By Jorge Heine
A measure of the interest this inspired poetry collection has aroused, is the truth that it has currently been translated and published into Italian, and Spanish and Bengali versions of this book will be forthcoming, to be launched next February at the International Kolkata Book Fair. In 2004, possessing been in post as ambassador of Chile to India for only a couple of months, I had the chance to give an opening address at the International Kolkata Book Fair. Chile was the focal nation of the Fair simply because of the centennial of Pablo Neruda, Chile´s Nobel Prize-winning poet, and an occasion that led to year-lengthy celebrations, fresh translations into half a dozen Indian languages, and quite a few seminars across India. On the occasion, we had a noted Chilean poet, Raúl Zurita, in attendance, with him playing a prominent part in the Fair.
In these pleasant days of February of 2004, my wife Norma went buying for the well-known cotton fabrics for which Kolkata is so effectively recognized. She was in the corporation of the daughter of Chile’s Honorary Consul in Kolkata, Mr Jougal Saraff. Upon getting into a shop, Vandana Saraff introduced Norma to the shop clerk as the wife of the Chilean ambassador to India. The young man’s eyes lit up, and he mentioned: “Chile, Chile—the land of Pablo Neruda” and asked my wife: “May I recite a poem?” My wife mentioned, “Of course”. And he proceeded to recite, in best English, one of Neruda’s poems from Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair.
Only in Kolkata can this take place,—a shop clerk understanding Pablo Neruda’s poetry by heart– a young man who told my wife he had found Neruda in a neighborhood library as a kid, and in no way looked back. In that identical vein, anytime I would take a look at Kolkata for the duration of my posting in India, I would get in touch with on then-Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, a scholar and a gentleman in the most effective sense of these words, in the Writers´ Building, the West Bengal’s government quarters, and we would speak at length on politics and literature. Some say that Bengalis, with their like of literature, of left-wing politics and of football, are the Latin Americans of India, and there is some thing to that.
Much like Ambassador Abhay, Neruda was also a poet-diplomat, as was our other Literature Nobel Prize winner from Chile, Gabriela Mistral. Harold Nicolson, the noted British diplomat and author of one of the common texts on statecraft, Diplomacy, published in 1939, but nevertheless made use of today, referred to diplomacy as a written art kind. Not surprisingly, there is a entire slew of writer-diplomats about the world, such as, of course, in India. But the quantity of poet-diplomats is a a lot smaller sized subgroup of this bigger universe, a subgroup in which Chile is effectively represented. As some of you may possibly know, following serving as ambassador in India, I served as ambassador of Chile in China. As it takes place, each our 1st ambassador to China, Armando Uribe, and his cultural attaché, Gonzalo Rojas, have been noted poets who went on to win Chile’s National Prize of Literature. I from time to time wonder irrespective of whether they communicated in verse at employees meetings.
Octavio Paz, the Mexican Nobel Prize winner, is in that category as effectively. Both Paz and Neruda (who are on the cover of The Alphabets of Latin America) had a sturdy connection with India, and Paz’s book, In Light of India, is an extended meditation on Indian civilization. Neruda and Paz are in truth joined at the hip in the Indian imagination, so a lot so that a very good buddy of mine in Delhi when told me that he “recalled” the days in which each Paz and Neruda served as ambassadors to India. This, of course, in no way occurred. Paz did serve as ambassador to India in the sixties, but Neruda in no way did—the closest he came to that was as consul of Chile in Colombo, as far back as the 1920s, even though he visited 4 occasions, such as a famously unhappy encounter with PM Jawaharlal Nehru in 1950 in Mumbai, which led to his poem, “India, 1950”. But each Neruda and Paz wrote about India in prose and in verse, expressing their like for and fascination with Mother India in unique approaches.
Ambassador Abhay methods into that distinguished tradition of poet-diplomats, conveying his sharp observations about Latin America—from Bahia to Belmopan. In a handful of lines he conveys so a lot about what tends to make the lands of magical realism tick—its geography, its cities, its literature, its politicians and even its drinks. I have been to most if not all the locations he writes about— even to Belmopan, the newly-constructed capital of Belize, a nation that has come a lengthy way from when it was recognized as British Honduras, and Graham Greene referred to as it “the armpit of the British Empire”. And I was struck by the accuracy of Abhay’s observations, his writer’s eye, and his knack for capturing the essence of a location in a handful of lines.
How do you convey the sheer, overwhelming, numbing diversity of “nuestra América “ as José Martí used to say, or “la América morena”, the term I favor, in a quick book of poems? Abhay’s option was brilliant: by signifies of the alphabet, employing it for nations, politicians, and writers, and take it from there.
Latin America has a dramatic geography, with some of the highest mountains and longest rivers in the world, and Abhay’s poems capture that completely. On the Andes, “The green breasts/ of Earth/ rise to quench the thirst/ of insatiable humanity” or on the Atacama desert, the driest desert in the world, “in the vastness of the desert/ the road merely a line/ snowcapped Andes/ sibylline as ever” or his poem on the Amazon, “The anaconda was missing/ so they offered us piranha fishing/ in consolation/and bathing with pink dolphins/ in the black river”.
Yet, the majority of Latin Americans live in cities, and the eagle’s eye with which these poems capture city scenes is breath-taking—in “Avenida Paulista”, “the destitute squat on the sidewalk/ as installations of modern art” the poem on the Carnival in Rio, one of the longest, and most strong or life in Bogotá, with its substantial bookstores, restaurants, the Gold Museum and Botero as effectively as on the sad decadence of Valparaiso, when one of the fantastic seven ports of the world, and now , “streets stale/ reeking of decay/ ageing and death” on Manaus, “where rivers meet/ bearing different colors/ and an opera is heard/ in the middle of the jungle” on Santiago, “guarded by the Andes/ wearing a veil of smoke” or on Cartagena de Indias, exactly where “an orange flame/ burns in the sky / the city squirms/ then revels/ inhaling the smell”.
Latin America is absolutely nothing if not sensuality, and these verses show an uncanny capacity to convey it. Much as Neruda had an ode to red wine, Abhay has a poem on caipirinha, Brazil’s national drink, with a further line that says it all, “Brazil is body, caipirinha its soul”.
Abhay was based in Brazil, and Brazil is really a lot at the center of this book, as is in lots of approaches Rio de Janeiro, the old capital, “ciudade maravilhosa”, as the song says. Thus, poems on the statue of Christ the Redeemer on the Itamaraty Palace (the former headquarters of Brazil’s Foreign Ministry, “Anaesthetized, clinical, green/ ready to build the scalpel/ of words—to slash, to heal”) on its revelry, and on its glorious beaches, Ipanema and Copacabana. “I have heard Copacabana is full of beauties/… I have seen them lying in the sand/ wearing nothing but a book in their hand”… Bahia, and Porto Alegre also make cameo appearances.
Many, even though naturally not all, of Latin America’s most striking urban landscapes located their way to these pages. It consists of one poem about what may possibly be the most imposing bookstore in the world, the Ateneo, situated in a former theater, only probable in a world city like Buenos Aires, that also features prominently in the book, with la Boca, Borges, Recoleta, and tango. I take it our poet has not been to Cuba, and I would have loved to see his verses on the Malecón in Havana a lot as I would some lines for El Morro and La Fortaleza in Old San Juan, or the colonial quarter in Quito. These are cities that have preserved a lot of that striking Spanish colonial architecture and urban design and style, and retain that particular magic that modern day cities generally lack. No doubt our poet, nevertheless intimidatingly young, will discover the occasion to take a look at these locations, and have his poetic imagination fired up with these pastel colors, cobblestoned streets and wooden balconies that speak of a further era, but make for a exceptional modern urban fabric.
Yet, there is no doubt that the spirit of Latin America is to be located in the pages of this book. Without missing a beat, these lines recreate the colors, the rhythms, the cadences and the pre-Columbian roots of a area of vast, empty spaces that ache to be filled with words, as Neruda used to say. Abhay has carried out so with verve, gusto and brio, displaying a sensibility each ancient and post-modern day. This slim but meaty collection of poems regales us each with sophisticated poetry and a splendid, panoramic introduction to lots of facets of the mestizo continent.
Bloomsbury India, 2020, Pages-138, ISBN 978-9389867909
(The book reviewer is a study professor at the Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University, and a former Chilean ambassador to India. He is the author of La Nueva India (El Mercurio/Aguilar, 2012. Views expressed are individual and do not reflect the official position or policy of TheSpuzz Online).