Editorial
This is our 10th anniversary issue. Almost Island now has 15 issues of the journal, three books with a fourth on its way, and this year will hold its tenth Dialogues in Delhi.
We would like to express our thanks and gratitude to everyone who has helped us to make Almost Island.
Subhashis Mohanty who began it all by first supporting the idea with funds and hosting our site so impeccably till today.
Itu Chaudhuri to whom we will always be indebted for the striking and original design of our website and two books.
Gurunandan Bhat, our web developer.
Ashwini Bhat, our editorial assistant for several years.
Munir Mohanty, for sustaining us with funds over all this time.
Kabir Mohanty for his ideas and his labour.
We would also like to thank Nakul Sood who has patiently recorded every single session at all our Dialogues.
Siddhartha Chatterjee for designing two books and posters.
And a very deep gratitude to those poets and writers and translators who sent us work early on when we were still getting off the ground, as well as to all those who have contributed since.
In this issue:
Irwin Allan Sealy, easily one of India’s most original, inventive and restless writers is back with Zelaldinus – a historical verse novel, a masque that stages an encounter between Akbar and present ironies; it’s vivid, twinkling with wit, and a heart-ravishing feast for the brain, the dancing, sound-making tongue. We present an excerpt from the just-released book, a collaboration between Aleph Book Company and Almost Island.
The major St. Lucian poet John Robert Lee, fresh on the heels of his recent Collected Poems 1975-2015 from Peepal Tree Press, gives us a series of soaring homages, at once elegiac and irrepressible, to friends in poetry: Melissa Green, Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Dionne Brand.
Jyotsna Milan has been something of a cult figure in Hindi literary circles for her landmark novel A Astu Ka, and her unique, idiosyncratic prose style and syntax. We are grateful to Mantra Mukim for introducing us to her equally distinctive and enigmatic poetry through his sharp, nuanced translations.
Taj Mahal Tears was produced from a visit by Chinese poets to India for the Almost Island Dialogues in 2009. The singular poet Ouyang Jianghe composes this poem from a confluence of streams – those of history, geography, primal emotion, and over all this the almost aerial gaze of a poet-philosopher. It has found in Lucas Klein a translator equal to the task.
Regis Bonvicino’s startling, seminal “negative poems” are both joyous and mischievous, nimble in the sharp cuts they often make on a society’s skin, gone before you’ve fully realized what they’ve been up to. Bonvincino is one of the most significant Brazilian poets writing since the 1970s; these new poems are from a just released Selected Poems from Green Integer, given to us by a star cast of translators.
Alive, rhizomatic, Sumana Roy’s new poems reason through a rare, unflinching empathy for both trees and humans – and the cold, still unthought space in between.
Valerie Mejer Caso’s Twelve Poems (Which Prologue a Flood) is a work that brings together poetry and painting and collage to explore new and imagined geographies, and old memories and absences, in her unmistakable, haunting – and haunted – idiom. This work forms part of her inter-media installation Untamable Light and was displayed at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2016.
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra writes a beautiful tribute to poet Reshma Aquil of Allahabad, who died in 2012, and reminds us not to forget those luminous poets and writers who have perhaps never raised their voices, those who have stayed away from “the catwalks of literary festivals”.
In Donaldson Park, Argentinian novelist Sergio Chejfec writes on something that for him is a lifelong fascination – city parks. Here, as elsewhere in his work, Chejfec looks at every element he passes and recalibrates our understanding of the ordinary.
Terry Pitts who has the unusual blog Vertigo and who has been a deep and consistent reader of image embedded fiction, takes a very close look at the way image and text encounter each other in five different novels.