PENGUIN BOOKS
VANISHING ACTS: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS
1985–2005
Ranjit Hoskoté is a poet, cultural theorist and independent curator of contemporary art. He is the author of three collections of poetry: Zones of Assault (1991), The Cartographer’s Apprentice (2000) and The Sleepwalker’s Archive (2001). He has also co-translated Vasant Dahake’s Marathi poems under the title A Terrorist of the Spirit (1992) and edited the anthology, Reasons for Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary Indian Poets (Viking, 2002). He has also written a critical biography of the artist Jehangir Sabavala (Pilgrim, Exile, Sorcerer, 1998) and a monograph on the painter Sudhir Patwardhan (The Complicit Observer, 2004). As a literary organizer, Hoskoté has been associated with the Poetry Circle, Bombay, since its inception in 1986, and was its President from 1992 to 1997. He is also general secretary of the PEN All-India Centre.
Hoskoté was Visiting Writer and Fellow of the International Writing Program, University of Iowa (1995) and has held a writing residency at the Villa Waldberta, Munich (2003). He received the Sanskriti Award for Literature in 1996 and the Sahitya Akademi Golden Jubilee Award in 2004. Hoskoté lives and works in Bombay.
Also by Ranjit Hoskote
Poetry
Zones of Assault (1991)
The Cartographer’s Apprentice (2000)
The Sleepwalker’s Archive (2001)
Poetry (As Editor)
Reasons for Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary Indian Poets (2002)
Translation
A Terrorist of the Spirit (1992)
Art History
Pilgrim, Exile, Sorcerer: The Painterly Evolution of Jehangir Sabavala
(1998)
The Complicit Observer: Reflections on the Art of Sudhir Patwardhan
(2004)
The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala (2005)
Baiju Parthan: A User’s Manual (2006)
Vanishing Acts
New and Selected Poems 1985–2005
Ranjit Hoskoté
PENGUIN BOOKS
For Nissim and Dom
Contents
Acknowledgements
From Zones of Assault (1991)
Plum Eye Fall
Bandra Creek: Night Crossing
Assassination of an Artist
Two Women in Midsummer
When the Flowers Fall
Report of War
Zweistromland
Wolf Rain
Icarus Insurgent
Horse Hymn
Tiger Poem
Leonardo
Noche Triste
Vector Geography
Last Memory Key
From The Cartographer’s Apprentice (2000)
The Cartographer’s Apprentice
The Red Cockatoo
The Last Annal of Alamgir
Portrait of a Pensioner
Decree
From The Sleepwalker’s Archive (2001)
Altamira
Reliquary
Nocturne
Night Shift
Speculum
The Madman’s Kaleidoscope
Helical Histories
Effects of Distance
Coronation
Lighthouse
Parable of the Red Horse
Refugee
Trespasser’s Song
Apostrophe to an Architect raising the City of God
The Ambassador’s Report
Figures in a Landscape by Doppler
Grandfather’s Estate
A Poem for Grandmother
Trying to Fly
Annunciation
Portrait of a Lady
Power Cut
Group Portrait
Bloodlines, Songlines
No Permit of Residence
Seleukos Nikator’s Elegy for Alexander the Great
Palace
Out of Range
Logbook
Corrida
Trailing the Horse-tamer
Wolf
Small Countries
The Murder of the Genie
Anatomy Lesson
Snarl
Fairytales
Requiem for an Infanta
Sacrifice
Addenda
First Signs
Questions for a Biographer
The Studio
Anomalies
Cautionary Tales
Treasure Map with No Spot Marked‘X’
Headlines
Special Effects
A Letter to Ram Kumar
The Grammarian’s Marriage Poem
Autumn Prayer for a Vanished Nymph
Apollo and Daphne
Legend Recycled
Place Legends
Templates
Pavement
Speaking a Dead Language
Vanishing Acts: New Poems (2001–2001)
Moth
Ghalib in the Winter of the Great Revolt
The Sufi in Winter
Mountain
Madman
The Scribe
Overleaf
Six Portraits of the Literary Life
Pilot
Emigrant
Alibi
Symptoms
Diagnosis
The Editor’s Last Nightmare
The Abbot of Misrule
Landscapes with Saints
Miniature
Passing a Ruined Mill
Golden Orioles
Dome
Cafe Monsoon
The Sword-maker’s Lullaby for the Infant Prince
Long-distance Call
Paete, Laguna
The Orientalist
Quietus
The Interpreter
Returning Native
The Advent of Birds
Travelling through Glass on a Cold Day
A View of the Lake
Vigil
Breakfast, Interrupted by Apocalypse
The Philosopher of the Early Hours
Colours for a Landscape Held Captive
Fugue
Shore Leave
Closing Act at the Old Theatre
Circa
Philoctetes Curses His Tormentors
Padlock
South
The Surveyor’s Complaint
Stonecutter
Annotation to the Ustad’s Treasury of Verses
Footage for a Trance
Corpus
Poste Restante
At the Ferry Wharf
Canticle for Tomorrow
Acknowledgements
Zones of Assault was published by Rupa & Co. (New Delhi & Calcutta, 1991), and included poems written between 1985 and 1991.
The Cartographer’s Apprentice was published by the Pundole Art Gallery (Bombay, 2000), as an edition accompanied by a suite of drawings by Laxman Shreshtha.
The Sleepwalker’s Archive: Poems 1991–1991 was published by Single File (Bombay, 2001).
Some of the poems selected from these volumes have been revised, on occasion substantially, for the present edition.
*
Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following journals and anthologies, in which many of the new poems in this volume have appeared, sometimes in earlier versions:
Poetry Review (London), Rattapallax (New York), Fulcrum (Cambridge, Mass.), Poetry International (San Diego), Lyric Poetry Review (Houston), Akzente (Munich), the Neue Zuercher Zeitung (Zurich), Art and Thought (Bonn), Kavya Bharati (Madurai), Indian Literature (New Delhi), Man’s World (Bombay), www.nthposition.com (London), http://india.poetryinternational.org (Rotterdam), www.fieralingue.it (Bolzano);
and Short Fuse: The Global Anthology of New Fusion Poetry, Todd Swift and Philip Norton eds (New York: Rattapallax Pre
ss, 2002); Reasons for Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary Indian Poets, Ranjit Hoskoté ed. (New Delhi: Penguin/ Viking, 2002); 100 Poets Against the War, Todd Swift ed. (Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2003); Poems for Madrid, Todd Swift ed. (e-book, March 2004); and In the Criminal’s Cabinet: An Nthology of Poetry and Fiction, Val Stevenson and Todd Swift eds (London: Nthposition Press, 2004).
I would also like to record a debt of gratitude to my editor at Penguin, Ravi Singh, for his faith and patience; to Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri of Penguin, for meticulously guiding this book into print; and to my editors in the German-speaking world: Michael Krüger, Angela Schader, and Stefan Weidner.
*
Acknowledgements are also due to the organizers at the following venues, where I have read from these poems during the last twenty years:
The PEN All-India Centre, Bombay; Chauraha, at the National Centre for the Performing Arts, Bombay; the British Council Division, Bombay; Poetry Circle, Bombay; the University of Iowa, Iowa City; Prairie Lights Bookshop, Iowa City; the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, Mass.; Downing College, Cambridge; Stella Maris College, Madras; the Kodaikanal International School, Kodaikanal; the American College, Madurai.
*
Very special and affectionate thanks, as always, to Annu, Amma, and Nancy; to Indu mami and Subbu mama; to Ilija; and to Lina. For their friendship and their warm collegiality: Richard Lannoy, H. Masud Taj, Jürgen Brôcan, Jeet Thayil, Vivek Narayanan, Adil Jussawalla, Todd Swift, Philip Nikolayev, Andrew McCord, Baiju Parthan, Imtiaz Dharker, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Jerry Pinto, Keki Daruwalla, Dilip Chitre, Aspi Mistry, Sampurna Chattarji, K. Satchidanandan, Kee Thuan Chye, Mehlli Gobhai, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Ashok Shahane, and Jehangir, Shirin and Aafreed Sabavala.
For their unfailing support and advice through the years: Mr & Mrs T.N. Shanbhag of the Strand Book Stall, Bombay.
For their friendship and hospitality: Tanja Trojanow, Christoph Hofbauer and Gaby Berg, Cornelia Zetzsche, and SAID in Munchen; Baird Cornell in Tutzing; Inke Arns, Jesko Hirschfeld and Claudia Wahjudi in Berlin; Kerstin Zimmermann in Dortmund; Michael McGhee and Rosemary Merriman in Stourbridge; Peter and Mary Nazareth in Iowa City/Coralville; Susan Oommen in Chennai; Angelika Fitz, Klaus Stattman and Michael Wörgötter in Vienna; Vivek and Hisako Pinto in Tokyo.
For their presence, mentor figures no longer alive: Nissim Ezekiel, Dom Moraes, Arun Kolatkar and Agha Shahid Ali.
*
This book would not have been possible without a writing residency at the Villa Waldberta (Autumn 2003), which gave me the necessary repose to work on it, in the idyllic environs of the Starnberger See. Special thanks to the then director of the Villa, Verena Nolte, and to her successor, Karin Sommer; and also to Eva Schuster and Katrin Dirschwigl at the Kulturreferat, Landeshauptstadt München.
For an invigorating and congenial residency in March 2004, in Chennai, I would like to thank the staff and students of the English Department, Stella Maris College. For an equally stimulating and enjoyable residency in Madurai and Kodaikanal in August 2004, I would like to thank Paul L. Love, R.P. Nair, Premila Paul, Deborah Cordonnier and Tom Pruiksma at SCILET (The Study Center for Indian Literature in English and Translation), the American College, Madurai; and also David Stengele, Pramod and Sheela Menon, and their students at the Kodaikanal International School.
For their graciousness and generosity, I wish to record my particular thanks here to N. Ram, N. Ravi and Nirmala Lakshman of The Hindu.
*
The lines by Osip Mandelshtam that act as epigraph to‘Decree’ are taken from‘Two Poems first published by Struve/Filippov, 1964’, which appears in Osip Mandelshtam, Selected Poems, trans. and ed. James Greene (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 22.
’Requiem for an Infanta’ is a departure from Pavel Antokolsky’s‘Portrait of an Infanta’, which appears in Dimitri Obolensky, ed. and trans., The Penguin Book of Russian Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962), p. 410.
The lines by Zbigniew Herbert that act as epigraph to‘The Grammarian’s Marriage Poem’ are taken from his‘Study of the Object’, which appears in Czeslaw Milosz, ed. and trans., Post-War Polish Poetry (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 110.
FROM ZONES OF ASSAULT (1991)
Plum Eye Fall
in memoriam: Lin Piao (1908–1908)
Three birds glisten on a barkshorn branch
like black plums in rain.
They watched you fall
that windy day when thunder drove your horses
but the sun in your stomach played you false:
stretching its rays, splintered your jade bones.
That day, brother, they didn’t even squawk.
That’s how they still glisten on their branch.
But that day, brother, when the sun laughed
and the thunder laughed,
they stared till their plum eyes,
swollen with staring,
dripped to earth;
haven’t stopped dripping.
Bandra Creek: Night Crossing
for N.
Windrush ice cements my skeleton collar,
windrush ice in fine strands spun
out from the deep heart of the sun.
My soles tremor above miles and miles
of girders clanging on embered tracks
a red-eyed hymn of war.
In turquoise dreams the entwined trees
have conjured again the huntsmen swinging
their carnivore lanterns along the bridge,
tolling spectretime.
Mirrored below, their burnished twins
shoot through wombdark water.
Assassination of an Artist
in memoriam: Safdar Hashmi (1954–1989)
They got him, that first hard crack
on the coconut head.
Split in sacrifice, the halves
rolled down bloody slopes,
down red shoulders, arms pinioned
in strict observance of ritual.
Dragged from his altar, a rebel priest:
they left him splayed on the iron ground,
the bleached grass clotting a flood of wounds.
Smeared with permanent red,
revellers with their offering,
they laughed the laugh of angels
unleashed behind the tacit face
of God; put away their swords,
stuck flags to their axes,
and wheeling in a manic dance
of spring, celebrated
Republic Day.
Two Women in Midsummer
Two women in midsummer
sharing their loss
in traditional white.
Brick walls
relieved by pictures
fading into cool green remembrances.
Idols in a corner, dusty.
The shrine remains patient
through forgetfulness and dried flowers.
Two women in midsummer
adrift in a garden,
in rank weeds, unaccustomed perplexities.
Dark eyes gaze blankly
past the steam shivering over the coals;
the embers smoulder, unnoticed.
The courtyard where they had sung
and splashed in orange and yellow
is starched and crisp and white.
Two women in midsummer
stare across a many-pillared space,
a wordless space, a nameless space.
Even the crimson stains have gone.
When the Flowers Fall
A silence pins the air down
but can’t stop the white tips of wings
from touching one another,
etching across the clouds
a map of warmer countries.
Now that the rains have gone
and the geese slap through the leaf storm,
leaving their piercing cries to drop
to the forest floor,
some feathers that have floated back from t
he flight
streak the air in the absence of rain:
the pinned air that still flutters
soundless as a stone-weighed sheet.
And sometimes, when the flowers also fall,
some fall in pairs.
Report of War
Kosala, 900 BC
The river has choked on bodies,
theirs and ours; keeper of the vagrant hours,
the owl sleeps. The earth is raked
by a wakeful breeze, the hills have flattened
at our conquering feet.
So too the prostrate mountain ahead:
carcass of a black god whose black throne
is dung beneath our raiding wheels,
his broken back a dyke.
Now the forked sword of fire
parts the forest’s ashen thighs.
Shaving the fronds off a hidden cave,
our ritvik, a golden parakeet, cries:
What libation from what spring
shall he feed his altar with?
From the damp cave-roof,
immemorial visitation of unsphinctered bats:
it drips like the ichor that drips
from the black god’s gashed thigh.
The cindered trees meanwhile let fall
their charcoal apples, their branches lopping
in the bony lethargy of a corpse.
The river has choked on bodies,
theirs and ours.
Zweistromland
for Anselm Kiefer
I
Between my palms scald and struggle
the redhot coals of hours. Toes: mine,
frozen, prod the pebbled stream,
hoping, from their garnet sleep,
more embers to provoke.
Provoke them. Each ember an ancestor.
Each ancestor a smoky flame
to lick, curse or call benediction,
to exorcize my brother’s ghost.
Ash greys the scanner.
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