Fractals was first published as a special commemorative edition for the 2013 Nobel Laureate Week, and launched by Derek Walcott. It contains new and selected poems, as well as translations, over a period 1979-2013. Tell us more about it.
It is best if I just quote part of the jacket text of the book. “Fractals: New & Selected Poems|Translations 1978–2013 — contains over 250 new pieces. It also includes a batch of 50 odd poems from the 1997 out-of-print volume — Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins) — that have been frequently anthologised, taught, and are popular with his readers. In many of his new poems, he contends with the sometimes uneasy and hard issues of illness, death, sex, love, loneliness, and loss — while exploring history, politics and the unsaid tension that has showed its ugly face in present-day Islam, Hinduism, and Christianity.
But at the heart of Fractals is the Jorge Zalamea International Poetry Prize winning ‘Blue Nude’ sequence — a formally chiselled set of poems inspired by Henri Matisse’s cobalt-blue cut-out series. Sen obliquely juxtaposes the Indian myth of Radha and Krishna with the post-modern view of European art, as he takes on other modern masters such as Cézanne, Picasso, Dali and Chagall. Literary classics, mythology, music, dance, theatre, graphic art, cinema, photography, and other media serve as additional inspirational sources for many of his new poems.
In complete contrast, however, the pieces in ‘BodyText’, ‘Rain’, ‘Wo|Man’, ‘Dreaming of Cezanne’ and others use a highly-wrought stylised mode of prose poetry or poetic micro-fiction that counter-points the traditional and classical verse-forms employed so effectively by Sen in his early works, such as The Lunar Visitations, New York Times & Kali in Ottava Rima.
In BodyText, while “excavating a set of images from physics, chemistry and biology, Sen does an extraordinary job of imbricating the corporeal with the natural elements and processes [in] a brilliant formalising of these themes … the images are startlingly fresh and extremely evocative.†(Pramod Nayar in Contemporary Indian English Poetry in English).
Sen’s passion for topography and terrain, science and design — both real and imagined, tactile and intellectual, external and internal — is intensely evident in the sections ‘Geographies’, ‘Parsing’, ‘Sexless like Alphabets’, ‘Brief|Case’, ‘India Ink’, and others. You are likely to find yourself in the bleakly beautiful Ladakh, the cloistered Sanskriti, decoding skeletal structures in the Scottish Highlands, crossing Dublin’s Liffey, praying at Jerusalem’s The Wailing Wall, mapping South African homelands, on the Nile banks dreaming of Cavafy in Alexandria, with the ship-breakers in Chittagong, in rain-drenched rural Bengal, amid shrilled-toned metropolises of New York, London and New Delhi, or at the ebullient mercy of Mount Vesuvius.
Then there are chance encounters — direct and indirect, real and bookish — with Joseph Brodsky in The Village, Derek Walcott in Omeros and Granada; Seamus Heaney in Sandymount, with Tomas Tranströmer captured by Bei Dao in Macedonia; with Jibanananda Das’s muse Banalata Sen, Rabindranath Tagore’s humour, Shakespeare’s Bolingbroke, Milton’s Satan, and many others in the world of history, science, politics, visual and literary arts.
In the concluding section of the book, the readers experience another important facet of Sudeep Sen’s oeuvre — literary translation. A small selection, presented from the A K Ramanujan Translation Award winning book Aria, show how deftly he crosses tongues, beautifully marrying a variety of linguistic traditions and forms — while conscientiously acting as a silent and subtle negotiator and sculptor of words and images.
Sudeep Sen’s poems are finely calibrated and cadenced. They are by turns lyrical, spare, subtle, and inventive; but always poised and deeply intelligent. Fractals is a long awaited, highly innovative, formally mature volume — a major book from one of India’s leading poets.â€
And your forthcoming book Blue Nude, which won the Jorge Zalamea International Poetry Prize?
Blue Nude is an abbreviated version of Fractals with additional new poems.
You serve variously as contributing editor, poetry editor, literary advisor for the Literary Review (USA), Orient Express (Oxford), Molossus (USA), International Literature Quarterly (UK), Sheffield Thursday (Sheffield), International Exchange for Poetic Invention(USA/Holland), New Quest (Pune), Urban Voice (Bombay), Six Seasons Review (Dhaka),facebookpoetry, Coldnoon, Four Quarters Magazine, Lakeview Journal, and others.
You are also the editor of important anthologies such as The HarperCollins Book of Modern English Poetry by Indians, Yellow Nib Contemporary English Poetry by Indians, World Literature Today: Writing from Modern India (this current issue), The Literary Review Indian Poetry, Biblio South Asian English Poetry (portfolio), Midnight’s Grandchildren: Post-Independence English Poetry from India, Index for Censorship [Poems] Songs of Partition, Lines Review: Twelve Modern Young Indian Poets, Wasafiri: Contemporary Writing from India, South Asia and the Diaspora, among others.
In addition, you are a photographer, filmmaker, visualiser, and designer, besides being a tireless literary activist. Do these innumerable roles not distract you and interfere with your poetry?
You are a true modern-day polymath!
That is terribly kind. As you already know, I was always equally and simultaneously interested in certain sciences and the arts—architecture, fibre optics, print and 3D design, moving and still image, music and dance, oral and printed literature. So, performing the other roles is simply an extension of me as an artist in its holistic sense. I enjoy the stimulus and challenge these other genres and roles offer, and the wide experience they bring to my writing.
As an editor, critic, and literary reviewer, I have to read so much new writing every day—and stumbling upon and reading good writing is always inspiring and uplifting—so my role as a traveller, literary editor and publisher fits in with me comfortably, and complements and enriches my life enormously as a full-time writer. I am grateful for the opportunity where my passion has turned out to be my profession.
Sudeep Sen is widely recognised as a major new generation voice in world literature and ‘one of the finest younger English-language poets in the international literary scene’ (BBC Radio). His poems have been translated into twenty-five languages, and have appeared in numerous major international magazines and anthologies. He is the editorial director of AARK ARTS and the editor of Atlas.
In January 2013, Sen was invited to the Nobel Laureate Week in St Lucia to present the prestigious Derek Walcott Lecture and read his own poetry. A special commemorative edition of his work, ‘Fractals: New & Selected Poems|Translations’ 1978-2013, was released by Derek Walcott himself.
This is an edited version of an interview which earlier appeared on World Literature Today, reprinted with the kind permission of Sudeep Sen. Readers wanting to read the full version, including the text of all poems mentioned in the interview (some of which are unavailable elsewhere online), can click here.
