Editorial
This new issue spans five continents and presents, among others, the diverse poets and writers who have enriched and will come to enrich the Almost Island Dialogues in New Delhi each year. We are thrilled to have the work of Raul Zurita, who will be at the Dialogues in February 2015, along with his translator, Anna Deeny Morales.
From Chilean poet Raul Zurita a tremendous, raging, recent sequence, Dreams for Kurosawa, which is a kind of new synthesis, or culmination of his long work with personas, following elements of memory that permutate themselves in dream, combining the fluidity we associate with consciousness and the hardness and heat we associate with the real.
From Argentina via New York City, comes Mercedes Roffe’s intense minimalism in Floating Lanterns, shining with a kind of almost classical, incantatory purity.
Eugenio de Signoribus is a contemporary Italian poet whose lyrics, disturbingly beautiful, seem to speak of our times in a language that is old and new, together, establishing almost a strange tradition of evil and despair.
The Chinese poet Xi Chuan talks of his life and poetry, and the things that have impacted both, in the context of his homeland. As always, his sharp intellect and poetic rigour shine a light on the paradoxes of the poet’s condition today.
The American prose writer Renee Gladman asks: “When we move from our minds into language, from something that must be multilayered, full of fragments, full of complete feelings, like novels that exist in the shape of an instant, what are we doing? What is the nature of that movement? How do we find language, how do we put the complex shape of our interiority — its vast web-like structure — into the straight line of the sentence?”
From South African Kobus Moolman comes new work - powerful, mute, zero-degree explorations of body, frailty, and again, shards of memory.
Indian poet Vinod Kumar Shukla’s work gives us desire leaping out of the everyday yet living within it at the same time, so that brief moments of flight and acceptance come together.
And: we would be wrong if we didn’t celebrate the near-miraculous powers of our poet- translators in this issue: Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Richard Dixon, Anna Deeny Morales.
Also, we are doing something we’ve never done before — a manuscript competition. It will, we hope, yield new voices, new work, from the sub-continental world. We are curious and keen to see the results of our call.