Vivek Narayanan: UK Reading Dates
Last Friday’s post lost out to the half-term holidays, but I’m sending this out today in the hope that it’s useful to a few people. The poet Vivek Narayanan is about to embark on a short U.K. reading tour for his new book After, and if you are able to get to any of the free events below — starting tomorrow — I would encourage you to do so!
Tuesday, November 1, 2022 - 5:30 to 7pm:
In conversation with Alice Oswald
Oxford Comparative Criticism & Translation (OCCT)
Tsuzuki Lecture Theatre, St Anne’s College
Event page and registration link: www.occt.ox.ac.uk/after-vivek-narayanan-conversation-alice-oswald
Monday Nov 7, 2022 - 6.30 pm:
In conversation with Jeremy Noel-Tod
Lecture Theatre 4, University of East Anglia
Tuesday Nov 8, 2022 - 6 pm:
In conversation with David Herd
School of English Reading Series
Keynes College Senior Common Room, University of Kent
Friday Nov 11, 2022 - 1 pm
In conversation with Gemma Robinson
English Studies, University of Stirling
Nov 11 - 3 pm UK time (virtual: details to follow):
Against Translation: a Modern Poetry in Translation roundtable, featuring Vivek Narayanan, Andre Naffis-Sahely, Jessica Sequiera and Onaiza Drabu, moderated by Janani Ambikapathy
I’ll hope to say more about After in a future post. For now, here is an edited extract from the publisher’s description:
Vivek Narayanan’s After is a playfully kaleidoscopic collection of poems inspired by Valmiki’s Sanskrit epic—The Ramayana. In this brilliantly innovative work from one of India’s most prominent English-language poets, The Ramayana is rewritten and reinvented—so that we might hear the ancient voice of the poem speak to the questions of the present. After begins as The Ramayana does, with Valmiki’s discovery, as South Asia’s “foundational poet,” of the meter which rhythms his epic. With a hypnotic momentum, Narayanan then plunges us into the world of that work, the first poem: into rich stories of gods and men, kingdoms and exiles, love and war.
But After does not just come after The Ramayana. On each successive page, After turns the reader toward another visionary experiment in adaptation, in which the echoes of Valmiki’s verses resonate with us before being bent into something utterly new. Narayanan’s many departures from the narrative of The Ramayana form a mesmerizing constellation of different poetic forms and voices—from essayistic comments to mantric hymns and bright gems of description which animate landscapes, rituals, and moods with a startling clarity. Throughout, After eddies around how we use poetry and around what we might discover in translations across languages and time. “The key to The Ramayana’s greatness,” Narayanan writes, “lies in its innate multiplicity, its resilience and in its potential for being retold.”
Vivek Narayanan is one of the best-known Indian poets writing in English. His books of poetry include Universal Beach and Life and Times of Mr. S. He has been a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. He currently teaches creative writing at George Mason University and is a member of the editorial board at Poetry Daily, where he helps to select poems and writes short essays about world poetry.