis, and also asked me to write to him in his Minneapolis ‘hermitage’.