Verse is not written, it is bled, somebody once said. Some sense of this imbued the recent poetry reading by Sampurna Chattarji, a Mumbai-based poet, fiction-writer and translator whose collection “Sight may strike you blind” was recently published by Sahitya Academy. Reading with her was S S Prasad, a microchip design engineer whose poems have appeared in various poetry journals. The event, organised by Toto Funds for the Arts (TFA) at Crossword Bookstore, is part of a regular series aimed at encouraging and supporting young poets.
Chattarji read a selection from her debut collection, which amply demonstrated her lyrical range and powerful use of clean, sharp images that slice through the reader’s consciousness. In her introduction to the reading, poet Anjum Hasan spoke of Chattarji’s “painterly eye” and this was evident in poems like “Still life in motion”: “The sky strides/ inland on giant stilts, unstoppable, shutting out the light” and “Dogs, mobs and rock concerts” where she describes local trains as “each rattling its chains,/ returning thousands to their cages,/ till dawn.”
Noted poet Jeet Thayil, who introduced Chattarji, spoke of “the unnameable condition bordering on doom’ that informs her poems. Telling the audience about Chattarji’s degenerative eye disorder which will eventually end in blindness, he added a layer of contextual depth to some of her lines. “In Sampurna’s poems, blindness is not only allegoric,” he said. “But not all her poems are dark and portentous,” he added, “they can also be sexy and mysterious.”
A lively discussion on Indian English poetry followed the discussion, and with quite a few poets present in the room—Jeet Thayil, Anjum Hasan, Mani Rao and translator N Kalyan Raman—it took some interesting turns. Although it was asked in jest, Chattarji chose to answer Thayil’s question on why she writes in English. “For me, it’s never been a choice,” she said. “English has always been the language for me. But I do feel impelled to translate Bengali poetry that affected me as a child. It is only through translation that I feel I can have a relationship with my mother tongue.”
