Editorial
In the sixteenth issue of Almost Island:
Jayant Kaikini produces a portrait of Mumbai which is compassionate and acerbic at the same time in “A Spare Pair of Legs”, translated from the Kannada by Tejaswini Niranjana. The identity of certain birds, and of certain fruits, explored with an intense, transcendent empathy that both preserves and effaces their otherness – respectively, by the the Delhi- based Nitoo Das and the great Uruguayan poet Amanda Berenguer. (This is Berenguer’s second appearance in Almost Island, the first time translated by Kent Johnson, and this time translated by Anna Deeny Morales.)
Poems from three books by the contemporary Swedish poet Erik Bergqvist, each a carefully- observed, carefully-lived, carefully-fashioned piece of time and wary presence.
Wren & Martin, every colonial schoolboy’s finger-wagging grammar book, re-read by Biswamit Dwibedy as a startling and tender elliptical romance.
Excerpts from a long, complex – and pure because complex – morphing meditation on memory by Aryanil Mukherjee, one of the foremost experimental poets writing in Bengali.
Abul Bashar’s “My Sleepwalking Mother”, translated from the Bengali by Epsita Halder, tells a tale of lives lived precariously between poverty and piety, perched on the banks of the river Padma.
Two sets of visions, defiantly human, returned to us for consolation from the middle of the twentieth century: Tristan Tzara in his later lyric phase, still largely unknown in English, in the inventive music of Heather Green’s translation; and the unclassifiable prose poems of Hijab Imtiaz Ali, translated from the Urdu by the UK-based avant garde poet, Sascha Aurora Akthar.
The images of Ranjit Hoskote, which are also civilisational genealogies of word and image: bright, intricate, perilous.
Adi Shankara, the eight century philosopher-poet, in the note-perfect English music of the US-based Russian poet, Philip Nikolayev.
Mirza Athar Baig’s “I Was Healed in a Plaster Shell”, translated from the Urdu by Haider Shahbaz, is a surreal account of an accident and surgery gone wrong.
And Hoshang Merchant’s riffs on Pound’s Cantos, that demand their own respect for a lifetime of living and reading: arguments and acts of love, joyous, naughty, profound, erudite and all-embracing