DHOOMIL

An Outpost of Progress

Translated from the Hindi by Rahul Soni


अnर

कोई पहाड़
संगीन क- नोक से बड़ा नह0 ह।ै
और कोई आँ ख
छोटी नह0 है समुd से
यह के वल हमारी pतीkाओं का अnर है – जो कभी
हमH लोहे या कभी लहरI से जोड़ता ह।ै


These poems have been selected from La trinità dell'esodo by Eugenio De Signoribus (GarzanA, 2011).]


Dhoomil was the pen-name of Sudama Panday, who was born in Khewali, a village near Varanasi, in 1936. He was educated in the village and in Varanasi, and was an instructor at the Industrial Training Institute in the city for several years. He died in 1975. He published one collection, Sansad se Sadak Tak (From the Parliament to the Street, 1972), during his short lifetime and one posthumous collection, Kal Sunna Mujhe (Hear Me Tomorrow, 1977), which won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1979.


Rahul Soni is a writer, editor and translator. He has edited an anthology of Hindi poetry in English translation, Home from a Distance (2011), and translated Shrikant Verma’s collection of poetry, Magadh (2013), Geetanjali Shree’s novel The Roof Beneath Their Feet (2013), a selection of Ashok Vajpeyi’s poetry A Name for Every Leaf (2016), and Pankaj Kapur’s novella Dopehri (2019).